Virginians and visitors can spend a day in the country with one of the world’s greatest Impressionist paintings.
This fall, the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Virginia, celebrates the 19th-century fascination with rural labor and countryside landscapes in a new exhibition that presents Claude Monet’s Haystacks, Late Summer, 1891, on loan from the renowned Musée d’Orsay in Paris, the world’s premier museum of Impressionist art. It will be on view alongside 21 Chrysler Collection treasures by Winslow Homer, Paul Gauguin, and Camille Pissarro, and others. The works include paintings on agricultural themes, sculptures, detailed drawings, early photographs and Impressionist masterworks known for their evocation of light. Enriching this exhibition is Vincent Van Gogh’s dramatic Wheat Field behind St. Paul’s Hospital, St. Remy, 1889, a generous loan from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond.
The Agrarian Ideal: Monet, van Gogh, Homer, and More opens to the public in the Chrysler’s skylit Hixon Family Impressionist Gallery (G. 217) on October 7, 2016 and remains on view through January 8, 2017. Admission is free.
“We are thrilled to partner with the Musee d’Orsay to bring this Impressionist masterpiece to the Chrysler,” says Lloyd DeWitt, Chief Curator and Irene Leache Curator of European Art. “It is a perfect complement to our own collection masterworks, as is the VMFA’s van Gogh.” 
“The Chrysler frequently lends important artworks to leading museums around the world,” says Museum Director Erik Neil. “Because of the relationships we have built, we are also able to borrow world-famous paintings like the Van Gogh from Richmond and the Monet from Paris.”
While the Impressionists are famous for scenes of Paris, in the 1890s many of them departed the city for the country. As Paris had become dangerous, crowded, industrial, and expensive, many of the city’s best artists left to seek simpler subjects and an integrated life untouched by the ills of modernity.
Claude Monet relished living in Giverny, 45 miles northwest of Paris. There, he captured the effects of changing light and weather on huge stacks in the fields near his home. Farmers in this part of France regularly stored the year’s crop of wheat in stacks that they left in the field, as they had for centuries. Between July 1890 through the following spring and summer, the artist completed more than 30 paintings featuring the subject. “Creating a shimmering surface with strokes of pure paint, Monet sought to capture the instant effects of light at their most evocative,” DeWitt says of Musée d’Orsay’s acclaimed canvas from late summer 1891.
Vincent van Gogh also headed to the country for solace. His Wheat Field (from the collection of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts) shows the view he painted many times from his window in the psychiatric hospital in St. Rémy. DeWitt says, “With its dramatic sky, it embodies the visionary approach he developed towards the end of his life.”
On this side of the Atlantic, Winslow Homer and a number of American artists also sought out country life in the wake of the Civil War, echoing Thomas Jefferson, who wrote in Notes on Virginia: “Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people, whose breasts he has made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue.”
The Agrarian Ideal: Monet, van Gogh, Homer, and More will be on view at the Chrysler Museum of Art, One Memorial Place, Norfolk, Va., from October 7, 2016 through January 8, 2017. Admission is free. For programs related to the exhibition, see chrysler.org
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The new Museum Voorlinden near the Dutch North Sea coast opened on Sept. 11

to showcase the impressive collection of modern and contemporary art assembled by wealthy Dutch industrialist Joop van Caldenborgh.
Among the highlights is Richard Serra’s 216-ton steel sculpture Open Ended which is on permanent display.
The setting in Wassenaar, The Netherlands, is also a draw for its landscaped gardens near the forested dunes outside The Hague. The museum is led by Wim Pijbes who left the prestigious Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam to head Voorlinden.
Through January 8, 2017, Ellsworth Kelly Anthology is a stunning assemblage of works by Ellsworth Kelly (1923 – 2015), the American hard edge and minimalist painter, illustrator and sculptor. The selection consists of 80 works, including paintings, drawings and collages, that were chosen in close cooperation with the artist himself and the Ellsworth Kelly Studio before the artist passed away at the end of 2015.
Also on view, the first Museum Voorlinden collection presentation titled 'Full Moon' highlights a range of works across periods, from the 1912 landscape painting Maannacht IV [moonnight] by Jan Sluijters (1881-1957) to a three-legged table bycontemporary Chinese artist Ai Weiwei.

​For the first time, an exhibition outside of Iran gives insights into Tehran's Museum for Modern Art.

The show in Berlin is to be understood as a political event: Berlin's National Gallery is showing works from Tehran's Museum of Contemporary Art (TMoCA).The works have been inaccessible for nearly 40 years, but will be on show in the German capital from December 2016 to February 2017. Tickets are already being sold online. After Berlin, the exhibition will continue on to the MAXXI museum in Rome.
"It is the most significant collection of 20th-century Western art outside of Europe or North America," Hermann Parzinger, president of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, told DW. Famous paintings by European and American artists made the collection so valuable, he added.
Among them are works by Claude Monet, Max Ernst and Jackson Pollock. They were collected by the former Persian Empress Farah Pahlavi, but were kept under lock and key after the Islamic Revolution in the late 1970s.

Parzinger said that fact that the exhibition is taking place in Germany can be attributed to "broad political support in Berlin," particularly from Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier and Culture Minister Monika Grütters.

Holocaust denial scandal threatened exhibition
After the nuclear deal was signed with Iran last year, Steinmeier in particular made a huge effort to bring the exhibition to Berlin as a symbol of Iran's openness and the strengthening of its civil society.
In the beginning, it nearly seemed like the politically delicate exhibition project would not come about. The director of the TMoCA, Majid Moullanourouzi, had handed over an award in a caricature contest in which some of the cartoons denied the Holocaust and Holocaust victims were ridiculed. For the Germans, the move was more than a faux-pas, it was an absolute taboo.
Steinmeier condemned the contest and Parzinger wrote a letter to Tehran, making clear that Holocaust denial would not be tolerated.

Tehran responded by putting Deputy Culture Minister Ali Moradkhani, who is ranked above Moullanourouzi, in charge of the exhibition collaboration. The decision sufficed for Germany, and the exhibition was back on.

In a recent press release from the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, there is no mention of the caricature incident. However, DW learned of the details of the resolution at a press conference attended by Parzinger, the Director of Berlin's National Gallery, Uwe Kittelmann, the Secretary General of the Goethe-Institut, Johannes Ebert.
Mix of Western and Iranian works on show
Although the works in the exhibition have been hidden away for many years, they are in good condition - comparable with paintings fresh out of the atelier, said Uwe Kittelmann. While in Tehran, he said he found the quality of the works to be even higher than he'd expected.
Together with their Iranian partners, the National Gallery decided on which images would be shown. "In the end, we got what we wanted," said Kittelmann.
Of the 60 works to go on show, there are 30 paintings from 20th-century European and North American artists and 30 works from Iranian painters that date back to the 1960s and 1970s. Names like Faramarz Pilaram and Behjat Sadr were mentioned. Six female artists are included among the Iranian painters that are represented

​Francis Bacon's famous triptych, which shows homoerotic scenes, will go on display. "That's a big step for Iranian society," Parzinger told DW.

The Goethe-Institut, which works under the umbrella of the German embassy in Tehran, has been tasked with planning the accompanying program. "It's important for us not only to present artworks, but also to put them in their social-artistic context," said Johannes Ebert. To do that, writers and filmmakers that are critical of the Iranian regime will be included.
Courageous cultural projects like this one also bear risks, which all of the participants are well aware of. But hopes are high that the Berlin exhibition will send a message that reaches people in Iran as well. The TMoCA is apparently constructing a new wing in its building. Perhaps at one point paintings that have been in hiding for decades will also be shown there.
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