Among a flotilla of known artists, curator Santiago Rumney-Guggenheim has launched a few lesser-known names in an overview from 1920 to 2014, a time when art changed at a head-spinning pace
Wassef Boutros-Ghali, Untitled, 2015. Acrylic on canvas, 38 x 38 inches.
CHICAGO, IL
.-Rhona Hoffman Gallery is presenting its first solo exhibition of Egyptian artist Wassef Boutros-Ghali (b. 1924, Cairo, Egypt). Situated as both constructivist compositions and Levantine landscapes, the collection of bold canvases hover between formal geometric abstractions and distilled figural representations of channels, canals, buildings struck by sunlight, and the limitlessness of the desert and the sea.
Two primary facts surrounding the artists storied biography are often asserted in relation to his paintings. The first is that he was born into a long lineage of statesmen and politicians; his brother (Boutros Boutros-Ghali) orchestrated the Camp David Accords in 1978, his grandfather (Boutros Ghali Pasha) was Egypts prime minister for over one year prior to his assassination in 1910. The second is that, though studying in the Beaux-Arts tradition, Boutros-Ghalis affinity toward the
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A visitor studies Titians portrait, Benedetto Varchi, left, and Bronzinos Allegorical portrait of Dante, at the Metropolitan Museum of Arts The Medici: Portraits and Politics, 1512-1570, exhibit in New York, June 21, 2021. The sweep of Italian history and art history in dazzling portraits from the dynastys final hurrah, on view in a sumptuous exhibition at the Met. Diana Markosian/The New York Times.
by Roberta Smith
(NYT NEWS SERVICE)
.- Its hard to imagine Florence, cradle of the High Renaissance of early modern Europe, without its avaricious, venal, culture-conscious first family, the Medicis. Crowned and uncrowned, during periods of supposedly republican government and not, they largely ruled the city-state, or connived to, from the mid-14th to the mid-18th centuries, using art to cement their power. They excelled at banking and prospered especially when their Rome branch quietly became banker to the popes. They al