The NSU Art Museum has three major exhibitions running alongside each other. The first shows a selection of 20th century works by artists from Mexico from the collections of Jacques and Natasha Gelman and of Stanley and Pearl Goodman, the latter of whom have recently donated more than 75 works by modern Latin American artists to the museum and have established the NSU Art Museum’s Stanley and Pearl Goodman Center for the Study of Latin American Art.. The second exhibition displays works on paper and ceramics by Pablo Picasso, and the third a number of paintings by the American artist and film director Julian Schnabel.
Kahlo, Rivera + Mexican Modern Art displays works from the Gelman and Goodman collections. Paintings by Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera sit alongside work by their contemporaries in Mexico, several of whom were born elsewhere and settled there later in life, including Lenora Carrington, Gerhard Gerzso, José Clemente Orozco, Wolfgang Paalen and Remedios Varo.
The exhibition includes several of Kahlo’s and Diego’s best known works including Kahlo’s Diego on my Mind (Self-Portrait as a Tehuana), Autorretrato con Monos (Self Portrait with Monkeys) and Rivera’s Autorretrato (Self-Portrait), Retratro de Natasha Gelman (Portrait of Natasha Gelman) and Landscape with Cacti, with sketches for building murals and photographs of the two artists by American and Mexican photographers such as Leo Matiz, Martin Munkácsi and Nickolas Muray (1892-1965).
A selection from the collection of Picasso’s works owned by the museum is included in Pablo Picasso: Painted Ceramics and Works on Paper, 1931 – 71. Etchings and aquatints are displayed alongside more than more than 50 of Picasso’s ceramic bowls, pitchers and plates that he made and painted while living in the South of France from 1947-71, exploring many of the themes of his earlier work in this new medium which he transformed it into an artform. The core of the Museum’s collection of Picasso’s ceramics was donated to the Museum by Miami hotelier Bernie Bercuson in 1991.
The third exhibition is of paintings by the American artist and filmmaker Julian Schnabel. Julian Schnabel: Portrait of Olatz is linked to a promised gift to the museum of Portrait of Olatz, 1997, by Olatz Schnabel, the artist’s former wife, which is shown alongside four of his other paintings on loan from Olatz Schnabel’s collection. In the 1980s, Schnabel received international media attention for his large-scale paintings on broken ceramic plates. He has achieved fame as a film director, having directed Before Night Falls and The diving Bell and the Butterfly.
Three exhibitions of artists from three different countries, which all reinforce the strength of the Museum’s growing permanent international collection of modern art, supported by generous gifts and donations.
Photographs copyright – see the NMU Art Museum website.
