Women, Art and Bach (2)

Last year I posted a link to a video survey of portraits of women in art history. I could identify several of these paintings, but not all. Boni, an instructor at the “Fayetteville Technical Community College” has a list of all 90 works used !

Monet and Renoir

In the late 1860s, through the practice of painting light and water en plein air (in the open air), Renoir and his friend Claude Monet discovered that the color of shadows is not brown or black, but the reflected color of the objects surrounding them. Several pairs of paintings exist in which Renoir and Monet, working side-by-side, depicted the same scenes.

La Grenouillère, 1869

Renoir – National Museum, Stockholm

Monet – Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Scream

An agonized figure is depicted against a blood red Oslofjord skyline in Edvard Munch’s Scream (1893), National Gallery, Oslo.

Frida Kahlo

Although her life on this earth was brief and quite often turbulent and painful, she left us with a legacy of art that rivals all others. Using her own unique “folkloric” style of painting, Frida painted the diary of her life. Each painting, rather it be a self-portrait or a still life, captures a moment in her life. They reflect the emotions of her turbulent relationship with her husband, the famous muralist Diego Rivera, the life long physical and emotional pain she endured as a result of a tragic bus accident and her inability to have children. During her life time Frida created some 200 paintings, drawings and sketches related to her experiences in life.

General internet resources

• “Frida Kahlo” at ArtCyclopedia
• Frida Kahlo at Olga’s Gallery
• Kahlo paintings at Ten Dreams Galleries
• Frida Kahlo fan site with biography, paintings, and photos

Articles and essays

• “Dolor y arte: Frida Kahlo” from Psikeba Magazine
• “Frida Kahlo & contemporary thought”
• “Frida by Kahlo”

Films

• Frida (2002 film) at the Internet Movie Database (watch this movie – he’s good)
• Documentary Film, Frida Kahlo

Exhibitions and museums

• “The Frida Kahlo Museum”, by Gale Randall
• Exhibition guide from Tate Modern
• The Heart of Frida exhibition in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico showcasing recently discovered letters and artwork.

(references taken from wikipedia)

Women, art and Bach

Women, art, and a Bach Suite for unaccompanied cello (Suite No. 1 in G major, BWV 1007 – Sarabande). Amazing ! Challenge : recognizing as many paintings as possible…Via

Some of the paintings used for this compilation :

02:46 – Mona Lisa, Leonardo da Vinci, 16th century
02:45 – Portrait of a Lady with a Unicorn, Raphael 1506
02:43 – The Birth of Venus, Sandro Botticelli 1486
02:29 – Lady with an Ermine, Leonardo da Vinci 1483-88
02:25 – Virgin Annunciate, Antonello da Messina 1476
02:24 – La Donna Velata, Raphael 1516
02:22 – Portrait of a Young Venetian Woman, Albrecht Dürer 1505
01:56 – The Straw Hat,Peter Paul Rubens 1626
01:54 – Self Portrait in a Straw Hat, Elisabeth Vigeé-Lebrun 1782
01:48 – Madame Barbe de Rimsky-Korsakov, Franz Xaver Winterhalter
01:23 – An elegant beauty, William Clarke Wontner
00:47 – The Artist, Alphonse Maria Mucha 1920
00:26 – Reverie, Alphonse Maria Mucha
00:22 – Exploding Raphaelesque Head, Salvador Dalí 1951
00:19 – Apparition Face and Fruit Dish on a Beach, Salvador Dali 1938
00:05 – Portrait de Françoise Gilot, Pablo Picasso, 1946

Help is appreciated.

Isenheim Alterpiece

Matthias Grünewald (c.1470 – August 31, 1528), is a highly regarded figure from the German Renaissance. He painted primarily religious works, especially somber and awe-filled crucifixion scenes.

In about 1512 Grünewald, on commission from Saint Anthony’s Monastery in Isenheim, began his masterpiece, the magnificent Isenheim Altarpiece (1512?–1515?, Musée d’Unterlinden, Colmar, France). It consists of nine large panels mounted on two sets of folding wings: the outer set consists of the Crucifixion with the Entombment below it and is flanked by Saint Anthony and Saint Sebastian; the inner set displays the Annunciation, the Concert of Angels, the Nativity, and the Resurrection. The innermost panels, flanking a carved wooden shrine to Saint Anthony, are Saint Anthony and Saint Paul in the Wilderness and Temptation of Saint Anthony.

Detail of the lefthand portion of the central panel.

Grünewald’s conception of these familiar subjects is unique; the compositions, powerfully reinforced by expressive linear rendering and richness of color unmatched in German art, have an overwhelming visual and emotional impact: for example, the crucified Christ, covered with flesh wounds and twisted in agony, is a gruesome image of suffering and death; the resurrected Christ, floating triumphantly upward in a radiance of intense light, is eternal life personified. Modern scholars have identified the source of the work’s complex iconography as the Revelations of Saint Bridget of Sweden, a 14th-century mystical tome popular in Renaissance Germany. (source text)

The temptation of Saint Anthony

More images also here and an extensive article about this painter at wikipedia in french (the other languages are unfortunately of a lesser quality).

Nature morte au melon vert by Paul Cézanne

Sold for 25,520,000 USD by Sotheby’s last tuesday:

Nature morte au melon vert – 1902/6

Resources :

• Paul Cézanne at wikipedia
• Paul Cézanne studio
• National Gallery of Art
• Paul Cézanne at the web museum
• Collection of links at Artcyclopedia
• A great resource is also Grove Art (a 34-volume encyclopedia of art, available to use free of charge to many UK and International Library members ; free trial possible)

Pierre and Gilles

Pierre et Gilles, Pierre Commoy and Gilles Blanchard, are gay French artistic and romantic partners. They produce highly stylized photographs, building their own sets and costumes as well as retouching the photographs.

Pierre Commoy, the photographer, was born in 1949 in La Roche-sur-Yon. Gilles Blanchard, the painter, was born in 1953 in Le Havre. After art studies, they moved to Paris in 1973 where they met in 1976, and began to work together.

People photographed by Pierre et Gilles include: musicians Lio, Khaled, Étienne Daho, Marie France, Mikado, Marc Almond, Madonna, Kylie Minogue, Erasure, Deee-Lite, The Creatures, Nina Hagen and CocoRosie (the cover of their 2007 album The Adventures of Ghosthorse and Stillborn); actress Catherine Deneuve, actor Layke Anderson and designer Jean-Paul Gaultier.

Medusa – 1990

Pierre and Gilles create their own kind of the staged portrait, turning a photograph into a mythological picture. In their works they present famous and unknown models as antique heroes, Christian saints and characters of genre scenes, as was customary in classical academic art. Pierre and Gilles found a convincing method of combining glamour and classics.

Madone

They create portraits of stars and unknowns in unique hand-painted photographs, through an established process:

• they first draw a sketch of the work they have imagined together, according to the model and the role they want him to play;
• they conceive the entire production from the set made with carefully selected materials and accessories, collected worldwide during travels or shopped all around. They also realize the lighting in order to animate and magnify the subject by a play of angles and filters. They select or even realize themselves the costumes, make-up and hairdressing, sometimes with the help of the best specialists;
• Pierre photographs the scenery they have imagined together. Gilles then paints the unique print with successive layers of paint and glaze, exceeding reality. It results in a unique, perfectly aesthetic image that definitely cannot be done by any kind of digital software;
• finally, they conceive the specific frame that is an integral part of the work. Actually, they consider the frame as the extension of the image’s universe ;

Everything is considered in order to achieve an aesthetic perfection and a vision of an enchanted world, corresponding to their dreamed reality. As they state: “This is a little bit of photo, a little bit of painting. There is the idealization of the sopped moment; Gilles with his brush can go and go back, and there is no time limit.”

Their own universe always shows the same reoccurring idealized set of themes: stars and unknown friends, sailors and princes, saints and sinners, fairy paradises and lowest depths, popular iconography and magic, all mixed together in a world of love and grace.

“On aime idéaliser mais on parle aussi de la mort, du mystère et de l’étrangeté de la vie. Il y a autant de douceur que de violence dans nos images…”

Pierre & Gilles

(We like to idealise but we talk also of death, mystery and the strangeness of life. There is an equal amount of tenderness and violence in our images)

External resource:their official web site (and source of part of the text above)

Eros in Modern Art

People say I think about women too much.
But there’s nothing more important, is there?

Auguste Rodin

The BA-CA Kunstforum holds an extraordinary exhibition on one of the most seminal themes of the modern movement in art: eroticism.

The encounter with all forms and varieties of Eros – love, passion and lust, desire, union and secret longings – always has been, and still is, one of the fundamental impulses for artistic inspiration.

The BA-CA Kunstforum is now addressing this theme with an exciting exhibition. More than 200 works by prominent artists from the late nineteenth century until the present day give striking and immediate expression to the fascination exercised on artists by the theme of eroticism. But the exhibition is not confined solely to the subject of the human body and portrayal of the act of love. The concept far more involves works that address the erotic sphere of temptation and union, desire and fantasy, dream and the subconscious, in a multitude of forms.

The show illustrates the artists’ fascination for Eros as the dynamic principle that keeps the world in motion – and therefore art as well; a principle that is just as much responsible for life as it is inevitably associated with death. It is a fitting vehicle for the artists who have constantly faced the challenge of showing something in Eros that in its totality can only be grasped by allusion, that throws up questions for which there are no universal answers – such as the idea deriving from the nineteenth century that the »origin of the world« can be found in the teeming womb of woman. Is this idea born of a typical »male« point of view? Is there a specifically female view of Eros? How does the relationship between art and pornography present itself from the modern perspective? And – perhaps most difficult to answer: Why is art so evidently connected to Eros? Why – to quote Picasso – is art »never chaste«?

The complexity of the theme is reflected in the key works of the exhibition. On the one hand, the leitmotif of Eros enables us to throw a new and unconventional light on modern art. Meanwhile, the show traces a development in depicting eroticism ranging from nude painting that frees itself more and more from conventions to the works that put eroticism on show not so much through the nude body as germinate it in the mind of the beholder.

Exhibits range from French interpretations oriented on Paul Cézanne and Edouard Manet, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Auguste Rodin to the erotic pictures by Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele in Austria; from works by Classical Modern artists including Pablo Picasso, Kees van Dongen and Joan Miró to the Surrealist masterpieces by Max Ernst, Man Ray and Salvador Dalí. Rounding off the exhibition are the rich variations of art inspired by eroticism after 1945 – the pop art of a Tom Wesselmann, the objects of a Louise Bourgeois and the monumentalising of flesh in the paintings of Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon.

Source text and images : BA-CA Kunstforum

Venue : Freyung 8, Wien (map), March 1st 2007 – July 22nd 2007

Deluge

The Deluge by Gustave Doré.

Deluge is the story of a Great Flood sent by a deity or deities to destroy civilization as an act of divine retribution is a widespread theme in Greek and many other cultural myths. The stories of Noah and the ark in Genesis, Matsya in the Hindu Puranas, Deucalion in Greek mythology and Utnapishtim in the Epic of Gilgamesh are among the most familiar versions of these myths. A large percentage of the world’s cultures past and present have stories of a “great flood” that devastated earlier civilization.

Willem de Kooining

Exactly 10 years ago the abstract expressionist painter Willem de Kooning died at the age of 92.

The Dead Toreador

The Dead Toreador, 1864, Edouard Manet, oil on canvas 75×154cm, National Gallery of Art, DC.

Three works by Picasso stolen in Paris

Two important paintings by Picasso estimated by the police to be worth a total of about $66 million have been stolen from the Left Bank home of his granddaughter Diana Widmaier-Picasso, the authorities announced Wednesday 28 February. Paris police officials said the two oils, “Maya With Doll” from 1938 and “Portrait of Jacqueline” from 1961, were taken from Ms. Widmaier-Picasso’s house on the Rue de Grenelle in the city’s chic Seventh Arrondissement sometime overnight between Monday and Tuesday.

The police said that two drawings, one by Picasso, were also stolen, but this could not be confirmed by the Picasso family lawyer, Céline Astolfe. In a telephone interview Ms. Astolfe said that Ms. Widmaier-Picasso and her mother, Maya, the daughter of Picasso’s longtime mistress Marie-Thérèse Walter, were asleep in the house when the theft occurred.
“They heard a noise, went downstairs and saw nothing,” Ms. Astolfe said. “They went to bed and the following morning they saw that two paintings were missing.”

The lawyer said the theft appeared to be the work of professionals because the home’s alarms were neutralized and there were no signs of a break-in. “They blocked the alarm, and they had either the code or keys,” she said.

Although the paintings formed part of the Picasso family’s private collection, they are nonetheless well known and, art experts said, would be difficult to sell on the open market. Ms. Astolfe said their value might exceed the police estimate.

“Maya With Doll” is a colorful Cubist portrait of Picasso’s daughter as a child clutching a doll, while “Portrait of Jacqueline” is a black, gray and white Cubist oil of Jacqueline Roque, Picasso’s second wife, whom he married in 1961.

Thefts of works by Picasso have become relatively common, not least because he was so prolific. London’s Art Loss Register lists 444 missing Picassos in its database, including paintings, lithographs, drawings and ceramics. There is also an active industry making and selling fake Picassos.

Resources:

• Interpol database of stolen art work
• Art Loss Register
• UNESO Cultural Heritage Laws Database,

Via NYT and various

Odd Nerdrum

Odd Nerdrum was born in Sweden in 1944. He studied at The Art Academy in Oslo, Norway and later studied with the conceptual artist Joseph Beuys in Düsseldorf, Germany. Nerdrum developed a style of painting that is unique by any standard. His work is in the permanent collections of several international museums and many American Museums including the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; The New Orleans Museum, New Orleans, LA; The Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR; The San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, CA; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; The de Young Museum, San Francisco, CA, and The Frye Art Museum, Seattle, WA. An Icelandic citizen, he now lives and works in Reykjavik, Iceland.

Lunatics

2003 – oil on canvas

Jules Olitski, 84, American Abstract Painter, Died

Jules Olitski, a painter and sculptor who became a widely admired and controversial member of the second generation of American abstract artists, died February 4th in New York. Via

Some references:

• Jules Olitski at Wikipedia
• Official web site

Gustave Doré

Gustave Doré’s illustration of Ludovico Ariosto’s “Orlando Furioso”.

A collection of other illustrations in this series

Paul Delvaux at Sotheby’s

Sotheby’s sale of Surrealist Art on the evening of Monday, February 5, 2007 will include 21 works that are together estimated to realise more than £9 million, making this one of the biggest such sales ever staged. All the masters in the field are represented, among them René Magritte, Francis Picabia, Max Ernst, Paul Delvaux, Marcel Duchamp, Salvador Dalí, André Masson and Matta.

Painted in 1941, Paul Delvaux’s Les Courtisanes is one of the artist’s finest compositions, combining the motif of mysterious female nudes with a classically-inspired setting. The backdrop to the scene – an azure sea and vast expanse of sky – evokes a Mediterranean idyll, very different from the urban setting in which Delvaux’s nudes are usually seen. Although Delvaux’s compositions often defy interpretation, the female nudes, semi-nudes and statues in this work are no doubt the courtesans of the title. As paramours of the members of the Royal courts, courtesans carried with them particular associations – of eroticism and a courtly bygone age – that held an enormous appeal for Delvaux (1897-1994).

More details about the auction at Sotheby’s

Further information on the painter at the Paul Delvaux Foundation

Victoria Art Gallery Hosts a Keith Vaughan Retrospective

Retrospective

Keith Vaughan (1912-77) was a leading member of the Neo-Romantic movement and one of Britain’s greatest artists of the post-war era. His work expressed his feelings about the male body, seen in relation to the landscape. This major retrospective of Vaughan’s work features over 60 oil paintings, gouaches, sketchbooks and journals. His first museum exhibition for 26 years, it coincides with the 30th anniversary of his death by suicide. On exhibit 3 February to 25 March 2007 at the Victoria Art Gallery (Bath, UK).

“LINEAR GROUP”

signed & dated 1966 lower right

19″ x 15″ (480mm x 380mm)

Ink, wash and gouache on paper (framed)

The Victoria Art Gallery exhibition will contain 50 oil paintings, gouaches, photographs and sketchbooks by Keith Vaughan. It is the first museum show of his work for 26 years and coincides with the the 30th anniversary of his death.

Keith Vaughan

Keith Vaughan was born in Sussex on 23 August 1912. Descended from a family of Hackney cabinet-makers, he attended Christ’s Hospital school where an enlightened art master provided the only formal art training that he ever received. He abandoned a career in advertising in 1939 to pursue painting. From 1941 to 1944 he served in the Pioneer Corps. His drawings of army life, however, attracted attention. From 1946 to 1952 he shared a studio with fellow painter, John Minton. As a younger generation Neo-Romantic he was heavily influenced by Graham Sutherland, Henry Moore and William Blake.
During the 1950s Paul Cézanne and Henri Matisse were major influences, but most important was that of Nicolas De Stael, who enabled him to reconcile figurative and abstract elements. In 1951 he was commissioned to make the Theseus mural for the dome of discovery at the Festival of Britain.
Vaughan travelled in the Mediterranean, North Africa, Mexico and the USA, where he was resident artist at Iowa State University in 1959. He taught in London at Camberwell School of Art and the Central School of Arts and Crafts and was a visiting teacher at the Slade School of Fine Art. He was awarded a CBE in 1965.

Further reading (and viewing)

• Keith Vaughan at Modern British Art (paintings)
• Book about his life and work by Malcolm Yorke

Jean Michel Basquiat

Jean-Michel Basquiat in his studio, 1985. Photograph © Lizzie Himmel

Jean-Michel Basquiat (December 22, 1960 – August 12, 1988) was an American artist born in Brooklyn, New York City. He gained fame, first as a graffiti artist in New York City, and then as a highly successful Neo-expressionist artist in the international art scene of the 1980s. Many recognize Basquiat as a leading figure in contemporary art, and his paintings continue to command high prices in the art market.

Art periods

Basquiat’s art career is known for his three broad, though overlapping styles.
In the earliest period, from 1980 to late 1982, Basquiat used painterly gestures on canvas, often depicting skeletal figures and mask-like faces that expressed his obsession with mortality. Other frequently depicted imagery such as automobiles, buildings, police, children’s sidewalk games, and graffiti came from his experience painting on the city streets.

Untitled, 1982. Oil paintstick on paper. Collection of Leo Malca

A middle period from late 1982 to 1985 featured multipanel paintings and individual canvases with exposed stretcher bars, the surface dense with writing, collage and seemingly unrelated imagery. These works reveal a strong interest in Basquiat’s black and Haitian identity and his identification with historical and contemporary black figures and events. On one occasion Basquiat painted his girlfriend’s dress, with his words, a “Little Shit Brown”.

In Italian, 1983. Acrylic, oil paintstick, and marker on canvas mounted on wood supports, two panels. The Stephanie and Peter Brant Foundation, Greenwich, Connecticut

The final period, from about 1986 to Basquiat’s death in 1988, displays a new type of figurative depiction, in a new style with different symbols and content from new sources. This period seems to have also had a profound impact on the styles of artists who admired Basquiat’s work. Basquiat’s lasting creative influence is immediately recognizable in the work of subsequent and self-taught generational artists such as Mark Gonzales, Kelly D. Williams, Raymond Morris, and Francesco Clemente. Carlitos Alvarez Villanueva was amongst those that inspired Basquiat during this time, which retrospectively, was the final stage for the influential artist.

Icarus Esso 1986
Acrylic and oil crayon on canvas

Further resources:

• Brooklyn Museum retrospective of Basquiat, including photographs of the artist and his work.
• Selection of paintings, biography, and links to more information about the artist at Emory University
• Books and art print at Amazon

Ice Age paintings

The Chauvet Cave or Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc Cave is near Vallon-Pont-d’Arc, in the Ardèche département, in southern France. It became famous in 1994 when a trio of speleologists found that it contained the fossilized remains of many animals, including those that are now extinct, and, even more significantly, that its walls were richly decorated with paleolithic artwork. The Chauvet Cave was soon regarded as one of the most significant pre-historic art sites, along with Lascaux, Altamira, and Cosquer.

Most of the artwork dates to the earlier, Aurignacian, era (30,000 to 32,000 years ago). Hundreds of animal paintings have been catalogued, depicting at least 13 different species, including those which have rarely or never been found in other ice age paintings. Rather than depicting only the familiar animals of the hunt that predominate in paleolithic cave art, i.e. horses, cattle, reindeer, etc., the walls of the Chauvet Cave are covered with predatory animals: lions, panthers, bears, owls, rhinos and hyenas. Typical of most cave art, there are no paintings of complete human figures, although there is one possible partial “Venus” figure that may represent the legs and genitals of a woman. Also a chimerical figure may be present; it appears to have the lower body of a woman with the upper body of a bison. There are a few panels of red ochre hand prints and hand stencils made by spitting pigment over hands pressed against the cave surface. Abstract markings—lines and dots—are found throughout the cave. There are also two unidentifiable images that have a vaguely butterfly shape to them. This combination of subjects has led experts in pre-historic art and cultures to believe that there was likely a ritual, shamanic, or magical aspect to these paintings.

Further reading

• Homepage of The Chauvet Cave or Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc Cave
• Dawn of Art: The Chauvet Cave by J.M. Chauvet, E.B. Deschamps and C. Hillaire (1996) Harry N. Abrams, Inc., New York. English translation by Paul G. Bahn from French edition La Grotte Chauvet