Hamad bin Khalifa Islamic Art Symposium, a leading international conference on Islamic art and culture concluded here yesterday. The fourth biennial event under the theme God is Beautiful; He Loves Beauty: The Object in Islamic Art and Culture, brought in experts from round the world to discuss some of the artefacts housed at the Museum of Islamic Art.
The three-day symposium was co-sponsored by Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts, Virginia Commonwealth University in Qatar, Qatar Foundation, Qatar Museums Authority and the Museum of Islamic Art.
Ruba Kana’an, head of Research and Publications at the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto, presented her paper entitled, A Biography of a 13th-century Brass Ewer: the Social and Economic Lives of Mosul Metalwork, on Sunday.
The Doha ewer, having been made for Abu’l Qasim Mahmud ibn Sanjar Shah who ruled the Jazirat Bani Umar in the first half of the 13th century, is comparable to other surviving Mosul ewers currently in major museum collections including the British museum, the Louver and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
Kana’an, examined the ewer’s decorative style and motifs, manufacturing techniques, and patronage and also the social, economic and political context of Mosul where these ewers were produced.
Kjeld von Folsach, director at The David Collection in Copenhagen, presented his paper, As Precious as Gold – Some Woven Textiles from the Mongol Period, on Sunday.
Textiles from the 14th century, many of them preserved in Tibetan monasteries, were the focus of this presentation. Manufactured within the borders of the new Mongol empire, they display a fascinating mixture of Western and Eastern motifs, techniques, styles and fashions, drawing on a vast cultural hinterland from Iraq in the West to China in the East.
Yesterday, independent scholar Rachel Ward presenting her paper, The Doha Bucket and an Experimental Glass Workshop, examined the large red 14th century gilded and enamelled glass bucket from the MIA’s collection. The bucket was made by a group of Mamluk glass-makers who strove to increase the coverage and thickness of the enamelled decoration by experimenting with the chemical constituents of the glass and enamels.
The next speaker, also an independent scholar, author and publisher of numerous books and periodicals on various aspects of Asian textile art, Michael Fransess, examined the finest discovery of the 12th and 14th century Anatolian rugs, The Four Pregnant Senmurvs Rug, one of the great masterpieces in the MIA.
His paper, New Light on Early Anatolian Animal Carpets, presented a detailed study of its design and technique and compared it with rugs depicted in contemporary paintings from Iran and Italy.
Renowned calligrapher Mohamed Zakariya’s paper, Murakkaa: The Ottoman Calligraphic Album and Its Role in Establishing the International Style, discussed the albums and teaching methods of the Seyh Hamdullah model. Based on the 14th century Ottoman master’s work, the model proved adaptable and applicable on the widest scale and is evolving until this day.
Dr John Seyller, professor of Art History, University of Vermont, opened the afternoon session with his paper entitled, Assembled Beauty: Five Folios from the Jahangir Album. Examining the five previously unknown folios from the Jahangir Album, a magisterial manuscript that began under the auspices of Prince Salim (later Emperor Jahangir) in the 15th century, Seyller discussed the paintings and specimens of writing by royal artists and eminent calligraphers of the time that filled the album.
Editor of Islamic Art, Eleanor Sims, delivered the final presentation of the day, 17th-Century Safavid Persian Oil Paintings in the Museum of Islamic Art. Two of the six late-Safavid paintings in oil on canvas which are at the MIA were the center of the presentation.
The 17th century paintings, of nearly life-size of men and women dressed in the garb of upper-class Persians and the Oriental Christians, were commissioned by Europeans who came to the Safavid court to take back with them, as a visual record of people from unfamiliar parts of the world.
The Symposium closed in the afternoon with a discussion and remarks from the co-chairs. “We have been overwhelmed by the public enthusiasm for this event,” said Dr Sheila Blair, one of the organizers of the Symposium.
“Many attendees have come up to us individually to tell us how excited they are to participate. We are also extraordinarily pleased by the quality and professionalism of the presentations, which serve to bring the wonderful collections of the MIA to the broader public,” and Dr Jonathan Bloom, another organiser of the Symposium.
The Hamad bin Khalifa Symposia on Islamic Art addresses significant themes and issues in understanding the visual arts of the Islamic lands.
These symposia seek to make the latest and most interesting scholarship in this growing field of Islamic art available and accessible to a wide audience, ranging from students and scholars to artists, architects, designers and the interested public.
2011年10月31日星期一
2011年10月30日星期日
Oil painter's scenes displayed in bold strokes
There’s impressionism, and expressionism, but people really should talk about “juicyism,” because that’s what works for Chris Kappmeier.
Kappmeier grew up in Jersey City and now lives in Lyndhurst, in a painting-stuffed house (canvasses along the walls, the stairs, under the furniture) with a kitchen floor covered in oil paint drips.
Recently he went back to work driving a delivery truck in Manhattan — there are a number of angry blobs depicting New York City traffic in his new show, “Bold Strokes,” at the Morris Museum — but manipulating thick pools of translucent oils beneath thin spools of threadlike color is his real vocation.
“He looks much younger than he is,” associate curator Angela Sergonis says of the stocky, tattooed, buzz-cut and 40-ish Kappmeier, who does all his work on-site, with his subject before him and the plein-air whistling about his ears. That helps give the work its immediacy. Because painting the way Kappmeier paints is not about finding the right detail, or the subtle color shift in light from shadow to darkness. It’s not about referencing other artworks, either, though he has kept a paint box with a Vincent Van Gogh self-portrait taped to the top.
It’s about relating to a scene right in front of him, and reproducing it in quick, thick layers.
You can see what we mean in “Arthur’s Steakhouse Hoboken” (2007) or “Washington & 4th, Hoboken” (2010): Kappmeier has set up his easel across the street, framed the picture between a strip of cloud-flecked sky at the very top and the dark asphalt lined with lumpy cars at the bottom, and just quickly lays in swatches of paint through the middle of it all.
He lays down slabs of paint, then takes the end of his brush and traces through the lines of brickwork or cast-iron railing that emphasize the perspective. When it hums, the picture rhymes with reality as if it had been seen through an uneven, distorting lens, the trees and buildings flickering as if in a flame.
Kappmeier paints so thickly at times that you wonder if dusting the pictures could be a problem. Flowers stand out in relief a quarter-inch deep, and those wonderful cars he paints, their automobile patinas made of lozenges of paint squeezed directly out of the tube, sometimes look like shelves on the canvas.
The best paintings — “NYC Skyline: View From the Meadowlands, Conservation Center” (2006), “Hoboken Taxi Stand” (2010) and “Brooklyn Bridge, Rainy Night” (2010) — take the speed and crash it into the moment. There’s a banana-shaped egret standing like a half-finished ghost in “Skyline,” and the conga line of taxis in “Hoboken” seem to shimmer, as if their engines were all running. You’re supposed to feel them, not see them.
Van Gogh and expressionism do hover somewhere above and behind Kappmeier’s work, but there’s another ghost in it too — that of one-time art star of the ’80s Chuck Connelly. Connelly has some of Kappmeier’s determination to make a picture out of anything — you could sit either man down in front of a view, no matter how unpromising, and they would charge in painting and ultimately find the picture there. Beset by righteous independence (and a certain fondness for alcohol), Connelly has burned more bridges than Kappmeier has even crossed, but the older artist is a juicy painter too, a lover of oil paint laid on thick as plaster, creamier than cake frosting.
Juiciness will be with us as long as oils because the medium is a kind of tiny lens, the illusion of depths it is capable of reproducing imitated by the stuff itself. But mentioning Connelly in this context is both revealing and a red flag. The abandon with which Kappmeier pursues the feel of a picture seems wholly male — no doubt there are women who paint very thickly, but the headlong rush into notional space, reckless and almost blind, that marks Kappmeier’s art feels like force, not sensation.
Kappmeier grew up in Jersey City and now lives in Lyndhurst, in a painting-stuffed house (canvasses along the walls, the stairs, under the furniture) with a kitchen floor covered in oil paint drips.
Recently he went back to work driving a delivery truck in Manhattan — there are a number of angry blobs depicting New York City traffic in his new show, “Bold Strokes,” at the Morris Museum — but manipulating thick pools of translucent oils beneath thin spools of threadlike color is his real vocation.
“He looks much younger than he is,” associate curator Angela Sergonis says of the stocky, tattooed, buzz-cut and 40-ish Kappmeier, who does all his work on-site, with his subject before him and the plein-air whistling about his ears. That helps give the work its immediacy. Because painting the way Kappmeier paints is not about finding the right detail, or the subtle color shift in light from shadow to darkness. It’s not about referencing other artworks, either, though he has kept a paint box with a Vincent Van Gogh self-portrait taped to the top.
It’s about relating to a scene right in front of him, and reproducing it in quick, thick layers.
You can see what we mean in “Arthur’s Steakhouse Hoboken” (2007) or “Washington & 4th, Hoboken” (2010): Kappmeier has set up his easel across the street, framed the picture between a strip of cloud-flecked sky at the very top and the dark asphalt lined with lumpy cars at the bottom, and just quickly lays in swatches of paint through the middle of it all.
He lays down slabs of paint, then takes the end of his brush and traces through the lines of brickwork or cast-iron railing that emphasize the perspective. When it hums, the picture rhymes with reality as if it had been seen through an uneven, distorting lens, the trees and buildings flickering as if in a flame.
Kappmeier paints so thickly at times that you wonder if dusting the pictures could be a problem. Flowers stand out in relief a quarter-inch deep, and those wonderful cars he paints, their automobile patinas made of lozenges of paint squeezed directly out of the tube, sometimes look like shelves on the canvas.
The best paintings — “NYC Skyline: View From the Meadowlands, Conservation Center” (2006), “Hoboken Taxi Stand” (2010) and “Brooklyn Bridge, Rainy Night” (2010) — take the speed and crash it into the moment. There’s a banana-shaped egret standing like a half-finished ghost in “Skyline,” and the conga line of taxis in “Hoboken” seem to shimmer, as if their engines were all running. You’re supposed to feel them, not see them.
Van Gogh and expressionism do hover somewhere above and behind Kappmeier’s work, but there’s another ghost in it too — that of one-time art star of the ’80s Chuck Connelly. Connelly has some of Kappmeier’s determination to make a picture out of anything — you could sit either man down in front of a view, no matter how unpromising, and they would charge in painting and ultimately find the picture there. Beset by righteous independence (and a certain fondness for alcohol), Connelly has burned more bridges than Kappmeier has even crossed, but the older artist is a juicy painter too, a lover of oil paint laid on thick as plaster, creamier than cake frosting.
Juiciness will be with us as long as oils because the medium is a kind of tiny lens, the illusion of depths it is capable of reproducing imitated by the stuff itself. But mentioning Connelly in this context is both revealing and a red flag. The abandon with which Kappmeier pursues the feel of a picture seems wholly male — no doubt there are women who paint very thickly, but the headlong rush into notional space, reckless and almost blind, that marks Kappmeier’s art feels like force, not sensation.
2011年10月27日星期四
Lammershoek grows caution to the wind
Giuseppe Cattaneo, our teacher and invigilator, stopped to look at my still life. I imagined myself to be profiting from my history of art studies, happily deploying techniques associated with some of the greater Post-Impressionists. "I'm not sure," Cattaneo couldn't stop himself from murmuring, "that an exam is the best time to carry out experiments." My borrowing from Cezanne was apparently not entirely successful.
This came back to me while I was tasting the wines of Lammershoek, one of the new-wave Swartland wineries. Wine sales generally are bad, exports less lucrative than they should be -- the industry is bleeding. Is this the best time, I wondered, for experiments from a producer that has been making some really attractive but fairly conventional wines? At which my tastebuds linked arms with my instincts and all shouted "Yes!"
Much of the change since young Craig Hawkins took over the winemaking in 2010 is very simple. In fact, simplicity is almost the essence of the Lammershoek project -- be as natural and organic as possible in the vineyards, pick the grapes before they get ultra-ripe (giving moderate alcohol levels) and then don't muck about with them in the cellar with acidification or additives, or compromise fruit purity with new oak barrels.
Excellent value
If one word could sum up the result, it would be "freshness". And don't underestimate genuine freshness -- it's not easy to come by or even to define, but wonderful to find. There's a lot to be said for the rich glow of a warm afternoon or balmy evening, but what is more exhilarating than the freshness of a fine, tingling early morning after a showery night?
The first observable changes in Lammershoek's wines have appeared in their new range called Lam. The label is as funky as the name and the wines are excellent value at about R60 a bottle. Unfortunately the initial vintages of the White Blend, Rosé and Pinotage were made in small quantities and have sold fast, but are worth looking out for.
The Lam Syrah 2010 was released recently so should be found (or contact the cellar). It's fragrant, with dried herbs and berries, light-feeling, lively and, yes, fresh.
There are a few other reds from the revolutionary Swartland offering extraordinary value and quality at this price: Kloof Street Rouge from Mullineux and Secateurs from Badenhorst. I've bought all three for myself but perhaps my softest spot is for the Lam.
Also being released are the first 2010 whites in the senior Lammershoek range: Chenin Blanc and the blend called Roulette, also based on old-vine chenin. Both beautifully combine light, steely elegance with subtle richness and a quietly penetrating intensity. The Chenin is more expressive now but both are still young. Excellent value at R90 ex-cellar .
The first fascinating but rather intellectual wines under Lammershoek's label used for more radical experiments, Cellar Foot, are also coming up.
There's a spicy, austerely grand example of the rare white grape Harslevelu (no sulphur added, 11.5% alcohol) and, from a slightly less unusual red grape, a thrilling, succulent Mourvèdre.
Lammershoek is arguably the most exciting biggish winery in the Cape. It's also producing eminently drinkable and interesting wines, which is the important thing.
This came back to me while I was tasting the wines of Lammershoek, one of the new-wave Swartland wineries. Wine sales generally are bad, exports less lucrative than they should be -- the industry is bleeding. Is this the best time, I wondered, for experiments from a producer that has been making some really attractive but fairly conventional wines? At which my tastebuds linked arms with my instincts and all shouted "Yes!"
Much of the change since young Craig Hawkins took over the winemaking in 2010 is very simple. In fact, simplicity is almost the essence of the Lammershoek project -- be as natural and organic as possible in the vineyards, pick the grapes before they get ultra-ripe (giving moderate alcohol levels) and then don't muck about with them in the cellar with acidification or additives, or compromise fruit purity with new oak barrels.
Excellent value
If one word could sum up the result, it would be "freshness". And don't underestimate genuine freshness -- it's not easy to come by or even to define, but wonderful to find. There's a lot to be said for the rich glow of a warm afternoon or balmy evening, but what is more exhilarating than the freshness of a fine, tingling early morning after a showery night?
The first observable changes in Lammershoek's wines have appeared in their new range called Lam. The label is as funky as the name and the wines are excellent value at about R60 a bottle. Unfortunately the initial vintages of the White Blend, Rosé and Pinotage were made in small quantities and have sold fast, but are worth looking out for.
The Lam Syrah 2010 was released recently so should be found (or contact the cellar). It's fragrant, with dried herbs and berries, light-feeling, lively and, yes, fresh.
There are a few other reds from the revolutionary Swartland offering extraordinary value and quality at this price: Kloof Street Rouge from Mullineux and Secateurs from Badenhorst. I've bought all three for myself but perhaps my softest spot is for the Lam.
Also being released are the first 2010 whites in the senior Lammershoek range: Chenin Blanc and the blend called Roulette, also based on old-vine chenin. Both beautifully combine light, steely elegance with subtle richness and a quietly penetrating intensity. The Chenin is more expressive now but both are still young. Excellent value at R90 ex-cellar .
The first fascinating but rather intellectual wines under Lammershoek's label used for more radical experiments, Cellar Foot, are also coming up.
There's a spicy, austerely grand example of the rare white grape Harslevelu (no sulphur added, 11.5% alcohol) and, from a slightly less unusual red grape, a thrilling, succulent Mourvèdre.
Lammershoek is arguably the most exciting biggish winery in the Cape. It's also producing eminently drinkable and interesting wines, which is the important thing.
2011年10月26日星期三
German Forgers Face Prison for Scam Worth More Than $22 Million
An art forger and his three accomplices, who together made more than 16 million euros ($22 million) by selling oil paintings they falsely attributed to famous artists, today face sentencing in a Cologne court.
Wolfgang Beltracchi, 60, confessed to painting 14 works that he sold as masterpieces by Max Ernst, Max Pechstein, Heinrich Campendonk, Andre Derain, Fernand Leger and Kees van Dongen. His wife, Helene Beltracchi, her sister and a fourth associate confessed to bringing the works to the art market.
Dealers and collectors say confidence in the German art market has been shaken by the forgery scandal, described as the biggest ever in Germany, as art historians, museums and auction houses were duped by the scam.
“The whole thing is quite terrible,” said Christoph Graf Douglas, a Frankfurt-based independent art dealer and consultant to collectors. “It has completely undermined confidence in the market. Not only were criminals at work, there was also some shoddy research. People have bought the idea that experts can detect forgeries, and this shows that is not the case.”
Among the forgers’ victims was the U.S. actor Steve Martin, according to a May report in Spiegel magazine. Martin paid 700,000 euros for a painting falsely attributed to Heinrich Campendonk, called “Landscape With Horses,” from Galerie Cazeau- Beraudiere in Paris in 2004, according to Spiegel.
It was then sold by Christie’s in 2006 for 500,000 euros to a Swiss businesswoman, the magazine said. Christie’s spokesman Matthew Paton declined to comment on the sale.
‘Highly Skilled’
The Cologne auction house Kunsthaus Lempertz said in January that it had sold five of the forgers’ works. The authenticity of all of them “was confirmed by leading experts and some of them were subsequently shown in a number of museums.”
“My colleagues and I, like the whole art market, were deceived by the highly skilled and professional operations of the forgers,” Lempertz chief executive Henrik Hanstein wrote in a letter to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in July.
The group not only produced and sold the paintings, it also invented an entire provenance for them, claiming the art came from either the “Jaegers Collection” or the “Wilhelm Knops Collection,” according to the Cologne court.
They said Werner Jaegers was Helene Beltracchi’s grandfather, while Knops was the grandfather of another associate, named as Otto S.-K. in court documents.
“People should have asked: Who is Jaegers?” said Douglas, a former managing director of Sotheby’s in Germany. “When did he live? Do we have a photo? How can there be a collector no one has heard of?”
In return for the confessions, prosecutors agreed to request prison sentences of no longer than six years for Beltracchi, a maximum of four years for his wife, five years for Otto S.-K. and a maximum suspended sentence of two years for the wife’s sister, Jeanette S., who is only implicated in three cases, according to the Cologne regional court.
The Beltracchi couple agreed to pay 980,000 Swiss francs ($1.12 million) to the court.
Christian Rode, Beltracchi’s lawyer, said in a final statement that his client wasn’t motivated by profit alone. The master forger, who has unruly gray locks and once lived in a houseboat, took great pride in his work, he said.
He felt a close connection with the artists whose oeuvres he sought to “complete,” calling his paintings the works that the artists should themselves have produced, but never got around to, Rode said. Beltracchi told the court that his pictures were sometimes almost “too good” for the artist, because he had the benefit of hindsight and knew how the artist and the history of art developed.
Rode said the trial exposed many of the shadier aspects of the art market.
“We have heard a lot about experts driven by interests, who don’t only provide expertise but also buy, mediate and receive commission,” he said in his concluding statement. “We have heard about duty-free entrepots in Geneva and payments from Swiss accounts to Swiss accounts.”
As many as 41 more paintings not included in the trial because of statutes of limitations may also be forgeries by Beltracchi. The scandal has spawned a number of civil cases against dealers and auction houses, as well as the criminal trial.
The forgers were only caught out when one buyer became suspicious and sent his picture to be examined by scientists. They discovered a paint color that had not existed at the time the work was supposed to have been produced.
“We want to know the whole truth,” said Douglas. “How many paintings did they forge? How many more are still on the market? The only way to combat the lack of confidence is with some detailed work.”
Wolfgang Beltracchi, 60, confessed to painting 14 works that he sold as masterpieces by Max Ernst, Max Pechstein, Heinrich Campendonk, Andre Derain, Fernand Leger and Kees van Dongen. His wife, Helene Beltracchi, her sister and a fourth associate confessed to bringing the works to the art market.
Dealers and collectors say confidence in the German art market has been shaken by the forgery scandal, described as the biggest ever in Germany, as art historians, museums and auction houses were duped by the scam.
“The whole thing is quite terrible,” said Christoph Graf Douglas, a Frankfurt-based independent art dealer and consultant to collectors. “It has completely undermined confidence in the market. Not only were criminals at work, there was also some shoddy research. People have bought the idea that experts can detect forgeries, and this shows that is not the case.”
Among the forgers’ victims was the U.S. actor Steve Martin, according to a May report in Spiegel magazine. Martin paid 700,000 euros for a painting falsely attributed to Heinrich Campendonk, called “Landscape With Horses,” from Galerie Cazeau- Beraudiere in Paris in 2004, according to Spiegel.
It was then sold by Christie’s in 2006 for 500,000 euros to a Swiss businesswoman, the magazine said. Christie’s spokesman Matthew Paton declined to comment on the sale.
‘Highly Skilled’
The Cologne auction house Kunsthaus Lempertz said in January that it had sold five of the forgers’ works. The authenticity of all of them “was confirmed by leading experts and some of them were subsequently shown in a number of museums.”
“My colleagues and I, like the whole art market, were deceived by the highly skilled and professional operations of the forgers,” Lempertz chief executive Henrik Hanstein wrote in a letter to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in July.
The group not only produced and sold the paintings, it also invented an entire provenance for them, claiming the art came from either the “Jaegers Collection” or the “Wilhelm Knops Collection,” according to the Cologne court.
They said Werner Jaegers was Helene Beltracchi’s grandfather, while Knops was the grandfather of another associate, named as Otto S.-K. in court documents.
“People should have asked: Who is Jaegers?” said Douglas, a former managing director of Sotheby’s in Germany. “When did he live? Do we have a photo? How can there be a collector no one has heard of?”
In return for the confessions, prosecutors agreed to request prison sentences of no longer than six years for Beltracchi, a maximum of four years for his wife, five years for Otto S.-K. and a maximum suspended sentence of two years for the wife’s sister, Jeanette S., who is only implicated in three cases, according to the Cologne regional court.
The Beltracchi couple agreed to pay 980,000 Swiss francs ($1.12 million) to the court.
Christian Rode, Beltracchi’s lawyer, said in a final statement that his client wasn’t motivated by profit alone. The master forger, who has unruly gray locks and once lived in a houseboat, took great pride in his work, he said.
He felt a close connection with the artists whose oeuvres he sought to “complete,” calling his paintings the works that the artists should themselves have produced, but never got around to, Rode said. Beltracchi told the court that his pictures were sometimes almost “too good” for the artist, because he had the benefit of hindsight and knew how the artist and the history of art developed.
Rode said the trial exposed many of the shadier aspects of the art market.
“We have heard a lot about experts driven by interests, who don’t only provide expertise but also buy, mediate and receive commission,” he said in his concluding statement. “We have heard about duty-free entrepots in Geneva and payments from Swiss accounts to Swiss accounts.”
As many as 41 more paintings not included in the trial because of statutes of limitations may also be forgeries by Beltracchi. The scandal has spawned a number of civil cases against dealers and auction houses, as well as the criminal trial.
The forgers were only caught out when one buyer became suspicious and sent his picture to be examined by scientists. They discovered a paint color that had not existed at the time the work was supposed to have been produced.
“We want to know the whole truth,” said Douglas. “How many paintings did they forge? How many more are still on the market? The only way to combat the lack of confidence is with some detailed work.”
2011年10月25日星期二
oil painting online store oil painting online stor
Walked the streets of Chinese painting, right and wrong without saying. We may not be just blame history. Has a deep sense of mission and spirit of a confident artist should never be a timid person before faltering. Nor will such as the chameleon-like because of a movement or trend of a so-called artistic philistine camel face-lift.
Self-confidence, a simple word, really find it difficult to repeat itself. Self, self. Letter, convictions. Today, the so-called "Art Spirit", an art form will lead to the emergence of a number of "cottage" version. As to whether emotions fit to explore the depths of his soul, in the interests of the face is no longer important. But the real self-confidence although Liaoruo Chen those stars, but the Chan-hyun sky.
Bo Po Art Network commentator fifteen author landscape painting,down jackets, over the English translation is Landscape oil painting, the literal meaning is to describe the object of natural scenery, with oil painting materials. Like with Chinese landscape painting, not a start there this category, but little by little until the purification and development of the formation of an independent system. According to Bo Po experts, Renaissance of the 16th century, landscape painting as an independent genre of painting appeared in the European art world,oil painting, and have been greatly developed. Since then, this great art arose in the art of jungle, bright day.
The spread of civilization, the Western classical oil painting into a strong flavor of Asian, West Asian countries to absorb the essence and will also feature their corresponding state of the art integration,oil painting online store, North Korea, is a typical representative. Grade of carefully Korean painters of landscape painting, and for a rise in my mind there will be too much for the kind words, but I do not know how to open expression. This is the characteristics of the Korean landscape, its beauty, you can move the first time, people a long time can not be the venue exudes the charm of moving the art of mind.
Bo Po experts say North Korea under the Juche idea, the artist with the greatest enthusiasm towards their own country every attraction,oil painting for sale, they use their life energy to describe these hastily Wood, mountains and rivers. Cooperation with Bo Po, Mr. Pu Yongzhe Korean artists is such a national artist, he painted the most emotional hot beautiful views North Korea, not a trace of his own feelings to creative integration in the fall, so enjoy his paintings, always feel strong emotions, strong ethnic flavor. He exhibited at the Bo Po called "summer" in the works, the use of a new perspective to enjoy Korean summer. Abandoned the traditional concept of the stretch of shade, but bright yellow with bright green Cross to render the atmosphere, so that the color of the summer, some more fresh but warm feeling. Painter in the picture to manipulate the relationship between light and shadow, scattered light so that the painting depicted a more open space, like an old photograph in appreciation of the general, so that the viewer into the success of their memories, to paintings and perfect blend of soul. Is a moving painting masterpiece.
Self-confidence, a simple word, really find it difficult to repeat itself. Self, self. Letter, convictions. Today, the so-called "Art Spirit", an art form will lead to the emergence of a number of "cottage" version. As to whether emotions fit to explore the depths of his soul, in the interests of the face is no longer important. But the real self-confidence although Liaoruo Chen those stars, but the Chan-hyun sky.
Bo Po Art Network commentator fifteen author landscape painting,down jackets, over the English translation is Landscape oil painting, the literal meaning is to describe the object of natural scenery, with oil painting materials. Like with Chinese landscape painting, not a start there this category, but little by little until the purification and development of the formation of an independent system. According to Bo Po experts, Renaissance of the 16th century, landscape painting as an independent genre of painting appeared in the European art world,oil painting, and have been greatly developed. Since then, this great art arose in the art of jungle, bright day.
The spread of civilization, the Western classical oil painting into a strong flavor of Asian, West Asian countries to absorb the essence and will also feature their corresponding state of the art integration,oil painting online store, North Korea, is a typical representative. Grade of carefully Korean painters of landscape painting, and for a rise in my mind there will be too much for the kind words, but I do not know how to open expression. This is the characteristics of the Korean landscape, its beauty, you can move the first time, people a long time can not be the venue exudes the charm of moving the art of mind.
Bo Po experts say North Korea under the Juche idea, the artist with the greatest enthusiasm towards their own country every attraction,oil painting for sale, they use their life energy to describe these hastily Wood, mountains and rivers. Cooperation with Bo Po, Mr. Pu Yongzhe Korean artists is such a national artist, he painted the most emotional hot beautiful views North Korea, not a trace of his own feelings to creative integration in the fall, so enjoy his paintings, always feel strong emotions, strong ethnic flavor. He exhibited at the Bo Po called "summer" in the works, the use of a new perspective to enjoy Korean summer. Abandoned the traditional concept of the stretch of shade, but bright yellow with bright green Cross to render the atmosphere, so that the color of the summer, some more fresh but warm feeling. Painter in the picture to manipulate the relationship between light and shadow, scattered light so that the painting depicted a more open space, like an old photograph in appreciation of the general, so that the viewer into the success of their memories, to paintings and perfect blend of soul. Is a moving painting masterpiece.
2011年10月24日星期一
America' at LACMA
As tinderboxes go, few are more potentially volatile than the politics of race and sex. Mix the two together, and the possibility for explosion rises exponentially.
In Glenn Ligon’s art, expertly surveyed in a traveling exhibition newly arrived at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the mixture is made. An explosion, however, never comes. What arrives instead is something different — something better, more cogent and worthwhile. Like all good iconoclasts, Ligon chisels open a space for contemplation from a place that is too often inaccessible and locked-down.
The Bronx-born artist, 50, began as a painter. Although the show includes sculptures, prints, drawings, mixed media and even neon signs, painting remains a core activity. Take the beautiful recent neon sculptures in the final room, which play with the word "America," flipping around its letters to show darker sides. Painting's usual support of stretched canvas is replaced by gas-filled and electrified glass tubing, parts of which are painted black to achieve various poetic effects. They're as much paintings as the canvases in the first gallery.
Those grew out of Ligon's youthful dissatisfaction with gestural abstraction. (The show is installed in a loose chronology, beginning around 1985.) A standard trope in postwar American abstraction drew an analogy between a painting and the human body — between the support as skeletal structure for a skin of paint. Ligon sent it spinning.
Mixing oil and enamel, "Untitled (I am a man)" derives from the defiant placards worn in 1968 by striking sanitation workers in segregated Memphis, Tenn. To the general indifference of city leaders, two men, Echol Cole and Robert Walker, had been crushed in a malfunctioning garbage truck. Their mangled bodies gave physical heft to protesters' large signs: "I AM A MAN." The existential outcry was held aloft on sticks or attached to the marchers' chests.
Ligon's painting features identical typeface painted on a white ground. Look closely, though, and the white surface is layered over a black skin of under-paint. The surface is smudged, worn, cracked -- evidence of use, as in those disruptive weeks in Memphis, but also a sign of tattered purity.
The artist, black and gay, painted it in the final full year of Ronald Reagan's presidency. Reagan had launched his first term's campaign with a notorious states' rights speech delivered in Philadelphia, Miss., site of a famous civil rights era triple-murder. Once in office, he remained silent about AIDS until the epidemic had ravaged the gay community, leaving more than 20,000 dead.
A wry and poignant Ligon drawing (executed with Michael Duffy) from 2000 masquerades as a millennial condition report on that earlier, intentionally "damaged" painting. Identifying every crack, spot and stain on its surface, he reports on a condition much larger than his art's.
Take the recent Arab Spring, where signs were spotted in Libya declaring “Ana Rajul” — Arabic for "I am a man." Ligon's painted 1988 sign, midway between past and the present, retains the capacity to jolt.
Ligon's fusion of art, language and the body soon expanded. Using black oil stick and stencils, recalling Jasper Johns' technique, he painted on wood doors covered in white gesso. The format subtly scales the painting to a viewer's body. In one, the word "passing" is repeated nearly 400 times, legibly across the top but clogging the stencil to become steadily more clotted and indecipherable as it cascades down the surface.
Passing — through doors, between rooms or, metaphorically, from life to death — is smudged with racial and sexual overtones, as in passing as white or straight to survive. A physical roughness in these works eventually gives way to sensuous elegance, especially in the 1990s, when Ligon began to mix coal dust into ink. The tactile surface gains a subtle, light-reflective sparkle, echoing Andy Warhol's use of diamond dust in paintings. The painting's body luxuriates in its own skin, gorgeous and scarred.
An essential pivot comes in the second gallery, where Ligon's "Notes on the Margin of the Black Book" is installed across two adjoining walls. He separately framed 91 erotic photographs of black males cut from Robert Mapplethorpe's 1988 "Black Book," installing them in two horizontal rows. Between them are two more rows of printed snippets of text, 78 comments on sexuality, race, AIDS, art and the politically inflamed controversy over Mapplethorpe's work launched by then-Texas Congressman Dick Armey.
Some, like twisted quotes from the late ambassador and art collector Walter Annenberg and New York Times art critic Hilton Kramer, make your jaw drop, partly because of the speakers' social and cultural power. Others, ranging from celebrated author James Baldwin to anonymous bar patrons, turn your head around in more intellectually expansive ways.
Ligon's piece, a sensation when shown at the 1993 Whitney Biennial, remains powerful today. Then, it erupted in the immediate aftermath of Patrick Buchanan's "culture war" battle cry at the Republican National Convention; now, coded racial animus and homophobia still course through presidential contests.
Ligon adroitly ruptures hardened positions. Note that the number of photographs (91) doesn't match the number of short texts (78). We're used to reading texts as descriptive photo-captions, but that can't happen here; the texts and photos don't match up.
Instead, these words and images slip and slide, the friction between them sending sparks and emitting light. The binary of words and pictures is banished -- along with black/white, gay/straight, naked/nude, liberal/conservative, art/porn, innocent/obscene. Human desires aren't so easily described. This is political art of the most thoughtful, least didactic kind, rewarding the extended viewing it requires with a shot of deep humanity.
The exhibition, with 79 works, has been trimmed from the 104 in its debut last spring at New York's Whitney Museum, where it was organized. But it's beautifully installed, giving a thorough accounting of an important artist at mid-career.
In Glenn Ligon’s art, expertly surveyed in a traveling exhibition newly arrived at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the mixture is made. An explosion, however, never comes. What arrives instead is something different — something better, more cogent and worthwhile. Like all good iconoclasts, Ligon chisels open a space for contemplation from a place that is too often inaccessible and locked-down.
The Bronx-born artist, 50, began as a painter. Although the show includes sculptures, prints, drawings, mixed media and even neon signs, painting remains a core activity. Take the beautiful recent neon sculptures in the final room, which play with the word "America," flipping around its letters to show darker sides. Painting's usual support of stretched canvas is replaced by gas-filled and electrified glass tubing, parts of which are painted black to achieve various poetic effects. They're as much paintings as the canvases in the first gallery.
Those grew out of Ligon's youthful dissatisfaction with gestural abstraction. (The show is installed in a loose chronology, beginning around 1985.) A standard trope in postwar American abstraction drew an analogy between a painting and the human body — between the support as skeletal structure for a skin of paint. Ligon sent it spinning.
Mixing oil and enamel, "Untitled (I am a man)" derives from the defiant placards worn in 1968 by striking sanitation workers in segregated Memphis, Tenn. To the general indifference of city leaders, two men, Echol Cole and Robert Walker, had been crushed in a malfunctioning garbage truck. Their mangled bodies gave physical heft to protesters' large signs: "I AM A MAN." The existential outcry was held aloft on sticks or attached to the marchers' chests.
Ligon's painting features identical typeface painted on a white ground. Look closely, though, and the white surface is layered over a black skin of under-paint. The surface is smudged, worn, cracked -- evidence of use, as in those disruptive weeks in Memphis, but also a sign of tattered purity.
The artist, black and gay, painted it in the final full year of Ronald Reagan's presidency. Reagan had launched his first term's campaign with a notorious states' rights speech delivered in Philadelphia, Miss., site of a famous civil rights era triple-murder. Once in office, he remained silent about AIDS until the epidemic had ravaged the gay community, leaving more than 20,000 dead.
A wry and poignant Ligon drawing (executed with Michael Duffy) from 2000 masquerades as a millennial condition report on that earlier, intentionally "damaged" painting. Identifying every crack, spot and stain on its surface, he reports on a condition much larger than his art's.
Take the recent Arab Spring, where signs were spotted in Libya declaring “Ana Rajul” — Arabic for "I am a man." Ligon's painted 1988 sign, midway between past and the present, retains the capacity to jolt.
Ligon's fusion of art, language and the body soon expanded. Using black oil stick and stencils, recalling Jasper Johns' technique, he painted on wood doors covered in white gesso. The format subtly scales the painting to a viewer's body. In one, the word "passing" is repeated nearly 400 times, legibly across the top but clogging the stencil to become steadily more clotted and indecipherable as it cascades down the surface.
Passing — through doors, between rooms or, metaphorically, from life to death — is smudged with racial and sexual overtones, as in passing as white or straight to survive. A physical roughness in these works eventually gives way to sensuous elegance, especially in the 1990s, when Ligon began to mix coal dust into ink. The tactile surface gains a subtle, light-reflective sparkle, echoing Andy Warhol's use of diamond dust in paintings. The painting's body luxuriates in its own skin, gorgeous and scarred.
An essential pivot comes in the second gallery, where Ligon's "Notes on the Margin of the Black Book" is installed across two adjoining walls. He separately framed 91 erotic photographs of black males cut from Robert Mapplethorpe's 1988 "Black Book," installing them in two horizontal rows. Between them are two more rows of printed snippets of text, 78 comments on sexuality, race, AIDS, art and the politically inflamed controversy over Mapplethorpe's work launched by then-Texas Congressman Dick Armey.
Some, like twisted quotes from the late ambassador and art collector Walter Annenberg and New York Times art critic Hilton Kramer, make your jaw drop, partly because of the speakers' social and cultural power. Others, ranging from celebrated author James Baldwin to anonymous bar patrons, turn your head around in more intellectually expansive ways.
Ligon's piece, a sensation when shown at the 1993 Whitney Biennial, remains powerful today. Then, it erupted in the immediate aftermath of Patrick Buchanan's "culture war" battle cry at the Republican National Convention; now, coded racial animus and homophobia still course through presidential contests.
Ligon adroitly ruptures hardened positions. Note that the number of photographs (91) doesn't match the number of short texts (78). We're used to reading texts as descriptive photo-captions, but that can't happen here; the texts and photos don't match up.
Instead, these words and images slip and slide, the friction between them sending sparks and emitting light. The binary of words and pictures is banished -- along with black/white, gay/straight, naked/nude, liberal/conservative, art/porn, innocent/obscene. Human desires aren't so easily described. This is political art of the most thoughtful, least didactic kind, rewarding the extended viewing it requires with a shot of deep humanity.
The exhibition, with 79 works, has been trimmed from the 104 in its debut last spring at New York's Whitney Museum, where it was organized. But it's beautifully installed, giving a thorough accounting of an important artist at mid-career.
2011年10月23日星期日
Delightful and inspiring
While surfing the art circuit recently, the snippet that caught my attention was from Sotheby’s that stated Raja Ravi Varma’s picture, ‘A Himalayan Beauty’, went to a private European buyer for $2,66,500 on September 16, 2011. I immediately remembered him being featured in the 1998 Limca Book of Records when his painting, ‘The Begum’s Bath, was sold for Rs 32 lakh at an auction of contemporary Indian art at the Nehru Centre, Mumbai, in 1997. It was recorded as the highest price ever paid for an Indian painting. Of course, Indian paintings have sold for much more since then. But one always remembers the pioneer. He was the first Indian artist who fused the techniques of Western and Indian art successfully, painting scenes from Indian myths and legends in the realistic style of the West, which eventually formed the basis of a popular art tradition later.
I first came across Ravi Varma’s paintings at the Maharaja Fatesingh Museum in Baroda. The art collection is displayed in a school building within the palace compound where Maharaja Fatesinghrao Gaekwad and other members of the royal family had their schooling. The art collection once belonged to Maharaja Sayajirao Gaekwad III, said to be the maker of Baroda city. It was he who invited Raja Ravi Varma, the first Indian artist to use oil colours, to paint portraits of the royal family. Many of his famous paintings on mythological subjects were also done at Baroda and now comprise a part of the Ravi Varma collection. They include masterpieces like Vishwamitra and Menaka, King Shantanu and Matsyagandha, Arjuna and Subhadra, Nala and Damayanti, Radha waiting for Krishna at the Kunjavana, and several others. The royal portraits include studies of Maharaja Sayajirao III, Sampatrao Gaekwad, Maharani Chimanabai II, Princess Tarabai and others. I was particularly interested in locating the portrait of the beautiful princess Indira Raje, his only daughter, who was the mother of Maharani Gayatri Devi. There are 80 paintings by Ravi Varma in this collection. Later in life he also patronised the royal houses of Travancore, Mysore and Udaipur, where his paintings are exhibited.
What strikes the layman first of all is Ravi Varma’s use of bright colours in his portraits and landscapes. There is an exquisite blend of the early Tanjore style of painting and the graceful realism of European masters. His forte was the use of bright colours in his portraits and landscapes. What also stands out is his apt selection of significant moments from the Sanskrit classics. He is said to have provided an important link between traditional Indian art and the contemporary; between the Tanjore School and Western Realism. Although his technique was European, the soul was undoubtedly Indian. He has been described as “a representative of Europeanised School of Indian Artists”.
Ravi Varma’s development as an artist is interesting. The son of Umamba Thampuratti and Neelakandan Bhattathiripad, he was born in a royal Travancore family at Kilimanoor. He showed great promise from a very young age, making charcoal drawings on the walls and floors of his house. His uncle, artist Raja Raja Varma, recognised his talent and gave him his first lessons. Ravi Varma was lucky enough to get the patronage of Ayilyam Thirunal, Maharaja of Travancore, when he was just 14 years old and had his first lessons from the palace painter, Rama Swamy Naidu. This is where he discovered and learned new techniques in the field of painting. Another important artist who trained him in oil painting three years later and greatly influenced his style was his British teacher Theodor Jenson.
Varma’s later years spent in Mysore, Baroda and other places enabled him to sharpen and expand his skills, finally blossoming into a mature and complete artist. Connoisseurs feel that it was largely because of his systematic training, first in the traditional art of Thanjavoor, and later, European art.
Ravi Varma made his debut in the fine arts exhibition at Chennai (then Madras), in 1873. His work, ‘Nair Lady at her Toilette’, won him the governor’s gold medal. This picture also fetched him the gold medal at the painting exhibition held in Vienna that year. After his return from Madras, he painted ‘Heights and Depths’ showing a Tamil woman from the royal family flinging a silver coin at a beggar woman. ‘The Gypsies of South India’, featuring a wandering fortune teller with a baby on her lap, also belongs to the same period. Some of his works were exhibited at the World Religious Conference of 1892 at Chicago.
Varma’s paintings have been broadly classified as portraits, portrait-based compositions and theatrical compositions based on classical myths and legends. His most outstanding paintings include Nala Damayanti, Shantanu and Matsyagandha, Shantanu and Ganga, Radha and Madhava, Kamsa Maya, Shrikrishna and Devaki, Arjuna and Subhadra, Draupadi Vastraharan, Harischandra and Taramati, Vishwamitra and Menaka and Seetaswayamvaram, among others. By 1876, he had painted several versions of Shakuntala and one particular painting sent for the Madras competition impressed the Duke of Buckingham so much that it was selected as the frontispiece for Sir Monier William’s translation of Abhijnana Shakuntalam. All his chosen subjects took new forms under his skillful brush. He was also convinced that mass reproduction of his paintings would initiate millions of Indians to real art. So, in 1894, he set up an oleography press called the Ravi Varma Pictures Depot.
Other museums housing paintings by Ravi Varma include the Jayachamarajendra Museum and Art Gallery in Mysore, the Sri Chitra Art Gallery in Trivandrum and the National Art Gallery in Chennai where fiber optic lighting is used to illuminate the important paintings to protect them from heat and radiation.
I first came across Ravi Varma’s paintings at the Maharaja Fatesingh Museum in Baroda. The art collection is displayed in a school building within the palace compound where Maharaja Fatesinghrao Gaekwad and other members of the royal family had their schooling. The art collection once belonged to Maharaja Sayajirao Gaekwad III, said to be the maker of Baroda city. It was he who invited Raja Ravi Varma, the first Indian artist to use oil colours, to paint portraits of the royal family. Many of his famous paintings on mythological subjects were also done at Baroda and now comprise a part of the Ravi Varma collection. They include masterpieces like Vishwamitra and Menaka, King Shantanu and Matsyagandha, Arjuna and Subhadra, Nala and Damayanti, Radha waiting for Krishna at the Kunjavana, and several others. The royal portraits include studies of Maharaja Sayajirao III, Sampatrao Gaekwad, Maharani Chimanabai II, Princess Tarabai and others. I was particularly interested in locating the portrait of the beautiful princess Indira Raje, his only daughter, who was the mother of Maharani Gayatri Devi. There are 80 paintings by Ravi Varma in this collection. Later in life he also patronised the royal houses of Travancore, Mysore and Udaipur, where his paintings are exhibited.
What strikes the layman first of all is Ravi Varma’s use of bright colours in his portraits and landscapes. There is an exquisite blend of the early Tanjore style of painting and the graceful realism of European masters. His forte was the use of bright colours in his portraits and landscapes. What also stands out is his apt selection of significant moments from the Sanskrit classics. He is said to have provided an important link between traditional Indian art and the contemporary; between the Tanjore School and Western Realism. Although his technique was European, the soul was undoubtedly Indian. He has been described as “a representative of Europeanised School of Indian Artists”.
Ravi Varma’s development as an artist is interesting. The son of Umamba Thampuratti and Neelakandan Bhattathiripad, he was born in a royal Travancore family at Kilimanoor. He showed great promise from a very young age, making charcoal drawings on the walls and floors of his house. His uncle, artist Raja Raja Varma, recognised his talent and gave him his first lessons. Ravi Varma was lucky enough to get the patronage of Ayilyam Thirunal, Maharaja of Travancore, when he was just 14 years old and had his first lessons from the palace painter, Rama Swamy Naidu. This is where he discovered and learned new techniques in the field of painting. Another important artist who trained him in oil painting three years later and greatly influenced his style was his British teacher Theodor Jenson.
Varma’s later years spent in Mysore, Baroda and other places enabled him to sharpen and expand his skills, finally blossoming into a mature and complete artist. Connoisseurs feel that it was largely because of his systematic training, first in the traditional art of Thanjavoor, and later, European art.
Ravi Varma made his debut in the fine arts exhibition at Chennai (then Madras), in 1873. His work, ‘Nair Lady at her Toilette’, won him the governor’s gold medal. This picture also fetched him the gold medal at the painting exhibition held in Vienna that year. After his return from Madras, he painted ‘Heights and Depths’ showing a Tamil woman from the royal family flinging a silver coin at a beggar woman. ‘The Gypsies of South India’, featuring a wandering fortune teller with a baby on her lap, also belongs to the same period. Some of his works were exhibited at the World Religious Conference of 1892 at Chicago.
Varma’s paintings have been broadly classified as portraits, portrait-based compositions and theatrical compositions based on classical myths and legends. His most outstanding paintings include Nala Damayanti, Shantanu and Matsyagandha, Shantanu and Ganga, Radha and Madhava, Kamsa Maya, Shrikrishna and Devaki, Arjuna and Subhadra, Draupadi Vastraharan, Harischandra and Taramati, Vishwamitra and Menaka and Seetaswayamvaram, among others. By 1876, he had painted several versions of Shakuntala and one particular painting sent for the Madras competition impressed the Duke of Buckingham so much that it was selected as the frontispiece for Sir Monier William’s translation of Abhijnana Shakuntalam. All his chosen subjects took new forms under his skillful brush. He was also convinced that mass reproduction of his paintings would initiate millions of Indians to real art. So, in 1894, he set up an oleography press called the Ravi Varma Pictures Depot.
Other museums housing paintings by Ravi Varma include the Jayachamarajendra Museum and Art Gallery in Mysore, the Sri Chitra Art Gallery in Trivandrum and the National Art Gallery in Chennai where fiber optic lighting is used to illuminate the important paintings to protect them from heat and radiation.
2011年10月20日星期四
High Museum curator shares insights on MoMA masterpieces
Nothing can quite compare to an all-afternoon ramble through a great showplace like New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Yet the just-opened High Museum of Art exhibition “Picasso to Warhol: Fourteen Modern Masters” offers some advantages over a visit to the Manhattan mothership beyond the airfare savings.
The High is billing the 129-work exhibit as one of the largest concentrations of modern art masterpieces ever to be exhibited in the Southeast. And while the masterwork-studded survey show is a sliver of MoMA’s deep permanent collection, concentrating the experience into an exhibit that can be viewed on one Wieland Pavilion floor emphasizes the connections between some of the 20th century’s most potent art-makers.
“While many of these iconic works are on view often at MoMA, they perhaps never have been organized in this way,” High curator of modern and contemporary art Michael Rooks said. He noted that MoMA show curator Jodi Hauptman and her New York colleagues have been struck by “the kinds of formal parallels, and rhymes and influences and responses that happen between and among the artists.”
One prime example he cites: the way Joan Miró’s organic shapes influenced Jackson Pollock, whose almost random way of painting is mirrored in Jasper Johns’ 1930 “Map,” an extremely loose rendering of the continental United States. A museum visitor can stand in one place in the gallery and feel the vibrations of inspiration radiating among the trio, Rooks said.
Galleries dedicated to Pablo Picasso and Andy Warhol bookend “Picasso to Warhol: Fourteen Modern Masters.” In between, works are showcased by Henri Matisse, Constantin Brancusi, Piet Mondrian, Fernand Léger, Marcel Duchamp, Giorgio de Chirico, Joan Miró, Romare Bearden, Alexander Calder, Jackson Pollock, Louise Bourgeois and Jasper Johns.
“It’s an amazing painting and has a great monumentality when you walk into the gallery,” Rooks said. “I think a lot of people are surprised by the size of each individual painting . Together, they form this kind of frieze in a way.”
When the 32 paintings, representing every flavor in the Campbell’s line, were first shown in 1962 at a Los Angeles gallery, they were lined on shelves, as if on display in a grocery. The artist’s idea was “to underscore the sense of ordinariness,” the curator said.
Nearly half a century later, it’s hard to know how much the work was intended as homage and how far Warhol’s tongue was planted in cheek.
“It’s such a common consumer product ... that we don’t think of it in terms of the monumental and heroic,” Rooks said. It’s more a celebration of “the ordinary, not the extraordinary,” the curator added.
Yet Warhol, who grew up in lower-middle-class Pittsburgh, quite appreciated Campbell’s. “I used to drink it,” he once recalled of the canned soup. “I used to have the same lunch every day, for 20 years I guess, the same thing over and over again.”
Still, it’s doubtless that Warhol was tweaking consumerism and, by repeating the same basic banal image at the same scale, riffing on the manipulations of advertising.
Warhol became known as such a master of the silkscreen process and other forms of reproduction, that Rooks believes many will be surprised that each canvas in “Campbell’s Soup Cans” is an original, completed with the help of studio assistants, and not a print.
“They look like they were made using mechanical reproduction, and that’s pop,” said Rooks, noting that Warhol soon thereafter moved to multiples. “They are subtle differences in each painting, which are kind of fun to find.”
Henri Matisse: "Dance (I)"
Rooks views this early 20th century masterpiece and hears an equally classic piece of music in his mind.
“It’s a life-affirming kind of painting,” the curator said. “I always think of Stravinsky’s ‘Rite of Spring,’ because it has this Utopian feeling about it.”
In 1908, the year before he produced this epic , Matisse said, “Suppose I want to paint a woman’s body. First of all, I imbue it with grace and charm, but I know that I must give something more. I will condense the meaning of this body by seeking its essential lines. The charm will be less apparent at first glance, but it must eventually emerge from the new image, which will have a broader meaning, one more fully human.”
Matisse’s reduction of the dance circle to simple forms rendered with minimal perspective and flat planes of paint, seen by some as crude at the time, indeed adds up to a heady encapsulation of joy, movement and energy.
The dancers, who could be viewed more as mythic beauties than actual performers, are set against flat expanses of purple-blue and green .
The figure at left, shown in graceful stride forward while reaching back for the hand of the dancer to her right, seems to be setting the circle’s fluid motion.
“One of the wonderful things about it is the sort of serpentine curve where the arms are connected,” Rooks said.
The curator connects that feeling to the dawning of a new century, the birth of the modern era that holds the promise of innovation and an improved quality of life.
“There was a sense of utopia that was crushed shortly thereafter,” he said, “but it’s wonderful to see in this painting.”
The High is billing the 129-work exhibit as one of the largest concentrations of modern art masterpieces ever to be exhibited in the Southeast. And while the masterwork-studded survey show is a sliver of MoMA’s deep permanent collection, concentrating the experience into an exhibit that can be viewed on one Wieland Pavilion floor emphasizes the connections between some of the 20th century’s most potent art-makers.
“While many of these iconic works are on view often at MoMA, they perhaps never have been organized in this way,” High curator of modern and contemporary art Michael Rooks said. He noted that MoMA show curator Jodi Hauptman and her New York colleagues have been struck by “the kinds of formal parallels, and rhymes and influences and responses that happen between and among the artists.”
One prime example he cites: the way Joan Miró’s organic shapes influenced Jackson Pollock, whose almost random way of painting is mirrored in Jasper Johns’ 1930 “Map,” an extremely loose rendering of the continental United States. A museum visitor can stand in one place in the gallery and feel the vibrations of inspiration radiating among the trio, Rooks said.
Galleries dedicated to Pablo Picasso and Andy Warhol bookend “Picasso to Warhol: Fourteen Modern Masters.” In between, works are showcased by Henri Matisse, Constantin Brancusi, Piet Mondrian, Fernand Léger, Marcel Duchamp, Giorgio de Chirico, Joan Miró, Romare Bearden, Alexander Calder, Jackson Pollock, Louise Bourgeois and Jasper Johns.
“It’s an amazing painting and has a great monumentality when you walk into the gallery,” Rooks said. “I think a lot of people are surprised by the size of each individual painting . Together, they form this kind of frieze in a way.”
When the 32 paintings, representing every flavor in the Campbell’s line, were first shown in 1962 at a Los Angeles gallery, they were lined on shelves, as if on display in a grocery. The artist’s idea was “to underscore the sense of ordinariness,” the curator said.
Nearly half a century later, it’s hard to know how much the work was intended as homage and how far Warhol’s tongue was planted in cheek.
“It’s such a common consumer product ... that we don’t think of it in terms of the monumental and heroic,” Rooks said. It’s more a celebration of “the ordinary, not the extraordinary,” the curator added.
Yet Warhol, who grew up in lower-middle-class Pittsburgh, quite appreciated Campbell’s. “I used to drink it,” he once recalled of the canned soup. “I used to have the same lunch every day, for 20 years I guess, the same thing over and over again.”
Still, it’s doubtless that Warhol was tweaking consumerism and, by repeating the same basic banal image at the same scale, riffing on the manipulations of advertising.
Warhol became known as such a master of the silkscreen process and other forms of reproduction, that Rooks believes many will be surprised that each canvas in “Campbell’s Soup Cans” is an original, completed with the help of studio assistants, and not a print.
“They look like they were made using mechanical reproduction, and that’s pop,” said Rooks, noting that Warhol soon thereafter moved to multiples. “They are subtle differences in each painting, which are kind of fun to find.”
Henri Matisse: "Dance (I)"
Rooks views this early 20th century masterpiece and hears an equally classic piece of music in his mind.
“It’s a life-affirming kind of painting,” the curator said. “I always think of Stravinsky’s ‘Rite of Spring,’ because it has this Utopian feeling about it.”
In 1908, the year before he produced this epic , Matisse said, “Suppose I want to paint a woman’s body. First of all, I imbue it with grace and charm, but I know that I must give something more. I will condense the meaning of this body by seeking its essential lines. The charm will be less apparent at first glance, but it must eventually emerge from the new image, which will have a broader meaning, one more fully human.”
Matisse’s reduction of the dance circle to simple forms rendered with minimal perspective and flat planes of paint, seen by some as crude at the time, indeed adds up to a heady encapsulation of joy, movement and energy.
The dancers, who could be viewed more as mythic beauties than actual performers, are set against flat expanses of purple-blue and green .
The figure at left, shown in graceful stride forward while reaching back for the hand of the dancer to her right, seems to be setting the circle’s fluid motion.
“One of the wonderful things about it is the sort of serpentine curve where the arms are connected,” Rooks said.
The curator connects that feeling to the dawning of a new century, the birth of the modern era that holds the promise of innovation and an improved quality of life.
“There was a sense of utopia that was crushed shortly thereafter,” he said, “but it’s wonderful to see in this painting.”
2011年10月19日星期三
Ross Stefan painting captures Southwest aura
I inherited an oil painting on canvas that measures 22-by-28 inches and is signed by Ross Stefan. I wonder about its monetary worth and where I might market it.
This oil on canvas presents a wonderfully warm domestic scene with a Native American mother holding her smiling infant safe and snug in a cradleboard.
Ross Stefan was born in Milwaukee, Wis., in 1934 and had his first one-man art show at the tender age of 13. Stefan met Western artist Daniel Cody Muller and was greatly influenced by his work.
Muller's father was part Blackfoot, and he scouted for the U.S. Cavalry with Buffalo Bill Cody. The younger Muller became a member of Buffalo Bill's Wild West Shows and for 18 years periodically toured North America and Europe with the company.
After leaving show business, Muller became one of genre's most accomplished artists. His work customarily depicts images of cowboys on horseback, sometimes playing sports such as "cowboy polo." He also does portraits of Native Americans.
Stefan moved to Arizona in 1953 and studied art at the University of Arizona. In his spare time, he worked as an illustrator for the Tucson Daily Citizen. But in 1955, Stefan quit school to paint full time.
He began traveling the desert, visiting the native pueblos and painting and drawing the American West's people and landscapes. His work is often described as "southwestern impressionism" because of his broad brushstrokes and heightened color palette, but this does not take into account the proportional accuracy and spatial realism of his landscapes, figures and architecture.
Ross Stefan's scenes of pueblo life and the southern Arizona landscape are still prime examples of this genre, and his legacy is secure as a leading Arizona artist of the 20th century.
But what about the marketplace? Prices for Stefan's work have increased dramatically over the last 10 years as interest in Western art has expanded. In 2007, his painting "Finally Caught" sold for $16,800 at auction. Many other Stefan paintings have sold privately at similar prices.
But prices paid for his landscapes far exceed those paid for his portraits and scenes of Native American people. The work in today's question is a decent size. If it were in perfect condition, it likely would sell at auction for $3,000 to $5,000.
It definitely would be better to sell this painting in the Southwest with Scottsdale, Ariz., and Santa Fe, N.M., both being leading candidates. We try to stay out of commercial transactions or personal recommendations, but exploring auction houses in these areas may be fruitful for N.G.
Auction companies in Altadena, Calif., and Reno, Nev., have also done well, and Stefan's work has sold successfully at one of the major international auction housed in New York City as well.
This oil on canvas presents a wonderfully warm domestic scene with a Native American mother holding her smiling infant safe and snug in a cradleboard.
Ross Stefan was born in Milwaukee, Wis., in 1934 and had his first one-man art show at the tender age of 13. Stefan met Western artist Daniel Cody Muller and was greatly influenced by his work.
Muller's father was part Blackfoot, and he scouted for the U.S. Cavalry with Buffalo Bill Cody. The younger Muller became a member of Buffalo Bill's Wild West Shows and for 18 years periodically toured North America and Europe with the company.
After leaving show business, Muller became one of genre's most accomplished artists. His work customarily depicts images of cowboys on horseback, sometimes playing sports such as "cowboy polo." He also does portraits of Native Americans.
Stefan moved to Arizona in 1953 and studied art at the University of Arizona. In his spare time, he worked as an illustrator for the Tucson Daily Citizen. But in 1955, Stefan quit school to paint full time.
He began traveling the desert, visiting the native pueblos and painting and drawing the American West's people and landscapes. His work is often described as "southwestern impressionism" because of his broad brushstrokes and heightened color palette, but this does not take into account the proportional accuracy and spatial realism of his landscapes, figures and architecture.
Ross Stefan's scenes of pueblo life and the southern Arizona landscape are still prime examples of this genre, and his legacy is secure as a leading Arizona artist of the 20th century.
But what about the marketplace? Prices for Stefan's work have increased dramatically over the last 10 years as interest in Western art has expanded. In 2007, his painting "Finally Caught" sold for $16,800 at auction. Many other Stefan paintings have sold privately at similar prices.
But prices paid for his landscapes far exceed those paid for his portraits and scenes of Native American people. The work in today's question is a decent size. If it were in perfect condition, it likely would sell at auction for $3,000 to $5,000.
It definitely would be better to sell this painting in the Southwest with Scottsdale, Ariz., and Santa Fe, N.M., both being leading candidates. We try to stay out of commercial transactions or personal recommendations, but exploring auction houses in these areas may be fruitful for N.G.
Auction companies in Altadena, Calif., and Reno, Nev., have also done well, and Stefan's work has sold successfully at one of the major international auction housed in New York City as well.
2011年10月18日星期二
Rouen Cathedrals' at LACMA
Sometimes a museum exhibition that sounds like a natural turns out to be anything but. That's the odd case with a new show at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which juxtaposes five gorgeous paintings by Impressionist icon Claude Monet (1840-1926) with five handsome ones by Pop master Roy Lichtenstein (1923-1997). For all the visual firepower of the individual works, as a show it's strangely flat and uninvolving.
By all means don't miss it — if not for the Lichtensteins, which have been shown at LACMA before (they belong to L.A. collectors Eli and Edythe Broad), then for the Monets. I doubt that five paintings from his pivotal series showing the soaring Gothic facade of Rouen Cathedral have ever been seen at once in Los Angeles before, and these five are fantastic. (The Getty Museum also owns a beautiful example, painted in the silvery light of morning.) They come from major public collections of Impressionist paintings — two from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, which co-organized the show with LACMA, and three from Paris' Musée d'Orsay.
The Monet cathedral paintings occupy two walls. On a third wall to the right are Lichtenstein's 1969 cathedral views -- larger, sleeker and painted by hand in small dots, the artist's familiar adaptation of modern commercial printing techniques. Each Lichtenstein is a two-color painting.
Some, such as the ones composed from interlocking red and yellow dots or blue and yellow dots, read as crisp, clear images of the church. Others, like the ones in yellow and white or blue and black, are so close in color values as to require scrutiny to make out the image. The yellow and white allude to blinding sunlight, the blue and black to the dead of night -- extreme daytime and nighttime interruptions in the ordinary practice of seeing.
The five pictures, each more than 5 feet high and 3 1/2 feet wide, are installed close together, side by side. Appropriately, the lineup is almost like sheets rolling off an assembly line or proofs from a printing press. In a media environment, reproduction rather than light creates or obscures the view; Lichtenstein refocuses attention on painting.
The Monets do too, but in a dramatically different way. In the late winter and early spring of 1892 and 1893 he painted about 30 versions, finishing what he started on site in Rouen back in his Giverny studio, closer to Paris. (Rouen is about 80 miles northwest of the capital.) These canvases, often intense, are smaller than the Lichtensteins — no dimension is more than 40 inches — and more chromatically diverse. In painting the effects of light and atmosphere at different times of day and under various weather conditions, Monet's broken brushwork used just about every oil color in the painter's arsenal.
The cathedral facade, seen here at a slight angle from the picture plane, nearly fills the entire composition. Only a small patch of sky is glimpsed at the top between the two front towers. Rouen offered Monet an intricately detailed stone surface, built over six centuries and marked by a seemingly infinite array of nooks, crannies and shadow patterns.
He chose to represent that surface — strong, sturdy, magnificently articulated and inseparable from his nation's long and splendid cultural history — by drawing a direct comparison between the church facade and his own painting's surface. Each work is heavily encrusted with densely layered colors, asserting the artist's lengthy labors in constructing the picture. It swallows up extreme nuances of dramatic visual knowledge gained over time. It represents the spiritual glorification of secular faith.
Monet's Rouen Cathedral paintings transfer the enduring power of epic masonry from religion to art. In their vibrant, light-filled stylistic innovation, they put dynamic change on an equal footing with heroic constancy.
So, given these two major artists, why doesn't the exhibition resonate? Partly it's just a matter of unequal weight. The balance seems out of whack.
The Lichtenstein paintings are very good, but his best works are the comic book and advertising paintings he began in 1961, as well as the reflection-free mirror paintings he started work on at the same time as the "Rouen Cathedral" series. Monet, by contrast, is in peak form here: He made other paintings just as great, but none greater.
Poor Lichtenstein. Monet's voluptuary, arduous surfaces keep drawing you away.
More inexpedient is the show's forced point. Was Lichtenstein putting his work in direct dialogue with Monet's, as is implied here? Not really. Whatever conversation there is between them is only indirect.
Monet's paintings didn't inspire Lichtenstein; photographs did. Monet was responding to the surface realities of light on the facade of Rouen Cathedral; Lichtenstein was responding to the surface realities of mass reproduction. For Lichtenstein the Monet cathedrals, while not entirely incidental, are just a distant background story. They're almost like academic footnotes.
A wall text explains the show's rationale. In 1968, Pasadena Art Museum curator John Coplans organized a famously influential exhibition titled "Serial Imagery." Lichtenstein saw it. He was impressed by artists who, rather than making singular masterpieces, were engaged in exploring paintings and sculptures in series.
Coplans' artists were as diverse as Josef Albers, with his precisely nested color squares, and Morris Louis, who poured rivulets of paint. The curator traced their origins back to Monet, whose "Rouen Cathedral" paintings are offered as a foundational masterstroke of serial imagery.
But are the Monet's really serial images? Critic Brian O'Doherty once noted that Coplans didn't make the necessary distinction between series (paintings on the same theme or subject) and serial (paintings based on systems). Therein lies the essential difference between the cathedral pictures of Monet and Lichtenstein. Monet explored multiple permutations of one theme, while Lichtenstein investigated mass-media systems, jolting life into otherwise deadened reproduction techniques.
Ironically, when I saw the show a work from LACMA's permanent collection happened to be installed in another gallery just around the corner, and it resonates in a more revealing way. In 1971, Andy Warhol silk-screened 100 plain wooden crates to look like corrugated cardboard shipping cartons that contain boxes of Kellogg's Corn Flakes. Warhol was nearing the end of his most innovative period -- the 1973 portraits of Chairman Mao would be his last hurrah -- but the boxes still exploit the sharp visual puns that dominate his great '60s work.
By all means don't miss it — if not for the Lichtensteins, which have been shown at LACMA before (they belong to L.A. collectors Eli and Edythe Broad), then for the Monets. I doubt that five paintings from his pivotal series showing the soaring Gothic facade of Rouen Cathedral have ever been seen at once in Los Angeles before, and these five are fantastic. (The Getty Museum also owns a beautiful example, painted in the silvery light of morning.) They come from major public collections of Impressionist paintings — two from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, which co-organized the show with LACMA, and three from Paris' Musée d'Orsay.
The Monet cathedral paintings occupy two walls. On a third wall to the right are Lichtenstein's 1969 cathedral views -- larger, sleeker and painted by hand in small dots, the artist's familiar adaptation of modern commercial printing techniques. Each Lichtenstein is a two-color painting.
Some, such as the ones composed from interlocking red and yellow dots or blue and yellow dots, read as crisp, clear images of the church. Others, like the ones in yellow and white or blue and black, are so close in color values as to require scrutiny to make out the image. The yellow and white allude to blinding sunlight, the blue and black to the dead of night -- extreme daytime and nighttime interruptions in the ordinary practice of seeing.
The five pictures, each more than 5 feet high and 3 1/2 feet wide, are installed close together, side by side. Appropriately, the lineup is almost like sheets rolling off an assembly line or proofs from a printing press. In a media environment, reproduction rather than light creates or obscures the view; Lichtenstein refocuses attention on painting.
The Monets do too, but in a dramatically different way. In the late winter and early spring of 1892 and 1893 he painted about 30 versions, finishing what he started on site in Rouen back in his Giverny studio, closer to Paris. (Rouen is about 80 miles northwest of the capital.) These canvases, often intense, are smaller than the Lichtensteins — no dimension is more than 40 inches — and more chromatically diverse. In painting the effects of light and atmosphere at different times of day and under various weather conditions, Monet's broken brushwork used just about every oil color in the painter's arsenal.
The cathedral facade, seen here at a slight angle from the picture plane, nearly fills the entire composition. Only a small patch of sky is glimpsed at the top between the two front towers. Rouen offered Monet an intricately detailed stone surface, built over six centuries and marked by a seemingly infinite array of nooks, crannies and shadow patterns.
He chose to represent that surface — strong, sturdy, magnificently articulated and inseparable from his nation's long and splendid cultural history — by drawing a direct comparison between the church facade and his own painting's surface. Each work is heavily encrusted with densely layered colors, asserting the artist's lengthy labors in constructing the picture. It swallows up extreme nuances of dramatic visual knowledge gained over time. It represents the spiritual glorification of secular faith.
Monet's Rouen Cathedral paintings transfer the enduring power of epic masonry from religion to art. In their vibrant, light-filled stylistic innovation, they put dynamic change on an equal footing with heroic constancy.
So, given these two major artists, why doesn't the exhibition resonate? Partly it's just a matter of unequal weight. The balance seems out of whack.
The Lichtenstein paintings are very good, but his best works are the comic book and advertising paintings he began in 1961, as well as the reflection-free mirror paintings he started work on at the same time as the "Rouen Cathedral" series. Monet, by contrast, is in peak form here: He made other paintings just as great, but none greater.
Poor Lichtenstein. Monet's voluptuary, arduous surfaces keep drawing you away.
More inexpedient is the show's forced point. Was Lichtenstein putting his work in direct dialogue with Monet's, as is implied here? Not really. Whatever conversation there is between them is only indirect.
Monet's paintings didn't inspire Lichtenstein; photographs did. Monet was responding to the surface realities of light on the facade of Rouen Cathedral; Lichtenstein was responding to the surface realities of mass reproduction. For Lichtenstein the Monet cathedrals, while not entirely incidental, are just a distant background story. They're almost like academic footnotes.
A wall text explains the show's rationale. In 1968, Pasadena Art Museum curator John Coplans organized a famously influential exhibition titled "Serial Imagery." Lichtenstein saw it. He was impressed by artists who, rather than making singular masterpieces, were engaged in exploring paintings and sculptures in series.
Coplans' artists were as diverse as Josef Albers, with his precisely nested color squares, and Morris Louis, who poured rivulets of paint. The curator traced their origins back to Monet, whose "Rouen Cathedral" paintings are offered as a foundational masterstroke of serial imagery.
But are the Monet's really serial images? Critic Brian O'Doherty once noted that Coplans didn't make the necessary distinction between series (paintings on the same theme or subject) and serial (paintings based on systems). Therein lies the essential difference between the cathedral pictures of Monet and Lichtenstein. Monet explored multiple permutations of one theme, while Lichtenstein investigated mass-media systems, jolting life into otherwise deadened reproduction techniques.
Ironically, when I saw the show a work from LACMA's permanent collection happened to be installed in another gallery just around the corner, and it resonates in a more revealing way. In 1971, Andy Warhol silk-screened 100 plain wooden crates to look like corrugated cardboard shipping cartons that contain boxes of Kellogg's Corn Flakes. Warhol was nearing the end of his most innovative period -- the 1973 portraits of Chairman Mao would be his last hurrah -- but the boxes still exploit the sharp visual puns that dominate his great '60s work.
2011年10月17日星期一
Colonial art woos with the wows
New Zealand has used its landscape's wow factor as a marketing tool since European colonists first painted its image on canvas.
So says art historian Jane Vial, who will outline in a public talk how early Europeans used oils and watercolours to express the awe they felt for the New Zealand landscape.
Scenic Wonderland will be held at the Yealands Estate Marlborough Gallery, High St, Blenheim, on Tuesday, October 25, the first of four lectures by Ms Vial in the following five weeks.
Characters like New Zealand Company surveyor and four-time New Zealand premier William Fox and premier Frederick Weld, who owned Flaxbourne Station, are two of the romantic landscape artists she will talk about.
Another is Thomas Attwood, whose early 1900s oil painting, Smith Sound, hangs in the Marlborough District Council staff room. Set in Fiordland, it shows majestic mountains towering above a tranquil bay. It typifies the early landscape paintings depicting the grand scenery of locations such as Fiordland, the Marlborough Sounds, Kaikoura and Rotorua.
"The Government wanted to promote New Zealand for its natural wonders," Ms Vial says.
New Zealand was one of the first countries in the world to have a tourism department. Established in 1901, it sold landscape paintings and printed promotional pamphlets to attract visitors and new citizens to the island country at bottom of the world.
The November 1 lecture, Getting Away From It All, looks at the next era of art in New Zealand, impressionism.
It became popular in the 1920s, when painted reproductions of mountains and fjords were out of fashion, Ms Vial says. The "wow" factor hadn't been entirely lost but impressionist artists wanted a more honest image.
Teacher and artist Charles Blomfield went on expeditions to Pelorus Sound and along the West Coast and used a pa at Mangamaunu on the Kaikoura coast as one of his bases.
The third lecture, on November 8, is Frances Hodgkins: A Well-Travelled Kiwi Artist. Hodgkins was born in Dunedin in 1869 and left New Zealand about 1901, meeting impressionist artists in the Netherlands, England and Australia.
After returning to New Zealand to see her mother, she was offered a job in England as an art buyer for New Zealand's national collection.
The final lecture, on November 22, suggests New Zealand's drink-driving problems are old ones. In The Awatere Accident, Vial looks at nine works by impressionist painter Mabel Hill, who was in the Awatere Valley when a horse-driven cart went into the river.
A 19th-century "boy racer" was the likely cause, says Ms Vial, who found Hill's paintings of the incident, and traced stories told by the young man's family members, diary entries, letters and reports in the local newspaper.
So says art historian Jane Vial, who will outline in a public talk how early Europeans used oils and watercolours to express the awe they felt for the New Zealand landscape.
Scenic Wonderland will be held at the Yealands Estate Marlborough Gallery, High St, Blenheim, on Tuesday, October 25, the first of four lectures by Ms Vial in the following five weeks.
Characters like New Zealand Company surveyor and four-time New Zealand premier William Fox and premier Frederick Weld, who owned Flaxbourne Station, are two of the romantic landscape artists she will talk about.
Another is Thomas Attwood, whose early 1900s oil painting, Smith Sound, hangs in the Marlborough District Council staff room. Set in Fiordland, it shows majestic mountains towering above a tranquil bay. It typifies the early landscape paintings depicting the grand scenery of locations such as Fiordland, the Marlborough Sounds, Kaikoura and Rotorua.
"The Government wanted to promote New Zealand for its natural wonders," Ms Vial says.
New Zealand was one of the first countries in the world to have a tourism department. Established in 1901, it sold landscape paintings and printed promotional pamphlets to attract visitors and new citizens to the island country at bottom of the world.
The November 1 lecture, Getting Away From It All, looks at the next era of art in New Zealand, impressionism.
It became popular in the 1920s, when painted reproductions of mountains and fjords were out of fashion, Ms Vial says. The "wow" factor hadn't been entirely lost but impressionist artists wanted a more honest image.
Teacher and artist Charles Blomfield went on expeditions to Pelorus Sound and along the West Coast and used a pa at Mangamaunu on the Kaikoura coast as one of his bases.
The third lecture, on November 8, is Frances Hodgkins: A Well-Travelled Kiwi Artist. Hodgkins was born in Dunedin in 1869 and left New Zealand about 1901, meeting impressionist artists in the Netherlands, England and Australia.
After returning to New Zealand to see her mother, she was offered a job in England as an art buyer for New Zealand's national collection.
The final lecture, on November 22, suggests New Zealand's drink-driving problems are old ones. In The Awatere Accident, Vial looks at nine works by impressionist painter Mabel Hill, who was in the Awatere Valley when a horse-driven cart went into the river.
A 19th-century "boy racer" was the likely cause, says Ms Vial, who found Hill's paintings of the incident, and traced stories told by the young man's family members, diary entries, letters and reports in the local newspaper.
2011年10月16日星期日
Out of the vault and into view
She's a second-year medical student, so her mind usually is focused on diseases, drugs and cures.
But as Laura Heuermann hustles between classes, her eye will sometimes catch one of the oil paintings in a third-floor hallway of the Omaha medical school where she spends up to eight hours a day.
About a dozen of the pieces found in the school on the University of Nebraska Medical Center campus are on loan from the Joslyn Art Museum.
Step into your local public library, school or hospital and you might spot art on loan from a museum. While museums are probably better known for loaning pieces to each other, they also lend to colleges, historic homes and similar places.
It's not uncommon for art institutions to make such loans as a way to expose people to art and strengthen the reputation of museums as inviting places, museum organizations say. Such loans are good, but must be done the right way — including maintaining the proper temperature and security — to keep the artwork safe, said Ford W. Bell, president of the American Association of Museums.
Bell said artwork lent to non-museums typically won't be a museum's most valuable pieces.
"You won't see a Rembrandt being loaned to community centers,'' he said.
Still, he said, museums have many high quality pieces that might not find their way out of storage and into public view unless they are lent out.
Bell said there is a concern in the museum industry about "warehousing," which involves museums aggressively collecting pieces but displaying only a fraction of their collection at any one time. Lending to non-museums is one way to address that concern.
"There is an increasing push to get art out (to) the public,'' Bell said.
For years, the Sheldon Museum of Art in Lincoln has lent exhibitions to such places as public libraries and colleges through its Sheldon Statewide outreach program. Since the 1980s, the Museum of Nebraska Art in Kearney has lent to similar places, including the Methodist Women's Hospital in Omaha and the same UNMC building that contains the Joslyn art.
The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Mo., lends pieces for the offices of state legislators and members of Missouri's congressional delegation. The University of Iowa Museum of Art has lent works to colleges in the region. The Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., lends exhibitions nationwide to such places as zoos, shopping malls and schools through its traveling exhibition service.
Jack Becker, executive director of the Joslyn, said it's important to expose people to as many of the Joslyn's pieces as possible and the loan to UNMC helps accomplish that goal.
Heuermann, the medical student, said she occasionally stops between classes to look at the artwork.
Viewing the paintings, she said, provides a "sense of relief" from the stress of medical school.
"It reminds you that there is something else going on in the world other than studying all day,'' said Heuermann, from Grand Island, Neb.
Several of the Joslyn paintings at the med school are soothing landscapes. One, "A Tranquil Morning," shows tall trees with long leaves blowing in a breeze. Another, "Landscape Near Oxford, Nebraska," depicts rolling farmland and a narrow dirt road that stretches out to the horizon.
Dr. Jim Linder, a UNMC faculty member who helped arrange the Joslyn loan, said it involved about a dozen pieces displayed in a hallway of the Sorrell Center for Health Science Education. The $52.7 million building opened in 2008. It houses most medical school programs and also serves students in nursing, pharmacy and other health fields.
He said a key goal was to make the atmosphere of the Sorrell Center more relaxing and inviting for students, faculty and visitors. He said the pieces generally are by artists with Nebraska ties.
Linder said UNMC appointed a committee of faculty and students to select art for the Sorrell Center. The committee, using private funds, also purchased art at auctions and from galleries and artists, he said. When the building opened in 2008, it had pieces from nearly 50 Nebraska artists.
About two years ago, Linder said he and other committee members approached the Joslyn about art loans. The Joslyn said the pieces first were lent to UNMC in 2010.
Asked if UNMC must return the artwork by a certain date, the Joslyn said there is a procedure to review the loan on a regular basis.
When museums lend artwork to a non-museum, handlers must make certain it's properly cared for.
Deborah Long, senior objects conservator at the Gerald R. Ford Conservation Center in Omaha, said it's crucial to avoid fluctuations in temperature and relative humidity to protect artwork from damage.
She said museums strive to keep their galleries at a steady temperature, generally between 65 and 72 degrees, depending on the type of artwork. Humidity generally should be between 40 percent and 50 percent, she said.
Swings in temperature or humidity can make a painting's canvass expand and contract, causing the paint to loosen over time, said Long, whose center is a division of the Nebraska State Historical Society.
Long said a building with a modern heating and cooling system, even if it's not a museum, has the potential to keep the climate at the right levels to protect artwork.
Proper lighting also is important, she said. Artwork holds up best in low and indirect lighting, she said. Sunlight and other sources of ultraviolet light can cause colors to fade.
Becker, the Joslyn director, said the proper climate, lighting conditions and security are in place at the Sorrell Center to protect the art. The requirements for those issues were outlined in a loan agreement between the Joslyn and UNMC, he said.
Becker said the art loan to UNMC was arranged before he took over as executive director in April 2010.
Asked to provide details on the security, the Joslyn said "to disclose security would be to weaken it."
UNMC officials said there are security cameras throughout the building and security patrols. The building is locked overnight on weekdays and throughout the weekend, although UNMC students and employees of the Sorrell Center have access with security cards.
For security reasons, Becker said, the museum does not discuss the value of pieces in its collection, including those on loan.
The Joslyn said that the pieces lent to UNMC are originals, except for two reproductions of works by Karl Bodmer.
Jennifer Marshall, an art history professor at the University of Minnesota, reviewed a list of the art lent by the Joslyn to the UNMC, and said some of the works were by artists with national or international reputations such Constance Richardson and William Malherbe.
Linder said that by sharing the pieces, Joslyn officials are helping UNMC and the community.
"They are doing more than hiding it in their vault,'' he said. "The real challenge of a museum is to make sure the public is seeing their art."
But as Laura Heuermann hustles between classes, her eye will sometimes catch one of the oil paintings in a third-floor hallway of the Omaha medical school where she spends up to eight hours a day.
About a dozen of the pieces found in the school on the University of Nebraska Medical Center campus are on loan from the Joslyn Art Museum.
Step into your local public library, school or hospital and you might spot art on loan from a museum. While museums are probably better known for loaning pieces to each other, they also lend to colleges, historic homes and similar places.
It's not uncommon for art institutions to make such loans as a way to expose people to art and strengthen the reputation of museums as inviting places, museum organizations say. Such loans are good, but must be done the right way — including maintaining the proper temperature and security — to keep the artwork safe, said Ford W. Bell, president of the American Association of Museums.
Bell said artwork lent to non-museums typically won't be a museum's most valuable pieces.
"You won't see a Rembrandt being loaned to community centers,'' he said.
Still, he said, museums have many high quality pieces that might not find their way out of storage and into public view unless they are lent out.
Bell said there is a concern in the museum industry about "warehousing," which involves museums aggressively collecting pieces but displaying only a fraction of their collection at any one time. Lending to non-museums is one way to address that concern.
"There is an increasing push to get art out (to) the public,'' Bell said.
For years, the Sheldon Museum of Art in Lincoln has lent exhibitions to such places as public libraries and colleges through its Sheldon Statewide outreach program. Since the 1980s, the Museum of Nebraska Art in Kearney has lent to similar places, including the Methodist Women's Hospital in Omaha and the same UNMC building that contains the Joslyn art.
The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Mo., lends pieces for the offices of state legislators and members of Missouri's congressional delegation. The University of Iowa Museum of Art has lent works to colleges in the region. The Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., lends exhibitions nationwide to such places as zoos, shopping malls and schools through its traveling exhibition service.
Jack Becker, executive director of the Joslyn, said it's important to expose people to as many of the Joslyn's pieces as possible and the loan to UNMC helps accomplish that goal.
Heuermann, the medical student, said she occasionally stops between classes to look at the artwork.
Viewing the paintings, she said, provides a "sense of relief" from the stress of medical school.
"It reminds you that there is something else going on in the world other than studying all day,'' said Heuermann, from Grand Island, Neb.
Several of the Joslyn paintings at the med school are soothing landscapes. One, "A Tranquil Morning," shows tall trees with long leaves blowing in a breeze. Another, "Landscape Near Oxford, Nebraska," depicts rolling farmland and a narrow dirt road that stretches out to the horizon.
Dr. Jim Linder, a UNMC faculty member who helped arrange the Joslyn loan, said it involved about a dozen pieces displayed in a hallway of the Sorrell Center for Health Science Education. The $52.7 million building opened in 2008. It houses most medical school programs and also serves students in nursing, pharmacy and other health fields.
He said a key goal was to make the atmosphere of the Sorrell Center more relaxing and inviting for students, faculty and visitors. He said the pieces generally are by artists with Nebraska ties.
Linder said UNMC appointed a committee of faculty and students to select art for the Sorrell Center. The committee, using private funds, also purchased art at auctions and from galleries and artists, he said. When the building opened in 2008, it had pieces from nearly 50 Nebraska artists.
About two years ago, Linder said he and other committee members approached the Joslyn about art loans. The Joslyn said the pieces first were lent to UNMC in 2010.
Asked if UNMC must return the artwork by a certain date, the Joslyn said there is a procedure to review the loan on a regular basis.
When museums lend artwork to a non-museum, handlers must make certain it's properly cared for.
Deborah Long, senior objects conservator at the Gerald R. Ford Conservation Center in Omaha, said it's crucial to avoid fluctuations in temperature and relative humidity to protect artwork from damage.
She said museums strive to keep their galleries at a steady temperature, generally between 65 and 72 degrees, depending on the type of artwork. Humidity generally should be between 40 percent and 50 percent, she said.
Swings in temperature or humidity can make a painting's canvass expand and contract, causing the paint to loosen over time, said Long, whose center is a division of the Nebraska State Historical Society.
Long said a building with a modern heating and cooling system, even if it's not a museum, has the potential to keep the climate at the right levels to protect artwork.
Proper lighting also is important, she said. Artwork holds up best in low and indirect lighting, she said. Sunlight and other sources of ultraviolet light can cause colors to fade.
Becker, the Joslyn director, said the proper climate, lighting conditions and security are in place at the Sorrell Center to protect the art. The requirements for those issues were outlined in a loan agreement between the Joslyn and UNMC, he said.
Becker said the art loan to UNMC was arranged before he took over as executive director in April 2010.
Asked to provide details on the security, the Joslyn said "to disclose security would be to weaken it."
UNMC officials said there are security cameras throughout the building and security patrols. The building is locked overnight on weekdays and throughout the weekend, although UNMC students and employees of the Sorrell Center have access with security cards.
For security reasons, Becker said, the museum does not discuss the value of pieces in its collection, including those on loan.
The Joslyn said that the pieces lent to UNMC are originals, except for two reproductions of works by Karl Bodmer.
Jennifer Marshall, an art history professor at the University of Minnesota, reviewed a list of the art lent by the Joslyn to the UNMC, and said some of the works were by artists with national or international reputations such Constance Richardson and William Malherbe.
Linder said that by sharing the pieces, Joslyn officials are helping UNMC and the community.
"They are doing more than hiding it in their vault,'' he said. "The real challenge of a museum is to make sure the public is seeing their art."
2011年10月13日星期四
Wayne exhibit comes to a close
The Joseloff Gallery located in the Harry Jack Gray Center was proud to exhibit the traveling showcase of artist Leslie Wayne in an exhibition titled “Leslie Wayne: Recent Work.”
Wayne’s work was on display from Aug. 30 through Oct 9. The last days of the gallery viewing were between 12-4pm where lovers of art and students of The Hartford Art School were welcome to come.
Along with the gallery viewing hours, included a reception on Thursday, Sept. 8 and a lecture given by Wayne herself in the Koopman Commons at the Hartford Art School.
Wayne’s work that was displayed came alive on the walls featuring manyoil paintings that had very intricate structures and designs that had brilliant colors.
These dimensionaloil paintings were inspired by the work of the 19-century paintings of Romantic Landscapes. The work did not only exhibit nature, but the world as a whole.
For me not being well verse in art, Wayne’s art was so intriguing because it wasn’t just a washed outoil paintings. These oil paintings had different dimensions and layers that the artist did to really convey and show the nature motif in her work.
This particular exhibition of Wayne’s work has been from the past five years (2005-2010) and takes a contemporary approach. The onepainting that really caught my eye among the 20 oil paintings featured was titled “Doxology.”
“Doxology” was a 42” x 25”oil painting on wood, which was in a shape of a “T.” This particular painting showed many different hews of blue that were layered on the base, and a bright orange hew on top.
“Leslie Wayne: Recent Work” made its first appearance in January 2011 at the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art [Charleston, SC] then made its way to the Visual Arts Center [Richmond, Virginia] before arriving at The Joseloff Gallery.
Wayne was born in 1953 and began her study of art at the University of California in Santa Babara, California, where she majored inpainting , then received a BFA in Sculpture from Parsons School of Design in New York.
Wayne currently resides in New York where she is continuously working. Through the years, Wayne’s work has appeared at many different exhibitions not only in the United States, but internationally as well. Wayne’s galleries include The Jack Shainman Gallery in New York City and Solomon Projects in Atlanta, GA.
Having Wayne’s exhibit at The Joseloff Gallery was a great opportunity for students of the Hartford Art School to come and view her work, as well as other students and members of the community that may not be as well verse in art. Seeing great art from an artist like Wayne redefines aesthetic beauty.
Wayne’s work was on display from Aug. 30 through Oct 9. The last days of the gallery viewing were between 12-4pm where lovers of art and students of The Hartford Art School were welcome to come.
Along with the gallery viewing hours, included a reception on Thursday, Sept. 8 and a lecture given by Wayne herself in the Koopman Commons at the Hartford Art School.
Wayne’s work that was displayed came alive on the walls featuring many
These dimensional
For me not being well verse in art, Wayne’s art was so intriguing because it wasn’t just a washed out
This particular exhibition of Wayne’s work has been from the past five years (2005-2010) and takes a contemporary approach. The one
“Doxology” was a 42” x 25”
“Leslie Wayne: Recent Work” made its first appearance in January 2011 at the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art [Charleston, SC] then made its way to the Visual Arts Center [Richmond, Virginia] before arriving at The Joseloff Gallery.
Wayne was born in 1953 and began her study of art at the University of California in Santa Babara, California, where she majored in
Wayne currently resides in New York where she is continuously working. Through the years, Wayne’s work has appeared at many different exhibitions not only in the United States, but internationally as well. Wayne’s galleries include The Jack Shainman Gallery in New York City and Solomon Projects in Atlanta, GA.
Having Wayne’s exhibit at The Joseloff Gallery was a great opportunity for students of the Hartford Art School to come and view her work, as well as other students and members of the community that may not be as well verse in art. Seeing great art from an artist like Wayne redefines aesthetic beauty.
2011年10月12日星期三
The Visceral Surge of Spanish Art
The plummy walls of the San Diego Museum of Art give the exhibition they surround, From El Greco to Dalí, a velvet jewel-case warmth. If the rooms were full of Goya’s ferocious Caprichos or Disasters of War, or Miró’s baleful work of the 1930s, or Picasso’s unforgiving restlessness, well, then, all that warmth would fast fly out the ventilation ducts. But it’s not that sort of show.
The pictures in From El Greco to Dalí, instructive, historically balanced, and occasionally exciting, belong to Pérez Simón, a Spanish-Mexican businessman born in Asturias who began collecting only 20 years ago, so the collection’s limitations have been determined by market availability. He has a great passion for the art of his homeland, however, and the things on view, while sampling a few familiar masters, fill lacunae in our knowledge of Spanish art. Mr. Simón has been especially acquisitive of works by another Valencia native, Joaquín Sorolla (1863–1923), a painter virtually unknown here, and his general strategy has been to buy stuff that represents the progress of Spanish art from 15th-century panels to 17th-century Mannerist painting up to the formal inventions of the 20th Century.
To judge by what’s on view, after Goya’s prolific, all-mastering expansiveness of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, Spanish painting — compared to what was happening during the same period in the France of Impressionism and Symbolism — seemed to lose its nerve. It didn’t find new excitements until Picasso, the sculptor Julio González, and Miró came along. The late 19th Century in Spain looks a lot like the same period in Italy, when a group called the Macchiaioli (I’d loosely translate that as “daubers” or “mark makers:” “macchia” means stain, spot, mark) treated indigenous Italian subjects with sketchy, vaguely impressionistic technique. From El Greco to Dalí, like Macchiaioli painting, is top heavy with women and anecdote — women sewing, women milking cows, women gossiping at village fountains, and one swell duchess mounted on a horse (both costumed like parade floats).
The Spanish parallel to Macchiaioli painting was costumbrismo, which represented regionalist customs and scenes of daily life in a quickened but dense impasto. Sorolla made many pictures in the style, though he sometimes inflated the ethnographic intimacy of costumbrismo into the monumentality of Afternoon Sun, where countrymen use three pair of oxen to tow a fishing boat to shore. Even in the small oil study included in the exhibition, you can see how Sorolla relished stormy sea spray and ribbons of ocean current. Much of his output looks to me like a mash-up of Manet, Degas, Boudin, and Cassatt. He’s a deft and enthusiastic colorist who is easy on the eye and easy to like. You sigh with affection before his pictures, you don’t gasp with surprise or astonishment or drop-dead delight. He’s also an example of a historical turnabout: you see in his brushwork something of Manet’s inflammatory handling, though Manet was himself critically shaped by Velázquez, Ribera, and Goya.
Spanish painting sometimes feels like raw experience just barely mediated by an artist’s touch. I visited the Prado for the first time last year, and when I walked into the room containing Goya’s The Third of May 1808, I felt physically shoved around, first by its dimensions (106 x 137 inches), which no book reproduction had prepared me for, but mostly by the brutality and merciless candor of Goya’s depiction of the firing squad execution of rebels who resisted French occupation. (Manet’s Execution of Emperor Maximilian comes straight out of Goya’s picture.) It reminded me that the most memorable pictures often entail misbehavior, whether in the use of formal resources or in the treatment of subject matter. That said, Goya also was a court painter who made elegant, telling portraits, one example of which — Doña María Teresa de Vallabriga y Rozas — appears in the exhibition.
One of the finest things here is also one of the smallest, El Greco’s Head of Christ. The Greek effectively became a Spanish artist because he spent 30 years of his career shuttling between Toledo and Madrid. Born in Crete, El Greco began as an icon painter, and the head from Simón’s collection has the stark presence of icon art, kneaded by the devotional emotionalism El Greco absorbed from Tintoretto during his years in Italy and gently stretched by his own signature manner. His Redeemer stares heavenward with stunned, porcelain eyes, apparently yearning without hope.
Another great Mannerist painter, Jusepe de Ribera, reversing El Greco’s career trajectory, was born in Valencia province in 1591 but around 1608 left for Naples and made his life in Italy. He started as a Caravaggista, much indebted to the florid carnality and canted overhead light of Caravaggio. His 1648 Saint Jerome, however, shows off his individuated, free-standing manner. His hermit is so physically diminished that it’s hard to distinguish Jerome’s wrinkles and folds of flesh from body hair. His grubby, emaciated hands grasp close to his breast the traditional cross and skull. It’s a portrait of piety in extremis. Like El Greco’s Christ, Jerome looks yonder but without much expectation. Half his face gleams, the other half shrivels into darkness.
This show made me realize that I’ll never like Ribera’s near-contemporary Bartolomé Murillo. The misted contours of his saints and angels and putti and clouds and sheep and all the rest suggest the fluid harmonics of Andrea del Sarto, and, like him, he’s Spain’s equivalent to what Vasari called del Sarto, “the perfect painter.” For me, though, his perfection is soporific. And his most notable follower, Alonso Miguel de Tovar, carried on the tradition in The Divine Shepherdess, where a peaches-and-cream Virgin Mary cozies up to sheep with flowers in their mouths. Two of the bouncy beasts, jaws locked down on roses, stare suspiciously forward as if daring us to giggle.
The secular pictures in the exhibition carry interesting information. An anonymous bullfighting picture from the 1650s doesn’t look nearly as theatrical and organized as the corrida has come to live in our imagination. Groups of spectators, students, and soldiers are neatly squared off, and action is scattered about the ring — toreadors, picadors, a bull and wounded horse, random participants brandishing swords, picks, and capes, plus a gaggle of priests (to administer last rites). Even when it’s far from religious fervor and social bloodletting, Spanish painting carries a visceral surge. The fiery flower pictures of Bartolomé Pérez, for instance, are among the surprises in the exhibition. His razor-lipped tulip blooms look like instruments of predation, and the arrangements suggest the randy turbulence of the mythic figures painted on the urns.
The pictures in From El Greco to Dalí, instructive, historically balanced, and occasionally exciting, belong to Pérez Simón, a Spanish-Mexican businessman born in Asturias who began collecting only 20 years ago, so the collection’s limitations have been determined by market availability. He has a great passion for the art of his homeland, however, and the things on view, while sampling a few familiar masters, fill lacunae in our knowledge of Spanish art. Mr. Simón has been especially acquisitive of works by another Valencia native, Joaquín Sorolla (1863–1923), a painter virtually unknown here, and his general strategy has been to buy stuff that represents the progress of Spanish art from 15th-century panels to 17th-century Mannerist painting up to the formal inventions of the 20th Century.
To judge by what’s on view, after Goya’s prolific, all-mastering expansiveness of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, Spanish painting — compared to what was happening during the same period in the France of Impressionism and Symbolism — seemed to lose its nerve. It didn’t find new excitements until Picasso, the sculptor Julio González, and Miró came along. The late 19th Century in Spain looks a lot like the same period in Italy, when a group called the Macchiaioli (I’d loosely translate that as “daubers” or “mark makers:” “macchia” means stain, spot, mark) treated indigenous Italian subjects with sketchy, vaguely impressionistic technique. From El Greco to Dalí, like Macchiaioli painting, is top heavy with women and anecdote — women sewing, women milking cows, women gossiping at village fountains, and one swell duchess mounted on a horse (both costumed like parade floats).
The Spanish parallel to Macchiaioli painting was costumbrismo, which represented regionalist customs and scenes of daily life in a quickened but dense impasto. Sorolla made many pictures in the style, though he sometimes inflated the ethnographic intimacy of costumbrismo into the monumentality of Afternoon Sun, where countrymen use three pair of oxen to tow a fishing boat to shore. Even in the small oil study included in the exhibition, you can see how Sorolla relished stormy sea spray and ribbons of ocean current. Much of his output looks to me like a mash-up of Manet, Degas, Boudin, and Cassatt. He’s a deft and enthusiastic colorist who is easy on the eye and easy to like. You sigh with affection before his pictures, you don’t gasp with surprise or astonishment or drop-dead delight. He’s also an example of a historical turnabout: you see in his brushwork something of Manet’s inflammatory handling, though Manet was himself critically shaped by Velázquez, Ribera, and Goya.
Spanish painting sometimes feels like raw experience just barely mediated by an artist’s touch. I visited the Prado for the first time last year, and when I walked into the room containing Goya’s The Third of May 1808, I felt physically shoved around, first by its dimensions (106 x 137 inches), which no book reproduction had prepared me for, but mostly by the brutality and merciless candor of Goya’s depiction of the firing squad execution of rebels who resisted French occupation. (Manet’s Execution of Emperor Maximilian comes straight out of Goya’s picture.) It reminded me that the most memorable pictures often entail misbehavior, whether in the use of formal resources or in the treatment of subject matter. That said, Goya also was a court painter who made elegant, telling portraits, one example of which — Doña María Teresa de Vallabriga y Rozas — appears in the exhibition.
One of the finest things here is also one of the smallest, El Greco’s Head of Christ. The Greek effectively became a Spanish artist because he spent 30 years of his career shuttling between Toledo and Madrid. Born in Crete, El Greco began as an icon painter, and the head from Simón’s collection has the stark presence of icon art, kneaded by the devotional emotionalism El Greco absorbed from Tintoretto during his years in Italy and gently stretched by his own signature manner. His Redeemer stares heavenward with stunned, porcelain eyes, apparently yearning without hope.
Another great Mannerist painter, Jusepe de Ribera, reversing El Greco’s career trajectory, was born in Valencia province in 1591 but around 1608 left for Naples and made his life in Italy. He started as a Caravaggista, much indebted to the florid carnality and canted overhead light of Caravaggio. His 1648 Saint Jerome, however, shows off his individuated, free-standing manner. His hermit is so physically diminished that it’s hard to distinguish Jerome’s wrinkles and folds of flesh from body hair. His grubby, emaciated hands grasp close to his breast the traditional cross and skull. It’s a portrait of piety in extremis. Like El Greco’s Christ, Jerome looks yonder but without much expectation. Half his face gleams, the other half shrivels into darkness.
This show made me realize that I’ll never like Ribera’s near-contemporary Bartolomé Murillo. The misted contours of his saints and angels and putti and clouds and sheep and all the rest suggest the fluid harmonics of Andrea del Sarto, and, like him, he’s Spain’s equivalent to what Vasari called del Sarto, “the perfect painter.” For me, though, his perfection is soporific. And his most notable follower, Alonso Miguel de Tovar, carried on the tradition in The Divine Shepherdess, where a peaches-and-cream Virgin Mary cozies up to sheep with flowers in their mouths. Two of the bouncy beasts, jaws locked down on roses, stare suspiciously forward as if daring us to giggle.
The secular pictures in the exhibition carry interesting information. An anonymous bullfighting picture from the 1650s doesn’t look nearly as theatrical and organized as the corrida has come to live in our imagination. Groups of spectators, students, and soldiers are neatly squared off, and action is scattered about the ring — toreadors, picadors, a bull and wounded horse, random participants brandishing swords, picks, and capes, plus a gaggle of priests (to administer last rites). Even when it’s far from religious fervor and social bloodletting, Spanish painting carries a visceral surge. The fiery flower pictures of Bartolomé Pérez, for instance, are among the surprises in the exhibition. His razor-lipped tulip blooms look like instruments of predation, and the arrangements suggest the randy turbulence of the mythic figures painted on the urns.
2011年10月11日星期二
Horse painting auctioned in race to repay fraud victims
A 300-year-old oil painting of a Newmarket horse-racing scene – once owned by US fraudster Bernie Madoff – is set to fetch up to £64,000 at an auction in America.
The picture, Brocklesby Betty, with Jockey up at Newmarket, before her celebrated match with Ashridge Ball, 7 October, 1718, was painted by John Wootton, regarded as the the finest horse painter of his time.
It is thought he received £40 for the painting. In 1929, it fetched 100 guineas (£105) when it was sold at Christie’s by the sixth Lord Sherborne.
More recently it was acquired by Madoff, the American stockbroker who admitted using his wealth management business to defraud thousands of investors of billions of dollars. He was jailed for 150 years in 2009, the maximum allowed.
Madoff’s assets – including his large art collection – were seized, to be sold in an attempt to reimburse his creditors. So far, federal officials have raised $25 million – £16 million – in this way.
The painting is going under the hammer tomorrow at Christie’s Rockefeller Plaza salerooms in New York.
Wootton, who died in 1764, produced several Newmarket racing scenes, including one owned by the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, entitled A Race On The Round Course, Newmarket.
Other Newmarket paintings by him adorn the stately homes of Longleat and Castle Howard.
The Dictionary of British Equestrian Artists describes him as “the first Englishman to paint horse portraits, considered to be the horse painter to the aristocracy for half a century.”
His works, often life-size, featured most of the famous racehorses of his time.
Brocklesby Betty was a chestnut filly foaled in 1711. She was bred at Brocklesby Park, Lincolnshire, and was a celebrated racing mare.
In 1718, she beat the Duke of Bridgewater’s Ashridge Ball in a match for 900 guineas.
At that time, Ashridge Ball was seen as the best horse in Britain.
The picture, Brocklesby Betty, with Jockey up at Newmarket, before her celebrated match with Ashridge Ball, 7 October, 1718, was painted by John Wootton, regarded as the the finest horse painter of his time.
It is thought he received £40 for the painting. In 1929, it fetched 100 guineas (£105) when it was sold at Christie’s by the sixth Lord Sherborne.
More recently it was acquired by Madoff, the American stockbroker who admitted using his wealth management business to defraud thousands of investors of billions of dollars. He was jailed for 150 years in 2009, the maximum allowed.
Madoff’s assets – including his large art collection – were seized, to be sold in an attempt to reimburse his creditors. So far, federal officials have raised $25 million – £16 million – in this way.
The painting is going under the hammer tomorrow at Christie’s Rockefeller Plaza salerooms in New York.
Wootton, who died in 1764, produced several Newmarket racing scenes, including one owned by the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, entitled A Race On The Round Course, Newmarket.
Other Newmarket paintings by him adorn the stately homes of Longleat and Castle Howard.
The Dictionary of British Equestrian Artists describes him as “the first Englishman to paint horse portraits, considered to be the horse painter to the aristocracy for half a century.”
His works, often life-size, featured most of the famous racehorses of his time.
Brocklesby Betty was a chestnut filly foaled in 1711. She was bred at Brocklesby Park, Lincolnshire, and was a celebrated racing mare.
In 1718, she beat the Duke of Bridgewater’s Ashridge Ball in a match for 900 guineas.
At that time, Ashridge Ball was seen as the best horse in Britain.
2011年10月10日星期一
Lynchburg woman was child model for Rockwell painting
One of Norman Rockwell’s models for one of his most famous paintings has been living in the Lynchburg area for nearly 20 years.
Rockwell’s iconic illustration, “The Problem We All Live With,” depicts Ruby Bridges, a brave 6-year-old in New Orleans who broke new ground for school desegregation in the U.S. on Nov. 14, 1960. But the little girl in the painting is not Ruby Bridges. She is a likeness of Rockwell model Anita Gunn Tinsley, now a 56-year-old widow residing in Lynchburg’s Fort Hill neighborhood.
Most people do not know of her link to the painting that received worldwide acclaim after it appeared as the centerfold of Look magazine on Jan. 14, 1964.
Tinsley herself rarely talks about it.
Years ago, when her youngest daughter told her elementary school classmates in Amherst County that her mother was a Rockwell model, “they laughed at her,” she recalled.
She had to send her daughter back to school with proof to stop the scoffing.
“That was typical,” she said. “I really don’t bother telling people about it anymore.”
Recent research on Rockwell’s “other people” confirms that it is not unusual for black Rockwell models to encounter disbelief about their role. While the artist was well known for recruiting as models townspeople from the New England communities where he lived, it is not well known that some of those people were black.
Stephanie Plunkett, chief curator of the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Mass., confirmed that Tinsley was indeed one of the models for the painting.
Tinsley, who grew up in Massachusetts, never has seen the actual painting of “The Problem We All Live With.”
She said she did not know of its significance until she attended a Rockwell models reunion in 2007 at the Norman Rockwell Museum. There, 44 years after her modeling session, she learned of the immense importance of the picture, and of the little girl in it.
Before returning home to Virginia, Tinsley went to the museum bookstore and bought a reproduction of the painting, which now hangs in her bedroom.
“I’m not one to show myself,” she said. “But to know I’m seen by millions of people, seeing myself, it’s a strange feeling.”
Tinsley, a native of Great Barrington, Mass., recently shared the details of her encounter with Rockwell, her first in-depth interview on the subject.
She remembers how Norman Rockwell literally walked into her life. “In the fall of 1963, I was coming home from school, crying because I wanted to take violin lessons. I loved watching our music teacher play and I wanted to learn. But my parents said we couldn’t afford the $25 for the lessons.”
As Anita sniffled along the street, a tall white man approached her, asking what was wrong. When the 8-year-old explained that she wanted to take violin lessons but there was no money for them, the man suggested that, if her mother approved, he would pay for her lessons if Anita would model for him.
“I didn’t understand anything about modeling. All I heard was $25! I had no idea who he was. And I didn’t tell my mother.”
Several days later, Elaine Gunn, Anita’s mother, remained home from her teaching job to care for one of Anita’s brothers, who was sick. When Mrs. Gunn answered a knock at her front door, there stood Norman Rockwell.
Gunn immediately recognized the famous illustrator, although she had never met him. He introduced himself, explaining that he had come from Stockbridge, eight miles away, to talk with her daughter, Anita.
Mrs. Gunn, stunned at the presence of Rockwell on her doorstep, stammered that Anita was not yet home from school.
“May I wait for her?” Rockwell asked.
When Anita tromped through the backdoor, she found her mother sitting at the dining room table, chatting with the man who had spoken to her on the street.
As Anita entered the room, Norman Rockwell rose and approached her. Stooping down and clasping her hands he asked, “How would you like to earn money for those violin lessons?” Then, according to Mrs. Gunn, Rockwell engaged the 8-year-old in a discussion about his latest project on the subject of integration.
Only when Anita, in her blue, Peter Pan-collared school dress, understood what “modeling” meant and what she was agreeing to did the artist turn back to Mrs. Gunn: “For the modeling session, can you have two dresses made just like the one she has on, only in white?”
Rockwell requested two dresses because he used two models for the painting: Anita and her cousin, Linda Gunn. Both girls had been recommended to him by David Gunn Sr., a pipe-smoking buddy of Rockwell’s, and grandfather to the two cousins. It was because of Gunn senior’s referral that Rockwell had recognized and approached Anita on the street.
For the photo shoot, Rockwell invited Anita’s entire family to his Stockbridge studio. When the group arrived, Rockwell pulled out bottles of Coca-Cola from the case he kept under the stairs. The artist popped opened sodas and handed one to each person. “It was wonderful,” Tinsley said with a laugh. “We didn’t have to share. We each had our own bottle.”
Anita was required to stand absolutely still, with her feet positioned on wooden blocks, for long minutes at a time. When Rockwell guided her poses, he bent down and spoke to the little girl directly. “He was very kind,” Tinsley recalled. At the end of the 45-minute session, she received a check for $25, signed by Norman Rockwell.
Anita did take violin lessons, but only for one year. “The strings hurt my fingers. And I didn’t want to get calluses on them.”
After graduating high school in Massachusetts, Tinsley attended a local community college for two years. Then, after working two years in a state housing and redevelopment agency, she went to live with an aunt in Delaware, where she attended Delaware State College.
Love, marriage and the birth of her oldest daughter, Tiana, ended that college try. But in 1992, while working for Sun Oil, Anita earned a B.A. in business administration from Widener College in Chester, Pa. That same year, she became divorced from her first husband, took an early retirement from Sun Oil and moved to Amherst to join Kevin Tinsley, the man would become her second husband and father to her youngest daughter, Kenita. Kevin Tinsley died in July 2007.
“The Problem We All Live With” was back in the national spotlight this past summer, when the painting was hung outside the entrance to the Oval Office, where the President can see it from his desk.
At President Barack Obama’s request, the Norman Rockwell Museum loaned the painting to the White House to mark the 50th anniversary year of those historic events in New Orleans in 1960.
When informed that her likeness now hung in the White House, Anita Gunn Tinsley’s first reaction was, “Wow!” Then, after a moment of silence, she said, “Maybe I’ll try to take a trip to Washington to see it.”
Rockwell’s iconic illustration, “The Problem We All Live With,” depicts Ruby Bridges, a brave 6-year-old in New Orleans who broke new ground for school desegregation in the U.S. on Nov. 14, 1960. But the little girl in the painting is not Ruby Bridges. She is a likeness of Rockwell model Anita Gunn Tinsley, now a 56-year-old widow residing in Lynchburg’s Fort Hill neighborhood.
Most people do not know of her link to the painting that received worldwide acclaim after it appeared as the centerfold of Look magazine on Jan. 14, 1964.
Tinsley herself rarely talks about it.
Years ago, when her youngest daughter told her elementary school classmates in Amherst County that her mother was a Rockwell model, “they laughed at her,” she recalled.
She had to send her daughter back to school with proof to stop the scoffing.
“That was typical,” she said. “I really don’t bother telling people about it anymore.”
Recent research on Rockwell’s “other people” confirms that it is not unusual for black Rockwell models to encounter disbelief about their role. While the artist was well known for recruiting as models townspeople from the New England communities where he lived, it is not well known that some of those people were black.
Stephanie Plunkett, chief curator of the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Mass., confirmed that Tinsley was indeed one of the models for the painting.
Tinsley, who grew up in Massachusetts, never has seen the actual painting of “The Problem We All Live With.”
She said she did not know of its significance until she attended a Rockwell models reunion in 2007 at the Norman Rockwell Museum. There, 44 years after her modeling session, she learned of the immense importance of the picture, and of the little girl in it.
Before returning home to Virginia, Tinsley went to the museum bookstore and bought a reproduction of the painting, which now hangs in her bedroom.
“I’m not one to show myself,” she said. “But to know I’m seen by millions of people, seeing myself, it’s a strange feeling.”
Tinsley, a native of Great Barrington, Mass., recently shared the details of her encounter with Rockwell, her first in-depth interview on the subject.
She remembers how Norman Rockwell literally walked into her life. “In the fall of 1963, I was coming home from school, crying because I wanted to take violin lessons. I loved watching our music teacher play and I wanted to learn. But my parents said we couldn’t afford the $25 for the lessons.”
As Anita sniffled along the street, a tall white man approached her, asking what was wrong. When the 8-year-old explained that she wanted to take violin lessons but there was no money for them, the man suggested that, if her mother approved, he would pay for her lessons if Anita would model for him.
“I didn’t understand anything about modeling. All I heard was $25! I had no idea who he was. And I didn’t tell my mother.”
Several days later, Elaine Gunn, Anita’s mother, remained home from her teaching job to care for one of Anita’s brothers, who was sick. When Mrs. Gunn answered a knock at her front door, there stood Norman Rockwell.
Gunn immediately recognized the famous illustrator, although she had never met him. He introduced himself, explaining that he had come from Stockbridge, eight miles away, to talk with her daughter, Anita.
Mrs. Gunn, stunned at the presence of Rockwell on her doorstep, stammered that Anita was not yet home from school.
“May I wait for her?” Rockwell asked.
When Anita tromped through the backdoor, she found her mother sitting at the dining room table, chatting with the man who had spoken to her on the street.
As Anita entered the room, Norman Rockwell rose and approached her. Stooping down and clasping her hands he asked, “How would you like to earn money for those violin lessons?” Then, according to Mrs. Gunn, Rockwell engaged the 8-year-old in a discussion about his latest project on the subject of integration.
Only when Anita, in her blue, Peter Pan-collared school dress, understood what “modeling” meant and what she was agreeing to did the artist turn back to Mrs. Gunn: “For the modeling session, can you have two dresses made just like the one she has on, only in white?”
Rockwell requested two dresses because he used two models for the painting: Anita and her cousin, Linda Gunn. Both girls had been recommended to him by David Gunn Sr., a pipe-smoking buddy of Rockwell’s, and grandfather to the two cousins. It was because of Gunn senior’s referral that Rockwell had recognized and approached Anita on the street.
For the photo shoot, Rockwell invited Anita’s entire family to his Stockbridge studio. When the group arrived, Rockwell pulled out bottles of Coca-Cola from the case he kept under the stairs. The artist popped opened sodas and handed one to each person. “It was wonderful,” Tinsley said with a laugh. “We didn’t have to share. We each had our own bottle.”
Anita was required to stand absolutely still, with her feet positioned on wooden blocks, for long minutes at a time. When Rockwell guided her poses, he bent down and spoke to the little girl directly. “He was very kind,” Tinsley recalled. At the end of the 45-minute session, she received a check for $25, signed by Norman Rockwell.
Anita did take violin lessons, but only for one year. “The strings hurt my fingers. And I didn’t want to get calluses on them.”
After graduating high school in Massachusetts, Tinsley attended a local community college for two years. Then, after working two years in a state housing and redevelopment agency, she went to live with an aunt in Delaware, where she attended Delaware State College.
Love, marriage and the birth of her oldest daughter, Tiana, ended that college try. But in 1992, while working for Sun Oil, Anita earned a B.A. in business administration from Widener College in Chester, Pa. That same year, she became divorced from her first husband, took an early retirement from Sun Oil and moved to Amherst to join Kevin Tinsley, the man would become her second husband and father to her youngest daughter, Kenita. Kevin Tinsley died in July 2007.
“The Problem We All Live With” was back in the national spotlight this past summer, when the painting was hung outside the entrance to the Oval Office, where the President can see it from his desk.
At President Barack Obama’s request, the Norman Rockwell Museum loaned the painting to the White House to mark the 50th anniversary year of those historic events in New Orleans in 1960.
When informed that her likeness now hung in the White House, Anita Gunn Tinsley’s first reaction was, “Wow!” Then, after a moment of silence, she said, “Maybe I’ll try to take a trip to Washington to see it.”
2011年10月9日星期日
Lynchburg woman was child model for Rockwell painting
One of Norman Rockwell’s models for one of his most famous paintings has been living in the Lynchburg area for nearly 20 years.
Rockwell’s iconic illustration, “The Problem We All Live With,” depicts Ruby Bridges, a brave 6-year-old in New Orleans who broke new ground for school desegregation in the U.S. on Nov. 14, 1960. But the little girl in the painting is not Ruby Bridges. She is a likeness of Rockwell model Anita Gunn Tinsley, now a 56-year-old widow residing in Lynchburg’s Fort Hill neighborhood.
Most people do not know of her link to the painting that received worldwide acclaim after it appeared as the centerfold of Look magazine on Jan. 14, 1964.
Tinsley herself rarely talks about it.
Years ago, when her youngest daughter told her elementary school classmates in Amherst County that her mother was a Rockwell model, “they laughed at her,” she recalled.
She had to send her daughter back to school with proof to stop the scoffing.
“That was typical,” she said. “I really don’t bother telling people about it anymore.”
Recent research on Rockwell’s “other people” confirms that it is not unusual for black Rockwell models to encounter disbelief about their role. While the artist was well known for recruiting as models townspeople from the New England communities where he lived, it is not well known that some of those people were black.
Stephanie Plunkett, chief curator of the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Mass., confirmed that Tinsley was indeed one of the models for the painting.
Tinsley, who grew up in Massachusetts, never has seen the actual painting of “The Problem We All Live With.”
She said she did not know of its significance until she attended a Rockwell models reunion in 2007 at the Norman Rockwell Museum. There, 44 years after her modeling session, she learned of the immense importance of the picture, and of the little girl in it.
Before returning home to Virginia, Tinsley went to the museum bookstore and bought a reproduction of the painting, which now hangs in her bedroom.
“I’m not one to show myself,” she said. “But to know I’m seen by millions of people, seeing myself, it’s a strange feeling.”
Tinsley, a native of Great Barrington, Mass., recently shared the details of her encounter with Rockwell, her first in-depth interview on the subject.
She remembers how Norman Rockwell literally walked into her life. “In the fall of 1963, I was coming home from school, crying because I wanted to take violin lessons. I loved watching our music teacher play and I wanted to learn. But my parents said we couldn’t afford the $25 for the lessons.”
As Anita sniffled along the street, a tall white man approached her, asking what was wrong. When the 8-year-old explained that she wanted to take violin lessons but there was no money for them, the man suggested that, if her mother approved, he would pay for her lessons if Anita would model for him.
“I didn’t understand anything about modeling. All I heard was $25! I had no idea who he was. And I didn’t tell my mother.”
Several days later, Elaine Gunn, Anita’s mother, remained home from her teaching job to care for one of Anita’s brothers, who was sick. When Mrs. Gunn answered a knock at her front door, there stood Norman Rockwell.
Gunn immediately recognized the famous illustrator, although she had never met him. He introduced himself, explaining that he had come from Stockbridge, eight miles away, to talk with her daughter, Anita.
Mrs. Gunn, stunned at the presence of Rockwell on her doorstep, stammered that Anita was not yet home from school.
“May I wait for her?” Rockwell asked.
When Anita tromped through the backdoor, she found her mother sitting at the dining room table, chatting with the man who had spoken to her on the street.
As Anita entered the room, Norman Rockwell rose and approached her. Stooping down and clasping her hands he asked, “How would you like to earn money for those violin lessons?” Then, according to Mrs. Gunn, Rockwell engaged the 8-year-old in a discussion about his latest project on the subject of integration.
Only when Anita, in her blue, Peter Pan-collared school dress, understood what “modeling” meant and what she was agreeing to did the artist turn back to Mrs. Gunn: “For the modeling session, can you have two dresses made just like the one she has on, only in white?”
Rockwell requested two dresses because he used two models for the painting: Anita and her cousin, Linda Gunn. Both girls had been recommended to him by David Gunn Sr., a pipe-smoking buddy of Rockwell’s, and grandfather to the two cousins. It was because of Gunn senior’s referral that Rockwell had recognized and approached Anita on the street.
For the photo shoot, Rockwell invited Anita’s entire family to his Stockbridge studio. When the group arrived, Rockwell pulled out bottles of Coca-Cola from the case he kept under the stairs. The artist popped opened sodas and handed one to each person. “It was wonderful,” Tinsley said with a laugh. “We didn’t have to share. We each had our own bottle.”
Anita was required to stand absolutely still, with her feet positioned on wooden blocks, for long minutes at a time. When Rockwell guided her poses, he bent down and spoke to the little girl directly. “He was very kind,” Tinsley recalled. At the end of the 45-minute session, she received a check for $25, signed by Norman Rockwell.
Anita did take violin lessons, but only for one year. “The strings hurt my fingers. And I didn’t want to get calluses on them.”
After graduating high school in Massachusetts, Tinsley attended a local community college for two years. Then, after working two years in a state housing and redevelopment agency, she went to live with an aunt in Delaware, where she attended Delaware State College.
Love, marriage and the birth of her oldest daughter, Tiana, ended that college try. But in 1992, while working for Sun Oil, Anita earned a B.A. in business administration from Widener College in Chester, Pa. That same year, she became divorced from her first husband, took an early retirement from Sun Oil and moved to Amherst to join Kevin Tinsley, the man would become her second husband and father to her youngest daughter, Kenita. Kevin Tinsley died in July 2007.
“The Problem We All Live With” was back in the national spotlight this past summer, when the painting was hung outside the entrance to the Oval Office, where the President can see it from his desk.
At President Barack Obama’s request, the Norman Rockwell Museum loaned the painting to the White House to mark the 50th anniversary year of those historic events in New Orleans in 1960.
When informed that her likeness now hung in the White House, Anita Gunn Tinsley’s first reaction was, “Wow!” Then, after a moment of silence, she said, “Maybe I’ll try to take a trip to Washington to see it.”
Rockwell’s iconic illustration, “The Problem We All Live With,” depicts Ruby Bridges, a brave 6-year-old in New Orleans who broke new ground for school desegregation in the U.S. on Nov. 14, 1960. But the little girl in the painting is not Ruby Bridges. She is a likeness of Rockwell model Anita Gunn Tinsley, now a 56-year-old widow residing in Lynchburg’s Fort Hill neighborhood.
Most people do not know of her link to the painting that received worldwide acclaim after it appeared as the centerfold of Look magazine on Jan. 14, 1964.
Tinsley herself rarely talks about it.
Years ago, when her youngest daughter told her elementary school classmates in Amherst County that her mother was a Rockwell model, “they laughed at her,” she recalled.
She had to send her daughter back to school with proof to stop the scoffing.
“That was typical,” she said. “I really don’t bother telling people about it anymore.”
Recent research on Rockwell’s “other people” confirms that it is not unusual for black Rockwell models to encounter disbelief about their role. While the artist was well known for recruiting as models townspeople from the New England communities where he lived, it is not well known that some of those people were black.
Stephanie Plunkett, chief curator of the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Mass., confirmed that Tinsley was indeed one of the models for the painting.
Tinsley, who grew up in Massachusetts, never has seen the actual painting of “The Problem We All Live With.”
She said she did not know of its significance until she attended a Rockwell models reunion in 2007 at the Norman Rockwell Museum. There, 44 years after her modeling session, she learned of the immense importance of the picture, and of the little girl in it.
Before returning home to Virginia, Tinsley went to the museum bookstore and bought a reproduction of the painting, which now hangs in her bedroom.
“I’m not one to show myself,” she said. “But to know I’m seen by millions of people, seeing myself, it’s a strange feeling.”
Tinsley, a native of Great Barrington, Mass., recently shared the details of her encounter with Rockwell, her first in-depth interview on the subject.
She remembers how Norman Rockwell literally walked into her life. “In the fall of 1963, I was coming home from school, crying because I wanted to take violin lessons. I loved watching our music teacher play and I wanted to learn. But my parents said we couldn’t afford the $25 for the lessons.”
As Anita sniffled along the street, a tall white man approached her, asking what was wrong. When the 8-year-old explained that she wanted to take violin lessons but there was no money for them, the man suggested that, if her mother approved, he would pay for her lessons if Anita would model for him.
“I didn’t understand anything about modeling. All I heard was $25! I had no idea who he was. And I didn’t tell my mother.”
Several days later, Elaine Gunn, Anita’s mother, remained home from her teaching job to care for one of Anita’s brothers, who was sick. When Mrs. Gunn answered a knock at her front door, there stood Norman Rockwell.
Gunn immediately recognized the famous illustrator, although she had never met him. He introduced himself, explaining that he had come from Stockbridge, eight miles away, to talk with her daughter, Anita.
Mrs. Gunn, stunned at the presence of Rockwell on her doorstep, stammered that Anita was not yet home from school.
“May I wait for her?” Rockwell asked.
When Anita tromped through the backdoor, she found her mother sitting at the dining room table, chatting with the man who had spoken to her on the street.
As Anita entered the room, Norman Rockwell rose and approached her. Stooping down and clasping her hands he asked, “How would you like to earn money for those violin lessons?” Then, according to Mrs. Gunn, Rockwell engaged the 8-year-old in a discussion about his latest project on the subject of integration.
Only when Anita, in her blue, Peter Pan-collared school dress, understood what “modeling” meant and what she was agreeing to did the artist turn back to Mrs. Gunn: “For the modeling session, can you have two dresses made just like the one she has on, only in white?”
Rockwell requested two dresses because he used two models for the painting: Anita and her cousin, Linda Gunn. Both girls had been recommended to him by David Gunn Sr., a pipe-smoking buddy of Rockwell’s, and grandfather to the two cousins. It was because of Gunn senior’s referral that Rockwell had recognized and approached Anita on the street.
For the photo shoot, Rockwell invited Anita’s entire family to his Stockbridge studio. When the group arrived, Rockwell pulled out bottles of Coca-Cola from the case he kept under the stairs. The artist popped opened sodas and handed one to each person. “It was wonderful,” Tinsley said with a laugh. “We didn’t have to share. We each had our own bottle.”
Anita was required to stand absolutely still, with her feet positioned on wooden blocks, for long minutes at a time. When Rockwell guided her poses, he bent down and spoke to the little girl directly. “He was very kind,” Tinsley recalled. At the end of the 45-minute session, she received a check for $25, signed by Norman Rockwell.
Anita did take violin lessons, but only for one year. “The strings hurt my fingers. And I didn’t want to get calluses on them.”
After graduating high school in Massachusetts, Tinsley attended a local community college for two years. Then, after working two years in a state housing and redevelopment agency, she went to live with an aunt in Delaware, where she attended Delaware State College.
Love, marriage and the birth of her oldest daughter, Tiana, ended that college try. But in 1992, while working for Sun Oil, Anita earned a B.A. in business administration from Widener College in Chester, Pa. That same year, she became divorced from her first husband, took an early retirement from Sun Oil and moved to Amherst to join Kevin Tinsley, the man would become her second husband and father to her youngest daughter, Kenita. Kevin Tinsley died in July 2007.
“The Problem We All Live With” was back in the national spotlight this past summer, when the painting was hung outside the entrance to the Oval Office, where the President can see it from his desk.
At President Barack Obama’s request, the Norman Rockwell Museum loaned the painting to the White House to mark the 50th anniversary year of those historic events in New Orleans in 1960.
When informed that her likeness now hung in the White House, Anita Gunn Tinsley’s first reaction was, “Wow!” Then, after a moment of silence, she said, “Maybe I’ll try to take a trip to Washington to see it.”
2011年10月8日星期六
Andy Warhol in 'Headlines' at Washington's National Gallery
Andy Warhol, the guru of Pop art, reveled in a lifelong obsession with newspapers, especially tabloids and their garish headlines. As a teenager, he saved pages with photos of his favorite Hollywood stars. Throughout his life he packed hundreds of newspapers into boxes he called "time capsules" to whet the fancy of the future. He collected scores of fraying clippings about himself in 34 scrapbooks. But most important, he used newspapers, especially the front pages, to model and inform some of the most important works of his fine art. It is hard to imagine Warhol the artist without his headlines.
Warhol's news junkie obsession and its importance to his art are detailed with great care in a new exhibition at the National Gallery of Art in Washington titled simply "Warhol: Headlines." The show, which closes Jan. 2, goes on to the Museum of Modern Art in Frankfurt in February, the National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome in June and the Andy Warhol Museum in his hometown of Pittsburgh in October 2012.
Unlike a retrospective of all the work of Warhol, the exhibition attempts to concentrate on a single aspect of the artist that, in fact, reveals a good deal about him. Curator Molly Donovan of the National Gallery says, "the theme enabled me to tell a tight and focused story ... that had not been understood before." Donovan dates Warhol's emergence as a fine artist to a series of newspaper canvases that he created in the early 1960s. Until then, he had devoted himself to advertising design (including a lucrative campaign for I. Miller shoes) and magazine illustration.
In one 1962 canvas, "A Boy for Meg (2)," which belongs to the National Gallery, Warhol, using oil and egg emulsion, re-created the front page of the New York Post announcing a baby boy born to Princess Margaret of England. Margaret was a household name. Only a few years earlier she had given in to pressure from the British royal family and, while the world awaited her decision, finally agreed not to marry the divorced man she loved. She later wed a never-married suitor instead, and the New York Post was celebrating the birth of their first child. Both the tabloid and Warhol shared an excitement over celebrity.
Warhol's rendition was not a simple reproduction. He inflated the front page on to a canvas 6 feet high and, while he attempted to include every detail, his pictures looked more like drawings than photographs. Warhol was often obscure while explaining his work. John Russell, a New York Times art critic, once wrote that "Warhol operates behind a mask of inarticulacy." Yet Warhol seemed clear about mocking the notion that he served as no more than a mirror reproducing his subject matter. "I'm going to look into the mirror and see nothing," he once said. "People are always calling me a mirror, and if a mirror looks into a mirror, what is there to see?"
In another 6-foot-high canvas completed in 1962, "Daily News," Warhol used acrylic and pencil to mimic the front and back pages of the New York tabloid. This work celebrated Elizabeth Taylor's rejection of her husband, singer Eddie Fisher, for actor Richard Burton. "Eddie Fisher Breaks Down/ In Hospital Here; Liz in Rome," the main headlines bellowed. Warhol removed all the captions from the photos, leaving details to the imagination of the viewers.
The 34-year-old Warhol was little known when he exhibited these works, and the idea of Pop art — the use of the icons of popular culture as subject matter for fine art — was little understood. His work was not well received at first. Dore Ashton, an influential critic, wrote that "Warhol simply lifts the techniques of journalism and applies them witlessly to a flat surface." But that view changed. It was soon recognized, as Donovan puts it, that Warhol had elevated his hoarded headlines "to the status of art" and had transformed his material "into something both grand and personal."
Warhol attracted more favorable notice with other subjects from this period like his paintings of Coca-Cola bottles and Campbell soup cans and his many colored silk screens of Marilyn Monroe. These spectacular works won him great success. His followers started calling him "the Pope of Pop" and "Papa Pop."
Warhol never abandoned headlines as a subject — even when he sensed that the tabloids were losing their impact. A few years after he emerged as a celebrated Pop artist, he saw the demise of one of his favorite tabloids — the Hearst Corp.'s New York Mirror. He also believed that television was replacing the tabloids as the source of lurid, gossipy "headlines" about celebrities and disasters. To keep up with this trend, Warhol and his followers began experimenting with the creation of television programs.
The artist was an avid photographer, and he enjoyed aiming his camera at tabloid vending machines with visible front-page headlines. "Drug Link to Amtrak Crash," cried one New York Post headline while another said, "$1.3m Picasso Disappears Again On L.I." While in London, he photographed the news vendor announcements that summarized the tabloid headlines. "London Strangler 'Kills Again,'" said one.
Warhol's New York studio, known as the Silver Factory or the Factory, was a collegial enterprise with many hangers-on The scene, according to Donovan, "had become its own hot commodity, selling cool stylishness." She describes it in the exhibition catalog as "a space where transvestites, heiresses, speed freaks, wealthy art collectors, rock musicians and Harvard graduates alike mixed together." The antics of the studio added to the celebrity of Warhol. "Don't pay any attention to what they write about you," he once said about media coverage. "Just measure it in inches."
The Factory was also the scene of the near killing of Warhol. In June 1968, Valerie Solanas, a feminist writer and hanger-on angered by the Factory's refusal to accept her manuscript for one of its publications, shot Warhol in the chest. Doctors managed to save Warhol's life only by massaging his heart. By now, Warhol had become enough of a celebrity to make the front page of his beloved tabloids. "Andy Warhol Fights for Life," the New York Post proclaimed, running front-page photos of Warhol and his assassin. The New York Daily News said, "Actress Shoots Andy Warhol."
In his later years, Warhol collaborated on newspaper projects with two young New York graffiti artists, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring. Both had distinguished but abbreviated careers, Basquiat dying at age 27 and Haring at age 31.
In a 1984 Basquiat collaboration, Warhol set down a headline from the New York Post: "Ailing Ali In Fight of Life." That headline, reminiscent of Warhol's own headline in the Post, described boxer Muhammad Ali's early symptoms of brain damage. In graffiti fashion, Basquiat painted around Warhol's letters with advertising logos and animals that obscured the original headline.
In a 1985 collaboration with Haring, Warhol used another New York Post front page as their model. Its main headline reported, "Madonna: 'I'm Not Ashamed'/Rock star shrugs off nudie pix furor." The artists produced a series of garish versions of the front page, some in glow paint, almost all covered with the favorite graffiti figures of Haring. No viewer could mistake these canvases as a reproduction of the original front page.
In 1987, when he was 58, Warhol died of complications from gall bladder surgery. The tabloids did not forget him. The front page of the New York Post ran a photo of Warhol standing in front of a silkscreen of Marilyn Monroe. It announced in large, somber type: "Andy Warhol Dead at 58." The subhead described him as the "Prince of pop art who turned a soup can into museum treasure." Stories about the "Life & Times of a Media Genius" were promised on three inside pages.
A far different Warhol can be encountered across the national mall at the Smithsonian Institution's Hirshhorn Museum. Curators there are displaying Shadows, a monumental Warhol work that extends 450 feet along the museum's curving walls. Completed in 1979, Shadows, which will be on exhibition in Washington until mid-January, is a complete break from pop art.
Warhol may have been mimicking and perhaps making fun of abstract art. The work comprises 102 colorful panels, each one a painting and silk screen of a similar right-angled figure that Warhol claimed was "based on a photo of a shadow in my office." Warhol, evoking an image like that of abstract expressionist Jackson Pollack dripping paint, also claimed that he mopped acrylic paint on to each canvas before it was silk screened. Hirshhorn curator Evelyn Hankins points out, however, that much of the paint is too carefully applied to fit the chaotic strokes of a mop.
All 102 panels have never before been displayed together. The Dia Art Foundation, which owns the work, usually shows 72. Perhaps because each panel is slightly different and Warhol and his assistants used some of his favorite colors like carmine and chartreuse and peach, the repetitive effect is far from boring — but mesmerizing instead, much like an impressionist film.
Warhol's news junkie obsession and its importance to his art are detailed with great care in a new exhibition at the National Gallery of Art in Washington titled simply "Warhol: Headlines." The show, which closes Jan. 2, goes on to the Museum of Modern Art in Frankfurt in February, the National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome in June and the Andy Warhol Museum in his hometown of Pittsburgh in October 2012.
Unlike a retrospective of all the work of Warhol, the exhibition attempts to concentrate on a single aspect of the artist that, in fact, reveals a good deal about him. Curator Molly Donovan of the National Gallery says, "the theme enabled me to tell a tight and focused story ... that had not been understood before." Donovan dates Warhol's emergence as a fine artist to a series of newspaper canvases that he created in the early 1960s. Until then, he had devoted himself to advertising design (including a lucrative campaign for I. Miller shoes) and magazine illustration.
In one 1962 canvas, "A Boy for Meg (2)," which belongs to the National Gallery, Warhol, using oil and egg emulsion, re-created the front page of the New York Post announcing a baby boy born to Princess Margaret of England. Margaret was a household name. Only a few years earlier she had given in to pressure from the British royal family and, while the world awaited her decision, finally agreed not to marry the divorced man she loved. She later wed a never-married suitor instead, and the New York Post was celebrating the birth of their first child. Both the tabloid and Warhol shared an excitement over celebrity.
Warhol's rendition was not a simple reproduction. He inflated the front page on to a canvas 6 feet high and, while he attempted to include every detail, his pictures looked more like drawings than photographs. Warhol was often obscure while explaining his work. John Russell, a New York Times art critic, once wrote that "Warhol operates behind a mask of inarticulacy." Yet Warhol seemed clear about mocking the notion that he served as no more than a mirror reproducing his subject matter. "I'm going to look into the mirror and see nothing," he once said. "People are always calling me a mirror, and if a mirror looks into a mirror, what is there to see?"
In another 6-foot-high canvas completed in 1962, "Daily News," Warhol used acrylic and pencil to mimic the front and back pages of the New York tabloid. This work celebrated Elizabeth Taylor's rejection of her husband, singer Eddie Fisher, for actor Richard Burton. "Eddie Fisher Breaks Down/ In Hospital Here; Liz in Rome," the main headlines bellowed. Warhol removed all the captions from the photos, leaving details to the imagination of the viewers.
The 34-year-old Warhol was little known when he exhibited these works, and the idea of Pop art — the use of the icons of popular culture as subject matter for fine art — was little understood. His work was not well received at first. Dore Ashton, an influential critic, wrote that "Warhol simply lifts the techniques of journalism and applies them witlessly to a flat surface." But that view changed. It was soon recognized, as Donovan puts it, that Warhol had elevated his hoarded headlines "to the status of art" and had transformed his material "into something both grand and personal."
Warhol attracted more favorable notice with other subjects from this period like his paintings of Coca-Cola bottles and Campbell soup cans and his many colored silk screens of Marilyn Monroe. These spectacular works won him great success. His followers started calling him "the Pope of Pop" and "Papa Pop."
Warhol never abandoned headlines as a subject — even when he sensed that the tabloids were losing their impact. A few years after he emerged as a celebrated Pop artist, he saw the demise of one of his favorite tabloids — the Hearst Corp.'s New York Mirror. He also believed that television was replacing the tabloids as the source of lurid, gossipy "headlines" about celebrities and disasters. To keep up with this trend, Warhol and his followers began experimenting with the creation of television programs.
The artist was an avid photographer, and he enjoyed aiming his camera at tabloid vending machines with visible front-page headlines. "Drug Link to Amtrak Crash," cried one New York Post headline while another said, "$1.3m Picasso Disappears Again On L.I." While in London, he photographed the news vendor announcements that summarized the tabloid headlines. "London Strangler 'Kills Again,'" said one.
Warhol's New York studio, known as the Silver Factory or the Factory, was a collegial enterprise with many hangers-on The scene, according to Donovan, "had become its own hot commodity, selling cool stylishness." She describes it in the exhibition catalog as "a space where transvestites, heiresses, speed freaks, wealthy art collectors, rock musicians and Harvard graduates alike mixed together." The antics of the studio added to the celebrity of Warhol. "Don't pay any attention to what they write about you," he once said about media coverage. "Just measure it in inches."
The Factory was also the scene of the near killing of Warhol. In June 1968, Valerie Solanas, a feminist writer and hanger-on angered by the Factory's refusal to accept her manuscript for one of its publications, shot Warhol in the chest. Doctors managed to save Warhol's life only by massaging his heart. By now, Warhol had become enough of a celebrity to make the front page of his beloved tabloids. "Andy Warhol Fights for Life," the New York Post proclaimed, running front-page photos of Warhol and his assassin. The New York Daily News said, "Actress Shoots Andy Warhol."
In his later years, Warhol collaborated on newspaper projects with two young New York graffiti artists, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring. Both had distinguished but abbreviated careers, Basquiat dying at age 27 and Haring at age 31.
In a 1984 Basquiat collaboration, Warhol set down a headline from the New York Post: "Ailing Ali In Fight of Life." That headline, reminiscent of Warhol's own headline in the Post, described boxer Muhammad Ali's early symptoms of brain damage. In graffiti fashion, Basquiat painted around Warhol's letters with advertising logos and animals that obscured the original headline.
In a 1985 collaboration with Haring, Warhol used another New York Post front page as their model. Its main headline reported, "Madonna: 'I'm Not Ashamed'/Rock star shrugs off nudie pix furor." The artists produced a series of garish versions of the front page, some in glow paint, almost all covered with the favorite graffiti figures of Haring. No viewer could mistake these canvases as a reproduction of the original front page.
In 1987, when he was 58, Warhol died of complications from gall bladder surgery. The tabloids did not forget him. The front page of the New York Post ran a photo of Warhol standing in front of a silkscreen of Marilyn Monroe. It announced in large, somber type: "Andy Warhol Dead at 58." The subhead described him as the "Prince of pop art who turned a soup can into museum treasure." Stories about the "Life & Times of a Media Genius" were promised on three inside pages.
A far different Warhol can be encountered across the national mall at the Smithsonian Institution's Hirshhorn Museum. Curators there are displaying Shadows, a monumental Warhol work that extends 450 feet along the museum's curving walls. Completed in 1979, Shadows, which will be on exhibition in Washington until mid-January, is a complete break from pop art.
Warhol may have been mimicking and perhaps making fun of abstract art. The work comprises 102 colorful panels, each one a painting and silk screen of a similar right-angled figure that Warhol claimed was "based on a photo of a shadow in my office." Warhol, evoking an image like that of abstract expressionist Jackson Pollack dripping paint, also claimed that he mopped acrylic paint on to each canvas before it was silk screened. Hirshhorn curator Evelyn Hankins points out, however, that much of the paint is too carefully applied to fit the chaotic strokes of a mop.
All 102 panels have never before been displayed together. The Dia Art Foundation, which owns the work, usually shows 72. Perhaps because each panel is slightly different and Warhol and his assistants used some of his favorite colors like carmine and chartreuse and peach, the repetitive effect is far from boring — but mesmerizing instead, much like an impressionist film.
2011年10月7日星期五
Gallery Espace exhibits at India Art Collective online fair 2011
Chintan Upadhyay is a multi dimensional artist who has given a new perspective to painting and sculpture through his explorations in new media. As a young painter, Chintan was exposed to the miniature paintings of Rajasthan and Abstract Expressionism of the west. He moved from Jaipur School of Art to continue his studies in Baroda, where, intrigued by the scope for meaningful juxtapositions, he began experimenting with a series of still-life compositions. Gradually he began to depict objects in a phallic manner in order to communicate the commoditization of sexuality. Moving to Mumbai, he experienced a sense of isolation from its residents which he translated into alien like pictures. Thereafter he began experimenting with caricature, satirizing the world around him. Over the last few years Chintan has been depicting images of babies who are usually male with exaggerated features and emotive faces. These futuristic looking babies speak on issues of identity, mutation and culture which are a jumble of ideas and conventions, partly his own and partly borrowed. Female foeticide and infanticide are recurring themes. These babies have reincarnated in the form of Smart Alecs in his series of works called 'Metastasis of Signs'. They have acquired a brand status and are representative of the socio-economic and cultural vandalism in India. Bodies of babies are used to create a situation which affirms and disputes their brand status. They derive their gestures from those of human beings used in different socio-cultural contexts in order to express emotions directly and vehemently, attributing newer meanings to them. Scenes from the Kama Sutra are also inscribed on their bodies. The artist lives and works in Mumbai.
GR Iranna's early education in the Gurukul followed by seven years in the ashram gives his works a strong connection to his cultural roots alongside his approach to exploring the antitheses of inherent dualities of the world. Aspects of Buddhist art influences are evident in his artistic endeavours. Iranna has continuously commented on human civilizational growth and its intrinsic follies consisting of aggression and ideological indoctrinations, violently inflicted upon human beings in the name of territorial growth. His artworks are symbolic of an attempt to break free from an establishment, or a style that is beginning to become claustrophobic. Many of his paintings depict pain as an abstract force that is translated visually in bruised textures and razor sharp cutting edges. His most recent works are visions of resistance where a sense of massive dynamic energy pervades the surfaces, an energy fueled by torment and the struggle against it. These conflicts except for being played out with the theme and on the surface also pervade colours, figures and the technique. Although he began with painting oil on canvases, Iranna later developed his range of medium, embarking on his now primary use of tarpaulin. His tarpaulin paintings for their grand size are often suggestive of narrative murals. They seem to be weathered by paint where the surfaces appear as if they have been hit by a storm of paint rather than civilly painted. GR Iranna lives and works in New Delhi.
Manjunath Kamath's consistent concern has been to free the visual story from its verbal equivalents. His colour intensive works are an eclectic mix of fantasy and reality wherein curious images take birth and read like a story. The images are drawn from his immediate surroundings and collective memories. Kamath believes that nothing is quite as it seems. By skillfully combining and transforming visual elements, the artist creates puns to generate new narratives. The challenging of logic and the introduction of absurd allegories give an interesting edge to his work. His artistic repertoire ranges from sketches and watercolours from his informal diary to large canvasses painted in oil or acrylic, as well as works in fiberglass, wood and terracotta. The skill and delicacy of his lines is evident across the media that he works with. These linear narratives command attention with wit, playfulness and beauty. The fragments that make up his artworks weave and re-weave interpretations. What we think we might know about the world around us could be something else. The artist lives and works in New Delhi.
Poetic and lyrical depiction of everyday ordinary is the characteristic of Nilima Sheikh's art practice which encompasses small miniatures on paper, large scale works, conventionally hung paintings, scrolls painted on both sides, and backdrops for theatre sets. She constantly evolves formats to accommodate the mood and method of describing a subject which is also reflected in her style of drawing fine, contoured lines. Having spent almost all of her student and professional life in Baroda, she acknowledges her debt to KG Subramanyam, and Santiniketan School which reinvented tradition and bridged the gap between craft traditions and studio practice. She also derives from the Far Eastern styles, and pre-Renaissance Italian art. She usually blends her colors from pigment with casein or tempera technique to produce intense and sensuous imagery.
Thematically, Nilima has searched the variables of feminine experience through folklore, oral poetry and contemporary historical interpretations. For instance, 'When Champa Grew Up' narrates the tragic life story of a woman murdered for dowry by her husband's family. 'Images from Umrao' include large screen panels to show changing of seasons as visuals to the ageing of courtesan Umrao Jaan. For the last decade, since 2000, Nilima has engaged with the historical fates of Kashmir and Gujarat She has explored the theme of community suffering in the face of sectarian violence and state brutality, delved deeper into violence, terror, trauma, grief of ordinary people investigating their relationship to the place they live in, offering accounts of their return to those spaces of violence which once constituted the very domain of everyday life. 'Each Night Put Kashmir in Your Dreams', 'The Country Without A Post Office: Reading Shahid Ali,' and 'Drawing Trails' are examples of such representations. The artist lives and works in Baroda and Delhi.
GR Iranna's early education in the Gurukul followed by seven years in the ashram gives his works a strong connection to his cultural roots alongside his approach to exploring the antitheses of inherent dualities of the world. Aspects of Buddhist art influences are evident in his artistic endeavours. Iranna has continuously commented on human civilizational growth and its intrinsic follies consisting of aggression and ideological indoctrinations, violently inflicted upon human beings in the name of territorial growth. His artworks are symbolic of an attempt to break free from an establishment, or a style that is beginning to become claustrophobic. Many of his paintings depict pain as an abstract force that is translated visually in bruised textures and razor sharp cutting edges. His most recent works are visions of resistance where a sense of massive dynamic energy pervades the surfaces, an energy fueled by torment and the struggle against it. These conflicts except for being played out with the theme and on the surface also pervade colours, figures and the technique. Although he began with painting oil on canvases, Iranna later developed his range of medium, embarking on his now primary use of tarpaulin. His tarpaulin paintings for their grand size are often suggestive of narrative murals. They seem to be weathered by paint where the surfaces appear as if they have been hit by a storm of paint rather than civilly painted. GR Iranna lives and works in New Delhi.
Manjunath Kamath's consistent concern has been to free the visual story from its verbal equivalents. His colour intensive works are an eclectic mix of fantasy and reality wherein curious images take birth and read like a story. The images are drawn from his immediate surroundings and collective memories. Kamath believes that nothing is quite as it seems. By skillfully combining and transforming visual elements, the artist creates puns to generate new narratives. The challenging of logic and the introduction of absurd allegories give an interesting edge to his work. His artistic repertoire ranges from sketches and watercolours from his informal diary to large canvasses painted in oil or acrylic, as well as works in fiberglass, wood and terracotta. The skill and delicacy of his lines is evident across the media that he works with. These linear narratives command attention with wit, playfulness and beauty. The fragments that make up his artworks weave and re-weave interpretations. What we think we might know about the world around us could be something else. The artist lives and works in New Delhi.
Poetic and lyrical depiction of everyday ordinary is the characteristic of Nilima Sheikh's art practice which encompasses small miniatures on paper, large scale works, conventionally hung paintings, scrolls painted on both sides, and backdrops for theatre sets. She constantly evolves formats to accommodate the mood and method of describing a subject which is also reflected in her style of drawing fine, contoured lines. Having spent almost all of her student and professional life in Baroda, she acknowledges her debt to KG Subramanyam, and Santiniketan School which reinvented tradition and bridged the gap between craft traditions and studio practice. She also derives from the Far Eastern styles, and pre-Renaissance Italian art. She usually blends her colors from pigment with casein or tempera technique to produce intense and sensuous imagery.
Thematically, Nilima has searched the variables of feminine experience through folklore, oral poetry and contemporary historical interpretations. For instance, 'When Champa Grew Up' narrates the tragic life story of a woman murdered for dowry by her husband's family. 'Images from Umrao' include large screen panels to show changing of seasons as visuals to the ageing of courtesan Umrao Jaan. For the last decade, since 2000, Nilima has engaged with the historical fates of Kashmir and Gujarat She has explored the theme of community suffering in the face of sectarian violence and state brutality, delved deeper into violence, terror, trauma, grief of ordinary people investigating their relationship to the place they live in, offering accounts of their return to those spaces of violence which once constituted the very domain of everyday life. 'Each Night Put Kashmir in Your Dreams', 'The Country Without A Post Office: Reading Shahid Ali,' and 'Drawing Trails' are examples of such representations. The artist lives and works in Baroda and Delhi.
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