Sculpted in Steel: Art Deco Automobiles and Motorcycles, 1929–1940

Feb 21, 2016 - May 30, 2016
http://www.mfah.org/

Today's automotive manufacturers strive for economy and efficiency, but there was a time when art and elegance reigned. Sculpted in Steel: Art Deco Automobiles and Motorcycles, 1929–1940 celebrates the cars and motorcycles designed during this iconic period.

Sculpted in Steel showcases 14 cars and three motorcycles, alongside historical images and videos. The classic grace and modern luxury of Art Deco design dazzles in vehicles from the United States and around the world. The innovative, machine-inspired Art Deco style began in France in the early 20th century, but the movement was interrupted by World War I. The style reemerged across Europe after the war, and the 1920s to 1930s proved to be one of the most creative eras for international design in all mediums. Art Deco influenced everything from fashion and fine art to architecture and transportation.

Mark Rothko: A Retrospective

Sep 20, 2015 - Jan 24, 2016
http://www.mfah.org/

Long recognized as among the foremost figures of the Abstract Expressionist vanguard, Mark Rothko embraced the possibility of beauty in pure abstraction with a painterly eloquence that gave a new voice to American art. The MFAH is the sole U.S. venue to present Mark Rothko: A Retrospective, which draws upon the unrivaled holdings of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

Across a career spanning the most troubled years of the 20th century, Rothko (1903–1970) explored the tragic and the sublime, and his canvases remain a testament to the deep humanism he brought to modern painting. This definitive retrospective comprises more than 60 paintings that trace the artist’s full career arc, highlighting milestones in the development of his signature style.

In 1986, the National Gallery of Art was the primary recipient of what are essentially “Rothko’s Rothkos,” the paintings the artist held within his own collection at the time of his death. By bringing these works to Houston, home of the Rothko Chapel, the MFAH is able to give Museum visitors the opportunity to see the full range of Rothko’s achievement in the same city as his most acclaimed and enduring public commission.

Habsburg Splendor: Masterpieces from Vienna’s Imperial Collections

Jun 14, 2015 - Sep 13, 2015
http://www.mfah.org/

See the spectacular treasures amassed by one of Europe’s longest-reigning dynasties. The major exhibition Habsburg Splendor: Masterpieces from Vienna’s Imperial Collections showcases masterworks and rare objects from the collection of the Habsburg Dynasty—the emperors of the Holy Roman Empire and other powerful rulers who commissioned extraordinary artworks now in the collection of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.

Largely composed of works that have never traveled outside of Austria, Habsburg Splendor explores the dramatic rise and fall of the Habsburgs and their global empire, from their political ascendance in the late Middle Ages, to the height of their power in the 16th and 17th centuries, to the expansion of the dynasty in the 18th and 19th centuries, and ultimately its end in the early 20th century at the conclusion of World War I.

The story unfolds through more than 90 works of art, including arms and armor, sculpture, Greek and Roman antiquities, court costumes, carriages, decorative-art objects, and paintings by masters such as Caravaggio, Correggio, Giorgione, Rubens, Tintoretto, Titian, and Velázquez

Spectacular Rubens

Feb 15, 2015 - May 10, 2015
http://www.mfah.org/

In the early 1620s, Flemish painter Peter Paul Rubens completed one of his greatest achievements: designing the Triumph of the Eucharist tapestries. The most elaborate and expensive tapestries made in Europe in the 17th century, the 20 monumental works in this series celebrate the glory of the Roman Catholic Church.

Rubens (1577–1640) was commissioned to create the tapestries by the Infanta Isabel Clara Eugenia, governor-general of the Netherlands, as a gift to her favorite convent, the Monasterio de las Descalzas Reales (Convent of the Barefoot Royals) in Madrid. Raised at the Spanish court, the infanta was the daughter of Habsburg monarchs Philip II and Isabel of Valois. Spectacular Rubens reunites Rubens’s exuberant oil sketches painted for this commission with the original tapestries, the largest number of works for the Eucharist series assembled in more than half a century. The exhibition offers an unrivaled opportunity for visitors to experience the Baroque master’s extraordinary impact, on both an intimate and a broad scale.

Spectacular Rubens features six painted modelli, or large-scale oil-on-panel studies, from the collection of the Museo Nacional del Prado in Madrid. Also on view are four of the original silk and wool tapestries, among the most renowned treasures of the Monasterio de las Descalzas Reales; several paintings by Rubens related to the Eucharist series; and a series of preparatory sketches for three of the four tapestries. The modelli have recently undergone conservation, rendering the pictorial surfaces once again lively and forceful, offering a record of Rubens’s impressive and beautiful brushwork.

John Singer Sargent: The Watercolors

Mar 2, 2014 - May 26, 2014
https://www.mfah.org

The expansive exhibition John Singer Sargent: The Watercolors offers a once-in-a-generation opportunity to see early 20th-century watercolors by Gilded Age American master John Singer Sargent (1856–1925). The more than 90 watercolors on view—depicting dazzling scenes of landscape, labor, and leisure—are punctuated by selected works in oil to highlight the artist’s experimentation with a variety of techniques and effects.

Sargent’s watercolor technique has been a source of wonderment for the past century. This exhibition unites, for the first time, the two most significant collections of his watercolor paintings: holdings from the Brooklyn Museum and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. The Brooklyn and Boston collections were purchased by the two museums (in 1909 and 1912, respectively) directly from Sargent’s only two American watercolor exhibitions, at the Knoedler Gallery in New York.

Representing Sargent’s departure from the commissioned portraits that made him famous, the compositions in this exhibition were painted in Greece, Italy, Palestine, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland, and Syria. The subjects include scenes of Mediterranean sailing vessels, villa gardens, marble quarries, fountains, gondoliers at work, and one of Venice’s greatest churches, as well as explorations of sunlight and shadow.