European Museum Shows in April

As ever, the museums of Europe are offering a wide and alluring range of exhibitions right now, and concocting a Top 5 list is more difficult for what you have to omit than what you include. This month, for example, I decided against the tempting theme of American artists in European Museums — including Jack Pierson at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Chuck Close at the Hermitage, Matthew Barney at the Vienna Kunsthalle, and Patti Smith at the Fondation Cartier — in favor of recognizing some remarkably ambitious and lavishly resourced scholarly exhibitions. I just felt a need to indulge in a good old-fashioned art history jag.

1. Cézanne & Giacometti — Paths of Doubt at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, outside of Copenhagen, through June 29

To celebrate its 50th anniversary, the Louisiana offers this blockbuster show, billed alternatively as its “exhibition of the year” and “three exhibitions in one”: With 60 Cézannes (drawn from collections in Denmark and France) and 100 Giacomettis (including some important loans), they claim that visitors can enjoy a retrospective of each artist, plus a comparative study of the two. The museum has its own extensive collection of Giacomettis, but remarkably this is the first time that anything like a proper retrospective of Cézanne’s work has ever happened in Denmark. Curators Poul Erik Tøjner (director of the Louisiana) and Felix A. Baumann (president of the Alberto Giacometti-Stiftung in Zürich) aim to demonstrate the undeniable influence of Cézanne on Giacometti, but they also treat the two artists side by side, trace similarities between their art, and examine their strangely parallel lives.

2. Modigliani and his Times at the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza and the Fundacion Caja, Madrid, through May 15

This major retrospective traces the absurdly short career of an artist who died when he was 36, from some early, remarkably Cézannesque studies through his beginnings in sculpture to his hugely popular long-faced, long-limbed portraits and nudes. The artist’s landscapes and drawings are also included, and at each stage of his career work by School of Paris contemporaries provide context. These comparisons — and a trove of historical photographs — provide a fascinatingly rounded picture not only of Modigliani’s art but of the intellectual, artistic, social, and political milieu that he enjoyed, and eventually endured, between his arrival in Paris in 1906 and his death in 1920.

3. Goya in Times of War at the Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid, April 15 – July 13

I’ve been thinking a lot about Goya since I interviewed Milos Forman here on ARTINFO and we discussed his latest movie, Goya’s Ghosts. This wonderful show concerns itself with the same period of Goya’s life as Forman’s movie, and is being staged now to coincide with the 200th anniversary of the events of May 1808 and the beginning of the Spanish war of independence. The exhibition begins its survey around the time of the stunning "Los Caprichos" etchings (1799) and traces Goya’s life and art to his final public work, The Communion of Saint José de Calasanz, painted in 1819. At the show’s center are the two great paintings of the 2nd and 3rd of May, picturing the Spanish uprising against their French occupiers and its suppression, which are being cleaned and restored specifically for this show. In addition, curator Manuela Mena promises new insights into Goya’s work, which is set against the background of his two serious illnesses, his deafness, the Peninsula War, and Ferdinand VII’s abolition of the Spanish Constitution in 1812.

4. Max Ernst, Une Semaine de Bonté: A Surrealistic Novel at the Albertina, Vienna, through April 27

This exhibit is a real treat not only for enthusiasts of Surrealism, but for anyone intrigued by the interconnections of art and the psychological imagination, and for fans of present-day graphic novels as well. For a graphic novel is precisely what Max Ernst’s Une Semaine de Bonté was. Published in five barely narrative volumes in 1934, just as Hitler was coming to power in Ernst’s native Germany, the 182 pages — which he produced in just three weeks on a visit to Italy — combine cut-up fragments of engravings from popular novels and encyclopedias to evoke a strange and often threatening world of chimeras, illusion, and religious and erotic fantasy. They amount to one of the most important and influential works of the Surrealist period and have remained so popular that compilations are still in print today: You can get a paperback version from Amazon for less than $12. Examples of the original print run of less than a thousand copies are extremely hard to come by, but the Albertina is offering something even rarer — Ernst’s original collages, which have been exhibited only once before, in 1936.

5. Arcimboldo at the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, through June 1

Organized in collaboration with the Musée du Luxembourg in Paris (where it was first shown) this is the first-ever full-scale survey dedicated to the proto-Surrealist’s work. Arcimboldo’s most famous pictures — fantastic human heads composed of magically arranged flowers, fruit, animals, fish, and birds — were a direct influence on Ernst and his contemporaries, but the question of how they possibly could have been invented by a 16th-century artist provides one of the central themes of this show. In filling out our knowledge of a somewhat shadowy artist — although hugely celebrated during his lifetime, he was almost entirely forgotten shortly after his death — the exhibition also focuses on two wildly differing aspects of his work: his almost scientific studies of the natural world (which were in fact highly respected by contemporary naturalists) on the one hand, and his production of the lavish processions, tournaments, balls, and other displays that were staged to celebrate the weddings, birthdays, and coronations of his imperial patrons in Vienna and Prague. Scientist, fantasist, and performance artist all at the same time, Arcimboldo emerges from this show even more remarkable than you might anticipate.