AMSTERDAM – With over 100 works on loan from 35 leading international museums including the Tate, MoMA, Musée Matisse, Le Cateau-Cambrésis and the Pushkin State Museum in Moscow, the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam presents “The Oasis of Matisse,” the most comprehensive survey of the French artist ever shown in the Netherlands. The exhibition, which runs March 27 through Aug. 16, occupies half of the ground floor galleries, the hall of honor and the first floor gallery suite to the rear. Covering over 21,500 square feet, “The Oasis of Matisse” is one of the largest-ever exhibitions in the Stedelijk’s history.

The Stedelijk conceived a unique exhibition concept for “The Oasis of Matisse,” the permanent collection on the ground floor is enriched with a selection of Matisse masterpieces, creating surprising combinations with the work of his contemporaries, teachers and followers. Visitors discover how, in 1914, Mondrian and Matisse were both pushing toward abstraction but in very different ways, and how raw the work of Matisse is when contrasted with German Expressionists like Kirchner.

After following Matisse’s development on the ground floor, on the first floor, visitors enter the oasis that Matisse created as a mature artist. Where the downstairs galleries revealed how the surface became progressively flatter in this part of the exhibition visitors can admire his world-famous cutouts in their full glory. At the heart of this presentation is The Parakeet and the Mermaid, which Matisse considered his finest cutout. This perennial favorite is on display together with other monumental Matisse cutouts that have rarely, if ever, been seen in the Netherlands such as Memory of Oceania from the Museum of Modern Art in New York, The Snail from the collection Tate Modern, London and The Sheaf from the Hammer Museum of Art in Los Angeles. Also featured are seldom-exhibited works in textile and stained glass which were inspired by the cutouts.

As one of the founders of modern art, Henri Matisse (1868-1954) is among the most-admired artists of the 20th century. His favorite subjects include interiors with Eastern nudes, colorful fabrics, carpets, potted plants and idyllic landscapes. Matisse excelled in blending foreground and background into a dazzling pictorial plane – the sumptuous patterns of a tablecloth overflow into a woman’s dress or wallpaper. Matisse seeks inspiration in Algeria, Morocco, Nice and Tahiti. There, he discovers a paradise that he evokes in undulating lines and flat areas of color.

Matisse later became an internationally celebrated artist. So it was all the more astonishing when, at the end of his life, he set off in an entirely new direction to make monumental, ornament-like cutouts. But in surveying Matisse’s entire oeuvre, it is clear that from his earliest modern works until his death the artist sought to evoke a bright, joyous simplicity with the minimum of color and shape.

For the first time, the Stedelijk is offering visitors the chance to reserve a time slot when they buy a ticket, to ensure that everyone gets the most out of their visit to the exhibition. Online ticket sales kicked off this week. When purchasing E-tickets, visitors are asked to choose a date and time. Once inside the museum, they can stay as long as they wish. A ticket surcharge applies: tickets cost 20 euros rather than the usual 15 euros. Visitors pay the surcharge just once (the usual admission price applies to repeat visits). Friends of the Stedelijk have free admission, and can visit as often as they like; they also have access through a special members entrance.

LONDON – The National Portrait Gallery is to display for the first time the largest portrait in its Collection, a print showing the entire funeral procession of the Duke of Wellington.

At 67 feet long the epic panorama will be displayed for the first time in the gallery’s exhibition “Wellington: Triumphs, Politics and Passions,” opening Thursday, having been stored in its archive since 1911.

Eight panels will be fully visible in the exhibition in a specially made display case housing the entire work. The gallery will display the print throughout the length of the Victorian Galleries in a free one-hour event on June 18, to commemorate the Battle of Waterloo. This will be the first time the panorama will have been seen at full length at the gallery.

Highlights of the work include depictions of the grand and ornate funeral cortege, the Lord Mayor’s carriage, members of the royal family, platoons of soldiers, and, by contrast, the simple but moving image of Wellington’s horse being led in the procession with his master’s empty boots reversed in the stirrups.

While other versions are in existence, many have been divided and framed in shorter lengths. The gallery’s version is still in its complete original form and in good condition.

After Wellington died in September 1852, his body was laid in state at the Royal Hospital, Chelsea before a grand state funeral. The procession to St. Paul’s Cathedral was watched by a crowd estimated at 1.5 million people. Other than for monarchs, with the possible exception of that given for Sir Winston Churchill, there has not since been a state funeral on a comparable scale.

George Augustus Sala’s panorama was one of many souvenirs produced to commemorate the event. By this time, the controversies of Wellington’s political career were 20 years in the past and feelings had softened. Furthermore, his death felt like the passing of an age. Wellington died as the quintessential Victorian, but his funeral was a reminder of the time 40 years before when he gained his heroic reputation.

Paul Cox, associate curator, National Portrait Gallery, London, says: “This extraordinary panoramic print has remained hidden in the National Portrait Gallery’s Archive Collection for many years. Few, if any, original purchasers of this souvenir can have had the space to see it at its full length. It is a rare and exciting opportunity to see it displayed in this way on the 200th anniversary of the battle of Waterloo.”

The exhibition, which runs through June 7, is part of the Battle of Waterloo 200th Anniversary Commemorations waterloo200.org .

LANCASTER, Pa. (AP) – The rear door of the big, 200-year-old house opened to John J. Snyder Jr.’s kitchen, where he cooked crab-stuffed flounder and other dishes he shared with Sukey and Gwinny, his coddled English springer spaniels.

It’s also where he kept seven rare, 8-foot-tall grandfather clocks, any one of which could have been a living room focal point.

Snyder, of Washington Boro, had a reason for seven clocks in the kitchen: He had filled up the rest of his house.

A small, mildly eccentric bachelor with a tidy mustache and inquisitive mind, Snyder was an independently wealthy antiques scholar with a thing for early Pennsylvania tall case clocks.

By the time of his death at the age of 67 in December 2013, he had collected 112.

Many were in storage. But 66 clocks stood, often shoulder-to-shoulder like Colonial infantry, throughout Snyder’s painstakingly restored, six-bedroom brick house he called Toad Hall.

Clock parts lay here and there.

Each clock plays a role in Snyder’s $9.7-million legacy, one that will benefit museums and historic preservation as far as North Carolina for years to come.

But there was more than clocks.

Snyder also filled his home, built in 1813, with dozens of early American pieces, such as tables, desks, cupboards, chests and chairs. In drawers and cabinets he stockpiled antique china, silverware, ceramics, jewelry, cane handles and more.

A two-story carriage house to the rear was similarly packed, but friends say Snyder wasn’t a hoarder. He was a man on a mission.

He wanted to study and save for future generations the best work of inland Pennsylvania furniture makers between 1760 and 1810. Journals and magazines published his research.

But as his health failed, friends grew concerned. They urged the heirless Snyder to decide what pieces should go where upon his death. Time ran out before he tackled the task.

It fell upon the three co-executors of Snyder’s $9.7-million estate to decide what pieces to sell and what to offer to museums.

They gave the best of the best to 17 museums, historical societies and historic homes. It took a year to inventory and distribute everything.

“It’s about all I did,” said Jamie Price, 61, of Carlisle, an antiques dealer who befriended Snyder four decades ago. Price worked with attorneys Paula Leicht and Elyse Rogers.

The biggest beneficiary was Rock Ford Plantation, the 18th-century home of Gen. Edward Hand, south of Lancaster. It accepted 300 items, including 30 tall case clocks.

Fourteen clocks went to York County Heritage Trust in York, 12 to Berks History Center in Reading, and nine to the National Clock and Watch Museum in Columbia.

The celebrated Winterthur Museum in Delaware, where Snyder had studied, got pieces, as did Old Salem Museums & Gardens in Winston-Salem, N. C.

“We were very pleasantly surprised,” said Robert Leath, chief curator at Old Salem, which received an 1804 chest of drawers.

Berks History Center is planning a two-room exhibit based on 29 pieces from Snyder’s collection. Executive director Sime Bertolet said the acquisitions “elevated our collection immeasurably.”

Snyder made clear to the co-executors he didn’t want his Pennsylvania clocks sold to collectors and closeted in their mansions.

He wanted them on public display in the counties of their origin, where scholars could discover more about their makers.

“He has set the bar for other collectors,” Price said. “It’s a challenge to those of us who have collections to also make prudent decisions on how to pass them on.”

But a challenge of a different sort fell upon Rock Ford.

Samuel Slaymaker, Rock Ford executive director, initially declined Price’s offer of dozens of clocks and other pieces.

In part, because Snyder had donated items over the decades, the Georgian-style mansion was furnished with historically accurate pieces and had no space for more.

“That’s too bad,” Slaymaker remembers Price saying. “He really wanted these things to go to Rock Ford.”

But the more Slaymaker and the collections committee considered the offer, the more they felt an obligation to honor Snyder’s life work by accepting a slice of his collection.

“The easiest thing is to say we’re sorry,” Slaymaker said. “But what would have happened is the collection John put together would have been scattered to the four winds.”

The Rock Ford board decided to turn an 18th-century barn uphill of the mansion into a museum of early Americana. It will feature furniture and rifles made in Lancaster County during the time Hand lived.

“I wouldn’t be honest not to admit to a certain amount of trepidation,” Slaymaker said, because of the money that must be raised. “This is not the easy solution, but we think it’s the right one.”

Not everything Snyder collected went to museums. More than 1,000 pieces went on sale at Conestoga Auction Co. in Manheim for three days last September and one day last November.

The sale netted more than $900,000, contributing to the more than $5 million of Snyder’s estate dedicated to the preservation of historic buildings. The money is in two trust funds managed by Lancaster County Community Foundation.

One fund provides grants of up to $75,000 to community benefit organizations in Lancaster and Cumberland counties with a historic structure. The money is for what Snyder called “unglamorous” maintenance projects. The first grants will be awarded in September.

The other fund specifically benefits maintenance at Rock Ford and Old Zion Church of Brickerville, which dates to 1813.

Snyder’s research and collection will cement his legacy, but those who called him friend will have memories to cherish.

A cabinetmaker in Colerain Township who restored many of Snyder’s pieces, David A. Weaver, 65, remembers the fun of auctions with Snyder.

People surreptitiously followed Snyder, Weaver said, to see what interested him and might have value.

Snyder was aware of the attention he drew, and Weaver asked if he ever considered feigning interest in a piece. Snyder’s response was memorable.

“Yes,” Snyder said, “it would be tempting. But it wouldn’t be right.”

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Online:

http://bit.ly/1wRstMa

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Information from: LNP, http://lancasteronline.com

Copyright 2015 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

AP-WF-03-10-15 1809GMT

LONDON – Frank Auerbach (b. 1931, Berlin) has made some of the most resonant and inventive paintings of recent times, of people and of the urban landscapes near his London studio. As the artist reaches his 84th birthday, Tate Britain will open a major exhibition of approximaately 70 paintings and drawings from the 1950s to the present day. The exhibition, which will run Oct. 9 through March 13, 2016, will reaffirm Auerbach’s status as one of the pre-eminent painters of our age and will offer new insights into the nature of his painting.

Painting 365 days a year, Auerbach produces his characteristically tactile and visually dynamic work in the same studio he has occupied since 1954. For half a century he has worked in an uncompromising way, scraping back the surface of the canvas to start and restart the painting process. He begins afresh for months or years until the single painting or drawing is realized in a matter of hours, having finally surprised him.

The curator of the exhibition, Catherine Lampert, has had a long relationship of working with Auerbach, having sat for him in his studio every week for 37 years. The realization of the show brings together these two people – artist and sitter – and their two approaches; one concerned with looking at individual works, and the other selecting groups of works to reveal thematic and formal continuities over many decades.

The depth, texture and sense of space in a painting by Auerbach makes standing in front of one a unique experience. The vast majority of works in the exhibition are from private collections and seldom on public display, providing a rare opportunity to see these important works in the flesh. It will include early portraits such as Head of Leon Kossoff 1954, as well as landscapes such as Building Site, Earl’s Court, Winter 1953 which come out of Auerbach’s identification with postwar London as a raw unpainted city rebuilt after bombing.

Large works from the 1960s include E.O.W, S.A.W. and J.J.W. in the Garden II 1964 and The Origin of the Great Bear, 1967-68, a mythological landscape set on London’s Hampstead Heath. Primrose Hill 1971 and Looking Towards Mornington Crescent Station 1972-74 also use expressive directional brushstrokes to suggest London’s foliage, street lamps and passers-by. Portraits of Auerbach’s longstanding model Juliet Yardley Mills, Head of J.Y.M. II 1984-85 and of his wife, Head of Julia II 1985 will also be shown, revealing a freer, more fluid treatment of paint. Auerbach’s more recent paintings of Mornington Crescent underline his identification with the area, such as The House II 2011, along with further portraits of the five sitters, Julia, Jake Auerbach, Catherine Lampert, David Landau and William Feaver, who visit his studio each week.

Focusing on this close group of sitters and locations makes Auerbach exceptionally aware of changes in the exact look and spirit of his subjects. He has described his acute awareness of time gradually fading away as the “evanescence of experience,” stating how he has “a strong sense of wanting to pin experience down before it disappears.”

Working closely with the artist, the exhibition is curated by art historian Catherine Lampert working with Elena Crippa, Helen Little and Sarah Olivey at Tate Britain. It is accompanied by a new publication by Tate Publishing with an essay by T.J. Clark and a program of talks and events in the gallery.

The exhibition will debut at the Kunstmuseum, in Bonn, Germany, on June 4.

For details log on to tate.org.uk .