Die Kunst ist super! (Art is super!) is the title under which the Nationalgalerie im Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart is showing a new presentation of works from its collections. In line with the motto "Die Kunst ist super!" proclaimed by Udo Kittelmann, this presentation is one of the most important steps on the path to the future positioning of the Hamburger Bahnhof under the new director of the Nationalgalerie. Spanning some 10,000 square meters, the exhibition uses thematic, monographic and motivic constellations, surprising dialogues and individual appearances rich in associations to cast works from the Nationalgalerie, the Marx Collection and the Friedrich Christian Flick Collection, as well as the Marzona Collection in Hamburger Bahnhof in a new light.

In an age that has seen supposedly stable systems of values collapse into crisis, their underlying instability laid bare, this new exhibition at the Hamburger Bahnhof presents art as a dependable variable. In all its flexibility and complexity, its creation of fictions and disillusionment of the same, whichever way you look at it: Art is super!


Presented artists are: Absalon, Richard Artschwager, Matthew Barney, Georg Baselitz, Georg Brecht, Joseph Beuys, Lee Bontecou, Marcel Broodthaers, Günther Brus, Salvador Dalí, Gino de Dominicis, Marcel Duchamp, Walker Evans, Lyonel Feiniger, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Dan Flavin, Peter Fischli & David Weiss, Lucio Fontana, Jochen Alexander Freydank, Isa Genzken, Wolfgang Tillmans, Franz Gertsch, Jack Goldstein, Rodney Graham, Philipp Jakob Hackert, Duane Hanson, Carsten Höller, Donald Judd, Allan Kaprow, Anselm Kiefer, Martin Kippenberger, Konrad Klapheck, Jeff Koons, Robert Kusmirowski, Sol LeWitt, Gordon Matta-Clark, Mario Merz, Paul McCarthy, John McCracken, Otto Mühl, Bruce Nauman, Helmut Newton, Roman Ondák, Nam June Paik, Mark Quinn, Robert Rauschenberg, Daniel Richter, Pipilotti Rist, Gerd Rohling, Dieter Roth, Thomas Ruff, Cindy Sherman, Roman Signer, Robert Smithson, Daniel Spoerri, Sturtevant, Thomas Struth, Hans Jürgen Syberberg, Cy Twombly, Wolf Vostell, Andy Warhol, Lawrence Weiner, John Wesley, Franz West, Otto Zitko, plaster casts of celebrated artworks and death masks from the Gipsformerei (Replica Workshop) of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, and models of various insects by Alfred Keller from the Museum für Naturkunde (Natural History Museum) in Berlin.


Address:
Invalidenstrasse 50 - 51, 10557 Berlin

Opening Hours:
Tue-Fr, 10 – 6 pm
Sat, 11 - 8 pm
Sun, 11 – 6 pm
Closed Monday

Image Source

The Philadelphia Museum of Art and the History of Art Department at the University of Pennsylvania are jointly initiating this annual symposium in honor of Anne d’Harnoncourt to celebrate her contributions to art and culture in Philadelphia, the region, and beyond. Scholars Present Marcel Duchamp: Étant donnés
Marcel Duchamp’s enigmatic final masterpiece Étant donnés: 1. La chute d’eau, 2. Le gaz d’éclairage (Given: 1. The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas) (1946-66), which the Museum’s late George D. Widener Director and CEO, Anne d’Harnoncourt, helped to install in 1969, shaped the contours of d’Harnoncourt’s curatorial and scholarly practice for the next four decades. The work has remained equally influential for generations of artists since. Respected Duchamp scholars, including Hans de Wolf, Elena Filipovic, Paul Franklin, David Hopkins, Francis Naumann, and Michael R. Taylor will present a series of papers offering new viewpoints on Duchamp’s provocative installation and its place within the artist’s iconoclastic oeuvre. The artist’s stepson, artist Paul Matisse, will offer his remembrances of the installation of Étant donnés at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Saturday, September 12, 2009
10:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m.    $50 ($40 members; $15 students); Ticket price includes Museum admission and box lunch

Film stills from Dreams that Money Can Buy

Image Source

On Sept. 4 the Rutgers Film Co-op/ New Jersey Media Arts Center will present the New Jersey Film Festival Fall 2009. The festival will showcase new international films, independent American films, experimental and short subjects, as well as "cutting edge" documentaries. It will feature over 50 screenings from September 4 to November 8.

Thursday evenings will highlight experimental films including such Surrealist masterpieces as Blood of a Poet (Le Sang D'Un Poet) by Jean Cocteau, The Golden Age (L'Age D'Or) by Luis Bunuel, and Dreams That Money Can Buy by Hans Richter, Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst and others; twenty of Andy Warhol's famous 4 minute Screentests; and mini-retrospectives of work by Bruce Baillie and Sidney Peterson.

Jerry T. Mosey/AP

Image Source

American heiress Peggy Guggenheim was considered to be as intriguing as the art she collected. One of the pioneering collectors of Abstract Expressionism, she had a particular fondness for surrealism, cubism and sculpture. At the height of her career, she amassed a piece of art per day.

In London, Guggenheim opened her first modern art gallery, Guggenheim Jeune, featuring artists like Wassily Kandinsky, Yves Tanguy and Pablo Picasso. Although she didn’t actually know very much about art when she started, she fortunately had Marcel Duchamp as her mentor.

It was the gallery that ultimately prompted her to start collecting: “Gradually I bought one work of art from every show I gave, so as not to disappoint the artists if I were unsuccessful in selling anything,'' she wrote.

In 1939, Guggenheim’s ambition increased, and she decided to open a modern art museum in London. Working with Duchamp and art advisor Harold Reed, she vowed to buy “a piece a day.”

In 1941, the approach of the German army drove Guggenheim to flee Europe with her fiancé, artist Max Ernst. She quickly established an art museum in New York called “Art of this Century.” Guggenheim continued to support abstract and surrealist painters, and was an especially enthusiastic admirer of the American movement of Abstract Expressionism.

In 1947, she moved to Italy and exhibited her collection at the 1948 Venice Biennale. Twenty-two years later, Peggy donated her collection to the Solomon F. Guggenheim Foundation, which had been established by her uncle.