Last week we started looking at slides and digital images entered in The Artist's Magazine's annual contest. At this time of year, we always look forward to sequestering ourselves in a dark room, where we project images that are often startlingly beautiful and sometimes utterly surprising. We have more than 12,000 entries! Senior Art Director Daniel Pessell, Associate Editor Lisa Wurster, Managing Editor Chris McHugh and I all agree that the quality of submissions this year is extremely high. Artists seem to be taking more chances; there is more expressive, edgy work; there's a greater sense of fun, and also of passion.

I've juried some shows where the protocol demands utter silence; we, on the other hand, talk incessantly and often vehemently. We spend as much time as it takes to discuss a painting, and then we vote. Luckily, we've worked together for awhile and we trust each other's taste, though I confess I'm more forceful, sometimes, than my colleagues in rendering judgment. By the end of June we'll have chosen finalists in each category; we will then send those slides and digital entries to our five judges, who will make the final decisions.--Maureen

I fell in love with Prague the first time I saw a photograph of the looming statues in the mists enveloping Charles Bridge. My brother Kevin, whose business requires that he travel all around the world, has often told me how beautiful Prague is. Thus, when Nan Sinton, who is the mastermind behind the ever-popular Horticulture Magazine tours, suggested Prague as the destination for The Artist’s Magazine’s first-ever art tour, I was thrilled. Prague has everything: Gothic cathedrals, Baroque palaces, stately gardens perfect to sketch and paint in, an Old Town and a New Town, and— not incidentally—fabulous public and private collections of art ranging from Etruscan to Renaissance,  Mannerism to Modernism, Art Nouveau, and Expressionism.

Prague was home to Kafka, Schiele, and Smetana; Mozart conducted the first performance of Don Giovanni there (and we’ve got tickets for a performance in the same opera house, where Milos Forman actually filmed Amadeus). I can’t wait to go! Up until now my favorite cities have been Paris, New York, Florence, Venice, London, and Nice; I have a feeling I’ll have to revise the list come October.

Please consider joining Nan Sinton and me on our 9-day tour (October 3-11 2007) of Prague; we’d love to have your company! To learn more about the tour, call toll-free 800/422-2550 or e-mail arttours@fwpubs.com. And please tell me your favorite places in Prague or any other traveler’s tips by writing a comment below.
—Maureen

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Of course, I wanted to catch the Cézanne to Picasso show at the Art Institute, so I made a dash on Friday. It was a treat to climb the main staircase to find excited middle-school children on a treasure hunt through the Modern galleries. “I found it,” one exclaimed. “A woman with two faces and a green dress on; it must be Picasso!”  The special exhibit, Cézanne to Picasso: Ambroise Vollard, Patron of the Avant-Garde, celebrates the influence of the Parisian dealer and collector who gave Picasso his first show and was a friend to Auguste Renoir, Pierre Bonnard, Edouard Vuillard, Henri Matisse, Mary Cassatt, Andre Derain, Maurice Denis and a host of other avant-garde artists. The story of the way Vollard acquired his collection shows how important it is to have a pocketbook at the right place and time. Vollard bought paintings Theo van Gogh had on hand when his brother Vincent died; he also seized the opportunity when Paul Gauguin, embarking on his second trip to Tahiti, left the Breton scenes in the studios of friends. The later, haunting masterpiece Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?, on loan from the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, commanded a wall.

Many of the rooms were dark, because Vollard prized works on paper; one small room displayed three breathtaking, late pastels by Edgar Degas; also memorable were works in charcoal by Odilon Redon. It was lovely, too, to see portfolios of stunning prints by two of my favorite artists, Vuilllard and Bonnard. And since Vollard commissioned his friends to try their hands at ceramics and illustrated books, there were gorgeous examples of vases and livres d’artiste, as well.

The exhibition has many pictures (photographs and paintings) of Vollard himself, as well as a short film that shows a genial Vollard asking an eagle-eyed Renoir, whose hands by then were crippled from rheumatoid arthritis, to sign a painting. To read more about this wonderful show, which originated at the Met and next travels to Musée d’Orsay in Paris.

The next day Lisa and I walked to the Art Institute School’s sale of students’ works. Interesting prints and lovely handmade books were on sale for 30 to 40 dollars; there were fabrics and textiles, as well as plaster buddhas and unusual jewelry (I bought a necklace for my older daughter and a woodblock print for my younger one). Across the street, the snaking line waiting for entrance to the Art Institute seemed not to move at all.
Maureen

By Maureen Bloomfield | Shows and Events