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You are here: Home Leisure Arts & Culture Artists view beautiful Venice in Swiss show

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21/11/2008Artists view beautiful Venice in Swiss show

Artists view beautiful Venice in Swiss show Basel’s Beyeler Foundation museum exhibits art by Canaletto, James McNeill Whistler and Monet through 25 January.

BASEL - Venice's stunning beauty includes a wealth of magnificent palaces lining a maze of canals crossed by hundreds of bridges.

For Petrarch, regarded as the greatest humanist of the Middle Ages, Venice was "another world" when he arrived there in the 1300s. As the principal East-West trade centre, it was then the most prosperous European city.

Lord Byron, the English poet, was enthusiastically devoted to the splendour of what became generally known as "La Serenissima" (the most serene). For James McNeill Whistler, the American artist, the city was "intoxicating", as he wrote a friend. And French impressionist painter Claude Monet was overwhelmed by its’ beauty.

Venice bridgeNumerous painters and writers were fascinated by Venice for centuries. And the works of some of the greatest artists are displayed for the first time together at an ambitious show at the Beyeler Foundation museum.

The 130 paintings, etchings, watercolours and drawings range from the "vedute" (landscape) by Venetian-born Canaletto, done in the early 18th century, to the paintings of Venice by Monet, first exhibited in 1911.

Visitors might be particularly captivated by the works of English landscape artist Joseph Mallord William Turner, Whistler and John Singer Sargent, an equally vivid presence on the Anglo-American cultural stage. The three take the largest space in the show, which runs through 25 January.

Lenders include museums and private collectors from Europe, the United States and Japan. Topping the list is London's Tate, which possesses the large body of Turner's work.

Turner seems inspired by Byron's poetic description of the city in his "Childe Harold" series and also by the craft with which Canaletto painted the Venetian scenery in the early 18th century. By then, as curator Martin Schwander notes in the show's catalogue, Venice was profiting from a first "wave of popularity as a destination for prosperous travellers" from England and Central Europe.

Turner's first stay in 1819 lasted less than a week, enough to fill a couple of sketchbooks, material often developed several years later into finished pictures. On view are 21 outstanding watercolours and eight paintings. In one, dated 1833, he refers to Canaletto’s imagery by including his figure in the margin. His brilliant play with light and colour proves he was a forerunner of modern art. His challenging of the conventional approach made critics call him a "madman."

Venice paintingWhistler's first Venice visit saved him from a financial disaster that could have ended an already brilliant career. He won a libel suit against a leading English art critic but the immense legal costs drove him into bankruptcy in 1879. London Fine Arts Society helped him Whistler by advanced him GBP 150 toward 12 etchings of Venice to be completed in eight weeks.

Whistler took 14 months to return, but he brought 100 pastel drawings and 50 etchings. He successfully reassured the London dealers worried for their money, writing them that he became familiar with a "'Venice in Venice' that the others never seem to have perceived."

The show features 34 samples of Whistler's trend-setting work, with pictures of palaces, the lagoon and some scenes of daily Venetian life.

"Despite the frustrations of loss and poverty, Whistler created some of his finest works in Venice, forming the foundation of his later career," the catalogue notes.

John Singer Sargent, who later earned fame for his hundreds of portraits of British and American celebrities, first visited Venice in 1880 when he was 24 years old. A colourful canvas showing a bowler-hatted man writing or drawing in a gondola was created by him that year. So was the first of a number on Venetian indoor studies.

A Florence-born American expatriate, Sargent settled in London but kept visiting Venice almost every year, producing a body of work which the catalogue considers a "testament to Venice's transporting and enduring allure".

Monet, who chose seclusion for working in his French retreat in the river Seine valley, reluctantly accepted an invitation to visit Venice in fall 1908. Upon arrival he was stunned. "Too beautiful to be painted", was his initial reaction, according to his wife. But he then created 37 paintings during a two-month stay. Fifteen of them help shape the core of the exhibition.

“Venice: From Canaletto and Turner to Monet” is on display at the Beyeler Foundation museum through 25 January. For information, visit here.

Text: AP / Hanns Neuerbourg / Expatica 2008


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