Oct 14, 2012 | art history, news
Even though Jacques-Louis David (pronounced Daaav-EED, I know, it’s French and weird) was considered to be the greatest painter of the 18th century. A Frenchman who worked mostly in a neoclassicist style, he’s not much discussed in my art history classes aside from “the guy who painted ‘The Death of Marat’.”
Surprisingly though, his history painting “Oath of the Horatii” is what comes up first under his Google artwork page, depicting a scene in early Rome where three brothers agree to sacrifice their lives for the city, placing civic loyalty over everything else. These historical themes were useful for David, as a vehicle to actively support the French Revolution, since loyalty to state is what’s most important here too.
“The Death of Marat,” number two for David according to Google, also has ties to the Revolution and is said to be the most well-known image that came from it. Jean-Paul Marat was a French revolutionary leader and journalist who had a skin condition that was helped by a bath. Which is why here he lies in the tub, holding out a piece of paper that in French reads, Because I am unhappy, I have a right to your help.”
Marat was stabbed in the bath by his political enemy Charlotte Corday who did not bother fleeing and was eventually tried and executed for his murder. You can’t see her here in the painting, but her name is also written on the piece of paper Marat holds, as he’s writing with his last breaths – a martyr for the Revolution.
Napoleon Crossing the Alps comes in at number three for David on Google, showing the breadth of his political alignment throughout his career and life – he aligned with the new ruler after being imprisoned.
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| Oath of the Horatii, 1784, Louvre |
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| Death of Marat, 1793, Royal Museums of the Fine Arts of Belgium |
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| Napoleon Crossing the Alps, 1800, Château de Malmaison |
And now it’s a happy art history Sunday!
Oct 10, 2012 | art history, painting
Socrates had a theory about how we know things exist – I’ve been trying for a while to find a way to explain so it makes sense, but this excerpt from
HistoryforKids.org (not embarrassed:) breaks it down better than I could:
He thought that everything had a sort of ideal form, like the idea of a chair, and then an actual chair was a sort of poor imitation of the ideal chair that exists only in your mind. One of the ways Plato tried to explain his ideas was with the famous metaphor of the cave. He said, Suppose there is a cave, and inside the cave there are some men chained up to a wall, so that they can only see the back wall of the cave and nothing else. These men can’t see anything outside of the cave, or even see each other clearly, but they can see shadows of what is going on outside the cave. Wouldn’t these prisoners come to think that the shadows were real, and that was what things really looked like?
I like to think that art developed alongside this same kind of idea – beginning at creating exact replications of reality for documentation purposes, evolving and evolving into billions of beautiful interpretations until the invention of photography slingshot substantive art into billions of other possibilities, but all the other types – the Untitled’s with no beginning or ending or purpose now have an easy way out with clicks of technology.
A chair started out as just a chair and became interpretations of what a chair looked like – sometimes colorful sometimes abstracted – and then moved into the concept of sitting down, resting and comfort, and now has moved into realms of design, rethinking how we’re able to manipulate the construction of chairs in the first place.
I want to create a series out of this thought, posting artworks that focus on an item or idea and move from the most realistic to the most abstract representations of that thing in art, as we move chronologically. If you think I’m missing a work that belongs in the line – if I leave out your favorite representation of a char for instance – and you want me to add another piece to the post, send it on over!
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Van Gogh Chair, 1888-1889
for more works by Van Gogh, check out the Van Gogh Gallery here🙂 |
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| One and Three Chairs by Joseph Kosuth, 1965
This is another kind of concept along the same lines – how many ways can you represent the same thing? |
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“Kitchen Chair” by Küchenstuhl, 1965
found here
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Man in a Chair, 1983-5
A portrait of Baron Thyssen by Jean-Antoine Watteau
(from the Tate catalogue) found here
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Roy McMakin, paintings with chairs & sculptures of chairs, 2006, installation view
Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery, New York and James Harris Gallery, Seattle, Photo: Mark Woods
found here
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Rocking Wheel Chair By Mathias Koehler
found in this post with a lot of other cool chairs |
Oct 8, 2012 | art history, museums, news, The Guggenheim, The Met
This weekend was a busy one. So much art in so little time wears me out, and I’m a firm supporter of the Put-More-Benches-In-Museums Movement, but the ones that the museums actually do have are never at great vantage points anyway. On Saturday we saw the Picasso Black and White exhibit at the Guggenheim and this morning it was the Met’s new Bernini: Sculpting in Clay show. I’m taking a whole class on the latter, which made it cool to actually be able to put all that tuition money to good use.
Picasso Black and White was a whole lot of the same, but not in a bad way – they almost saturate you in his shapes and forms till you feel like you have to shake it off to keep your face from getting out of whack. And although most of it was kept to the two shades listed, there were quite a few works that were colored everything from purple to blue to yellow, to the point where it might have been more appropriate to call it Picasso in Monochrome – although I suppose “black and white” sounds classier.
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Pablo Picasso, The Maids of Honor (Las Meninas, after Velazquez)
August 17, 1957 |
Most of the pieces were profiles of women or girls “seated” or “reclining,” and it was so interesting to see him move from beautiful realist portraits to skewed, geometricized, sexualized ones, as his interpretation of the human form grew into abstract shapes both two and three dimensional. The three dimensional ones were some of my favorite, where the profile was constructed as a grouping of deep shapes, stacked and hanging on top of each other, sometimes with little eyes peeping out from somewhere unexpected and usually an obvious nose protruding.
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| Diego de Velazquez, Las Meninas, c. 1656 |
There were also beautiful renditions of compositions taken from artists that came before him, like “Las Meninas” by Velasquez and the “Rape of the Sabines”story that so many artists have interpreted since Rome’s founding. So many of the pieces looked like the roughest of sketches too, and some were only completed on one half of the canvas. The whole time I couldn’t stop wondering what Picasso would think of this great triumph he’s been built up into; if he’d be proud or embarrassed that all of us were looking at something he made on an unconscious whim that was never intended as a finished product.
They do a pretty good job letting you know that in the exhibit, but it still feels like so much of it is prep work for masterpieces we can’t see.
Bernini: Sculpting in Clay was a whole different universe of art – although both exhibits are heavily idolizing one individual’s contribution to the scene. It could just be because his 17th century time period can’t help but leave him wrapped up in mystery, but I’d choose Bernini over Picasso when it comes to inherent talent. I wish he could’ve lived in a different era though, outside the pope’s reign of power, but maybe then it would’ve turned out much differently and he wouldn’t have had the resources he did to create all that he was able to.
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| Faun teased by putti |
This exhibit is the best you can do without actually going to Rome – on the wall are giant black and white photographs of the massive sculptural programs that actually made it into the palazzos and churches in Rome, out of the bozzetti planning stages on paper and in terracotta before you. The gallery is laid out underground, with two rows of lights above strategically pointed at each glass case containing a little red-brown masterpiece.
The curators did a really great job explaining everything to the viewer. You can see the thought process behind each piece as it develops from sketches to bozzetti to the giant black and white photographs on the walls. Because the sculptures are in the middle and the sketches are hung on the walls, the gallery ends up grouped into little clumps of the same character or type.
The angels that line the back aisle of the exhibit was one of my favorite groupings, since walking through these sculptural pairs that face each other and face you creates the greatest sense of environment, giving you one little glimpse of how it woulda-coulda-shoulda felt to see these pieces in all their finished-product marvelousness in Rome.
Sep 17, 2012 | art history, news
If you spend any time on the internet at all, you’ve probably noticed the swanky new features Google has been adding to their searches.
One of the coolest new features is the little drop-down artwork list that pops up whenever you search an artist’s name plus the word “artwork.” Google automatically arranges the pieces showcased here by search popularity, thus inspiring this new series, “Google, what’s my masterpiece?”
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| Screen shot from my iPad:) |
I think it’s so fascinating that the entire portfolio of an artist’s life and work can be stripped down to six pieces and a little blurb, and although some might consider this trivializing, I think it’s a great way to appeal to those outside the typical art community. It shows the basics in a really useful way, at the same time ranking the artist’s works by how many people know about them enough to search for them; how many people want to learn more.
Clicking on each work takes you to a Google search of that painting individually, including the right-hand breakdown of the work which gives you a background summary, year it was completed, artist’s name, dimensions of the work, genre, media, and artistic period during which it was made.
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| The Kiss, 1908 |
This week I’m starting with Gustav Klimt, the Austrian painter who used a collage-like sometimes called “symbolism” style to create lofty dream-scenes that are too beautiful to be real. Obviously his incredibly famous work “The Kiss” was the very first work listed on Google, although it was probably given a big boost the day Google chose to showcase this work in their logo as a way of honoring Klimt’s 150th birthday this past July.
Coming in second is Klimt’s Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I, created in 1907. Klimt also made a second portrait of this woman that’s listed fourth on Google. Adele was the wife of a wealthy industrialist, Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer, who was a patron of the arts and a supporter of Gustav Klimt.
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| Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I, 1907 |
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| Adele Bloch-Bauer II, 1912 |
Can you imagine what the artists would think if they knew we were arranging their works based on how SEO-friendly they’ve become? What do you think about the way technology is simplifying our art intake?
“The Death of Marat,” number two for David according to Google, also has ties to the Revolution and is said to be the most well-known image that came from it. Jean-Paul Marat was a French revolutionary leader and journalist who had a skin condition that was helped by a bath. Which is why here he lies in the tub, holding out a piece of paper that in French reads, Because I am unhappy, I have a right to your help.”
