Art News Headlines: January 29, 2011

Roy Lichtenstein, Kiss IV , 1963

The Albertina Musuem in Vienna presents a new exhibition of 70 drawings by Roy Lichtenstein entitled “Roy Lichtenstein: The Black-and-White Drawings, 1961–1968” introducing an entirely new dimension of the artist’s work to audiences more accustomed to seeing his brightly colored paintings. Although Pop art in general has been the subject of a number of shows lately, they have featured few drawings and rarely addressed the practice of drawing by Pop artists. The exhibition also explores the sources—comic strips, advertisements, magazines, and mail-order catalogues—of Lichtenstein’s subjects. In addition to the drawings themselves, related sketches are on display as well as clippings from newspapers, magazines, telephone books, and other sources from which Lichtenstein drew inspiration for the works in the exhibition.

Army units secured the Egyptian Museum in central Cairo against possible looting on Friday, protecting a building with spectacular pharaonic treasures such as the death mask of the boy king Tutankhamun, state TV said. The news follows a day of violent anti-government protests in Cairo and other cities. Well-known Egyptian film director Khaled Youssef had earlier called on the army to ensure the museum was protected. Some of the most violent scenes in four days of protests have been in squares and streets close to the museum building. Reports of looting of some government buildings have surfaced. One Reuters photographer said looters had broken into a ruling party building near the museum and were walking out with furniture, computers and other items.

Sir Jacob Epstein, “Rush of Green“

Robert Bowman Modern in London is holding a selling exhibition of modern British sculpture. On view through April 7, the show coincides with that of their neighbor the Royal Academy, who is hosting its first 20th-Century British sculpture exhibition in 30 years. Robert Bowman Modern presents works by the key modern British sculptors including Kenneth Armitage, Michael Ayrton, Elizabeth Frink, Barbara Hepworth and Leon Underwood. The exhibition also features a number of works by Jacob Epstein, one of the leading pioneers of modern British sculpture. In his lifetime he championed many of the concepts central to modernist sculpture, including ‘truth to material’, direct carving, and inspiration from so-called primitive art, all of which became central to twentieth-century practice.

Throughout January and February, Sotheby’s will exhibit selections from the Jerni Collection, the largest and most comprehensive collection of magnificent quality European and American toys and trains ever assembled. The exhibition takes up an entire floor of Sotheby’s York Avenue headquarters, yet remarkably, what is on view represents a mere 20% of the tens of thousands of objects included in the collection. The entire collection is available for private sale through Sotheby’s as a single lot.
“Imagine a vast space filled with the rarest toys in the most perfect condition,” said David Redden, Sotheby’s Vice Chairman. “The Jerni Collection is a passionate homage to the Golden Age of toy making, but on a scale that is breathtaking. Tens of thousands of miniature works of art—trains, stations, villages, carousels, Ferris wheels—conjure up a privileged childhood world of beauty, magic and sheer happiness. To see this collection is to be moved beyond words.”

People and their pencils from New Zealand to New York are hitting the streets four times a year with a common aim: Turn the world into art for one day. The 30th global “SketchCrawl,” a worldwide, daylong drawing binge that takes place four times a year, produced a gallery of images posted on SketchCrawl.com this month. The images depict life across the world through a day of art. From penciled snowscapes of Iceland to watercolor palm trees in Hawaii and sketches of people chatting over drinks in a Norwegian café to a bustling coffee shop in South Africa. “It’s so satisfying seeing other corners of the earth, corners we might never see, observed and captured by a fellow artist’s pencil,” website founder Enrico Casarosa commented. The story artist, who works on animation and comics in San Francisco, conceived the idea of sketch “marathons” after going on a pub crawl for a friend’s bachelor party a few years ago.

Laura Lawson paints when writer’s block strikes and writes when painter’s block strikes. She has studied fine art at LCAD and is pursuing a degree in journalism. Recently diagnosed with the degenerative eye disease retinitis pigmentosa, she strives to bring hope to those without vision through her blog. She is currently working on her first book about coping with vision loss.