BUFFALO, NY — The U.S. Postal Service honors the artistic innovations and achievements of a group of artists who moved the United States to the forefront of the international art scene with the release of the Abstract Expressionists commemorative postage stamps. The vibrant stamps feature works by Hans Hoffmann, Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still, Barnett Newman, Robert Motherwell, Adolph Gottlieb, Arshile Gorky, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock and Joan Mitchell.

“These bold artists used art to express complicated ideas and primitive emotions in simplified, abstract form,” said Linda Kingsley, USPS senior vice president, Strategy and Transition. “Although these stamps can’t compare in size to their real-life canvases, they bring the passion and spirit of abstract expressionism to an envelope near you. The Postal Service is proud to pay tribute to the legacy and unique perspectives of these revolutionary artists.”

Abstract expressionists believed that art no longer depicted experience but became the experience itself. They emphasized spontaneous, free expression and allowed personal intuition and the unconscious to guide their choice of imagery. Other shared traits include the use of large canvases and an emphasis on paint texture and distinctive brushstrokes.

“The abstract expressionists began one of the most important art movements in the last century, placing New York and American art at the very center of the art world for the first time,” noted Louis Grachos, director of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, NY, home of four of the works featured on the stamps. “The Albright-Knox Art Gallery was one of the first museums to begin collecting abstract expressionist paintings, and we are very proud that work from our collection was chosen by the Postal Service as some of the finest examples of the period.”

One of the most influential art teachers of the 20th century, Hans Hofmann (1880-1966) pioneered a method of improvisational painting that helped shape the development of abstract art after World War II. The Golden Wall (1961) features his trademark “push and pull” technique: geometric shapes that animate the canvas by seeming to shift and overlap.

Adolph Gottlieb (1903-1974) created a uniquely American blend of inspiration from late medieval and early Italian Renaissance masters, European cubism, and the freely expressive line of surrealism in his innovative “Pictographs” of the 1940s. Romanesque Façade (1949) brings together his aspiration to be intuitively understandable to everyone and to convey a universal emotional reality.

Mark Rothko (1903-1970) is best known for his monumental paintings of two or more rectangles floated within a field of color. Orange and Yellow (1956) features two rectangles painted in the vibrant tones that Rothko favored. Far from static, the rectangles seem to stretch and contract, while translucent, luminous colors bring them to life.

Influencing much of the American abstract art that followed, Arshile Gorky (1904-1948) developed an original style that combined cubism and surrealism with his own disguised imagery. The Liver Is the Cock’s Comb (1944) — one of his largest and greatest pictures — uses abstract forms to camouflage a deeply personal portrait of his family at home.

Clyfford Still (1904-1980) painted ponderous, abstract canvases to convey universal themes about the human condition. 1948-C (1948) illustrates his signature style of richly textured surfaces, expressive lines and shapes, and sublime color in an expansive field. Still kept tight control of his work, much of which has never been seen.

Willem de Kooning (1904-1997) transformed the traditions of European art to create his own energetic and unconstrained style. While much of his work was entirely abstract, de Kooning’s best-known paintings blend abstraction and figural representation. Skittering black lines, shifting shapes, fragmented body parts, and flashes of color fill the surface of his 1948 work Asheville.

Barnett Newman (1905-1970) created deceptively simple works often characterized by large, even expanses of a single color punctuated by one or more vertical lines, which he called “zips.” One of several works based on ancient Greek mythology, Achilles (1952) does not feature a zip but rather a swath of red paint that moves down the canvas to end in a ragged edge.

Best known for his poured paintings, Jackson Pollock (1912-1956) created spontaneously painted works that marked a break with artistic tradition. For Convergence (1952), he laid blue and white clouds and loops of red and yellow atop a black-and-white base. The expressive color and drawing are so fresh that the paint still looks wet.

Robert Motherwell (1915-1991) viewed literature and philosophy as integral components of his art. He is best known for the “Elegy to the Spanish Republic” series, an ambitious group of somber abstract paintings. Elegy to the Spanish Republic No. 34 (1953-1954) features black bars and ovals and vertical white stripes that partly obscure colors that refer to the flag of the Spanish Republic.

Joan Mitchell (1925-1992) created expansive paintings with an energetic style distinguished by large gestural strokes, driving brushwork, and emotional intensity. She is perhaps best known for her ability to communicate the visual sentiments of nature — or, in her own words, “to convey the feeling of the dying sunflower.” La Grande Vallée 0 (1983) is one of 21 opulent French landscapes.

www.usps.com

NEW YORK – Neue Galerie New York shows “Otto Dix,” the first one-man museum exhibition of works by German artist Otto Dix ever held in North America. Open through March 11, 2010. The show will contain over 100 masterpieces from the United States, Canada, and Europe, and will fill all the exhibition spaces in the museum. It will run through August 30 at the Neue Galerie before travelling to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, where it will be on view from September 20, 2010, to January 2, 2011.

More than almost any other German painter, Otto Dix and his works have profoundly influenced the popular notion of the Weimar Republic. His paintings were among the most graphic visual representatives of that period, exposing with unsparing and wicked wit the instability and contradictions of the time. This exhibition will include the paintings that Dix is best know for—paintings from the so-called “golden Weimar years“—but to contextualize them, it will also include Dix’s work from the early 1920s, as well as his later more allegorical work, produced as veiled protest against the Third Reich.

The exhibition is organized by Dr. Olaf Peters, Professor of Modern Art History and Art Theory at the Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg in Germany. Dr. Peters is a distinguished scholar in the field of 20th-century German art, and the author of many books on that subject.

CATALOGUE
A fully illustrated catalogue, published by Prestel, will accompany the exhibition. With new research and fresh interpretations from leading scholars on Dix and the art of the Weimar Republic, the publication will be an indispensable contribution to the study of the Weimar era.

www.neuegalerie.org

Image: Otto Dix (1891-1969), Portrait of the Lawyer Dr. Hugo Simons, 1925. Tempera and oil on wood, 75 x 60 cm (29 1/2 x 23 5/8 in.). The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. © 2010 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

The Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum presents “ColorForms,” an exhibition devoted to the exploration of color and abstract form through a variety of media, March 11 through winter 2011. Organized by associate curator Evelyn Hankins and located in the lower-level galleries, the exhibition highlights artworks from the Hirshhorn’s collection that date from 1949 to the present, including two major recent acquisitions: Paul Sharits’ four-projector film installation, “Shutter Interface” (1975) and Fred Sandback’s linear yarn sculpture “Untitled (Sculptural Study, Twelve-Part Vertical Construction)” (1990). Several paintings on loan from the National Gallery of Art’s renowned Mark Rothko holdings are also on view. After six months, a selection of works in the exhibition will rotate.

James Turrell, “Milk Run,” (1996). Hirshhorn Collection

“‘ColorForms’ showcases the breadth of the Hirshhorn’s collection by featuring works spanning six decades that demonstrate how contemporary artists have revisited the fundamental elements of visual expression-color and form-to produce a remarkable array of effects,” said organizing curator Hankins.

Color has long been a primary means of expression in Western art. “ColorForms” presents some of the diverse ways that contemporary artists, freed from the limits of representation and empowered by an array of unconventional media, use abstract form to examine color’s possibilities. In addition to works by Sandback, Sharits, and Rothko, “ColorForms” also includes Wolfgang Laib’s “Pollen from Hazelnut” (1998-2000), a field of yellow hazelnut pollen that appears to hover above the ground; James Turrell’s “Milk Run” (1996), a fluorescent-light installation that challenges our visual perception; and Anish’s Kapoor’s “At the Hub of Things” (1987), a large, conical sculpture covered in velvety blue pigment. Although dramatically different in aesthetics and composition, the works in “ColorForms” share a mesmerizing blend of color and form. Together, these works showcase the physical, perceptual and metaphysical effects of color.

Related Programs
The Hirshhorn offers a range of interactive educational experiences designed to a broad range of audiences. Friday Gallery Talks are weekly, informal chats with artists and scholars that focus on one work during a lunchtime tour. On Friday, March 12, exhibition curator Hankins gives a talk in the “ColorForms” galleries. The museum’s ever-expanding library of podcasts (featured on iTunes in the top 100 Arts and Entertainment podcasts) make walk-throughs of galleries and interviews with artists accessible internationally.

www.hirshhorn.si.edu

Tate Modern is ten on 12 May 2010. Over 45 million visitors have passed through the gallery’s doors since it first opened to the public ten years ago. Tate Modern is the world’s most visited gallery of modern art and is one of the UK’s top three free tourist attractions. To celebrate its tenth anniversary, Tate Modern will stage a major free arts festival, No Soul For Sale – A Festival of Independents, in the Turbine Hall from 14-16 May 2010.

Tate Modern has been a catalyst both for the transformation of public attitudes to the visual arts in the UK and for the regeneration of north Southwark. It has become synonymous with groundbreaking artist projects, such as the celebrated Unilever Series, innovative Collection displays, a critically acclaimed exhibition programme and a highly renowned film and live performance programme.

For the tenth anniversary, Tate Modern will build on the participatory spirit of previous projects that celebrate the iconic Turbine Hall space, which is part gallery, part covered street, by inviting No Soul For Sale, the brainchild of artist Maurizio Cattelan and curators Cecilia Alemani and Massimiliano Gioni, to bring its anarchic, tongue-in-cheek sensibility to the Turbine Hall.

Tate Modern, working in collaboration with Cattelan, Alemani and Gioni, has invited 50 independent art spaces and collectives, from Shanghai to Prague, to create unique projects for this global arts festival. No Soul For Sale will fill the Turbine Hall for three days with an eclectic mix of cutting-edge arts events, performances, music and film. The gallery will stay open until midnight on Friday 14 and Saturday 15 May for late night events with special guests.

The idea for the festival was developed to foster a spirit of independence and diversity by inviting artist collectives and underground enterprises from across the world to take part. Confirmed participants for the Tate Modern festival include among others ArtHub (Shanghai), Artists Space (New York), e-flux (Berlin), PiST (Istanbul), Latitudes (Barcelona), no.w.here (London), Loop (Seoul), The Royal Standard (Liverpool), Tranzit (Prague), VIAFARINI (Milan), White Columns (New York), and Y3K (Melbourne).

On Tate Modern’s birthday there will be a special morning procession from Borough Market to the gallery of 300 local children, a band and cakes which are inspired by the building. Visitors will be invited to enjoy a slice of the birthday cakes on the day.

Tate is also asking the public for their memories of Tate Modern over the last ten years. These will be used in a film that will tell the public’s story about the gallery. These stories, pictures and film clips will be gathered via Tate’s online blog, the Tate Modern Flickr Group, Facebook, Twitter and on YouTube.

Over the last ten years, Tate Modern has presented 52 exhibitions, staged over 135 performances, held around 400 film screenings, mounted ten Unilever Commissions and hosted one million school visits. Almost 3.5 million people have taken part in the gallery’s learning programme. Tate Modern contributes over £100 million in economic benefits to London annually.

Tate is Transforming Tate Modern with a major building project to increase the gallery and learning spaces. This is essential development of the gallery which is visited each year by around 5 million people in a building that was designed for 2 million. Tate also needs more varied spaces to show the ever-growing Collection. There will be 60% more display space in the new Tate Modern.

www.tate.org.uk

Thomas P. Campbell, Director of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, announced that Jennifer Russell will return to the Museum as Associate Director for Exhibitions. She is currently Senior Deputy Director of Exhibitions, Collections, and Programs at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. She had worked at the Metropolitan Museum as Associate Director for Administration from 1993 to 1996, and will rejoin the Museum in her new role effective April 26. She was formally elected at the March 9 meeting of the Board of Trustees.

“I am delighted to welcome back a colleague with extensive experience in the New York museum community and in exhibition planning on a local as well as national and international scale,” commented Thomas P. Campbell, Director of the Metropolitan Museum. “She brings significant managerial experience, sound sense, and wide-ranging contacts, all of which are essential to sustaining and developing the encyclopedic breadth, scale, and quality of the Met’s unique and world-renowned exhibition program. Her familiarity with the Museum’s structure and staff—from her previous work here during the tenure of my predecessor, Philippe de Montebello—will be a great advantage as well. For more than 40 years, the Met has been the leading forum for ground-breaking loan exhibitions and stimulating installations highlighting aspects of its vast collections. This program, with all of its depth, scope, and vitality, will remain central to the Museum’s activities and mission, and I look forward to working on it with Jennifer over the years ahead.”

At the Metropolitan, Jennifer Russell succeeds Mahrukh Tarapor, who served in the position for more than 15 years.

www.metmuseum.org