On Thursday May 10th, The Van Gogh Museum revealed the watercolor, depicting a dead willow, “lonely and melancholy” over a pond near the Hague. In July 26, 1882, Van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo that he had to paint it the next morning. The work was purchased at an auction in London earlier this year for $1.9 million.

“For the first time in five years, the Van Gogh Museum has purchased a work by Vincent van Gogh: a watercolour entitled “Pollard willow”. Van Gogh completed the work during the summer of 1882 in The Haque, near his house on the outskirts of the city. The powerful, graphic work shows a pollarded willow tree, a ditch and a rough track, with the Rijnspoor rail depot in the background.”

Director Axel Rueger revealed the painting to the media and said that the painting, filled a gap in the museum’s collection of Van Gogh works.

In the following video curator of prints and drawings Marije Vellekoop explains why this watercolour is a crucial addition to the Van Gogh Museum’s collection .

“It’s a very elaborate, well done watercolor and that’s quite extraordinary in this period of Van Gogh’s oeuvre,” said Marije Vellekoop, the museum’s curator of prints and drawings. “Out of the blue, in the summer, in July, he makes a series of watercolors … with a lot of detail, but also very painterly, fluent.”

A few days after completing the painting, Van Gogh wrote enthusiastically to Theo and he included a sketch of the watercolor.

The letter, on faded brown paper, hangs next to the completed painting in the museum.

In it, Van Gogh says he considers the willow the best of a series of watercolors he painted that summer.

See Video below for introduction of the Van Gogh painting at the Van Gogh Museum.

 About The Van Gogh Museum Amsterdam

The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam houses the largest collection of art works by Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) in the world. The permanent collection includes more than 200 paintings by Vincent van Gogh, 500 drawings and more than 750 letters. The museum also presents exhibitions on various subjects from 19th-century art history.

'A Card Player' by Paul Cezanne

Rare Cezanne Work Discovered in Private Collection

A rare watercolor by Paul Cezanne, which had not been seen in public for decades, sold for a stunning 19.12 million, which is an amazing price for a work on paper.

The work sold at auction at Christie’s and had received very ambitious estimates of expected price at $15 to $20 million. The buyer preferred to remain anonymous.

The particular watercolor, Cezanne’s “Joueur de Carte” which was painted somewhere between 1892 and 1896, depicts a card player, who appears in three of the five paintings titled “Les Joueur de Cartes” It appears to be the most similar to the version which hangs in the Musee d’Orsay in Paris, which is considered to be the most accomplished of the seminal Card Players series.

The Courtauld Gallery in London exhibited the five-painting series in 2010; the exhibition traveled to the Metropolitan Museum of Art last year.

The preparatory watercolor study offers a rare glimpse into Cezanne’s creative process. The figure in the painting is that of Paulin Paulet, a gardener on Cezanne’s estate near Aix en Provence, France. It was last displayed at a New York gallery in 1953.

So where had this watercolor been for decades?

It was discovered by Christie’s Auction House when they were working with the estate of Dr. Heinz Eichenwald, who died in September, at age 85, at his Dallas, Texas home.

The late 19th-century work on paper is one of Cezanne’s preparatory studies for his seminal Card Players series of five paintings, ‘Joueurs des Cartes.’ Its whereabouts had been unknown for decades until it re-emerged from the collection of a doctor in Texas. The auction house found the drawing when it was working with the estate of Dr. Heinz Eichenwald, who died at his Dallas, U.S., home in September at the age of 85.

Paul Cézanne, c. 1861

For nearly six decades this watercolor, depicting Paulin Paulet, a gardener on Cézanne’s family estate near Aix-en-Provence, France, was familiar to scholars only as a black-and-white photograph. No one knew if the actual work, a study for Cézanne’s celebrated Card Players paintings, still existed and if it did, who owned it.

About The Collector 

It is thought Eichenwald’s parents brought the drawing with them to the U.S. when they fled the Nazi occupation of Europe. The deceased doctor was a keen art enthusiast and collector, and it is expected there will be many more items to feature in the Christie’s sales.

Eichenwald is said to have ‘transformed medical care for children across north Texas and around the world for more than 40 years,’ according to The Dallas Morning News.

Watch the video below to see inside the Christie’s Auction for the Cezanne watercolor. 

The Amon Carter Museum is exhibiting “Romance Maker: The Watercolors of Charles M. Russell,” which is the first comprehensive show to focus on the artist’s seminal position in Americas 19th-century watercolor tradition. There are one hundred of Russell’s paintings from the museum’s own collection and from other public and private collections which document his career.

The Amon Carter Museum has a particularly rich collection of artists who depicted the American West, especially Frederic Remington and the artist who was his greatest rival, Charles Marion Russell (1864-1926).

The works now on view in the Russell exhibition range from sketches and notebook drawings which reveal early crude efforts to document his cowboy life of the 1880′s, through his ultimate mastery of the acqueous medium during the 1890′s and 1900′s.  His very last watercolor is also included, “When Cows Were Wild,” which was painted shortly before his death.

When one considers the reputation that Russell had as a cowboy artist, one can wonder how he came to this particular venue.  His real background was in sharp contrast to the life he chose to portray. Russell actually grew up in a prosperous urban environment in St. Louis. But his longing for life on the prairies was so strong that he actually worked as a real cowboy for eleven years.  During this time he recorded his experience through rather naive sketches which only contrast with the assured draftsmanship of his work during the early 1890′s.  This contrast documents the stages of learning for an artist who was really self taught.

Watching for the Smoke Signal, 1907

This exhibition also illuminates Russell’s innovative approach to watercolor techniques. As it happened Russell’s affinity with watercolor as his preferred medium was parallel with a real surge of interest in the watercolor medium after the Civil War. At that time the commercially manufactured paints and papers were more available for shipment by mail.  While at an earlier time, the watercolor medium had been utilized in John James Audubon’s precise ornithologic works, and also by artists such as Asher Durand and George Caleb Bingham, these works in watercolor were still considered subservient to oil painting, until the emergence of Winslow Homer around 1875.  Homer became the first American to fully embrace the watercolor medium for its own transparent and opaque qualities, as opposed to adding color to a linear drawing.

Bronc to Breakfast, 1908 Russell

Russell experimented with looser brushwork in his backgrounds and foregrounds in his compositions while painting the figures much more tightly. He certainly did not exploit the same kind of color, for instance, which was used by Homer, but he did constantly explore various technical approaches in order to represent the details of his chosen subject matter of cowboy and Indian culture.

A catalog, written by Rick Stewart, the exhibition curator, provides descriptions of the technical approaches utilized by Russell, and also details Russell’s approach as a storyteller.

Alan Shields, Watercolor, thread on multi-layered handmade paper

Alan Shields, Something Goin’ On & On

A fascinating solo exhibition of the work by Alan Shields (1944-2005) was presented by Greenburg Van Doren Gallery, NYC, which inaugurated their representation of the artist’s estate.  Exploring multiple materials, Shields painted, dyed, wove, sewed and sculpted his works into interactive forms on canvas or paper.  The show combines large hanging pieces, sculptured forms, and flat works using a strong palette of circles, spirals, pyramids, biomorphic and natural forms.

Shield’s watercolors were on thick handmade paper, and then enhanced by sewn lines, as a method of introducing linear elements along with the areas of watercolor.  Sometimes there is an embossed effect as strips of handmade paper are overlaid on the paper with additions of beads and linear sewing.

Alan Shields, Watercolor, block printing, glitter, stitching on handmade paper

Shields work was produced in the wake of Minimalism in the ‘60s in New York as he adapted his materials and techniques in painting,installation work and printmaking.

His longtime friend, the curator Jill Brienza showed a selection of work from the ‘70s and ‘80s that distills and reflects the entirety of Shields work which spanned four decades.

The exhibition was on view from April 28th to June 24th, 2011. A fully illustrated catalogue featuring an essay by Bob Nickas was published on the occasion of the exhibition. Alan Shields was born in Herington, Kansas in 1944 and died in Shelter Island, New York in 2005. He was educated at Kansas State University and participated in Summer Theatre Workshops at the University of Maine. He was the recipient of a 1973 Guggenheim Fellowship.

Alan Shields, New Shadow Old Legs4, watercolor plus

Solo museum exhibitions include Alan Shields: Stirring up the Waters, The Parrish Museum of Art, Southampton, NY (2007), Alan Shields: A Survey, The Beach Museum of Art, Kansas State University, Manhattan, KS (1999), and 1968-1983: The Work of Alan Shields, The Brooks Memorial Art Gallery, Memphis, TN (1983). His works are included in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Tate Collection, London, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art among many others.

John Marin: Modernism at Midcentury

An exhibition of the work of John Marin at the Portland Museum of Art focuses on the innovative work which he developed after moving to northern Maine in 1933.  This is the period when his work was inspired both by the coast of Maine and by the architecture of Manhattan. During this time he developed the vibrant, abstract works which contributed to his significant reputation.

The exhibit shows the interrelationship between his watercolors, sketchbooks and oil paintings of the late period of his career. From early in his career (1917) Marin was influenced by the rocky shores and islands of Maine. But it was when he came to Cape Split in 1933 that he realized how this untamed terrain of northern Maine would be a major inspiration for a body of work.

The exhibition features 54 works and runs from June 23-October 10, 2011. Major loans from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the National Gallery of Art, Washington D. C. and other museums and private collections have made this exhibition possible.

Cape Split, 1940. oil

Marin was based both in New York and New Jersey and then followed a path to Maine, like many artists. But Marin came to Maine with a Modernist perspective, unlike many of his predecessors. When he was spending summers in Cape Split, he confronted a very raw and unspoiled landscape. He saw the possibilities of translating these ephemeral patterns of waves into visionary compositions which reflected upon some of the characteristics of mid-century American art.

Although Marin’s primary production was in watercolor, he also began to work in oil alongside his compostions in watercolor. With the oil offering a more viscous texture and intense saturation and the watercolor providing an immediacy and fluidity, Marin used both outlets to explore his abstracted compositions.

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