Art Talk

Diego Rivera's tribute from Google

2011-12-09T08:07:00.001-08:00

HAT TIP TO Los Angeles Times for this well written story about the search Giant Google's tribute to Diego Rivera

Posted at 12:06 AM ET, 12/08/2011

DIEGO RIVERA GOOGLE DOODLE: Logo celebrates the legendary Mexican muralist whose career was larger than life

“SINCE ART IS ESSENTIAL for human life, it can’t just belong to the few.”

So demanded Diego Rivera, the leading Mexican muralist whose creative ambitions swept across the 20th century as large as his class-spanning public art. And Thursday, Google does what it can to spotlight Rivera’s essential art for an audience of millions.

Today, on the 125th anniversary of Rivera’s birth, Google’s homepage ”Doodle” celebrates the artist with a mural rich not only in color, but also in biographical detail.

Between the Doodle’s columns is the historic panorama of a towering career and transforming country. At left, in typical attire, Rivera himself stands on the telltale scaffolding, the full-bodied painter placed in telling proximity to a star-like image whose hues burn as bold and bright as the artist himself. (Like the burst of a sunflower surrounded by leaves, the image also sprouts thoughts of such agrarian Rivera works as “The Blood of the Revolutionary Martyrs Fertilizing the Earth.” from 1927.)

Beneath the scaffolding is a feminine silhouette — as if a shadowed nod to such Diego Rivera models as 1949’s ”Ruth Rivera” and her reflectionbeheld as if in the sun. And then there’s the prominent scaffolding itself — as if inspired directly by 1931’s “The Making of a Fresco, Showing the Building of a City.”

Rivera believed that outdoor public art helped visual mediums reach the masses across the classes. “Art is the universal language,” Rivera said, “and it belongs to all Mankind.”

And so it is telling that as our eye sweeps to the Doodle’s right, we see a man in red scarf, clad as a laboring campesino — so evocative of his“Peasants” and the iconic “The Flower Carrier.” And moving still right, by contrast, we see a bowler-topped, urban fellow — as if he migrated directly from the middle of 1948’s “Dreams of a Sunday Afternoon in Alameda Park.”

Then, the central striking image of two faces — mother and offspring — that summons the emotional poetry of “Mother and Child Sleeping.”

“All art is propaganda,” Rivera said. “Religious art. Political art. The only difference is the kind of propaganda.”

And so it is fitting that as we move to the foot of the “L” in “Google,” we get an industrial worker wielding a tool — a visual reference to one of Rivera’s controversial American commissions. Rivera was hired by the Ford Motor Co., and his series of politically charged fresco panels was called “Detroit Industry.” Ultimately, Edsel Ford allowed that it was acceptable for an artist to displease his patron; the work is now recognized as one of Rivera’s masterpieces.

Rivera also believe that art was a great source of national pride, so as the Doodle’s Mexican flag waves to the right, we see buildings reflective of his official commissions and his modern-day nation.

And there, admiring all this, are two women. The woman with the trademark flowers in her hair is clearly Frida Kahlo — the legendary Mexican painter and wife of Rivera whose life and career is so inextricably intertwined with Rivera’s. Kahlo, in fact, has already received her own Google Doodle — back in 2010.

And the woman in white? That could an allusion to Lupe Marin, who was referred to as “Rivera’s other wife.”

----read the rest here: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2011/12/google-doodle-celebrates-the-work-of-diego-rivera.html

Mural Altered at Penn State

2011-11-12T16:28:00.001-08:00

Should art be altered to reflect the change

in understanding about a subject?

Painted out of the picture

Prior to his day in court, former Penn State coach Jerry Sandusky, and was convincingly tried by the media, and found and presented as guilty of heinous sexual abuses on multiple children. Sandusky, has been charged with 40 criminal counts related to sexual abuse that occurred over 15 years. Sandusky’s attorney, Joe Amendola, says his client has been aware of the accusations for about three years and maintains he is innocent.
And prior to his day in court, Sandusky's image was removed from the `Inspiration Mural' at Penn State.

Will Paterrno be Next To Be Removed?

Joe Patterno, nicknamed "JoePa," holds the record for the most victories by an FBS football coach with 409 and is the only FBS coach to reach 400 victories. He coached five undefeated teams that won major bowl games and, in 2007, was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame as a coach. He defended his failure to go to police after Mike McQueary, then a 28-year graduate assistant and now Penn State’s receivers coach, told him of the March 2002 incident, in which Sandusky assaulted the boy in the showers. Paterno report the incident up the chain of command to Tim Curley, Penn State athletic director. Curley reports it up his chain of cpommand to senior vice president for finance and business Gary Schultz. Both Curley and Schultz meet with McQuery

"While I did what I was supposed to with the one charge brought to my attention, like anyone else involved I can’t help but be deeply saddened these matters are alleged to have occurred," Paterno says.

Curley and Schultz surrender that afternoon on charges of perjury and failure to report the possible abuse of a child. Each is released on $75,000 bail after appearing in a Harrisburg courtroom.

Paterrno offered to resign at the end of the season. He offered his regrets and acknowledges some responsibility for the scandal. "It is one of the great sorrows of my life," it said. "With the benefit of hindsight, I wish I had done more." He also added: "At this moment the board of trustees should not spend a single minute discussing my status. They have far more important matters to address."

But the board of trustees was greatly critical over Paterrno's failure to call police or follow up after learning about the alleged March 2002 assault. On the same night that Patterno offers to resign at thend of the season, he is fired by the University.

At a packed news conference at 10 p.m. Wednesday, when John Surma, vice chairman of the board, announced that Graham Spanier and Joe Paterrno were being fired.

Graham Spanier, who had been president at Penn State for 16 years, the president of one of the biggest, most-respected universities in the country, who manages a $4.3 billion budget, 24 branch campuses and 96,000 students, was also dismissed after being caught up in the child molestation charges.

But after the announcement reporters from every national news outlet from NPR to Fox News spent their time asking detailed questions — some of them angrily — about why the football coach was let go.

Soon after students pour into the streets toward the columns of the Old Main administration building and into Beaver Canyon, a street located between rows of tall apartment buildings. They throw rocks and bottles, overturn a TV news van and kick out the windows, and chant "We Want Joe!" The police respond with pepper spray.

Make him, and his memory go away

(Reuters) - Until a few days ago, Jerry Sandusky's face smiled down on students from a mural in downtown State College, the home of Penn State University, where football players and coaches are treated like royalty.

On Wednesday, the creator of the mural painted over Sandusky. The former assistant football coach was charged a few days earlier with sexually abusing eight boys over more than a decade.

"I got an email yesterday from one of the victim's mothers saying simply, 'Michael, can you please take Sandusky off the mural,'" said Michael Pilato, a local painter who created the "Inspiration" mural in 2001.

The Harrisburg Patriot-News, citing five sources, reported in March 2011 that a grand jury had been meeting for at least 18 months to consider child abuse allegations against Sandusky.

Last weekend, Sandusky was charged with sexually abusing eight boys between 1994 and 2008.

Through the long investigation, Sandusky himself remained a fixture on campus. As recently as this summer, he was seen using the football players' weight room several times a week.

Sandusky was also seen at a Second Mile golf fundraiser, and several attendees said he appeared up-beat.

The former coach is removed

Sandusky's memoir titled "Touched" was published in 2000.

In the book, Sandusky confesses an inability to grow up. "I had always professed that someday I would reap the benefits of maturity, but my lifestyle just wouldn't let me," he wrote, later adding that "the times when I found myself searching for maturity, I usually came up with insanity."

With more time on his hands after retiring, Sandusky shifted his focus to the Second Mile, the foster home-turned-charity for kids from broken homes he started in 1977, the year after taking the defensive coordinator job at Penn State.

Second Mile was an integral part of Sandusky's life. He was its chief fundraiser and best cheerleader and even drew a salary, though he had no operational authority.

According to the grand jury, the Second Mile was also where Sandusky found his victims.

*http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/11/12/us-usa-crime-coach-feature-idUSTRE7AB0OW20111112

The elusive art of the elusive artist Bansky in the news

2011-09-14T16:51:00.000-07:00

Bansky as he appeared in his documentary

It has been said, sometimes smugly, by some street artist that if the public doesn't like their art (graffiti) then they can just paint over it. The situation is more true if the graffiti art is painted on private property.

This year there are two interesting stories about the street artist Banksky's work painted on private property.

Banksy is a pseudonymous England-based graffiti artist, political activist, film director, and painter. He has dozens of celebrity collectors - including Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie and Christina Aguilera - who have paid hundreds of thousands for his creations.

Wikkepedia writes:

"Banksy began as a freehand graffiti artist 1992–1994[13] as one of Bristol's DryBreadZ Crew (DBZ), with Kato and Tes.[14] He was inspired by local artists and his work was part of the larger Bristol underground scene with Nick Walker, Inkie and 3D.[15][16] From the start he used stencils as elements of his freehand pieces, too.[13] By 2000 he had turned to the art of stencilling after realizing how much less time it took to complete a piece. He claims he changed to stenciling whilst he was hiding from the police under a rubbish lorry, when he noticed the stenciled serial number[17] and by employing this technique, he soon became more widely noticed for his art around Bristol and London.[17]

Banksy wrote in his glossy coffee-table book Wall and Piece : “The people who truly deface our neighborhoods are the companies that scrawl giant slogans across buildings and buses trying to make us feel inadequate unless we buy their stuff. They expect to be able to shout their message in your face from every available surface but you’re never allowed to answer back. Well, they started the fight and the wall is the weapon of choice to hit them back.”

Many consider him, his name at least, as the best know street artist of all time. His fame has increased dramatically with his documentary "Exit Through the Gift Shop,"

In 2006 Banksy was introduced to Thierry Guetta, an exuberant, eccentric French expatriot claiming to be making a documentary about street artist. Banksy joins in on the project, but is greatlly dissapointed with the final results. Banksy decides to take over the editing of the project from Guetta and brings in two proffesionals Jamie D'Cruz and Chris King, as producer and editor. They went through thousnads of hours of Guetta's unlabeled film, much of it unuasable. Guetta, not detered by his freinds rejection of his editing of the material, returns home to Los Angeles to begin making art himself. Banksy comes up with the idea to shift the focus from street artist to focus on Guetta.

The resulting documentary "Exit Through the Gift Shop", list Banksy as it's director. The film has received overwhelmingly positive reviews, holding 96% on Rotten Tomatoes, and was nominated for Best Documentary in the 2011 Academy Awards. One consistent theme in the reviews was the authenticity of the film: Was the film just an elaborate ruse on Banksy's part, The Boston Globe movie reviewer Ty Burr found it to be quite entertaining and awarded it four stars. He dismissed the notion of the film being a "put on" saying "I’m not buying it; for one thing, this story’s too good, too weirdly rich, to be made up. For another, the movie’s gently amused scorn lands on everyone."

Still not everyone know who Banksy is: Banksy's gorilla in a pink mask (July 2011)

Banksy's gorilla in a pink mask appeared on the wall of the former North Bristol Social Club in Eastville One of street artist Banksy's most famous early works in Bristol has been mistakenly painted over.

The gorilla in a pink mask on the wall of the ex-North Bristol Social Club, in Eastville, had been a familiar landmark in the area for more than 10 years.

But the building has recently been turned into a Muslim cultural centre.

New owner Saeed Ahmed assumed it was a regular piece of graffiti and had it painted over. "I thought it was worthless," he said.

He added: "I didn't know it was valuable and that's why I painted over it. I really am sorry if people are upset."

The wall was whitewashed by the new owner of the building who had never heard of Banksy.

A paintings conservator, Richard Pelter of Park Street-based International Fine Art Conservation Studios, was last night attempting to remove the whitewash using large cotton buds and sensitive cleaning materials.

Mr Pelter said he had been doing some tests.

"What I found was that the paint there was quite soluble underneath, but no-one could actually tell me where it was on the wall. The upper layers of paint can be removed, very carefully. It would take quite a long time and cost quite a bit of money to do it."

The gorilla was uncovered, maybe not the best idea.

Every Picture Tells a Lie -uncovered (September 2011)

In 2003 Banksy spray painted a mural inside, on the wall of a contemporary art gallery in Germany's capital. The graffiti shows five soldiers with angel's wings and yellow smiley faces beneath the slogan "Every picture tells a lie!"

When the show was over the picture was painted over.

Now the covering paint has been removed. The mural was excavated as part of an art project by Brad Downey, a Berlin-based American artist, whose exhibition is titled What Lies Beneath and focuses on layers of paint. Downey, who also took part in the 2003 exhibit, remembered Banksy's work and wanted to uncover it for his 2011 project.

The gallery is unsure of what will happen to Banksy's work once Downey's exhibit ends on Oct 23rd. It could go back to hibernating behind white-washed walls -- that is, if someone doesn't try to buy it first.

It's 9/11 again - a choice for an artist meditation: Van Gogh

2011-09-12T02:14:00.000-07:00

It's 9/11 again, television and papers are filled with reflections on the terrorist attack ten years ago. As the United States has found, the true enemy is always allusive.

Artist must face allusive threats from such enemies as procrastination to perfectionism. So for today's reflection I chose a letter from Vincent Van Gogh to his brother:

My dear Theo,

Life passes, time does not return, but I am dead set on my work, just for the very reason that I know the opportunities of working do not return.

Especially in my case, in which a more violent attack may destroy forever my ability to paint.

During the attacks I feel a coward before the pain and suffering—more of a coward than I ought, and it is perhaps this very moral cowardice which, while formerly I had no desire to get better, makes me now eat like two, work hard, limit myself in my relations with the other patients for fear of a relapse—altogether I am now trying to recover like a man who has meant to commit suicide and, finding the water too cold, tries to regain the bank.

My dear brother, you know that I came to the south and threw myself into my work for a thousand reasons. Wishing to see a different light, thinking that to look at nature under a brighter sky might give us a better idea of the Japanese way of feeling and drawing. Wishing also to see this stronger sun, because one feels that without knowing it one could not understand the pictures of Eugène Delacroix from the point of view of execution and technique, and because one feels that the colors of the prism are veiled in the mist of the North.

My work is going very well, I am finding things that I have sought in vain for years, and feeling that, I am always thinking of that saying of Delacroix’s that you know—that he discovered painting when he no longer had either breath or teeth.

Well, with this mental disease I have, I think of the many other artists suffering mentally, and I tell myself that this does not prevent one from exercising the painter’s profession as if nothing was amiss.

When I realize that here the attacks tend to take an absurd religious turn, I should almost venture to think that this even necessitates a return to the North. Do not talk too much about this to the doctor when you see him—but I do not know if this does not come from living for so many months, both in the Arles hospital and here, in these old cloisters. In fact, I really must not live in such an atmosphere, one would be better off in the street. I am not indifferent, and even during the suffering, religious thoughts sometimes bring me great consolation. Thus this last time during my illness a misfortune happened to me—that lithograph of Delacroix’s, the Pietà, together with some other sheets, fell into some oil and paint and was ruined.

I reproach myself for my cowardice; I ought rather to have defended my studio, even if it meant fighting with the police and the neighbors. Others in my place would have used a revolver, and certainly if as an artist one had killed some rotters like that, one would have been acquitted. I should have done so, and as it is I have been cowardly and drunk.

Ill as well, yet I have not been brave. Then face to face with the suffering of these attacks I feel very frightened too, and I do not know if my zeal is anything different from what I said, it is like someone who meant to commit suicide and finding the water too cold, struggles to regain the bank.

Do not fret in any case—my work goes well and look here, I can’t tell you how it rekindles me to tell you sometimes how I am going to do this or that, cornfields, etc. I have done the portrait of the warder, and I have a duplicate of it for you. This makes a rather curious contrast with the self-portrait I have done, in which the look is vague and veiled, while he has something military in his small, quick black eyes.

I have made him a present of it, and I shall do his wife too if she is willing to sit. She is a faded woman, an unhappy, resigned creature of small account, so insignificant that I have a great desire to paint that blade of dusty grass. I have talked to her sometimes when I was doing some olive trees behind their little house, and she told me then that she did not believe that I was ill—and indeed you would say as much yourself now if you saw me working, my brain so clear and my fingers so sure, that I have drawn that Pietà by Delacroix without taking a single measurement, and yet there are those four hands and arms in the foreground in it—gestures and torsions of the body not exactly easy or simple.

I beg you, send me the canvas soon if it is possible, and then I think that I shall need ten more tubes of zinc white. All the same, I know well that healing comes—if one is brave—from within, through profound resignation to suffering and death, through the surrender of your own will and of your self-love. But that is no use to me—I love to paint, to see people and things and everything that makes our life—artificial—if you like. Yes, real life would be a different thing, but I do not think I belong to that category of souls who are ready to live and also ready at any moment to suffer.

What a queer thing touch is, the stroke of the brush.

In the open air, exposed to wind, to sun, to the curiosity of people, you work as you can, you fill your canvas anyhow. Then, however, you catch the real and the essential—that is the most difficult. But when after a time you take up this study again and arrange your brush strokes in the direction of the objects—certainly it is more harmonious and pleasant to look at, and you add whatever you have of serenity and cheerfulness.

Ah, I shall never be able to convey my impressions of some faces that I have seen here. Certainly this is the road on which there is something new, the road to the south, but men of the north have difficulty in penetrating it. And already I can see myself in the future, when I shall have had some success, regretting my solitude and my wretchedness here, when I saw between the iron bars of the cell the reaper in the field below. Misfortune is good for something.

To succeed, to have lasting prosperity, you must have a temperament different from mine; I shall never do what I might have done.

Shiro Daimon on dancing

2011-09-05T11:06:00.000-07:00

Shiro Daimon is recognized as one of the most remarkable Japanese dancers today. His meticulous technique, complete, is both as a dancer, actor, musician. Disciple of the great masters of Noh (Kanza Tetsunojô 8th, national treasure) and dance of Kabuki (Hanayagi School)

It's been almost 60 years since I started dancing,
yet dance is still a mystery to me.
Dance upsets me now as before.

Why does the dance make me crazy?

One day, I must find the reason.

Once I wrote:

"At the age of 7, I was eaten by the dance."

Indeed, at that time, the days preceding the show,

my throat could not accept food and after the dance,

my soul felt separated from my body,

as though it had left, gone on a journey.

I can find in the story the origin of my religion of the dance.

The most important thing for the dance is to liberate the soul.

The choreography is a way for the release.

The soul is a flower.

The technique is a seed.

I planted on my body several seeds so that the flower may open.

It is the Soul who chooses the seed.

She, the Soul, makes me dance.

If one day my body is like a frozen tree,

certainly my soul will

open like a flower.

by Shiro Daimon

"Inflammatory art" in Los Angeles

2011-08-27T21:49:00.000-07:00

An artist's incendiary painting is his bank statement

Alex Schaefer's depiction of a Chase branch going up in flames drew the attention of L.A. police, who asked if he was a terrorist. He said the work was a metaphor for the havoc banking practices have caused the economy.

full story at LA Times: http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-bank-painting-20110828,0,4395501.story

Hilarious 'Do Not Enter' Series By One Of the Finest Street Artists-'Dan Witz'

2011-07-10T17:36:00.000-07:00

Hilarious 'Do Not Enter' Series By One Of the Finest Street Artists-'Dan Witz'

Dann Witz is a Brooklyn, US based street artist and a realist painter who has been creating explicit works of art since the 1970s. Each of his creations look realistic and you'll definitely give a second look to his confusing creations. The give a look as if a real person is staring or peeping out of them. His work has been showcased throughout the US and Europe. Not only that, he has authored 18 books and taken part in many films.

"As an art student, right out of the gate, rebellion was my default setting. The idea was, if the world was a fucked up place that desperately needed changing, and contemporary art (and art schooling) had failed us in this respect, then it became necessary to subvert current art practices—to, yes, destroy our idols. Taking my cue from punk rock and graffiti I abandoned conventional art making and took to the streets", saysthe artist. Though all of his projects are awesome but I found 'Do Not Enter' project the best and I have some hilarious images of that project to share with you guys. Check them out!

Hat tip to http://www.e-junkie.info

Creationem-photography: Shiva pose posted in Illiterate Magazine online

2011-03-10T13:03:00.000-08:00

The Shiva Pose by Paul Grant (follower of Basho)

This is from a collection of works that I made (6) for a group show called “Bike Art” held at Altered Esthetics's in Minneapolis Minnesota . All the art in the show had to have bicycles in it. Each of my works showed people doing yoga poses while on bicycles.

Each image begins as a photograph and then undergoes transformation using Photoshop, then reprinted, the new image undergoes transformation using pastels, then is scanned - and printed again as a photograph.

The process is to create a `work’ , rather than just take a photograph (which is capturing an image). I call this concept of creating a `work’, using a camera as only one tool in a process and not the end means : “creationem-photography”.

In my classification system there are three uses for a cameras ability to capture:

1.A photograph is a predetermined picture, where there is forethought and, perhaps, posing. The photograph is a capture of physical reality in time and space.

2. A snapshot, which is a happenstance picture . Where the camera is used to record something not specifically planned on. The snapshot is a capture of physical reality in time and space..

3. Creationem-photography, which is the using of either a photograph or a snapshot and manipulating it to create something new and different and unreal.

I do not judge any of the classifications to be higher or lower. The sucess of each process can only be judged by the final work. I would be interested to hear other peoples views about this.

The friend who posed for the original `photograph’ was 7 months pregnant.

70 Million by Hold Your Horses ! (OFFICIAL MUSIC VIDEO)

2011-03-09T12:46:00.000-08:00

Beautiful Franz Marc picture of a deer on auction at Christies

2011-01-27T15:15:00.000-08:00

Franz Marc' "Reh"

I love Franz Marc's work. This beautiful piece is being auctioned at Christies sale: Impressionist/Modern Evening Sale - February9, 2011 -London, King Street -Online at: http://www.christies.com/LotFinder/searchresults.aspx?action=refine&intSaleID=23150&sid=27906e79-de06-4463-8688-46597c27f25c&t=1296156407185#action=search&intSaleID=23150&sid=27906e79-de06-4463-8688-46597c27f25c

Lot Notes

'What does the deer have in common with the world we see? Does it make any reasonable or even artistic sense to paint the deer as it appears on our retina, or in the manner of the Cubists because we feel the world to be cubistic? Who says the deer feels the world to be cubistic? - it feels it as a deer, and thus the landscape must also be 'deer' ... I could paint a picture called 'The Deer'. Pisanello has just done that. But I may also want to paint 'The Deer Feels'. How infinitely more refined a sensitivity must a painter have to paint that!' (Franz Marc, 'How does a Horse See the World?', 1911, quoted in K. Lankheit, ed., Franz Marc: Schriften, Cologne, 1978, p. 99.)(1)

One of the very finest of Marc's tempera paintings, Reh is an holistic semi-abstract fusion of dynamic intersecting lines of force, figurative form and rich, radiant colour, executed in 1912, at the very height of the artist's self-defined mission to devise an 'animalised' art. The aim of such 'animalisation', as Marc described it, was to render a vision of the world as it might be seen from within - through the feeling and the senses of the living sentient beings (animals and man), who inhabited it. Reh is an extraordinarily elegant, simple and stunningly composed painting that powerfully asserts itself as an icon of this visionary aim.

One of a series of groundbreaking and revolutionary paintings of lone deer enveloped in their natural environment that Marc produced between 1912 and 1913, Reh is a work that belongs amongst the very greatest of Marc's artistic achievements. For Marc, the deer, more than any other animal, symbolized the innocence, fragility and preciousness of animal life as well as what he believed to be its pervasive suffering. Perhaps inspired by a story by one of his favourite authors, Gustave Flaubert's La légende de Saint-Julien,(2)

throughout 1912 and 1913 Marc employed the image of a lone deer sheltering in the forest, threatened by an unseen presence and at the mercy of the violent destructive forces of nature, in a series of ambitious semi-abstract Cubo-Futurist paintings such as Reh im Wald II (Lenbachhaus Museum, Munich), Reh im Klostergarten (Lenbachhaus Museum Munich,) and Tierschicksale (Kunstmuseum Basel). In these works, culminating in his masterpiece Tierschicksale (The Fate of the Animals), Marc encapsulated the central themes of his work. Here, his holistic view of the cosmos and of a spiritualised vision of the world, as seen by innocent animals sensitive to hidden unseen forces and presences, is rendered in semi-abstract form and pulstaing colour, derived from Delaunay and the Italian Futurists, to present a poetic vision of the life of the world on the point of dramatic change. Merging dynamic abstract forces, cubo-futuristic planes and fragmentation, the deer stand at the centre of these paintings and symbolize, as they had in Flaubert's Saint - Julien, innocent victims threatened by a vast unknown destructive force. Prophetic of calamity and, as many have pointed out, also perhaps of the forthcoming deluge of the Great War in which Marc himself would die, these paintings are intimations of the Apocalypse which Marc believed would mark the beginning of a new age of the Spirit. If his blue horse was his symbol of this forthcoming age, the deer was the image he used for the necessary sacrifice of innocence that would have to precede it.

'I am seeking a feeling for the organic rhythm in all things, a pantheistic empathy into the shaking and flowing of the blood in nature, in trees, in animals, in the air', Marc had written in 1910. 'I see no happier means to the 'animalisation of art', as I would like to call it, than the animal picture. Therefore I treat it accordingly' (Franz Marc, 'Letter to Reinhard Piper', 20 April, 1910, in G. Meissner, ed. , Franz Marc, Briefe, Schriften und Aufzeichenungen, Leipzig, 1980, p. 30).(3)

Reh is a work that expresses this 'pantheistic empathy' and the invisible 'organic rhythm' existing between 'all things' through its formal synthesis of solid form - animal, mountain, trees etc - and abstracted kraftlinien or force-lines derived from the Italian Futurist art he had recently seen at the Der Sturm Gallery exhibition of their work.

With the aim of creating 'symbols for their own time, symbols that will take their place on the altars of a future spiritual religion', it was Marc's intention to reveal, through his work, the 'magic, sympathetic bond between the earth and the organic forms it has engendered, earth and object... blended together' (Franz Marc, Almanac Der Blaue Reiter, Munich, 1912, p. 6 and F. Marc, 'Geistige Güter', in Der Blaue Reiter, 1965, p. 21) (4)

This symbiotic sense of interdependence between animal and landscape and the holistic universal nature of all things is expressed in Reh through a subtle abstracting tendency that Marc has used to blur the boundaries between abstract graphic mark and figurative image. The slightly elongated forms of the deer and the rhythm of her legs are echoed by angled brush lines delineating trees and mountains behind. In this way the painting becomes as much a cubo-futuristic construction of intersecting dynamic form as in a work such as Balla's sculpture of Boccioni's fist, or his lines of movement of a motor car, as it is a figurative representation of a deer in a forest. It is the ambiguity established by such an abstracting tendency that ultimately imbues the work with the sense that it is a depiction of a deeper symbiotic reality existing between animal and environment - that it is a picture not of a deer, but of an entirely new and holistic way of seeing the world - an ideal and spiritualised vision of how a deer might perceive its world.

Lot Description

Franz Marc (1880-1916)
Reh
signed 'F.Marc' (lower right)
gouache, watercolour and pencil on paper
18 x 15½ in. (45.7 x 39.2 cm.)
Executed in 1912

Pre-Lot Text

PROPERTY FROM A PRIVATE EUROPEAN COLLECTION

Provenance

(possibly) Kurt Schueler, Berlin, by 1922.
Galerie Ferdinand Möller, Berlin, by whom probably acquired from the above after 26 July 1933.
Eberhard Thost, Hamburg, by whom acquired from the above by 1936.
Siegfried Adler, Montagnola, by 1974.
Galerie Margret Heuser, Dusseldorf, by 1997.
Private collection, Rheinland.

Literature

A. J. Schardt, Franz Marc, Berlin, 1936, no. II-1912-26, p. 167 (with incorrect dimensions).
K. Lankheit, Franz Marc, Katalog der Werke, Cologne, 1970, no. 445, p. 144 (illustrated, dated '1912/14').
A. Hoberg & I. Jansen, Franz Marc, The Complete Works, Volume 2, Works on Paper, Postcards, Decorative Arts and Sculpture, London, 2004, no. 221, p. 198 (illustrated p. 199).

Exhibited

London, The Institute of Contemporary Arts, The Arts Council of Great Britain & The Insitute of Contemporary Arts: Modern German Prints & Drawings, 1949, no. 74 (illustrated pl. 1, titled 'Gazelle').
Hamburg, Kunstverein, Franz Marc, Gemälde, Gouachen, Zeichnungen, Skulpturen, November 1963 - January 1964, no. 74.
Düsseldorf, Galerie Margret Heuser, Frühjahr 1997, March - April 1997, no. 4.
Berlin, Brücke-Museum, Der Blaue Reiter und seine Künstler, October 1998 - January 1999, no. 62, p. 382 (illustrated p. 274); this exhibition later travelled to Tübingen, Kunsthalle, January - March 1999.
Munich, Städtische Galerie in Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau, Franz Marc, Die Retrospektive, September 2005 - January 2006, no. 189, p. 325 (illustrated p. 251, dated '1912-13').

Department Information

Impressionist & Modern Art

Artist/Maker/Author Information

Marc, Franz (1880-1916)

Keywords

------------------------------------

The essay: Franz Marc, 'How does a Horse See the World?', 1911 can be found in :

2. Gustave Flaubert's La légende de Saint-Julien

3. This letter, and Marc's relationship to the publisher Reinhard Pipe are discussed in detail in:

Shinichi Maruyama, Artist Maruyama,, Water art

2011-01-24T18:49:00.000-08:00

Water Sculpture from Shinichi Maruyama on Vimeo.

ht www.boingboing.net

See also: http://www.shinichimaruyama.com/

posted by Paul Grant (follower of Basho) on Art Talk January 24, 2011

Thinking about Dalí Metamorphosis of Narcissus

2011-01-10T11:34:00.000-08:00

Nice reflection on Salvador Dalí. Metamorphosis of Narcissus 1937 at the Tate Modern
(http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/daliandfilm/resources.shtm

[The surrealists] called the ability of Dali to do this, to see things simultaneously as more than one thing, as a result of a psychological state, which they called ‘paranoic critical activity.’ It was based on a willfulness reading of Freud. Freud talked about the filters that kept the unconscious and the conscious mind apart. But Dali claimed that in the state of ‘paranoic critical activity’ he could actually embrace both the unconscious and the conscious simultaneously, so that his conscious mind could actually do the painting.”

Early Elvis Photographs on Display

2011-01-08T18:50:00.000-08:00

Alfred Wertheimer is a professional photograph that has an intimate display exhibit of photos now being seen at the National Portrait Gallery. Unique to the eye, these photos gave people a chance to see the legend, before he was big and before he was an icon.

Capturing the excitement of the fans, even while Elvis was known regionally, the photos capture something rarely seen in a softer, younger Elvis Presley. From the crowd shots or the one-on-one time with fans, there isn’t a cap or costume, only raw emotion.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

New Clue found on Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa

2010-12-13T17:21:00.000-08:00

Mona Lisa's eyes may reveal model's identity, expert claims

Silvano Vinceti claims initials – possibly the model's – are discernible in the left eye of the iconic Da Vinci painting

Tom Kington in Rome
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 12 December 2010 19.49 GMT
larger | smaller

Leonardo da Vinci's painting of Mona Lisa contains several clues as to the model's identity, Vinceti claims. Photograph: Gianni Dagli Orti/Corbis

An Italian researcher has sparked new controversy over the world's most famous painting by claiming Leonardo da Vinci painted tiny letters into the eyes of the Mona Lisa which may finally reveal the disputed identity of his model.

To arrive at a theory worthy of The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown's 2003 bestseller, researcher Silvano Vinceti avoided the Mona Lisa's enigmatic smile and instead gazed deep into her eyes with the help of high-resolution images.

"Invisible to the naked eye and painted in black on green-brown are the letters LV in her right pupil, obviously Leonardo's initials, but it is what is in her left pupil that is far more interesting," said Vinceti, the chairman of the Italian national committee for cultural heritage.

Vinceti said that the letters B or S, or possibly the initials CE, were discernible, a vital clue to identifying the model who sat for the Renaissance artist. She has often been named as Lisa Gherardini, the wife of a Florentine merchant, but Vinceti disagreed, claiming Leonardo painted the Mona Lisa in Milan. He said he would announce his conclusions next month.

"On the back of the painting are the numbers '149', with a fourth number erased, suggesting he painted it when he was in Milan in the 1490s, using as a model a woman from the court of Ludovico Sforza, the Duke of Milan," said Vinceti, who claimed earlier this year that he had identified the lost remains of the painter Michelangelo da Caravaggio.

In The Da Vinci Code, Brown suggests Mona Lisa is an anagram for Amon l'Isa, referring to ancient Egyptian deities.

"Leonardo was keen on symbols and codes to get messages across, and he wanted us to know the identity of the model using the eyes, which he believed were the door to the soul and a means for communication," said Vinceti.

He said that while researching the model's identity he had been inspired by a 1960s book by a French art historian, which mentions the letters in her eyes.

"Under the right-hand arch of the bridge seen in the background, Leonardo also painted 72, or L2, another possible clue," he added. "Two expert painters we consulted on this tell us that all these marks, painted using a tiny brush and a magnifying glass, cannot be an error."

2010-09-05T16:55:00.000-07:00

In his essay:

Art and Aesthetics in Action
Written by: Professor Severyn T. Bruyn

Bruyn a new venture in aesthetics.

Below are polar ideas in philosophy. Polar ideas are contrary or contradictory to one another. The taxonomic image in Table 1 should prepare our thinking about how a philosophy of aesthetics develops in a university.

The analysis of D.W. Gotshalk is based on contrary principles, but we now expand their number. A new philosophy of aesthetics now asks questions about how contrary ideas touch every discipline.

This observation of opposites may assist in reading, and thinking about art.

Polar Principles in Art

Philosophical Being vs. Becoming Order vs. Change Subject vs. Object Conscious vs. Unconscious Same vs. Different Repetition vs. Innovation	Unity vs. Plurality Spirit vs. Matter Mind vs. Body Real vs. Ideal Feeling vs. Reason Knowledge vs. Ignorance
Religion/ Ethics Sacred vs. Secular Transcendent vs. Imminent Human vs. Divine Life vs. Death Everything vs. Nothing Right vs. Wrong Virtue vs. Vice	Interior vs. Exterior Mortal vs. Immortal Heaven vs. Hell Holy vs. Unholy Moral vs. Immoral Good vs. Evil Inner vs. Outer
Natural Science Night vs. Day Soft vs. Hard Black vs. White Female vs. Male Wide vs. Narrow Deep vs. Shallow	Light vs. Dark Smooth vs. Rough Summer vs. Winter Height vs. Depth Fast vs. Slow Tall vs. Short
History Particular vs. Universal Unique vs. Common Structure vs. Change Continuity vs. Discontinuity Present vs. Future	Natural vs. Human Progression vs. Regression Cyclic vs. Linear Present vs. Past Causality vs. Telos
Politics Freedom vs. Justice Liberty vs. Slavery Male vs. Female	Hierarchy vs. Equality Guilt vs. Innocence Upper Class vs. Lower Class
Humanities and Arts Conceal vs. Reveal Control vs. Surrender Spontaneity vs. Design Seeing vs. Finding Impulse vs. Idea Fact vs. Value Logic vs. Intuition Appreciation vs. Judgement Comedy vs. Tragedy Harmony vs. Discord Purity vs. Impurity Beautiful vs. Hideous Vitality vs. Decay	Social Science Optimism vs. Pessimism Community vs. Individual Despair vs. Rage Innocence vs. Guilt Connection vs. Disconnection Social vs. Economic Religion vs. Science Inhibit vs. Release Visible vs. Invisible Simplicity vs. Complexity Empty vs. Full True vs. False Life vs. Death.

Artist Technique : James Barry

2010-09-03T18:54:00.000-07:00

The Judgment of Paris.

From the Tate:

This study illustrates Barry's method of sketching out a composition. After making an initial rough sketch in black chalk, he has used the brush like a pen to draw over the chalk with loose flowing lines. The result is an image composed of soft grey strokes, varying in length and width. The figure of Paris (on the right) is the most well-defined in the composition. Those of Juno, Minerva and Venus are more worked over with numerous repeated strokes and flourishes of the brush. To give more definition to this group, Barry has finished off with some darker grey strokes, applied quite dryly.

(From the display caption August 2004)

James Barry was one of the most influential figures in Irish and British art during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. He was a great history painter, a print-maker, and essayist. He was appointed Professor of Painting at the Royal Academy in 1782. He was born at Water Lane in the Blackpool district of Cork in 1741. He was a protégé of the statesman, Edmund Burke, and a firm sympathiser with the movement for American Independence. In his youth he studied classical antiquity and history painting in Bologna and Rome, only returning to London in 1771 where he became a member of the newly-created Royal Academy.
Barry was a great individualist who believed completely in the vocation of painting, particularly history painting. Instead of settling for an easy life of making society portraits, he chose the lonely and unrewarding path of truly fine art, and of history painting in the great European tradition. He lived a life of wretched poverty and deprivation, growing increasingly isolated and paranoid in later years. He fought with his friends and enemies with equal vigour and, up to recently, he was the only artist ever expelled from the Royal Academy.
Although he painted beautiful self-portraits and individual history paintings in the Classical tradition, such as Christopher Nugent (1772), Edmund Burke (1774), Barry as Timanthes (1786) and Ulysses and his companions escaping from Polyphemus (1776), his fame rests firmly on the prodigious series of wall painting he executed for the Great Room of the Royal Society of Arts in London. He spent nearly six years working on these six huge works on canvas. They existed for Barry and his contemporaries as a profound allegory on the progress of human knowledge and Hellenic civilisation.
Barry was also a very important theorist of Art. His letters from the Continent are full of the most brilliant perceptions on the meaning of art, especially Classical art and the Italian Masters. His book An Inquiry into the Real and imaginary Obstructions to the Acquisition of the Arts in England (1775) is a powerful defence of the British artistic imagination whileThe Works of James Barry (ed. E. Fryer, 2 vols., 1809) contain the lectures, correspondence and opinion that challenge the reader to seek after greatness. Although he may have fought with everyone in the British arts establishment, in 1806 Barry's body lay in state in the Great Room of the Royal Society of Arts and he was buried beside Sir Joshua Reynolds in the crypt of St Paul's Cathedral.
See also the complete correspondence of James Barry at :
http://www.texte.ie/barry/

Ref: http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ViewWork?workid=22301&searchid=20300

http://www.askaboutireland.ie/reading-room/arts-literature/art-artists/james-barry-(1741-1806)/index.xml

Remodernism: 'towards a new spirituality in art'

2010-08-21T18:52:00.000-07:00

posted by Paul Grant (follower of Basho) 8/ 21/10
Just came upon this document. I know many artist struggle to place themselves into some comprehensible `art movement' to better position themselves with an audience. Of course it would seem dated to call oneself a pop artist or a cubist in 2010 - so here is another word- claimed by some to be a movement:

Remodernism
'towards a new spirituality in art'

Through the course of the 20th century Modernism has progressively lost its way, until finally toppling into the pit of Postmodern balderdash. At this appropriate time, The Stuckists, the first Remodernist Art Group, announce the birth of Remodernism.

1. Remodernism takes the original principles of Modernism and reapplies them, highlighting vision as opposed to formalism.

2. Remodernism is inclusive rather than exclusive and welcomes artists who endeavour to know themselves and find themselves through art processes that strive to connect and include, rather than alienate and exclude. Remodernism upholds the spiritual vision of the founding fathers of Modernism and respects their bravery and integrity in facing and depicting the travails of the human soul through a new art that was no longer subservient to a religious or political dogma and which sought to give voice to the gamut of the human psyche.
3. Remodernism discards and replaces Post-Modernism because of its failure to answer or address any important issues of being a human being.

4. Remodernism embodies spiritual depth and meaning and brings to an end an age of scientific materialism, nihilism and spiritual bankruptcy.

5. We don't need more dull, boring, brainless destruction of convention, what we need is not new, but perennial. We need an art that integrates body and soul and recognises enduring and underlying principles which have sustained wisdom and insight throughout humanity's history. This is the proper function of tradition.

6. Modernism has never fulfilled its potential. It is futile to be 'post' something which has not even 'been' properly something in the first place. Remodernism is the rebirth of spiritual art.

7. Spirituality is the journey of the soul on earth. Its first principle is a declaration of intent to face the truth. Truth is what it is, regardless of what we want it to be. Being a spiritual artist means addressing unflinchingly our projections, good and bad, the attractive and the grotesque, our strengths as well as our delusions, in order to know ourselves and thereby our true relationship with others and our connection to the divine.

8. Spiritual art is not about fairyland. It is about taking hold of the rough texture of life. It is about addressing the shadow and making friends with wild dogs. Spirituality is the awareness that everything in life is for a higher purpose.

9. Spiritual art is not religion. Spirituality is humanity's quest to understand itself and finds its symbology through the clarity and integrity of its artists.

10. The making of true art is man's desire to communicate with himself, his fellows and his God. Art that fails to address these issues is not art.

11. It should be noted that technique is dictated by, and only necessary to the extent to which it is commensurate with, the vision of the artist.

12. The Remodernist's job is to bring God back into art but not as God was before. Remodernism is not a religion, but we uphold that it is essential to regain enthusiasm (from the Greek, en theos to be possessed by God).

13. A true art is the visible manifestation, evidence and facilitator of the soul's journey. Spiritual art does not mean the painting of Madonnas or Buddhas. Spiritual art is the painting of things that touch the soul of the artist. Spiritual art does not often look very spiritual, it looks like everything else because spirituality includes everything.

14. Why do we need a new spirituality in art? Because connecting in a meaningful way is what makes people happy. Being understood and understanding each other makes life enjoyable and worth living.

Summary

It is quite clear to anyone of an uncluttered mental disposition that what is now put forward, quite seriously, as art by the ruling elite, is proof that a seemingly rational development of a body of ideas has gone seriously awry. The principles on which Modernism was based are sound, but the conclusions that have now been reached from it are preposterous.

We address this lack of meaning, so that a coherent art can be achieved and this imbalance redressed.

Let there be no doubt, there will be a spiritual renaissance in art because there is nowhere else for art to go. Stuckism's mandate is to initiate that spiritual renaissance now.

Billy Childish

Charles Thomson

1.3.2000

First published by The Hangman Bureau of Enquiry

11 Boundary Road, Chatham, Kent ME4 6TS

Auke Sonnega's Mystic Gamelan up at auction

2010-08-16T10:51:00.000-07:00

In an upcoming auction at Christies I was struck by a work by the artist Auke Sonnega:

Sale Information Sale 2846 :: Nineteen to Now, Art from the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries including Indonesian Art and Topographical Observations :: 7 September 2010 Amsterdam :: Estimate(Set Currency)
€8,000 - €12,000 -($11,000 - $16,000)

The work: Mystic Gamelan
signed, dated and inscribed 'A. Sonnega Bali '57' (lower left), and inscribed with title (on the overlap) oil on canvas 50 x 61.5 cm.

I was only familiar with his stylized pictures of people in Bali. Much like Paul Gauguin, he was a European artist who went to a less civilized (or corrupted, depending how you judge it) to find inspiration.

This work, Mystic Gamelan, up at auction, represents the transformation that came over the artist after having `spiritual visions: as referred to in the following article:

Auke Cornelius Sonnega (1910 – 1963) was a Dutch painter who spent much of his life working in Bali. After working as a textile designer on the island of Java, Sonnega moved to Bali before the outbreak of the Second World War, eventually dedicating himself to painting after starting out as a newspaper travel writer.

Auke Sonnega’s southeast asian art style reflected his background as a designer and the Art Deco movement of the time, and his works often have a mystical sensation about them. In 1951, he experienced spiritual visions as the result of conversations with his comrade Husein Rofe, which led to a heightened emotional presence in his work going forward.

"This inner change would bring about significant changes in my professional life, through a heightened emotional awareness which would affect the quality and subject of my painting. After eight years, I am in a position to testify that this did in fact come about. Especially from 1954-56, I was aware of considerable progress in the domination of abstract motifs, and their concrete portrayal. My technique and understanding of the fourth dimension improved. I thus discovered that my aesthetic emotions had always been stimulated by a subtle perceptive faculty, which it had never occurred to me previously to qualify as clairvoyance. And yet I prefer to avoid such mystical terms as too often they serve to refer to illusions, as smoke without fire."

-Auke Sonnega, on his spiritual awakening

Above from http://www.wendtgallery.com/artists/auke-sonnega

The artist wrote about his spirituality:

Husein and I had become close friends, and when he left Djogja, he came to stay for a while in my home. Every day we had discussions about Subud and everything connected with it. I remember how, one Saturday morning in November 1951, I returned home from one of my jobs as a commercial artist, in a most depressed and disappointed condition. I was really "down in the dumps" at this moment, and Husein was staying in my house, so it was difficult to hide from him that something was wrong. Nevertheless, I should have preferred to conceal it, since I was aware that he would certainly reiterate his suggestion that I undergo the Subud training, and I was anxious to avoid that, since I felt little inclination for it, and was quite convinced that it would have no effect on me whatever!
After our lunch in a nearby restaurant, I suddenly felt so unwell that I could no longer pretend; and when Husein offered his help and told me just to go and lie down and relax quietly on my bed, leaving the rest to him, I was too tired to argue, and resigned myself, with the view that, if it would do no good, it was also unlikely to harm me! Husein sat cross-legged on the ground, and began intoning a type of melody which I had now become accustomed to; but this time it did not last long, and after a few seconds, I began to lose consciousness of what was going on around me. After twenty minutes I awoke, and then found out that my body had meanwhile been performing involuntary motions. I was in fact now lying facing the opposite direction, and the blankets were in disorder. Husein was still sitting on the same spot.
I shall try to describe to the best of my ability what I had been through. Shortly after a change in my state of awareness (I shall not say sleep or trance, for I remained fully aware), I traversed three spheres of consciousness all entirely different from each other. The first was the vaguest, and I remember nothing of that now. The second was a blue ocean of waves, and that was the clearest. I was floating, apparently quite naked, across a panorama of small houses, of which there were myriads perhaps 15,000 ft. below me. But I noticed no fixed landmark; there were no mountain-tops, no clouds, nothing but a blue mass of waves of some unfamiliar substance. They must have been about 10 ft. long, one above the other, spaced out at intervals of some twentv inches.
I was floating all alone up there, and all the towns and landscapes of the world were passing by below. I had no fear of the height, because of a vague sense of a link between myself and a superior intelligence, guiding me from above, and in contact with the base of my spine. In fact there appeared to be a pipe about ten inches long fixed to my back, in the manner of planes being refuelled in the air! But this may have been a stream of light. What was most real for me was the sense of an extension of consciousness.
I was aware of the entire panorama below me, and all that was below was also simultaneously within. All my problems were laid out clearly before me, with their solutions even more clear! The vision was so bright and significant. I had an unbelievable sense of exaltation, of bliss pure and intense; there was awareness of the blessed majesty of a consciousness, within which all material forms were reduced to nothing, like glass, transparent and simple to deal with. I saw the houses far below me, and everything that went on in them, the people, their worries, the furniture, the passions. And all this was simultaneously around, above, below, before and behind me.
The principal light was of a fluorescent blue, shining from nowhere, and yet from everywhere, strangely, with great depth and intensity. It belonged to quite another dimension, came from nowhere and went nowhere, shimmering like a blue jewel. My most important discovery was that of my own omnipresence, for I could understand and examine all, even the entire creation. Then I slipped into a third dimension, and while the feeling of omnipresence remained, I now felt as if my consciousness penetrated into everything like X-rays. I noted strange relationships, lines and points, in which I participated while yet I saw them from without. I found myself in little spheres like peas, and then outside them, and noticed thousands, like a huge transformer.
All moved so slowly that I could suspect it was stationary, and yet I knew that life and motion were present, as if in some kind of geometric power station. When I awoke, twenty minutes had gone by. I experienced some resistance in returning to a normal condition, and discovered later on that I had changed my physical position during the process. But Husein had remained sitting on the same spot, on the ground.
This experience produced such an impression on me that, only now after several pears, can I realize how it radically altered my entire existence. It was going to deflect the entire course of my life. The sense of bliss remained present, shining from within, and exalting all things. Many problems which had been worrying me just solved themselves.
There remained a link with that higher consciousness, and for the first three days, flashes continued to come through. Then the sensation vanished, and all seemed to be once again as before; for nearly three weeks, the undertone of bliss remained, then all went dark again as previously. Yet it was not quite the same, since memory persisted. And there was more than memory: there had been a radical transformation in the subconscious and in the superconscious. Had this been a glimpse of eternity? Yet I acted as if nothing had taken place, in order to continue to give the necessary attention to my daily affairs.
External circumstances seemed to proceed as before, but I had no yardstick to measure the inner changes. With the passage of time, I began to recognize more clearly the tremendous implications of what I had undergone. A few stones in the wall of my prison began to crumble, and shafts of light began to penetrate, which had far-reaching consequences for my future. I felt as if reborn through this "exercise" which Husein had communicated to me; it was like a refreshing bath, and exhaustion had vanished like snow thawing in the sunlight.
I did not conceal the experience from my new Subud colleagues, who all congratulated me and were anxious to know just what I had undergone. They shared in my joy, and I did my best to try to let them share in what had taken place. Both Husein and Pak Subub were to tell me that this inner change would bring about significant changes in my professional life, through a heightened emotional awareness which would affect the quality and subject of my painting.
After eight years, I am in a position to testify that this did in fact come about. Especially from 1954-56, I was aware of considerable progress in the domination of abstract motifs, and their concrete portrayal. My technique and understanding of the fourth dimension improved. I thus discovered that my aesthetic emotions had always been stimulated by a subtle perceptive faculty, which it had never occurred to me previously to qualify as clairvoyance. And yet I prefer to avoid such mystical terms as too often they serve to refer to illusions, as smoke without fire.
What I discovered had little in common with the clairvoyance of which I had heard in my youth. I prefer to speak therefore of clear perception, and I now see this in its true perspective, having managed to free myself from the preconceptions on the subject instilled into my mind in the theosophical environment of my youth. I saw "astral" forms present at the Balinese gamelan orchestra preformances, and noted how these subtle beings "nourished" players and dancers, by inspiring them and guiding their motions to the level of art and culture. These devis were feminine forms, sensual but comely, and always had the same detached expressions as the dancers themselves. They were luminous almost in the manner of neon signs, but more vital, vibrating, richly-coloured.
I have seen such auras around human beings. We are told that this is "etheric" light; but then how do we know it is not "astral", or what is the relationship between the two? All these writings are very difficult to sort out. These are no earthly colours, and the etheric spectrum is broader than the physical counterpart. One is reminded of those colours found in ancient Eastern dresses, interwoven with gold threads, which possess a glow hard to describe.
My perceptions of this sort increased during those years. I remember how, about one week after the first experience, I awoke in the middle of the night from a sound sleep, and must have sat upright in bed. At that moment, a sort of electric discharge took place in my head. There was a sound of a tremendous explosion. I heard a clear crackling, and was aware of very high voltage and a pale blue light. In that incommunicable brief second, I saw stars, balls and fountains of light emanating from my head. They were all dancing in and out of each other.
All this was crystal-clear to me, and it was no dream, for it was far more vivid than any dream could be. All of a sudden, I was levitated to a height of perhaps three feet above my bed, and then fell down on my back again. Almost at once I fell back into the same deep sleep, and the next morning I remembered all the details of the experience. It was difficult to decide the precise significance of all these phenomena. Nevertheless, there seemed no doubt that this experience was directly related to the spiritual exercise. So much in Subud was incomprehensible, and though that worried me at the time, today I see it as a healthy sign that mystery should remain inexplicable.
A few months later, I was ready to travel with Husein to Djogjakarta to participate in the training at the home of Pak Subuh, and this came about in February 1952. I remember how I caught a chill on the way, and arrived in Djogja with 'flu'. Nevertheless, I did not under any circumstances wish to miss this meeting, and went to Pak Subuh's home with a European jacket over my tropical clothes, sitting in a betjak, or bicycle rickshaw, with Husein.
We were received in a very simply furnished room, and Pak Subuh entered some time later. Husein gave him a brief account of my spiritual experiences, and also mentioned that I had an attack of influenza and should be glad of his assistance. We chatted for half an hour; there was no mention of a spiritual exercise on that occasion. Pak Subuh observed that I should soon be fit again, and he just sat calmy smoking a fragrant Dutch cigar. I was impressed by the absolutely calm manner of his entry, his peaceful gestures, his balanced and self-possessed mode of conversing. The cigar was smoked in the same calm way. We drank a cup of sweet Javanese tea, served by Pak Subuh's daughter, and then it was time to withdraw.
Pak Subuh laughingly said that my objections would soon vanish, and gave me his hand in farewell. The influenza and fever had in fact vanished. I felt quite fit again, and drove through the cold evening air without the thick coat in which I had arrived. We remained in Djogja for about five days, and participated in two meetings with the senior Subud members. Some were present who had been continuing the training under Pak Subuh's personal supervision since 1937. There was one elderly man, who had been given up in that year by the doctors, as an incurable tuberculosis sufferer, and he was still alive in 1952! and without t.b.! People said that, if Pak Suhuh walked through a hospital ward, all patients not suffering from broken bones and similar complaints would be able to return home the next day!
This was probably a mere legend, but as such was quite typical of the pious fictions which were current locally about the Javanese sages. As far as I was concerned, none of my subsequent exercises, with Pak Subuh or with Husein, could compare with that power-ful manifestation during my initiation. For me this was a stumbling-block, since I was inclined to make comparisons. Although I was to have inspirational moments of heightened consciousness, there was nothing on a level with the first revelation. The evolution taking place was one in the background of normal consciousness, and hence its effects were not immediately perceptible on the surface.
Husein and I returned to Djakarta, where we had weekly reunions with the local members of the group which he was consolidating there. They were nearly all Indonesians, and the two of us felt at home in their midst. Our respective affinities for the Indonesian psyche helped us both a great deal to absorb the message behind Subud. Husein could speak, read and write Indonesian fluently after a few months' application, while I had been struggling with it since 1935. At that time however, neither of us could speak it like our mother tongues.
My artistic training enabled me to design and present a printed pamphlet for the Subud movement early in 1952. I chose a simple rose-coloured folder on which to display the text written in English by Husein. A few hundred copies were made, and Husein gave or posted them to interested persons. Husein announced in these pamphlets that Subud would shortly spread beyond Indonesia. When one listened to him talking about such matters, one just had to believe him! Nevertheless, the process took a few years longer than Pak Subuh had predicted, and than Husein had in consequence expected.
For those like myself, such predictions awakened doubt and impatience as to their validity, but for ilusein it was an incentive to publicize Subud with increased zeal. At the end of 1952, he left Djogjakarta for Palembang in South Sumatra, where he was later to establish a Subud branch, and where he subsequently accepted a teaching post for STANVAC at nearby Sungei Gerong. Although it did not take him long to establish the first Sumatran branch, I could no longer visit him on account of the distance, and we kept in touch only by mail.
I left for Europe in early 1953, and when I returned to Indonesia in October of the same year, I visited Husein at Medan, in North Sumatra, where he had once again gathered around him a number of adherents enthusiastic about Subud: people of the most varied racial origins: Indians, Indonesians, Chinese, Europeans. The members of the group got on well together, and Husein had a gift for making them feel at ease and at home. Wherever he went, he rapidly awakened great interest in his ideas, and quickly acquired a constantly extending circle of friends, who often included prominent persons that were obliged to recognize his unusual talents.
Once the Medan group was able to stand on its own legs, Husein returned to Palembang. In 1954, he left for Japan by a Japanese boat to participate in a religious congress, having obtained a re-entry permit prior to his departure. When however, he was returning to Indonesia, he learnt before the ship touched Hong Kong that the visa had been withdrawn, and he was forced to disembark in Hong Kong. In late 1954, the first letters from Hong Kong began to reach me, on notepaper which indicated where the seven existing Subud groups were. He had soon elicited an interest in the question of Subud among his new acquaintances in the British colony, where there gathered around him a new nucleus.
Thenceforth, Subud was to develop in a manner which I could no longer witness directly. I remained in a charming home in the Sumatran mountains for a while, and later returned to Bali. But the correspondence with Husein continued, and I learnt that he had suddenly sailed for Cyprus in late 1955 at the invitation of an occultist and philosopher who had become much interested in the new ideas expressed by Husein in newspaper articles and personal letters. Husein remained in Cyprus in the troubled time of the "emergency", during which the regularity of our correspondence suffered. For a long time, there was no news; then I heard rumours that Husein was in England.
In a letter to me dated "Hong Kong, February 18, 1955", Husein wrote as follows "Progress depends on perpetual dissatisfaction with oneself. Therefore, what I was doing and writing a year ago has little meaning for me today, and I know that I shall in five years' time consider my present views as rather childish. Now it is because all this comes through me practically automatically that I never pay much attention to it, as the stream keeps on flowing. What is important is whtat has yet to he born. The past will take care of itself. That is why I hate retyping and thinking over or revising old work. I like to be going ever onward. Form is, to me, only a temporary house of Spirit. That's why I can't be much bothered with art, personally, as I am interested in drinking the tea, but not in forming a collection of teacups!"
Husein and I could be in agreement over a work of art; but on the subject of Art, which he appeared so to deprecate, I considered him quite incompetent to judge. Art was my holy of holies. The manner in which he approached it may have been good for my sense of perspective, yet I found it none too pleasing. Later he wrote "You see a lack in me, but there is a lack in everything. Something can appear as a lack when it is another man's past. To see a parent not interested in marbles may appear as a lack to the child, but the parent feels he has more important things to get on with. I consider this world merely as a temporary resting-place in a much bigger pattern, so all the forms of this world which so fascinate you have little meaning for me".
Without wishing to ignore the bigger pattern, insofar as our intuition can grasp it, I feel that Art (with a capital A!) is something never to be denied, on whatever level of consciousness. All forms of this world have their correspondences and causes on higher planes. Material forms are expressions of beauty; the forms can eventually be dispensed with, but Beauty cannot. As my training taught me through experience, the form of Art is in the higher dimensions nobler, greater and vaster. Beauty is an aspect of Divine Love. The universal relationships which form the basis of this beauty play a very important part in the cosmic pattern; without them, this world would be like a concentration camp, unimaginable chaos; perhaps it could not even subsist!
I should have been glad to remain as long as possible, indefinitely, in Indonesia, owing to my fondness for the land and its peoples; but the subject of the sovereignty of West New Guinea was causing increasing tension and difficulties for Dutch subjects. In December 1957, things had reached such a pass that many of them either decided to leave definitively, or were expelled. I myself considered it a good time to travel abroad provisionally, and shortly afterwards arrived in Malaya, where I held exhibitions of my Balinese paintings in Singapore and Kuala Lumpur.
The combination of Husein's travels and my own left me without news of him for a long time. The chance sight in Singapore of a book on Subud by J. G. Bennett acquainted me for the first time with the fact that Pak Subuh's visit to Europe, predicted to me in 1951, had already taken place. His spiritual brotherhood now possessed centres in Europe and the United States. The tough obstinacy, zeal and devotion of Husein Rofe' had finally not been in vain. I know the almost religious dedication with which he had given himself up wholeheartedly to his task; I had participated in some of the most difficult moments of his life. and observed how he never gave up, but carried on without an instant of doubt. Now the objective for which he had worked so hard has been realized, and his considerable personal sacrifices have borne fruit. This came about because he never allowed himself to be intimidated or deflected from the pursuit of what he considered right.
The strange visitor from Tangier had not entered my life in vain in a Balinese inn. It was at times difficult to understand and follow him. His inner struggles and material problems sometimes seemed without end, to the point of appearing monotonous. Yet I wish I could remember every detail of this interesting and fascinating being; here I have merely recorded the salient facts preserved in my memory. For Husein, the past is worthless and quite devoid of meaning, but for us, it can be of great consequence to know as much as possible about that futile facet in the ''cosmic pattern", the history of Subud.
Zeist, Holland December 10, 1959.

Caravaggio in the news as we Commemorate 400th a of death

2010-07-17T14:01:00.000-07:00

First a stolen Caravaggio is recovered:

The 17th-century painting The Taking of Christ by Italian Renaissance artist Michelangelo Caravaggio, stolen from a Ukrainian museum in 2008, has been found in Berlin, Die Welt reported on Monday.

The masterpiece, also known as the Kiss of Judas, was stolen from the Odessa Museum of Western and Eastern Art in southern Ukrainian city of Odessa. The thieves intended to sell it to the German art collector.

The German newspaper said police in Germany detained three Ukrainian nationals and a Russian when they attempted to hand over the painting to the buyer.

The painting was brought to Odessa at the beginning of the 20th century. It was long believed to be a copy of a Caravaggio, but the authenticity of the work was established in 2005 while the canvas was on exhibit in Spain.

Experts estimate that the painting is worth as much as several tens of million euros.
BERLIN, June 28 (RIA Novosti)

Also of note: a Caravaggio Ipad app

Now, in a bid to make the old master even more contemporary, Italian multimedia company Scala Group International has launched an iPhone and iPad app to spread his chiaroscuro-abetted fame in the Internet age.

Called "CaravaggioMania,” the program provides video tutorials about the artist's life and key works, pop-up images accompanied by explanatory texts, and a map showing the artist's tortured route through Italy, from the Rome of his birth to the Tuscan shore where he died. Other highlights of the package include an interactive 360-degree video of Caravaggio's paintings in Rome's Galleria Borghese and a walking tour of the artist's landmarks in the city. Also included is a GPS map with Caravaggio-themed travel itineraries.

Featuring approximately 300,000 high-resolution images of artworks sourced from museums around the world, from Italy to New York's Museum of Modern Art, the app is available through Apple's iTunes store for $1.99.

And then a New A new Caravaggio Painting May Have Been Found

A new Caravaggio painting may have been found in Rome, ASNA Italian news agency said citing L'Osservatore Romano, a semi-official newspaper of the Holy See.

The Martyrdom of St. Lawrence (Martirio di San Lorenzo) belonging to the Catholic priestly order of the Jesuit has not yet been identified as a work of Caravaggio as further analyses are required before it can be attributed for certain to the Italian master.

The newspaper said, however, the painting has many hallmarks of Caravaggio works including dramatic lighting effects and the unique perspective from which the subject is seen.
It said there were similarities with other artist's paintings, such as a movement of the saint's hand or body but added that no known document mentions St. Lawrence as a subject of Caravaggio's work.

Saint Lawrence of Rome, depicted on the painting, was allegedly burned to death in 258 during a persecution of Christians initiated by the Emperor Valerian
.
Italy is marking the 400th anniversary of Caravaggio's death so churches and art galleries and museums housing Caravaggio will be open all night this weekend. The country has also held major exhibitions dedicated to the artist.

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio was born in 1571 in Milan. He pioneered Baroque painting technique and was notoriously famous street brawler, who allegedly killed a man in a row and fled Rome, which much of his short and tortured career was tied to. In Rome the artist won fame and the patronage of aristocrats and cardinals.
Caravaggio mysteriously died on July 18, 1610. Last month Italian anthropologists announced they had found his remains after a year of digging up bones in Porto Ercole and conducting carbon dating, DNA testing and other analyses. Some theories into the painter's death suggest that he was killed on a isolated Tuscan beach or collapsed there due to an illness.

Rarely seen Ledger will auctioned at Christies

2010-06-06T15:19:00.000-07:00

Estimate cost :£500,000 - £800,000 ($731,000 - $1,169,600)
Sale Information: 7859 Impressionist/Modern Day Sale on 24 June 2010
London, King Street

A rarely seen Ferdanad Ledger painting will auctioned at Christies (Painted in 1938).

Joseph Fernand Henri Joseph Fernand Henri Léger (February 4, 1881 – August 17, 1955) was a French painter, sculptor, and filmmaker.

Léger was born in the Argentan, Orne, Basse-Normandie, where his father raised cattle. Fernand Léger initially trained as an architect from 1897-1899 before moving in 1900 to Paris, where he supported himself as an architectural draftsman. After military service in Versailles in 1902-1903, he enrolled at the School of Decorative Arts; he also applied to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts but was rejected. He nevertheless attended the Beaux-Arts as a non-enrolled student, spending what he described as "three empty and useless years" studying with Gérôme and others, while also studying at the Académie Julian.[1] He began to work seriously as a painter only at the age of 25. At this point his work showed the influence of Impressionism, as seen in Le Jardin de ma mère (My Mother's Garden) of 1905, one of the few paintings from this period that he did not later destroy. A new emphasis on drawing and geometry appeared in Léger's work after he saw the Cézanne retrospective at the Salon d'Automne in 1907.[2]

Lot Notes
Le vase rouge was painted during a time of great upheaval in Léger's art. His purist, geometric aesthetic had reached its culmination only a short while previously when his work had achieved a sublime balance of form and colour that was based on the integral beauty of an isolated object. Now, however, Léger began to use the forms in his paintings to disrupt and unbalance the harmony that he had strived for so fiercely.

During World War II Léger lived in the United States, where he found inspiration in the novel sight of industrial refuse in the landscape. The shock of juxtaposed natural forms and mechanical elements, the "tons of abandoned machines with flowers cropping up from within, and birds perching on top of them" exemplified what he called the "law of contrast".

Although never affiliated with the Surrealists, Léger had contact and indeed friendships with many of the movement's members and it was through their indirect influence that his art began to show an increasing disregard for 'reality' throughout the 1930s. The Rappel à l'ordre that had followed the chaos of the First World War had characterised his work for a long time, and had brought him to see the machine as the salvation of the modern world, as the ultimate vision of the future. However, by 1938, when Le vase rouge was executed, this call to order had long since ceased to influence his painting.

Turning his back on the geometry and order that represented his visual expression of purism, Léger reacted to this change in different ways. On the one hand, he continued to combine both real objects and images of abstraction together in his pictorial vocabulary, creating a new objective unity that he hoped would enhance the inherent beauty to be found in the everyday modern world. On the other, Léger began to explore with a new sense of freedom ideas of form, colour and, more importantly, dynamism, expressing what Léger called a 'lyricism in which colour, form and object play equal parts'. While the first group of works was meant to be understood by everyone, Le vase rouge belongs to the second and expanding group of works which Léger was executing with the 'educated' viewer in mind. Le vase rouge, with its exuberant explosion of planes, lines and forms, is a work packed with rhythm and energy, whose dynamism displays an ongoing process of experimentation and discovery by an artist who had always been preoccupied with movement.

Every Painting in the MoMA on 10 April 2010

2010-06-02T20:35:00.000-07:00

Hard to believe it's true, this is a photo of every painting on display from the painting galleries in the MoMA on April 10, 2010. I noticed, I thought one duplicate pic - do you see it?

Studioscopic Episode 7: Kukuli Velarde

2010-06-01T04:41:00.000-07:00

Picasso painting breaks world record

2010-05-05T22:28:00.000-07:00

Artist recreates a masterpiece using a single pen

2010-04-30T23:12:00.000-07:00

Vermeer Masterpiece Drawn With One Bic Pen
In an entertaining new advertisement, Bic challenged artist James Mylne to recreate Johannes Vermeer's The Girl With a Pearl Earring—using a single pen. The ad is part of a series by Bic.

Banksy art painted over in Melbourne

2010-04-28T20:44:00.000-07:00

CBC News - Art & Design - Banksy art painted over in Melbourne

Officials in Melbourne, Australia, are red-faced after a city cleanup crew painted over street art by internationally renowned artist Banksy.

Melbourne has a policy of encouraging street art and Banksy had created several murals during a visit to the city in 2003.

But the city also has a problem with gangs tagging walls and public property, and it sent a crew last week to clean up a downtown laneway.

The overzealous workers painted over the tags, but also the Banksy mural.

The work by the elusive British artist, who does not want anyone to know what he looks like, was a stencil of a parachuting rat wearing aviator goggles.

"Apparently what happened was that the residents requested that the laneway be inspected and cleaned because it was in pretty awful condition in terms of tagging, and also a whole lot of other people had dumped rubbish [there]," said city CEO Kathy Alexander.

"Unfortunately the contractors were not made aware by us that that was an important piece and unfortunately that means the piece is gone."

Lord Mayor Robert Doyle says it is difficult to protect street art, which is vulnerable to others painting it over. He called the gaffe an "honest mistake."

In Britain, Banksy's work has been defaced by vandals and ordered painted over by some local councils who do not want to encourage graffiti artists. However, his works have sold for more than $1 million at auction.

Read more: http://www.cbc.ca/arts/artdesign/story/2010/04/28/melbourne-banksy-street-art.html#ixzz0mSQ9bsrg

Met to Unveil Picasso Exhibit

2010-04-28T10:32:00.000-07:00

***additional note: I was at a booth at Art Chicago last year (I think) and I was taken by an etching, at a distance, and i said, that looks like a Picasso, a Picasso I have never seen. The gallery gentleman came over and we discussed it. I made it quite clear that I could not afford the work, which did not diminish his enthusiasm for an informative discussion. It seems the gallery will not be at Art Chicago which is here this weekend, but you can see many less familiar works on paper by Picasso (and others) at their site http://www.johnszokeeditions.com

Free art for everyone—if you can find it

2010-02-10T17:27:00.000-08:00

Chicago Tribune had this interesting story, about a guy who leaves his art around for people to pick up. It's a simialr concept to

bookcrossing:

n. the practice of leaving a book in a public place to be picked up and read by others, who then do likewise.

(added to the Concise Oxford English Dictionary in August 2004)

At bookcrossing's web site people post where they leave books. It's really a cool site- check it out:: http://www.bookcrossing.com/ and see if their are any books in your neighborhood.

The artist in this story post where he is leaving his art via Twitter. (Note he is in Chicago)

Patrick Skoff wanted his paintings to be noticed. So he started dropping them in plain sight, free for all

By Christopher Borrelli, Tribune reporter

February 10, 2010

Patrick Skoff and his friend Samantha Brown climbed from the van with a small painting. They placed it at the base of a statue, took pictures of it with their cell phones, typed in brief messages, then walked away.

A jogger ran past, glanced at the painting and kept going. Another approached, slowed, but continued on.

For a few minutes, the painting sat there, abandoned on a street corner, for anyone to walk off with.

No one did.

A moment later, a car shot to the curb.

A large bearded man leapt from the front seat so quickly his seat belt had no time to snap back into place. The buckle clattered against the pavement and the nylon belt unfurled onto the street. The man left his car door wide open and darted across the road. It was a January Sunday morning in Lincoln Park, drizzling and quiet. He ran straight toward the statue of Greene Vardiman Black, a pioneer of modern dentistry techniques. There, leaning against Black, was Skoff's painting, an acrylic abstract. Thin squiggles of red and blue bounced across the center of the black canvas like sonar pings. A sheet of plastic had been wrapped around its rectangular frame to stave off the rain.

The man said nothing.

He placed the painting under his arm and ran back to his car. He slid the canvas into the back seat, where a woman sat, huddled between two larger paintings, smiling bashfully. She grabbed for the edges of the frame and navigated the artwork through the car door and added it to their small collection.

Skoff watched with bemusement, and anxiety.

Bemusement, because he had painted the work the man grabbed. If he had sold it, he would have asked $70 — which is modest, though it's $70 he could have used. The '88 Chevy van he drove, for starters, could use a passenger door that opens from inside. But leaving the painting for someone to carry off was always the intent. He had no regrets. In fact, he painted the work, and many others, specifically for this purpose: He would abandon each painting in a public place, then walk away. Just as he has done every month for a year.

Skoff ran a landscaping business for a decade but was unhappy and gave it up to paint full time. Now he drives in from his home in Glen Ellyn. He tools around Chicago for a few hours and leaves hundreds of dollars worth of his art in random spots. He drops hints about the locations via Twitter and texts. Then he goes home.

He watched the man carry off his painting with some anxiety, though, because — well, because he worried that the people in that car were onto him. He doesn't want to have too much contact with anyone who has found his paintings, he said. He prefers the mysterious altruism of the idea. So far that morning he had left three paintings around Chicago — one a block from Michigan Avenue, one in the Gold Coast and one in Lincoln Park — and they had found all three. He planned to leave four more that day and was getting antsy. His van, a charcoal behemoth covered in Pollock-esque splatters and graffiti splotches, was tough to miss.

He didn't want them to follow, but they did.

Which is ironic.

•••

A year and a half ago, Skoff, 32, began to leave his artwork around Chicago for others to take home because he realized how easy it was to ignore his artwork. He was not getting noticed. And now he is.

At one location that morning, after he drove off, two cars racing toward the spot where he left a painting got into a fender bender in front of it, Skoff heard from a participant. During previous hunts, participants have had cars ticketed and towed.

"I hate to hear that," he said, sitting in his van. "People come out to find a $100 piece of art and go home with $500 in repairs. Maybe this could get too big." As he spoke, a man appeared in the corner of his eye, running down the street in his direction. Skoff watched with a fascinated smile. The man reached the statue of Black, raced around it, then, never noticing the paint-splattered van nearby, threw up his arms and walked away.

"You can always tell the ones following us," Brown said. "And there are the ones who think we don't see them and wait for us to turn a corner then grab our paintings and walk away fast, like they stole something."

At last count, Skoff figures 700 people — via Twitter, Facebook and texts, where he and Brown call themselves "Skoff and Sam" — were following his exploits, receiving digital hints about where and when he would leave new artwork. The idea began smaller. Skoff would take the Eisenhower, get off in the South Loop, leave a painting, then, because he didn't know the city, go home. At times he would watch for a few minutes after he left a piece. Often people hurried past, without stopping. "The first time, I thought 'So I just leave it?' Would I get into trouble somehow? Was I littering?"

On the back of each work, Skoff left his e-mail address. He got a few replies, informing him that his painting was found. He told them to keep it. (This is how he met Brown, who found two of his works, and now paints with him.) After a few months of this, the number of claimed paintings went from a small fraction of the number left to half. He kept the replies — a few liked the piece they found so much they asked him to paint on commission. He started to sell his art on Craigslist. But more importantly, he had created a market for himself and built a network of followers, many of whom wanted to know when he would leave some new art.

So he made a game of it.

A game that raises questions: Is it about art? Or self-promotion? The thrill of the hunt? Or a sly comment on art appreciation? Is it generous or, considering he's unknown, desperate? Does it prove, as he believes, you don't need "a gallery light shining on a work to show art; the city can be your gallery"? Or the opposite — that context matters, and, considering how many people walk past his art without pausing, real art is gallery art?

"He makes people work to find art," said Tricia Van Eck, associate curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art, "which is interesting, but does it mean anything? It would mean more if there was some criticality to it."

"Leaving your paintings on a street corner and expecting someone to walk by and consider it?" asked art dealer William Lieberman, of the Zolla/Lieberman Gallery in River North. "I have been doing this 30 years. I have never heard of anything like that. Sounds like the work can't be that difficult to achieve if he's giving it away — yet you say people are buying his art now? They probably don't know what they're buying, I'm sure."

Or, maybe quality isn't the point anyway.

Said Steven Lappe, Skoff's art teacher at East Leyden High School in Franklin Park: "Chicago has a tendency to be a poor art market for its native children, and an artist makes (his) own opportunity."

•••

"Right here," Skoff said, not long after making the stop in Lincoln Park. He pulled alongside a curb on Clark Street, before a row of abandoned storefronts that sat behind rusted gates. "It's an ugly spot, and we can make it pretty — for 15 minutes or so." They climbed out of the van and moved a dirty diaper aside and rested a small yellow abstract against the grating. Brown Tweeted a message hinting at the location, and they moved on, to Wicker Park, where they placed another painting against a crumbling CTA track pillar off Damen Avenue.

Finished, they waited.

Brown, 20, thin and willowy, huddled on the floor of the van, shivering. Skoff, a guileless sort, stared from the windshield. He wore a fleece zip-up. Splattered paint on his pant leg ran in unbroken streaks to his sneakers. He said he doesn't want to "do the traditional Chicago art loop," doesn't want to keep a loft or hang out with other artists. He said he's uneasy in art galleries, and that he's selling three or four pieces a week anyway (at $150 on average), but he doesn't need a lot of money. He also said none of this is meant to provoke — "It's not a socioeconomic statement. I'm saying if you like my art, and do the work, it's yours."

Told of Skoff, and shown examples of his work, Chicago curators, teachers and gallery owners said he had skill, but they were not impressed. They brought up precedents — napkin scribbles Picasso would give away, the Papergirl project in Berlin (art rolled up in cardboard tubes, tossed from bicycles), an Art Institute of Chicago marketing campaign that involves red cubes left throughout the city, an MCA exhibit that asks visitors to find the works.

Maud Lavin, chair of visual and critical studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, said Skoff's hunt is a "kissing cousin" of relational art, which deals in human contact and not framed pieces. Donald Young of the Donald Young Gallery in the West Loop said: "An artist can do well being a decorative artist or by copying impressionistic painters or being an original thinker, but that last one is different from others. Though in a way, what he's doing is about the human story and the art is irrelevant."

Skoff, to an extent, might agree.

Beneath the Damen Blue Line, after 10 minutes passed, a car pulled up and a woman leapt from a passenger door and ran to Skoff's piece, giddy. She said she had just come from her lawyer's office and was considering bankruptcy. She said she'd just had property foreclosed on. She said she needed something to brighten her day, and her daughter had told her about Skoff. He smiled and thanked her, then he drove home.

cborrelli@tribune.com

View photos of Patrick Skoff dropping off his art.

On the hunt

Patrick Skoff and Samantha Brown (@SkoffAndSam on Twitter) plan to conduct their next art scavenger hunt Sunday. Here are the locations they chose Jan. 24.

1. Fountain at East Illinois Street and Cityfront Plaza, between Tribune Tower and the NBC building

2. Corner of North Ritchie Court and East Banks Street, in the Gold Coast

3. Southeast corner of Lincoln Park: the Greene Vardiman Black statue at Astor Street

4. Totem pole at Recreation Drive and Lake Shore Drive

5. 4400 block of North Clark Street, near Montrose Avenue

6. West Webster Avenue, behind the Green Dolphin Street venue

7. Against a pillar beneath the Damen Blue Line "L" stop at North and Milwaukee avenues

Copyright © 2010, Chicago Tribune

Rembrandt masterpiece unseen for 40yrs to be sold

2009-11-15T14:07:00.000-08:00

LONDON (Reuters) - Christie's will offer for sale what it calls a Rembrandt "masterpiece" in December, and expects to fetch up to 25 million pounds ($41 million) in what would be an auction record for the artist.

The painting, titled "Portrait of a man, half-length, with his arms akimbo," was painted in 1658 and has been unseen in public for nearly 40 years.

The catalouge at Christies notes:

Rembrandt's Portrait of a Man, painted in 1658, was first documented in 1847 at an exhibition at the British Institution, but it did not receive any critical attention until after its sale in London more than eighty years later. The art historian Tancred Borenius, writing in The Burlington Magazine shortly after the sale, hailed the portrait as 'undoubtedly one of the most notable additions made for a long time to the list of Rembrandt's extant works', remarking on its 'absolutely perfect condition', its 'simplified and effective, monumental character' and the 'extraordinarily constructive power of the master's brushwork'. His view was echoed a few months later in the same publication by the Rembrandt scholar Wilhelm R. Valentiner, who considered it as 'the largest and most impressive among the rediscovered paintings ... quite in the style of the monumental self-portrait executed by Rembrandt in 1658' (New York, The Frick Collection; see fig.1); and, in America, The Antiquarian deemed it 'one of the great artist's masterpieces'. The portrait was subsequently recorded by Bredius (1935), Bauch (1966) and Gerson (1968), and its place within the Rembrandt canon was assured. Nevertheless, having remained hidden from public view and unavailable to scholars since 1970, the Portrait of a Man has been largely ignored in more recent literature on the artist and it remains relatively unknown today.

The last time it was sold at auction was in 1930 when it fetched 18,500 pounds, or today's equivalent of nearly six million pounds.

"We look forward to welcoming international collectors and institutions from around the world to what will be a landmark auction in the history of the European art market on December 8 at Christie's in London," said Richard Knight, co-head of Old Masters and 19th century art.

With a pre-sale estimate of 18-25 million pounds, one of the most valuable paintings to come to auction for some time will be seen as a key barometer of the strength of the art market, which has contracted sharply during the financial crisis.

The work will go on public display from December 4-8. The work has been displayed in the past:

Exhibited

London, British Institution, 1847, no. 45, as 'A Dutch Admiral'.

New York, Masterpieces of Art, May-October 1939, no. 304.

Los Angeles, Los Angeles County Museum, Frans Hals, Rembrandt, 18 November-31 December 1947, no. XXVIII.

Raleigh, North Carolina Museum of Art, Rembrandt and his Pupils, 16 November-30 December 1956, no. 29.

Wisconsin, Milwaukee Art Institute, An Inaugural Exhibition, 12 September-20 October 1957, no. 17.

New York, Gallery of Modern Art (Huntington Hartford Museum), 23 August-9 September 1964.

Chicago, The Art Institute; Minnesota, The Minneapolis Institute of Arts; Detroit, The Detroit Institute of Arts; Rembrandt after Three Hundred Years - An Exhibition of Rembrandt and His Followers, 25 October 1969-5 April 1970, no. 13.

The Path of the painting:

Soon after the painting was sold at auction in 1930, it was acquired privately by George Huntington Hartford II, an art collector and heir to a large fortune. Heir to The Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company = A&P Supermarkets. At 21, Hunt inherited a fortune—"the greatest fortune on Earth"; Net worth US $ 2.6 billion (pre-1975). He died on May 19, 2008 at age 97.

Side note: A&P Supermarket, which at one point had 16,000 stores in the US and was the largest retail empire in the world. When his uncles died they had no heirs so he inherited their fortune. The money also went to the John A. Hartford Foundation, which had $800 million as of 2007. In the 1950s A&P was the world's largest grocer and, next to General Motors, sold more goods than any other company in the world. The A&P in 2007 had revenue of 6.9 Billion. In 1950 Time Magazine wrote the A&P had sales of 2.7 billion. Time magazine wrote in November 13, 1950 issue that "the familiar red-front A & P store is the real melting pot of the community, patronized by the boss's wife and the baker's daughter, the priest and the policeman. To foreigners A & P's vast supermarkets are among the wonders of the age; to the U.S. middle class, they are one of the direct roads to solvency. "Going to the A & P" is almost an American tribal rite."

The picture was not displayed at Hartford's own museum called The Gallery of Modern Art at 2 Columbus Circle which Hartford had built to showcase his great art collection, including Impressionists, pre-Raphaelites, and Surrealists notably Salvador Dali. (Hartford commissions Salvador Dali to paint a painting called The Discovery of America by Chrisopher Columbus for the opening.)

His art collection consisted of Salvador Dali, Claude Monet, Manet, Rembrandt, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Turner and Degas among others. The Museum opened in 1964. The project proved unpopular and he abandoned it after only a few years.

The Portrait of a Man, which Hartford considered 'the greatest Rembrandt portrait I have ever seen' .

Side note: Edward Durell Stone (March 9, 1902 - August 6, 1978)

The architect of 2 Columbus Circle was Edward Durell Stone (1902-78), who studied at Harvard and MIT, set up shop in New York, and was responsible for the original Museum of Modern Art.* In the 1950s, Stone broke with orthodox International Style Modernism and produced a series of buildings that incorporated ornamental screens, decorative motifs, and rich materials. Like Wright's late work, Stone's iconoclastic buildings made him an architectural renegade. Clients liked his work, however, and provided him with a steady of flow of prominent commissions, including the Florida State Capitol, the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi, and the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. 2 Columbus Circle, which was originally the Gallery of Modern Art, built for the millionaire Huntington Hartford, was classic Stone: a vertical Venetian palazzo supported on delicate scalloped columns with a white-marble facade perforated by scores of tiny portholes.By 2004, the idiosyncratic building on Columbus Circle had become an integral part of New York's urban landscape, which is why there was such an outcry when the Museum of Arts and Design announced that it planned to destroy Stone's facade as part of its renovation."

"An unspoken sentiment underpins the historic-preservation movement: the widely held conviction that it is worth saving old buildings from demolition because whatever will replace them is likely to be not as good. It's hardly a lofty ideal, but it is the result of too many lost masterpieces: H.H. Richardson's Marshall Field's store, Charles McKim's Pennsylvania Station, Frank Lloyd Wright's Larkin Building." (http://www.slate.com/id/2208529).

Hard to believe, with prominent voices protesting- the building was `remodelled':

Columbia Uni. Ownership of the Painting:

The Portrait of a Man, was donated in 1958 to Columbia University. According to a file in the Frick Collection Archives, the picture was intended for ultimate sale to support research in the Department of Neurology, College of Physicians and Surgeons. Such a spectacularly generous gesture was not uncommon for Hartford. The portrait was displayed in the president's office until students occupied it during a demonstration in 1968, after which the picture went into storage for safekeeping. It is interesting to note that the riots at Columbia University, that lasted almost one week, initially had no police intervention.

"The Administration did not call in the police on Tuesday afternoon; nor on Tuesday night when the Hamilton Hall protest turned into a community sleep-in; nor on Wednesday morning to clear Low Library of a handful of student occupiers who didn't take to the windows (among them Mark Rudd) at the sight of police entering the building to retrieve a Rembrandt painting from the President's office. Why not? Students of all ideological stripes concluded that the Administration was persisting in the strategy operative throughout the previous year, to "avoid confrontation at all costs." The effect of this inaction was to anger anti-protest students to the point where they talked openly of clearing the buildings themselves."

Eventually the police were called in by the University to deal with the protesters on Day 8 of the protest- "1000 police clear 800 occupiers and another 200 bystanders on steps from five University buildings; 500 spectators on campus; the transactions 2+ hours in the doing. 712 arrests/ 150 plus injuries/372 police brutality complaints."

The police were well aware on that Tuesday that the colledge was under seige by some of the students - but the Rembrant painting was of higher concern for the administration. Six years later the painting was quietly sold to raise money for the university’s endowment fund.

It was last seen in public at the exhibition Rembrandt After 300 Years at The Detroit Institute of Arts in 1970.

The buyer was the New York dealer Harold Diamond who paid an undisclosed sum reported to have been in excess of $1 million. It was acquired in the same year by the present owner.

Hard Times for Rembrandt

In 1658, when the work was painted, Dutch master Rembrandt was forced to sell his house in Amsterdam and move to a smaller studio, having been declared bankrupt two years earlier.

Only one other painting by the artist dated from 1658 is known to exist: "Self-portrait" in the Frick Museum in New York.

According to Christie's, the auction record for a Rembrandt is 19.8 million pounds (then $29 million) set at Christie's in London in 2000.

More notes from Christies on the picture:

His view was echoed a few months later in the same publication by the Rembrandt scholar Wilhelm R. Valentiner, who considered it as 'the largest and most impressive among the rediscovered paintings ... quite in the style of the monumental self-portrait executed by Rembrandt in 1658' (New York, The Frick Collection; see fig.1); and, in America, The Antiquarian deemed it 'one of the great artist's masterpieces'. The portrait was subsequently recorded by Bredius (1935), Bauch (1966) and Gerson (1968), and its place within the Rembrandt canon was assured.

Nevertheless, having remained hidden from public view and unavailable to scholars since 1970, the Portrait of a Man has been largely ignored in more recent literature on the artist and it remains relatively unknown today.

Having thus far evaded the intense scrutiny of modern Rembrandt research, the Portrait of a Man has recently been subjected to extensive scientific analysis for the first time, the findings of which are included in this entry. Furthermore, the picture has been examined by Professor Ernst van de Wetering, chairman of the Rembrandt Research Project, who had never before had the opportunity to examine it in person. His unequivocal endorsement of Rembrandt's authorship re-asserts this picture's standing as one of the artist's most striking late portraits, painted during one of his most inventive artistic phases and yet, at the same time, one of the most turbulent periods in his personal life. Admiring particularly the manner of Rembrandt's execution and his mastery his mastery of light, Van de Wetering summarised thus:

'One of the most striking qualities of this painting throughout is the remarkably intelligent and sensitive dealing with delicate light effects and the dosage of the light. It would take a long analytical argument to provide insight into all these finesses. Judged after my long experience with Rembrandt, this painting is in that respect one of Rembrandt's masterpieces'. (Private correspondence, May 2009).

The late 1650s were extremely difficult years for Rembrandt, despite the enormous success and fame he had achieved in the 1630s and 1640s. His revenue had declined considerably in the 1640s due to the lack of demand for portrait commissions or, as is more likely, his refusal to accept them.

He started to refocus on portraiture in the mid-1650s, presumably in an effort to boost his income, and some of the most celebrated of all his male portraits originate from this time, including Nicolaes Bruynigh, dated 1652 (Kassel, Gemäldegalerie), and Jan Six (Amsterdam, Six Foundation) and Floris Soop (New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art), both painted in 1654.

However, after years of financial mismanagement and overspending, Rembrandt was declared bankrupt in 1656. His extensive art collection - one of the main causes of his insolvency - was gradually auctioned off in the years 1656 to 1658 and in February 1658 he was finally forced to sell his house in the Sint Anthonisbreestraat, where he had lived and worked since 1639, and move across Amsterdam to a smaller rented property in the Jordaan.

Beset by this upheaval, it is not surprising that Rembrandt's output in the late 1650s was relatively limited. Only two other dated works from 1658 are known: a small mythological scene, Philemon and Baucis (Washington, National Gallery of Art), and the magnificent Self-Portrait (New York, The Frick Collection-see below), in which Rembrandt shows himself at his most magisterial despite the enormous strain he was under.

Valentiner notes that at this time the artist hardly ever received portrait commissions (1956, loc. cit.), and it is true that with the exception of Catherina Hooghsaet (Catrina Hooghsaet was fifty when she sat for her portrait, the same age as the artist, Rembrandt.), who sat to Rembrandt in 1657 for the picture now at Penrhyn Castle, there is no other commissioned portrait extant from the years 1657 to 1659.

Given Rembrandt's financial position he would no doubt have welcomed more commissions. However, it seems probable that the majority of prospective patrons were put off by his increasingly expressive style of painting in a period when aesthetic taste now favoured smoothness and elegance.

Comparison with the Penrhyn picture shows just how far removed the present work is from the constraints of a formal commission, raising the question as to whether the sitter actually charged Rembrandt with painting it or whether he was chosen by the artist as a model for picturesque reasons. Irrespective of the nature of the commission, the model's highly individualized features and the direct manner of the execution indicate that he was painted from life. The man's identity is unknown. He was described simply as A Dutch Admiral when the picture was first recorded at the British Institution exhibition of 1847, a title that alluded to his commanding presence but has no seventeenth-century foundation.

In 1956 Valentiner suggested he might be the lawyer Louis Craeyers, based on the fact that Craeyers was named as guardian to the artist's son Titus on 4 April 1658, but there is nothing in the picture to suggest the man is a lawyer and this idea has not gained any support (loc. cit.). The sitter is in his prime, perhaps in his mid-thirties, solidly built, with undeniably handsome, patrician looks. Van de Wetering sees him probably as a visitor to Amsterdam, perhaps of Mediterranean origin. His clothes appear to have little to do with contemporary fashion, suggesting to Marieke de Winkel that they belong with the sort of fanciful, antique costumes that Rembrandt used for his history pieces and in many of his self-portraits (verbal communication). The hat is of the type worn so often by Rembrandt himself to heighten the 'antique' effect of his portraits, while the round-necked chemise and the short, open doublet with a sash around the waist, recall the costumes worn by sitters in Venetian cinquecento portraiture. This use of historical costume evokes a timeless quality that, as De Winkel has demonstrated in relation to the self-portraits, was linked to Rembrandt's ambition to cast himself and his art within the tradition of the great Old Masters of the past - of Dürer, Raphael and Titian (see M. de Winkel, 'Costumes in Rembrandt's Self Portraits', in the exhibition catalogue, Rembrandt by Himself, London, National Gallery; and The Hague, Mauritshuis, June 1999-January 2000, pp. 60-74).

Rembrandt's interest in Italian art is well documented. The unquestionably Italian character of the Portrait of a Man was first mentioned by Borenius who drew attention to its relationship with Raphael's Portrait of Baldassare Castiglione (Paris, Musée du Louvre; ),

a picture that Rembrandt saw at the time of its auction in Amsterdam in 1639: 'I hope it is not fanciful to find in the picture a reminiscence of the rise and fall of the quiet and monumental silhouette of Castiglione' (T. Borenius, op. cit., p. 54). Rembrandt made a pen and ink drawing of the Raphael there and then (Vienna, Albertina; see fig. 3) and his use of it for the self-portraits of 1639 (in etching) and 1640 (London, The National Gallery) gives an idea of the considerable impact Raphael's masterpiece had on him. If the spirit of the Castiglione portrait can indeed be felt in the present work, and the connection seems anything but fanciful, the influence of Titian can be felt in equal measure.

In the second half of the 1650s Rembrandt's interest in Titian appeared to reach new heights and most of his single figure pictures from these years have at one time or another elicited comparison with the Venetian master: for example, Flora (circa 1654; New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art), Hendrickje Stoffels (circa 1654-9; London, The National Gallery); Woman at an open door (circa 1656-7; Berlin, Gemäldegalerie), Titus (circa 1657, London, The Wallace Collection); and the 1658 Self-Portrait (New York, The Frick Collection).

The frontal pose adopted by the present figure echoes that often found in Titian's portraiture and John Maxon, former Director of the Art Institute of Chicago, pointed to its affinities with the 1558 Portrait of Fabrizio Salvaresio (Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum; see fig. 4), a picture formerly in the collection of Archduke Leopold in Brussels that Rembrandt could have seen through plates for David Teniers' Theatrum Pictorium, released in proof form in 1658 (see catalogue of the exhibition, Rembrandt after Three Hundred Years, 1969-1970, p. 38, no. 13). It is not only the composition of this portrait and character of the sitter that strike the viewer as Titianesque, but also the manner of its painting. The strong use of light, the earthen palette with crimson highlights and, above all, the vigorous, broad application of paint, all speak of Titian's late style.

The powerful impact this picture makes on the viewer owes much to the frontal pose adopted by the sitter and his defiant air. He stands before the artist with an unflinching gaze, hands on hips, chest out, in a display of commanding self-assurance. The pose, as first pointed out by Valentiner (1930, op. cit., p. 260), also recalls that used by the artist himself a few years earlier for one of his most assertive self-portraits (1652; Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum; see fig. 5), for which there is a closely related drawing showing the artist in full-length (Amsterdam, Museum het Rembrandthuis). The figure's right hand, which is clenched and in shadow in the Vienna picture, is here given prominence, with the fingers extended, in a manner that further enhances the forceful nature of the pose. The rapid, sketch-like rendering of the hand is a bravura display of painting that offers a contrast to the minutely observed details of the face.

The effect of the sitter's grandeur is heightened by the monumental way in which he fills the picture space and the inventive use of light, which defines the form of the figure and the space around it. The play of light became an ongoing preoccupation for Rembrandt in the 1650s and here, as in the Vienna picture, he chose to light the figure almost directly from the left side. 'Such deliberations are typical for Rembrandt', Van de Wetering observes, where in this case 'the choice seems to have had to do with the most refined solutions as to the lighting of the figure'. However, where in the Vienna picture the entire right side of the figure is cast into shadow, the torso is here turned slightly to the right, enabling the light to catch the back of the left arm, thereby giving more definition to the shape of the body and lending an added sense of dynamism to the composition as a whole.

x-radiograph of the picture

Rembrandt clearly contended with other factors in resolving the overall design of the composition. Comparison with the x-radiograph of the picture reveals that several changes were made in the course of painting (see fig. 6). For instance, adjustments were made to the shape of the beret, the outline of the left shoulder and right arm. A condition report on the painting, prepared by R.M.S. Shepherd Associates, notes that 'the radiograph shows areas of paint which were later covered as the composition evolved. Rembrandt established some things early on in the course of executing this work, leaving areas reserved for certain features, whilst modifying others to refine the end result. The x-radiograph shows no uncertainty or lack of clarity; only definite changes of particular features' (condition report available on request). The x-radiograph suggested to Van de Wetering that the canvas may be trimmed at the lower and left edges although the losses may only be slight.

By 1658 Rembrandt's execution had become increasingly bold and complex. In the Portrait of a Man he achieved infinitely subtle effects of light, colour and texture by the use of continuously varied combinations of paint, made up from just a few pigments, that were applied layer upon layer until he was satisfied with the result. This elaborate paint structure is manifest both in the face, which is observed with remarkable sensitivity, and also in the doublet, where sweeping brushstrokes have been used to render its form. Van de Wetering takes the view that 'the looseness of this brushwork, in part seemingly governed by chance, is typical of the late Rembrandt. It is at the same time characterized by a specific [to Rembrandt] mixture of freedom and control'.

This new expressive style of painting was out of step with the contemporary taste for elegance and refinement and must have left Rembrandt in a strangely isolated position within the Amsterdam artistic community. No doubt he also suffered from the perception that his 'rough' painting style and his reversal in fortune went hand in hand. Nevertheless, apparently undaunted by popular taste, Rembrandt continued to paint in an uncompromising manner that would become increasingly radical in his output from the 1660s. In the face of his mounting difficulties and his apparent fall from grace, the Portrait of a Man stands as a defiant statement of Rembrandt's genius as a portraitist.

The top price at auction for an old master picture was 49.5 million pounds ($77 million) for "The Massacre of the Innocents" by Peter Paul Rubens set at Sotheby's in London in 2002.

The auction will also feature Saint John the Evangelist by Domenico Zampieri, called Il Domenichino (1581-1641), one of the most important Baroque paintings to be presented at auction in a generation, which will be presented for sale for the first time in over 100 years at Christie’s in December (estimate: £7 million to £10 million).

Most probably painted for Cardinal Benedetto Giustiniani or his younger brother, Marchese Vincenzo Giustiniani (1564-1637), the picture was first recorded in 1621 as part of their collection in Rome. The Giustinianis were among the most important Italian art collectors of the 17th century, and the picture was one of the most significant of their collection which also included no fewer than 15 works by Caravaggio. Its importance led it to be included in most 18th century guide books and it was engraved by Jean-Honoré Fragonard. Measuring almost 2.5 metres by 2 metres, it is a reinterpretation of the artist’s pendentive fresco of Saint John the Evangelist in Sant’Andrea della Valle, Rome. Apparently painted soon afterwards (circa 1627-29), it displays a sculptural character which would go on to define the artist’s most celebrated masterpieces; the frescoes in the chapel of Saint Januarius in the Cathedral at Naples.

Domenico Zampieri, called Il Domenichino (1581-1641), was one of the most important Italian artists of the 17th century. By the 18th century he enjoyed an enormous reputation and his masterpiece:

Last Communion of St. Jerome in the Vatican was considered to be one of the greatest pictures ever painted, second only to Raphael.

Finding Frida Kahlo, A collection of fakes - or the real deal?

2009-10-02T08:48:00.000-07:00

Real or fake? A treasure trove of works that may possibly been done by Frida Kahlo is disputed by her decedents.

Carlos Noyola, the art and antiques dealer who acquired the collection, says he has proved that it is. There are 1,200 items, worth a fortune if they were Kahlo’s, everything from stuffed hummingbirds, like the one she wears as a necklace in a 1940 self-portrait, to a small notebook of private thoughts and sexually explicit drawings.

In fact, when all was said and done, the trove included 16 small oil paintings, 23 watercolors and pastels, 59 notebook pages (diary entries, recipes, etc.), 73 anatomical studies (some dated prior to Kahlo's disfiguring 1925 trolley accident), 128 pencil and crayon drawings, 129 illustrated prose-poems, and 230 letters to Carlos Pellicer, the Modernist poet and Frida's close confidant, many adorned with sketches -- skulls, insects, lizards, birds.

Mostly it's ephemera, like a small box holding 11 taxidermy hummingbirds. There are pistols, such as an ornate 1870 Remington; a tricolor Mexican flag, its central white panel altered to celebrate Leon Trotsky ("Troski") and the Communist Party, to which Kahlo and Rivera belonged; hotel bills; photographs; receipts for sales of Rivera paintings; an embroidered huipil, a traditional Mayan blouse; an intimate diary, with one entry expressing Frida's intense (and unrequited) erotic attraction to lesbian ranchera singer Chavela Vargas; a French medical text on amputation, painted over with blood-red pigments; and more.

The Kahlo cache is said to have been stored for 50 years in two wooden chests, a metal trunk, a wooden box and a battered suitcase. The forthcoming book, honest in its uncertainty about authenticity, tells a spare but reasonable history of ownership -- first given by the dying artist to sculptor Abraham Jimenez Lopez, a friend of Kahlo and Rivera's, in 1954, and then sold by him to attorney Manuel Marcue in 1979 -- as well as the Noyolas' initial efforts at verification.

But the publication by Princeton Architectural Press of a glossy art book in the United States about the trove has mobilized a diverse group of experts in Mexico, the United States and Europe who say that the objects are fake. Last week the Mexican government trust that controls the copyright to Kahlo’s work filed a criminal complaint against Mr. Noyola, a measure aimed at investigating the works. The trust is also investigating legal recourse in the United States to halt sale of the books.

he book, “Finding Frida Kahlo,” scheduled for publication on Nov. 1 but already available on Amazon (they already have used copies for sale) and elsewhere, contains lavish illustrations of many items in the collection.

Beginning in 2004, the couple said, they bought the items from a reclusive Mexico City lawyer, who told them that he had acquired them from a woodcarver who had made frames for Kahlo. She trusted him so much that she gave the woodcarver several suitcases and boxes full of her most intimate possessions. The Noyolas tracked down a photograph of the woodcarver, Abraham Jiménez López, which appears in the book.

They had the works authenticated by Ruth Alvarado, Rivera’s granddaughter, who died two years ago. They also consulted three artists who studied and worked with Kahlo and Rivera in the 1940s. One of them, Arturo García Bustos, signed numerous certificates of authentication for the works. Mr. García Bustos said that he recognized Kahlo’s hand in the work. “I observed, I knew the maestra’s personality,” he said, using the Spanish term of respect for a teacher and also an artist. “I see it reflected in the works of the collection.”

The Noyolas also hired a handwriting expert recognized by Mexican courts and an expert in chemical analysis who works with the government’s National Institute of Fine Arts. Both presented evidence to suggest that the trove could be real.

But such arguments do nothing to sway critics like Hilda Trujillo Soto, adjunct director at the Frida Kahlo Museum in Mexico City. “The title and the text trick people who buy the book in good faith thinking that it’s about Frida,” she said. “The publisher is taking a cynical attitude. They are disseminating Frida Kahlo fakes.”

Katharine Myers, publicity director of Princeton Architectural Press, said that the publisher would continue to sell the book because it clearly states that the objects are still under study.

Authenticating art is by its nature subjective, the result of years of experience. One of the foremost Kahlo scholars, Salomon Grimberg, a co-author of Kahlo’s catalogue raisonné and the author of several studies on Kahlo, said he believed the collection was fake. Seeing the originals of the letters, he said, is unnecessary. “I know the handwriting. The content of these letters is not accurate. It has nothing to do with what she thought.”

The New York Times article is here: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/29/arts/design/29frida.html?pagewanted=2 It has a small multi-media show with some examples of the questioned work compared to authentic work.

David Lynch's Twisted Art - The Daily Beast

2009-09-20T15:41:00.001-07:00

The acclaimed director talks to Peter Owen Nelson about his new show of surrealist paintings and mixed media assemblages. Plus, VIEW OUR GALLERY.

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“Negative Space: The Inside-Out Illustrations of Noma Bar” Slideshow | Fast Company

2009-09-16T16:44:00.001-07:00

“Negative Space: The Inside-Out Illustrations of Noma Bar” Slideshow | Fast Company

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Update: Updated: "Obama Hope" artist Separd Fairey pleads Guilty

2009-07-13T15:18:00.000-07:00

The street artist Shepard Fairey, creator of the Obama "Hope" poster, has cut a deal with Boston prosecutors. In February Boston police arrested Fairey as he was on his way to DJ at a party to mark the opening of his big show at Boston's Institute of Contemporary Art, which runs through Aug. 16. He was later hit with multiple charges of vandalism, though many of them were subsequently dropped for lack of evidence. There didn't seem to be much to prove that it was Fairey who had pasted up the Fairey stickers that constituted the offending acts in those charges, since those stickers are available to anybody over the Internet.

But Fairey has now pleaded guilty to three of the charges, been sentenced to probation and agreed to pay $2000 to a graffiti removal group. In exchange prosecutors have agreed to drop 11 remaining charges.

Fairey will be headed back to the Boston ICA on July 31 to DJ at a replay of that party he never got to attend, but tickets are already sold out.

"Obama Hope" artist Separd Fairey Arrested"

Obama 'Hope' poster artist arrested in Boston

By Milton J. Valencia and Mark Shanahan, Globe Staff | February 7, 2009

Shepard Fairey, the controversial street artist riding a roller coaster of publicity with his red, white, and blue posters of President Barack Obama, was arrested last night on his way to DJ an event kicking off his exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art.

Fairey, a 38-year-old known for his countercultural style, was arrested on two outstanding warrants and was being held at a police station, according to a police official with knowledge of the arrest who requested anonymity.

Police could not describe the nature of the outstanding warrants last night, but said they were based in Massachusetts.

Fairey has been arrested at least 14 times, he has told the Globe.

The artist was arrested at about 9:15 p.m. as he was about to enter a sold-out dance event at the Institute of Contemporary Art on Northern Avenue, known as "Experiment Night." The event is geared toward a younger-age crowd, with techno-style music, and more than 750 people were waiting for him, some of whom had bought tickets for the event on Craigslist for as much as $500.

Fairey was supposed to appear as a guest DJ for the kickoff of his exhibit, Supply and Demand, which will run through Aug. 16. He was scheduled to go on stage at about 10:30 p.m., and an hour later organizers reported to the crowd that he was arrested.

"We're very disappointed," said Paul Bessire, deputy director of the Institute of Contemporary Art.

"Shepard Fairey is a wonderful artist who created some positive work and we were very pleased to present his work here and around the city. We feel he is an influential artist."

Fairey, a street artist, graphic designer, and political activist, is best known for his "Obey Giant" campaign of stickers, stencils, and posters in the early 1990s.

Most recently, he has achieved fame with the red, white, and blue posters of Obama, emblazoned with the words "Hope," "Progress," and "Change."

The president used the posters during his campaign, and one of the displays in Fairey's exhibit includes a typed letter from Obama that read: "I am privileged to be a part of your art work and proud to have your support."

Fairey was recently seen with Mayor Thomas M. Menino in an event to promote his show, and banners raised at City Hall also announce the exhibit.

At the same time, however, anti-graffiti activists complained that a street artist was going to be the subject of a museum show.

But Bessire said, "We feel he is an influential artist. We were just very pleased and felt fortunate to show his work."

The arrest of Fairey -- who cites linguistic theorist Noam Chomsky with a poster that reads, "I lived with the system and took no offence/until Chomsky lent me the necessary sense" -- helped maintain his counterculture reputation.

"I wouldn't say it's cool he was arrested, but I think it shows he has integrity," said Bill Galligan, a graphic designer. Some in the crowd last night speculated the incident may have been a publicity stunt.

Ginny Delany, a 27-year-old graduate student from Cambridge, said, "It makes him even more of a hero to me.

"The fact that he is arrested for his art shows that it is meaningful tohim and he cares about what he is doing."

David Rosen, a 19-year-old from Allston, said last night that he was disappointed with the arrest, but "I understand that his art requires him to take risks."

Christopher Muther of the Globe staff contributed to this report.

Iconic Obama Artwork Finds a Home

January 18, 2009 2:12 PM

ABC News' Sunlen Miller reports:

The iconic image of President-elect Barack Obama’s campaign is now on display permanently at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C.

The original painting, by Los Angeles artist Shepard Fairey, was unveiled yesterday –- and now hangs in the “New Arrivals” section for the many visitors in the district during inauguration to see.

Fairey’s red, white and blue portrait collage with Obama’s face over the word “hope” was reprinted in mass quantities, donning campaign shirts, posters, hats, buttons and stickers throughout the campaign.

The painting was a gift to the Portrait Gallery of Tony and Heather Podesta.

This weekend’s inauguration festivities are bringing Obama fans to the museum in droves. Museum staffers say crowd control has been an issue in the less-than-24 hours the artwork has been on display. They have set up a black rope in the middle of the aisle, creating two lines to view the picture. Police officers hustle viewers to move quickly after snapping a quick picture.

After being hung in a temporary gallery within the museum the portrait will find a home in the permanent display.

-- Sunlen Miller

Connecting the Pieces of Grant Wood's Corn Mural

2009-07-13T10:24:00.000-07:00

COUNCIL BLUFFS, Iowa - An arts group is hoping to raise $120,000 to buy the remnants of a mural painted on a hotel wall by Grant Wood in 1927 that was cut to pieces nearly four decades ago and to put it back together.

Recent discovery of part of the border of that mural was found above a dropped ceiling. The border contained the painted refrain, “where the tall corn grows,”.

The group hope to make the mural the centerpiece of an art center planned for the Bluffs. Ideally, they'd like that art center to be in the mural's original home at Bluffs Towers.

The odd history:

In 1926, hotel magnate Eugene Eppley (April 8, 1884-October 14, 1958), also known as Gene, was a hotel magnate Eppley is credited with single-handedly building one of the most successful hotel empires, by the 1950s the largest privately owned hotel chain in the United States. At its peak in the 1950s, the Eppley Hotel Company owned 22 hotels in six states. Eppley sold the company to Sheraton Hotels in 1956 for $30 million. (1)) hired Wood to paint four murals for the dining rooms of his hotels in Sioux City, Council Bluffs, Cedar Rapids and Waterloo.

Three of the murals were `corn murals' (one in each hotel). They were painted to fill the room. The corn murals were supposed to make viewers feel as if they were sitting in an Iowa field with tall stalks of corn, rolling hills and barns dotting the horizon.The mural is a typical example of the kinds of landscape visible in the surrounding countryside.

"Wood was painting what he longed for, an agrarian paradise where the land took care of her own before the machine came to torment her; further, this was an America without urban centers and thus free of the social complexities of mass unemployment, crowded conditions, factories and industry." (2)

Wood's murals from the hotels in Sioux City and Cedar Rapids ended up in the Sioux City Art Center and the Cedar Rapids Museum of Art. But in 1970, owners of the Bluff Towers in Council Bluffs invited the public to cut away parts of their Wood mural and take them home.

Wood's technique in painting this mural was subtractive -- his assistant Carl Eybers would put a thin layer of paint on a prepared section of the canvas, and Wood would then wipe away from that paint to create the corn stalks, buildings and other imagery visible. The murals are faded today both because of this subtractive technique. The Canvas was then glued to the wall. (3)

The corn room mural mural for the Martin Hotel in Sioux City has been
kept whole, and a conservation process saved the mural, but damage has dimmed the imagery and shifted his colors towards golden-brown. That mural can be seen at the The Sioux City Art Center.

Grant Wood (1891-1942) born in Iowa has an international reputation. His best-known painting, American Gothic (1930) (at the Art Institute of Chicago), has become an iconic image of rural America. Wood spent the majority of his art career living and working in Cedar Rapids. He was the head of the Iowa section of the Public Works of Art Project which ran from 1933-1934.

Wood was the most prominent artist in the Regionalist art movement in the 1930s, and he remained a proponent of its approach to art for the remainder of his career. This movement was a democratic art accessible to everyone and reflecting local, rather than imported from Europe or elsewhere, interests and traditions. The ideas Regionalism describe are connected to the immediate, local audience for the art.(4)

Wood's canvases also came with the bonus of a recognizable subject, one that was bucolic and idyllic, that provided instant uplift and gratification. (5)

Grant Wood's Corn Room Mural is historically important because it shows that Wood was developing the ideas and approaches that would become Regionalism several years before he produced his first clearly-Regionalist works and achieved critical success with his invention: Woman with Plants (1929)

and American Gothic (1930). Both these paintings have their origins in the specific landscape of the Midwest, but fuse their local subjects with formal concerns drawn from seventeenth-century Dutch painting. Wood's concerns with landscape, visible in the Corn Room Mural, remain a constant reference point for his Regionalist works: it appears as the background to Woman with Plants and in the famous house seen behind the couple in American Gothic. The central imagery in one of the main panels -- conical piles of harvested corn -- reappears in his later work, notably as the central focus of his lithograph, January (1937), in the painting Iowa Cornfield (1941), and in his last known work, an oil sketch from 1941 called Iowa Landscape.(6)
(Iowa Cornfield 1941)

Can you help?
The Bluffs Arts Council is encouraging anyone with pieces of Grant Wood's corn mural to contact the organization at (712) 328-4992.

The council also is accepting donations for the project. Send them to Bluffs Arts Council, City Hall, 209 Pearl, Council Bluffs, IA 51503.

Paul Grant (follower of Basho)

(1)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_C._Eppley
(2)http://xroads.virginia.edu/~MA98/haven/wood/landscape.html
(3) http://www.tfaoi.com/aa/7aa/7aa827.htm
(4)ibid
(5)ibid
(6)ibid

Refrenced also:
http://www.tfaoi.com/aa/8aa/8aa392.htm

Canadian Artsist:: Christopher Cann

2009-06-15T20:18:00.000-07:00

Part of my series: Contemporary artist from around the world.

I saw this work on an on-line competition called Art & Design. I was struck by the flowing element similar to early Japaneses painting. I was also struck by the pureness of the simple wood, something I used to do.

You can see more of his work on his website

The artist contact is currently living in the Yukon. (Northern Canada) Best way to get a hold of him is via e-mail brodapper@yahoo.com.

Artist statement

I do what I do because I have an itch that needs to be scratched. If I am not creating, I feel like I have forgotten something - and it nags at me until I fulfill its need. It’s the same feeling you get when you leave the house, and get to where it is you were going and are not sure if you turned the stove off or not. I enjoy painting, but am ultimately compelled to do it, as it needs to be done. I hope one day to satisfy the itch and not need to scratch so often - but I know this will never happen. So I think by creating work I am happy with on a semi regular basis will keep the crabs at bay.

I learned how to paint through experimentation. Art school was a whole lot of dead ends for me. I was so turned off by the whole experience I finished as quickly as I could and went traveling. During these travels, I discovered that I am art. I am the subject of the most important documentary I will ever see. When I realized this, I saw that we are all in the same boat. I started to paint caricatures of everyday situations in my life, and before long these paintings took over the majority of what I chose to paint. Although I do quick gestures of my ideas, most decisions are made while I am sitting painting the image. My process is spontaneous and intuitive. Besides the gestures, they are mostly done from memory, and the way the situation that I am conveying made me feel.

I am currently painting on wooden panels. This allows me to use the natural patterns in the wood grain as part of the image. I often use the wood grain itself as a jumping off point. I also use a dremel to engrave images back into the wood panel, or use it to uncover layers underneath the paint; producing a flowing pin stripe effect. I am still painting with a stylized cartoon technique that I initiated in art school, which is inspired by Japanese animation, and graffiti. I use bold black out lines with varying weights. I feel that cartoons speak to the viewer’s inner child. By doing this, I hope to make my images accessible. I am no longer forcing myself to fill the entire panel with paint. Where my past work has not had much focus, my current body of work is a collection of moments that take place in my everyday life. Spontaneous ideas, everyday occurrences and daydreams are all a part of what motivates me to create. Although my inspirations are broad, my body of work is now focused. It reads like a photo album with an underling narrative which ultimately tells the story of the painter. Looking at another person’s photo album without context can make it difficult to make a connection. On the other hand, I think we can all relate to the collecting of special moments in ones life, as all of our lives are a series of these moments. I am trying to capture these moments on the panel when they are fresh. The hardest part is being aware of when they are happening and opening myself to experience them fully. To grow as a painter, I have to grow as a human being, by experiencing life and making mistakes. I hope by continuing to paint and producing images that are unique and accessible I will make a connection with the viewer.

Michelle Obama, Hillary Clinton, other prominent women unveil bust of Sojourner Truth

2009-04-28T09:29:00.000-07:00

- It's Equal Pay Day -- designed to call attention to women's lower earning power -- and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and first lady Michelle Obama will mark it by speaking in succession at an the unveiling of a Capitol Visitor Center bust of women's rights crusader Sojourner Truth.

The $3.2 million bust makes history as the first memorial bust of a black woman to be placed in the Capitol. The project was spearheaded by the National Congress of Black Women, Inc., and took nearly 10 years to complete.

Sojourner Truth (1797 – November 26, 1883) was the self-given name, from 1843, of Isabella Baumfree, an American slave, abolitionist, and women's rights activist. Truth was born into slavery in Swartekill, New York. Her best-known speech, Ain't I a Woman?, was delivered in 1851 at the Ohio Women's Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio.

Damien Hirst : Requiem, major retrospective in Kiev

2009-04-22T14:29:00.000-07:00

Notorious British provocateur Damien Hirst is opening the largest single show of his career at the Pinchuk Art Center in downtown Kiev.

"I always thought museums were for dead artists and I was afraid of that," said Hirst, who decided to mount his exhibit in the Ukraine because he believes audiences there are new to contemporary art. "I hope it will make people think."

Hirst, perhaps the most famous current living artist, sold his work at auction last year at Sotheby's for nearly US$200-million. Whatever it is that attracts art buyers to his fish skeletons, dead sharks and bewjeweled skulls will soon be making its way to Kiev.

The PinchukArtCentre (Kyiv, Ukraine) is pleased to announce Requiem, a major retrospective of over 100 works dating from 1990 to 2008, by Damien Hirst. Requiem opens on 25th April and continues through 20th September 2009.

"Art's about invention and we are all desperately trying to invent a better future, and to learn from the past." (Damien Hirst, in conversation with Eckhard Schneider)

In his work over the last two decades, Hirst has continually produced paintings, sculptures and drawings that radically and directly address our shared quest for life in the face of inevitable death. Through an exploration of beauty and decay, love and desire, science and religion, history and art, Hirst has created some of the most conceptually profound and challenging artworks of our time.

“Charity.” 2002-2003

Requiem brings together many of the artist's most celebrated works. Ranging from early iconic sculptures such as A Thousand Years, 1990 and Away from the Flock, 1994 to more recent works like the monumental butterfly triptych, Doorways to the Kingdom of Heaven, 2007 as well as Death Explained, 2007, a sculpture of a shark cut in half in formaldehyde, the exhibition shows the extraordinary breadth of Hirst's artistic enterprise.

Since the start of his career, Hirst has pushed the boundaries of art and what it means to be an artist. Requiem bears witness to a bold new direction in his work by showing for the first time a series of skull paintings he created between 2006 and 2008. In works such as Floating Skull, 2006, The Meek Shall Inherit the Earth, 2008 and Men Shall Know Nothing, 2008, Hirst returns to the solitary practice of painting and confronts, in very personal terms, the darkness that lies at the heart of human nature and experience.

The impulses driving Damien Hirst’s work stem from dilemmas inherent in human life: ‘I am aware of mental contradictions in everything, like: I am going to die and I want to live for ever. I can’t escape the fact and I can’t let go of the desire’. The materials he uses often shock, but he says he ‘uses shock almost as a formal element . not so much to thrust his work in the public eye . but rather to make aspects of life and death visible’. (Tate Britain.)

“The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living.” 1991

Victor Pinchuk: "This exhibition is of great significance but what is most important for me is that the opportunity to see Hirst's new body of work occurs first in Kyiv. Damien's exhibition in Kyiv symbolises the reciprocal and mutually beneficial relationship between contemporary Ukrainian culture and that of the rest of the world. They share a common ground."

Eckhard Schneider, General Manager of the PinchukArtCentre: "With this fundamental retrospective including a cycle of new paintings the PinchukArtCentre gives an important international contribution to the debate surrounding one of the leading artists of our time."

Requiem is made possible by the loaning of key works from private collections. The exhibition was curated by Eckhard Schneider and developed in close cooperation with Damien Hirst and Victor Pinchuk. In hosting a major retrospective of one of the most important artists working today, the PinchukArtCentre is testament to the Ukraine's ongoing cultural development. -- www.gagosian.com

Amedeo Modigliani Comprehensive Retrospective Exhibition (with video)

2009-04-21T19:34:00.000-07:00

The `last bohemian of Paris' Amedeo Modigliani shows up in a major show in Bonn Germany 17 April – 30 August 2009.

Amedeo Modigliani was one of the most important artists of the 20th century. His works have long since gained iconic status in our collective pictorial memory. The Art and Exhibition Hall is holding a comprehensive retrospective exhibition to pay tribute to this outstanding artist, who died tragically young at the age of only 35. Born in Italy in 1884, Modigliani was a painter, draughtsman and sculptor. With the exception of a handful of landscapes, his creative energy was entirely devoted to portraits and nudes.

Modigliani's paintings are deeply rooted in Italian art history, drawing particularly on the formal languages of the Renaissance and Mannerism. These he combined with elements from Expressionism, Cubism and Symbolism as well as African sculpture, whose perceived primitivism and iconic presence equally fascinated many other avant-garde artists of his day. While Modigliani's work cannot be easily classified as belonging to any contemporary styles such as Cubism or Fauvism, it bears eloquent testimony to the restlessness and exuberance of an artist only too aware of his own vulnerability and mortality, and who needed the euphoria of intoxication to live and work. Even today, Modigliani’s idiosyncratic, at times melancholy portraits have lost none of their power to captivate the viewer. The exhibition is structured biographically, reflecting the decisive turning points of his life. The Art and Exhibition Hall hopes to present a representative selection of paintings,drawings and sculptures from 1900 to 1919, giving a vivid impression of the oeuvre of this exceptional artist

Sad: Artist and art-car sculptor Tom Kennedy Drowned

2009-04-21T13:02:00.000-07:00

Artist and activist Tom Kennedy, known internationally for his work in "art car sculpturing" drowned about 2 p.m. Sunday April 19th, 2009 at Ocean Beach California.

The Bay Area artist was a pioneer in the art-car movement who built the Topsy-Turvy Bus for ice cream czar Ben Cohen and Ripper the Friendly Shark for himself.

Mr. Kennedy, who was 48, was pulled from the surf just south of the Cliff House.

The cause of death was not released Monday, but friends wrote on Laughingsquid.com that he had been body surfing and was hit by a large wave, and a companion pulled him to shore.

Rescue crews rushed him to a local hospital, where he was pronounced dead on arrival, according to officials at the Golden Gate National Recreation Area.

Mr. Kennedy's art cars were vehicles that have been turned into rolling works of original art - they look a lot different from ordinary, factory-designed cars.

Harrod Blank, a veteran of the art-car movement, said Mr. Kennedy's works "were, ironically, inspired by the sea - his famous art-car, Ripper the Friendly Shark, was one, and there was Fishbait, an angelfish bicycle, the Sharkbite bicycle, the Dolphin Car and the Whale."

Cobbling up cars that looked like sharks and upside-down buses was hardly in the offing 20 years ago, when Mr. Kennedy was living in Houston and plying the corporate trade.

"Tom worked at the Houston Chronicle" in circulation sales, Blank said, "and he did the typical things - buy a house, get married, get a good job, the whole traditional lifestyle. Then he went to a Houston drowned about 2 p.m. Sunday at Ocean Beach parade. After seeing the effect these rolling sculptures had on people, he decided he wanted to make an art car and join that group of people. He made Ripper the Friendly Shark.

"It suspends your disbelief. It's a car, but all you see on the highway is a giant shark. It's something you're not used to seeing on a highway."

Mr. Kennedy left the Houston Chronicle and began devoting every waking hour to his new and different life as an art-car sculptor, aided by his wife and collaborator, Haideen Anderson.

Mr. Kennedy did art cars for public exhibits and also for individual clients, such as Cohen of Ben & Jerry's ice cream. The Cohen bus was a rolling protest against military spending. Mr. Kennedy built more than 30 art cars in all, and his art-car career and life can be seen at his Web site: www.tomkennedyart.com.

Mr. Kennedy also did special cars, like the Whale, for the annual Burning Man festival in the Nevada desert, a place where he felt there was enough room to stretch.

"I told him about Burning Man," Blank said, "and that opened the doors to his creativity. It was a venue where he could make large-scale sculptures and blow fire.

"He was kind of a renegade," Blank added. "He would drive Ripper like a shark, zigzagging around. He celebrated that a lot - he wanted to live, and he lived by that principle."

He received his bachelor's degree in marketing from the University of Houston and then spent a couple of years studying at the university's School of Sculpture.

He will have a part in an upcoming documentary see www.artispatriotic.com )“He hit the road hard,” said California car artist and filmmaker Harrold Blank. “He called himself an ambassador of good will.”

Blank’s documentary, Automorphisis, which features Kennedy, will be screened this weekend at WorldFest-Houston International Film Festival.

“We thought this would be a celebration,” Blank said. “Now I guess it will be a memorialization.”

Among Kennedy’s early creations were the eye-shaped vehicle that shot Twinkies from a cannon and the Mack the Fin Mobile.

The Topsy Turvy bus — a school bus with a second upside down bus welded to its top — alluded to military expenditures made at the expense of education and health programs.

A truck bearing a large missile and accompanied by a bevy of female attendants made numerous appearances during the past presidential election.

Mr. Kennedy is survived by his wife.

Sad: Vandals deface historical and sacred site

2009-04-21T12:52:00.000-07:00

This is a picture of the rock art at Ubirr

Sacred Aboriginal sites, including rock art at Uluru and rock faces in Kakadu have been defaced by acts of graffiti in several locations.
In the heritage-listed Kakadu National Park two rock faces were damaged with graffiti.

No rock art in the park –among the oldest in the world- had been impacted, according to Shannon Murray from the Kakadu visitor services team.

There have been three graffiti incidents but none had defaced the rock art.
However, vandals had left scratchings of graffiti on Ubirr lookout, which is one of the most sacred sites in the national park.

The Aboriginal rock art at Ubirr is tens of thousands of years old, Ms Murray said. A Parks Australia spokeswoman was unable to confirm reports that traditional owners were incensed about the vandals’ acts. Ms Murray said that local Aboriginal people expect visitors to treat their land with respect.

Earlier this year vandals also damaged rock art at Uluru in central Australia, causing thousands of dollars worth of repairs.

People who deface any surface in a commonwealth park face fines of up to $2,500.

Berlin Wall renovation -Artist re-painting

2009-04-21T05:22:00.000-07:00

"The concrete has been scrubbed, the graffiti removed, the metal de-rusted and now Thierry Noir, the first artist to paint on the Berlin Wall, is set to start all over again.

"We need to restore it to protect it for future generations," Noir said. "The wall will never be a thing of beauty, and nor should it. Too many people died because of it. It is there to remind a future generation of what happened."

Noir, who says he personally painted about three miles of the wall with his trademark figures, has devoted years to tracking down lumps taken by people as mementos or sold by dealers. "I found two big blocks being used as urinals in a Las Vegas casino. It's disgusting. The wall is a work of art and a historical monument."

The artists - from 21 different countries - who painted the wall 20 years ago have been painstakingly traced and paid to return to Berlin to re-create their works once the wall, badly damaged by years of vandalism, exhaust fumes, harsh weather and souvenir hunters, has been resurfaced."

Outsider Art Show opening in April in Chicago

2009-04-09T13:49:00.000-07:00

Culprits, Innocents and Outsiders
Heartland Visions

April 29- August 29, 2009
Opening Reception: Wednesday, April 29, 5-8pm

Self-taught and outsider art is a worldwide phenomenon, and America’s Heartland boasts some of the most distinct, recognized and collected artists in this genre, as well as some whose talents are not so known. This exhibition will feature art by the venerable William Hawkins (1895-1990) and Elijah Pierce (1892-1984), plus works by lesser-known artists Mary Borkowski (1916-2008), Mary Frances Merrill (1920-1999), David Pond (1940-2001), Ernest “Popeye” Reed (1919-1985) and Morris Ben Newman (1883-1980).

Inspired by his own Ohio roots and accounts of the 1986 exhibition, 1 + 3 from Ohio, curator Kevin Cole culled several stellar Midwest public and private collections to produce an exhibition worthy of an audience. Self-taught art, although a global phenomenon, embodies the Midwestern and American attitude of self-reliance and the “go your own way” mentality. Culprits, Innocents and Outsiders: Heartland Visions highlights Self-Taught Midwesterners, including Merrill, Borkowski, Newman and Pond whose work has never been exhibited in Illinois.

Notable or newly exhibited, the work of these artist reflect a creative spirit and expression that is very often moving and poignant, impressive and worldly, sometimes humorous and always personal. Revealed are values such as: love, self reliance, independence, self awareness, and a strong work ethic, expressed through such subjects as family, religion, personal tragedy, current and political events, America’s heritage, and nature. Simply put, they present the Midwestern and American experience without a filter. It is the raw presentation of people compelled to create using whatever means and materials necessary and the independent spirit of a region exemplified by the artists who call it home.

Hitler wamted to castrate Picaso

2008-11-30T13:31:00.000-08:00

Balls to Picasso's masculinity

Pablo Picasso on a beach in 1937.

I found this essay on Picasso dealing with Picasso's sexual imagery of himself as a Bull man, and Hitlers assertion that artist who paint` unusually' should be castrated so as not to pass down the genes. Interesting.

Hitler's resolve to castrate modern artists only strengthened Picasso's obsession with the bullish minotaur, writes Robert Nelson.
.

Picasso did paint one direct commentary on war, his mural-sized Guernica from 1936; but this famous picture is the exception that proves the rule.

For the rest, Picasso's pictorial agonies seem to lack a moral or political frame and, instead, you get a great sense of an artist proud of his masculinity.

I've always felt that the image of the weeping woman in Picasso proceeds straight from the artist's ego. The spectacle of female pain and vulnerability flatters the artist's power and boastful privileges - at the expense of female gratification - of exercising an imaginary superhuman potency.

For years, Picasso identifies with the image of the minotaur and once went so far as to describe the bull-man archetype as analogous to himself. This mythical creature is conveniently revived from ancient Greece as a grandiose pretext for showing off; for it allows Picasso to hang upon the human frame the formidable head and testicles of a bull.

What kind of courage did it really take Picasso to advertise his randy instincts? How can his manifest indulgence - supported by an establishment of collectors and museums - be construed as an act of resistance?

Never was ancient myth so prostituted in the service of an artist's delusion, and never were such fantasies turned so successfully to the marketing of conceit and the pomposity of genius. How can we celebrate all that big-headedness, especially when transacted in an age of mass extermination?

The Picasso exhibition at the NGV has made me rethink some of those claims to which previously I'd given no credence. It is a serious study of the relationship between Picasso and his volatile lover and model of the war years, Dora Maar, an interesting artist in her own right.

Anna Baldassari is more than the curator of the current exhibition; she's also the author of a learned monograph accompanying it. Among many fascinating historical explorations, this eloquent book introduces some chilling facts concerning the culture of the German occupation in which Picasso was domiciled.

In Picasso's library, Baldassari found a volume of a magazine (Lit tout) summarising Hitler's policy on art. It described a strategy so unsettling that I decided to check to see if the report on Hitler's plans was really true. So I hunted down the 'Urtext' to find a loathsome document that is predictably painful to read. This awful exercise proves the truth of the account that Picasso would have read in Lit tout.

In 1937, Hitler gave the inaugural address at the opening of the "Haus der deutschen Kunst". This was a defining moment in Nazi cultural history, launching not only the severe neo-classical building by the architect Paul Ludwig Troost, but announcing what kind of art should go into it. The only profession for which Hitler had any training was art; he had a special interest in controlling it and approached it with a vengeance.

Hitler's philosophy of art is much as you would expect. He hates modern fads and fashions; he wants to see eternal greatness and absolute beauty, as of the Greeks, beyond time and transcending the happenstance and contingencies of the epoch. Art should aspire to universal virtues and beauty.

These tenets, structurally speaking, are the same kind of essentialist aesthetic still pursued by some writers today who denounce the relativism of critical theory in contemporary art. But Hitler's diatribe against modern art isn't just an expression of scorn and contempt, such as conservatives rehearse still today.

By 1937, Hitler was not merely venting his frustration but redesigning the world to his plan. Just as he was determined to eliminate Jewry and homosexuality from Aryan dominion, so he was prepared to stamp out, by whatever means, the congenital sickness that expressed itself in modern art.

Towards the end of his somewhat reasoned speech, Hitler comes to the crunch. In regard to the distortions and perversions of modern art, he declares:

"There are only two possibilities: either these so-called 'artists' really see things in that way and believe in the (appearance of) things that they represent, in which case it would only remain to investigate whether their ocular failure has arisen in a mechanical way or through inheritance ('Vererbung').

"In the one case, it is deeply sad for these unfortunate ones, in the second, important for the Ministry for the Interior, which would then have to concern itself with the question of how, at the very least, to prevent ('unterbinden') further inheritance of such a ghastly disturbance of vision."

In other words, the most conservative or minimal treatment of the degenerate artists is to ensure that they don't have children, lest their congenital shortcomings are transmitted to another generation. Sooner or later, Hitler was going to have the balls of the avant garde; and Picasso's would have been close to the top of the list.

An artist facing the threat of sterilisation would have no recourse to excuses along theoretical lines to do with illusion and perspectival experiments. Hitler's next sentence excludes this appeal: "Or, however, they do not themselves believe the reality of such impressions, but are motivated by other grounds, to annoy the nation with this humbug, whence such a process falls into the area of the criminal justice system (Strafrechtspflege)."

The artist would be tried in court, I imagine, for subversion, the punishment for which would probably be the death penalty. Nazi culture was not compassionate and ultimately saw all forms of cultural difference in congenital terms. No artist could assume that these guys were joking. They were serious about deleting unwanted lines of defective progeny. You wouldn't have imagined that you could somehow laugh it off. If you were deemed degenerate, you feared the worst.

The report in Picasso's possession explains that Hermann Goering had given "instructions for carrying out artistic cleansing to the civil servants of Germany's fine arts institutions" with "the order to act without pity against all the partisans of modernism". Indeed, pity and Goering had no overlap and resisting compliance with his edicts would have been nigh suicidal.

Quite what it felt like in those years to be a modern artist in the occupied territory (1940-44) is hard to imagine. The urge to make radical pictures would not have been encouraged with the triumphal jubilation that it enjoys in hindsight, and the terror of cultural oppression would have weighed heavily on the brush. There's no doubt that painting in a non-illusionistic way would have required a brave spirit.

The circumstances covered in Picasso: Love & War 1935-1945 are exceptional and horrendous. But apart from inspiring some humility among us postmoderns in relation to Picasso's creative torment, the dark recesses of history help connect two qualities in tension within the pictures: one, a kind of ballsy swagger and the other cry for freedom, especially using the female model.

The case shouldn't be overstretched. After all, Picasso was painting somewhat similar pictures before and after the period of the Vichy government; and the Nazi threat of castration would have had no influence. So it would be unhistorical to see Hitler as somehow conditioning the imagery or the intention behind any of Picasso's pictorial innovations, subject matter or expressive habits.

The audacity that made Picasso archetypical is a condition all to do with art and personality; it isn't primarily directed against the fascists in Spain or Germany. But the authoritarian mood in Europe that grew explosively with Franco, Mussolini and Hitler had a much longer lead-time than just the later 1930s, and modern art adopted an unmistakably anti-authoritarian posture in relation to mass conformity and agreed symbols.

The period was also obsessed with origins, the racial origins of people and their psychology, their assumed character, culture and even physical traits. As well as totalising the diversity of people, the fascination in cultural origins followed a master-narrative of racial purity. Picasso, though not necessarily chauvinistic in this regard, somewhat shared the disposition.

In the cubist period (early 20th century), Picasso was interested in space and composition, using motifs such as jugs, mandolins and figures. But from the 1930s, the intellectual concerns of the cubist years receded in favour - certain sentiments more closely identified with the Latin patrimony. Picasso turned to the dark mythical strata that might propose some kind of explanation for the enduring rituals and psychology of the Mediterranean.

The bull, which is still a fetish in Spain through bloody rituals, is explored in relation to Greek myth, likewise steeped in genealogies and procreative sacrifices. Baldassari sees the obsession as being primarily about art: "This symbol of the Minotaur, this man-bull Picasso chose as the emblem of his own persona, is moreover the very figure of myth, and thus an expression of the possible that is the condition of art."

But I think this return to the archaic is more about a common stock of culture. Specifically, the figure of the minotaur is also about "kinds of men". Heroes. Men of original nature who are imagined with enormous bollocks and, consequently, all the metaphors of courage and sexual vigour that go with them.

And so it seems that in this epoch, the bollocks go full circle. As the seat of male genetic material, they're at once tossed to the audience as a trophy of the artist/lover and solicited by the fascist dictator who wants to control them and snuff their wanton sprog. Gratefully, I guess, there is another phase, where the genetic resources swing gleefully back into boastfulness and produce more modern progeny that recuperates the same ancient animal vim.

In our more modest epoch, this bizarre emphasis on manly prowess strikes us as repugnant in greatly different measures, but on all sides a bit disgusting.

It has also contributed to the persistent cultural conceit that it takes balls to make modern art. In this economy, you'd have to ask: what chance did Dora Maar have?

robert.nelson@artdes.monash.edu.au
Picasso Love & War, is on at the NGV International, 180 St Kilda Rd, until October 8.

Under Pressure :: Michalangelos David

2008-09-19T17:54:00.000-07:00

Under pressure from viewers Michalangelos David is Cracking:

In a single day the news brougt up Michalangelos David, the first was about fears that the historic statue in Florence was cracking from the vibrations of the viewers walking around it.

The second was the concept of the "David Effect" (another explaination of that term here) about famed Harry Potter actor Danial Radcliffe enbaresment at first preforming nude.

"Daniel Radcliffe was so nervous about getting naked on stage -- his penis shrank when he first stripped off in Equus.

The Harry Potter star, 19, made his stage debut in London on February 27 2007 in the revival of Peter Shaffer's play, in which he does a full frontal scene.

And Radcliffe was so scared about the performance that he suffered from "Michelangelo's David effect".

Daniel tells the New York Times, "He [David] wasn't very well endowed, because he was fighting Goliath.

"There was very much of that effect. You tighten up like a hamster.

http://www.showbizspy.com/showbiz/09152008/Daniel-Radcliffe-My-Willy-Shrank-When-I-Stripped-Off-On-Stage

He might have been refuring to a Gaurdian article:

Shrivelled from the fear of mortal danger ... Michelangelo's David.

One of the most intriguing, if least openly discussed, mysteries in art has been resolved.

Michelangelo's David is meant to be a representation in marble of the perfect male form. So why did his creator not make him - how would one say - a little better endowed?

As every visitor to Florence will know, the modest dimensions of David's "pisello" are a running joke with Italians, and the stuff of irreverent postcards.

But, in a paper to be published at the end of this month, two Florentine doctors offer a scientific explanation: the poor chap was shrivelled by the threat of mortal danger. Michelangelo's intention was to depict David as he confronted Goliath.

What the new study shows is that every anatomical detail - right down to the shaping of the muscles in his forehead - is consistent with the combined effects of fear, tension and aggression.

One of the authors of the paper, Pietro Antonio Bernabei, of the Careggi hospital in Florence, said one such effect would be "a contraction of the reproductive organs".

Last autumn he and his collaborator, Professor Massimo Gulisano, of Florence University, conducted a computer-assisted study of the 4.34 metre-high statue, in the Galleria dell'Accademia. They emerged, in Prof Gulisano's words, "stupefied" by Michelangelo's physiological accuracy.

The only mistake is at a point in the centre of David's back that is hollow and ought to be rounded. Michelangelo was aware of the error. But, as he wrote at the time: "Mi manco matera" ("I lacked [enough] material").

Dr Bernabei said allowance had to be made for the conventions of high Renaissance art, which depicted activity in a "much more composed and elegant fashion than today". But, anatomically, everything about Michelangelo's David was consistent with a young man "at the moment immediately preceding the slinging of a stone".

His right leg is tensed while the left one juts forward "like that of a fencer, or even a boxer". Tension is written all over his face. His eyes are wide open. His nostrils are flared. And the muscles between his eyebrows stand out, exactly as they would if they were tightened by concentration and aggression.

"You see the same thing on Japanese opera masks depicting anger," said Dr Bernabei.

David is holding something in his right hand, and it has conventionally been assumed that it is a stone. But Dr Gulisano said their studies suggested otherwise.

"He is holding the handle of the sling. The arrangement of the muscles in his right arm is consistent with someone making, or about to make, a rotary movement, but not with someone about to throw a stone," he said.

Their full findings are to be given in a paper written for the Dutch Institute for Art History in Florence. A summary was published in the latest edition of the Italian journal Il Giornale dell'Arte.

The two experts' examination of one of the world's most famous statues was carried out using a specially constructed scaffold that was wheeled into place when the gallery closed its doors to visitors in the evening and on public holidays. Michelangelo's masterpiece, completed in 1504, was put back on display last May after cleaning which allowed its anatomical details to be studied much more easily than before.

Now we all know why he is rather less substantial in one area than might have been expected, just one great puzzle remains: why, since David was Jewish, did Michelangelo sculpt him uncircumcised?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2005/jan/22/science.highereducation

The real David's problume is more serious

Michelangelo's David 'may crack

By Mark Duff
BBC News, Milan

Major restoration works were carried out in 2004

Michelangelo's famous statue of David could collapse because of its exposure to mass tourism, Italian experts say.

They say the massive statue of the naked boy-warrior is in danger because of its size, shape and the weakness of the marble from which it was carved.

But they warn that the greatest risk comes from the footfall of many visitors who troop past it each day at Florence's Galleria dell'Accademia.

The experts want to protect the statue by insulating it from the vibrations.

This would cost about 1m euros (£785,000). Otherwise David could topple over, engineers from the University of Perugia say.

Iconic status

The warning follows a detailed study of the statue which showed that the cracks filled

during major restoration works four years ago - on the occasion of its 500th anniversary - have already reopened.

That restoration was itself controversial because it involved using distilled water to clean the statue - which critics argued could damage it.

Michelangelo's David has had iconic status almost since its completion at the height of the Renaissance.

At the time it was seen as a powerful symbol of Florence's republican political ideals: David being the youthful warrior who felled the mighty Goliath in the Biblical Old Testament story.

Since then it has enjoyed mixed fortunes: attacked by crowds when it was first displayed, then hacked by a deranged painter in 1991.

The statue has also acquired kitsch status - its copies adorn everything from casinos in Las Vegas to tacky Mediterranean beach bars.

Painting by Hugo Chávez president of Venezuela sells at Auction

2008-09-18T09:12:00.000-07:00

A canvas painted by Venezuela's president, Hugo Chávez, when he was in prison after his failed 1992 coup attempt has sold at auction for $255,000. Photograph: Reuters

"The mill of the gods grinds slowly!"

It was painted by a young army officer languishing in jail and it conjures loneliness and yearning: a full moon seen through the bars of cell. A message written in red letters beneath the portrait says: "The mill of the gods grinds slowly!"

Sixteen years later it seems the mill was not so slow in effecting dramatic change. The artist, Hugo Chávez, is the president of Venezuela and the painting has just sold for $255,0000 to help fund his socialist revolution.

Three Venezuelan businessmen paid the sum at an auction last week, surpassing all expectations for the picture, titled The Yare Moon, which opened bidding at $14,000.

The money will go to the PSUV, a socialist party that is carrying the president's banner in municipal and regional elections next month on the eve of the anniversary of Chávez's 10th year in power. He did the painting during a two-year jail sentence for leading a coup attempt in 1992, a military fiasco which nevertheless paved his path to electoral victory.

Hiroshima Bravo, a congresswoman and "chavista" loyalist, said she was surprised by the price but considered the painting a symbolic part of Venezuelan history.

Nelson Mandela's paintings of landscapes glimpsed through jail bars also fetched high prices, though subsequently doubts were raised about their authenticity.

Chávez's artistic credentials are not in question. As a boy in Sabaneta, a dusty, poor town in the plains, he used to paint friends, animals and landscapes. As a military cadet he drew caricatures of his comrades for their graduating yearbook.

Asked last year why he wanted to abolish term limits so he could run indefinitely - he has spoken of ruling until 2025 - the president said his revolution was like an unfinished painting and he was the artist. Giving the brush to someone else was risky, "because they could have another vision, start to alter the contours of the painting".

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/sep/18/venezuela?gusrc=rss&feed=worldnews

Three other World leaders were noted painters: Hitler, Churchill & Eisenhower

An article in Newsweek : The Art of Politics What happens when world leaders get creative. Hint: it isn't always pretty.

"Churchill bonded over painting with the American general, later president, Dwight Eisenhower. Eisenhower's tastes ran to plashing streams, dilapidated barns and birch-studded snowscapes in a style that might be called Greeting Card Pastoral. (In fact, when a small collection of his works was marketed as Christmas-gift prints, the publisher was Hallmark.) He was appropriately modest about his oeuvre, which he described as "daubs." Churchill, a far more accomplished and ambitious artist, was well aware of his amateur status, in comparison, say, to his hero Cézanne. "When I get to heaven," he once remarked, "I mean to spend a considerable portion of my first million years in painting, and so get to the bottom of the subject." But Hitler for many years regarded himself as an artist by profession. An authorized book of his watercolors referred to him in 1937 as "at once the First Fuehrer and the First Artist of our Reich."

http://www.newsweek.com/id/147791

CHICAGO SCULPTOR MIKLOS P. SIMON 20 YEAR RETROSPECTIVE

2008-09-11T14:53:00.000-07:00

CHICAGO SCULPTOR MIKLOS P. SIMON INVITED TO NOTRE DAME ISIS GALLERY FOR 20 YEAR RETROSPECTIVE, Round and Round We Go, Cycles in Art

CHICAGO (September 10, 2008) – Chicago-based sculptor Miklos P. Simon has been invited by the Art & Design Department of the University of Notre Dame to exhibit work at the ISIS Gallery on the Notre Dame Campus. The show will open on September 25 and will run through October 23. This one-man show marks the 20th anniversary of attending Notre Dame and is a retrospective of his body of work.

Miklos P. Simon is a Hungarian-American, an artist and educator born 1960 in Zalaegerszeg, Hungary. (Birthplace of the famous Hungarian Sculptor Zsigmond Kisfaludi Strobl) After four years in the School of the Arts at Pecs, and one-year additional study at the Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest, he left his homeland for the United States and settled in Chicago.

He continued his studies at the University of Illinois Chicago campus and later earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Simon Miklos was naturalized as a U.S. citizen in 1987. The following year, he enrolled in the Master of Fine Arts program at the University of Notre Dame.

"The title of the show is 'Round and Round We Go, Cycles in Art' and I am exploring the cycle and internal revolutions of myself as an artist – from the perspective of deflecting from Hungary to my current life as a naturalized American, as well as the smaller, more mundane rotations and orbits experienced – what emerges is a re-thinking of my body of work and new whimsical installations that explore the literal and figurative play of cycles," said Simon.

Opening night is September 25, 2008 at 6:30pm with an artist lecture followed by a reception – open to the public and runs through October 23, 2008. Isis Gallery is located on the Campus University of Notre Dame, ISIS Gallery (located in O'Shaughnessy Hall) Notre Dame, IN 46556. Phone: (574) 631-7085. Accessible by the Metra South Shore Line (http://www.nictd.com/).

Since graduation he has taught art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the University of Notre Dame, and the University of Chicago. Since the fall of 1999, he has been a part-time faculty member at Columbia College Chicago. He has participated in numerous national, international, group and solo exhibitions such as with SOFA Chicago, Art Chicago/Thomas Blackman & Associates Gallery and Fernando Silio Galeria de Arte, Santander, Spain, and at Liget Gallery, Budapest, Hungary. He is the principal of Simon Sculpture Studios and has received commissions for the Naval Monument in D.C., Roosevelt Road Viaduct Project, and his work appears in many Chicago-area architectural buildings and public displays including the Fine Arts Building, Harold Washington Library, Garfield Park Conservatory, The National Kidney Foundation (read about here) and the Looking Glass Theatre Company.

MIKLOS P. SIMON Artist Statement

In my most recent work I am posing individual questions or problems per piece, not so much as developing a theme. With materials such as electric fans, charcoal, garden hose or a man‘s wool flannel suit, I realize in objects, installations, and performance pieces personal, cultural or purely aesthetic issues. A few of these works explore impossibilities, others are therapeutic and some are humorous.

For example, the impossible manifests itself in the piece „Suit of a man who was cut in half and survived“. The viewer is faced with an impossible truth or a contradiction. The suit has been tailored to be worn by someone who has been split in half. „My Private Island“, a private space defined by a garden hose, is a tongue-in-cheek metaphor of the need for escape and refuge. A vacation delineated on the gallery floor.

MIKLOS P. SIMON Website = http://www.miklospsimon.com/index.html

Artist Statement : Sandra Ginter , Sculptress

2008-09-07T20:49:00.001-07:00

Artist Statement

"Through the use of clay I have developed a strong desire to address the issues of touch. However, it is not just the touch which is transmitted by the fingertips that intrigues me, but the feeling of being surrounded and transformed. Large or small, we all want space. We are surrounded at every moment of every day by space, but we are seldom consumed by it.suit (detail)

I am currently working on a series of single chamber "suits." These suits are constructed primarily out of clay. The images I draw from are airplanes, shark's and the human body. Airplanes and sharks resmbel the human body's basic form, but they contrast it in their nature.

The human body's suit is its' skin, it is soft supple organic and sensitive to the environment around it. Because of this, we often need additional shelter. This shelter not only protects but often furthers our boundaries. For example, we design hard, metallic airplanes so we may fly with speed and power. Similar to airplanes, sharks have speed and power, but they are also stereotyped as fearless eating machines with wet, leathery suits.

I have chosen these three images not only for their basic resemblance in form, but for the metaphors I am able to draw between them. As an airplane, you may attempt to climb inand fly away. As a shark, you are invited to possible change your persona, feeling sharper, stronger, harder, or fearless. One may not always view the texture covering the interior as a safe haven. However, once you have climbed inside you've become shielded, and if only for a minute, you are consumed.

I want my work to create a space that lures the viewer in, entwining them with the sense of touch....

http://www.saintmarys.edu/~events/Calendar/MoreauGalleries/faculty/ginter/ginter1.html

It is interesting to compare this self-statement, with a reviewer statement. Clearly the reviewer must have gotten their facts from the artist. But the description becomes more explanatory rather than the almost metaphysical tone of the artist statement.

"Ginter, who received a MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art and currently teaches at Saint Mary’s College in South Bend, Ind., uses her work to satire issues that surround being a mother and living in the Midwest and examines bits of Midwestern iconography with the piggyback perspective of a busy, working mom with three small children. She uses color and symbolic form to create small narratives that are all part of a larger tale in which cows and pigs hold particular significance. Larger issues are hinted at, such as genetic cloning, the significance of the individual and the ritualistic nature of living day to day."

http://www.iwu.edu/CurrentNews/newsrelease07/art_MayTermShowings_407.shtml
October 9-November 6, 2008:

Hammes Gallery goes….PINK! A ceramic sculpture exhibition curated by Prof. Sandi Ginter and Helen Otterson. Featuring work by: Tom Bartel, David East, Jeannie Hulen, Lisa Conway, Erin Furimsky, Sandi Ginter and Helen Otterson.

Hammes Gallery is located in the Moreau Center for the Arts at Saint Mary's College in Notre Dame, IN. Gallery hours are Monday through Friday from 10am-4pm; closed campus holidays

ARTIST'S STATEMENT : Tom Bartel

2008-09-07T15:20:00.000-07:00

This is another interesting artist statement, part of our new collection of artist statements of contemporary artist.

ARTIST'S STATEMENT

Clay is my chosen material; ceramics is my chosen medium. I cannot do what I do with any other material or process; clay and its firing process usually allow me to manifest my ideas best.

I have always been fascinated by human form and tend to use this as a starting point in my work. My work questions various stages of life, which are determined primarily by the biological development of the body from birth to death. I see the human life cycle as an experience containing many beginnings and endings many "births and deaths"; the connection between the beginning and ending of life is a continual source of inspiration. I am observant of how powerful time can be and am intrigued by the many ways in which we are affected by its passage. The changes that take place over time are frighteningly subtle.

Some of my work is directly concerned with the relationship between clothing and growth and clothing and skin. Each has the potential to encompass physical as well as emotional concerns. The body, when patterned, usually refers to clothing... to some degree. I enjoy the ambiguity that this situation presents. Furthermore, I see our clothing and/or appearance as being capable of summing up who or what we are yet it is only a facade; the ideas of mask, disguise, transformation and identity are fundamental to my concerns.

The ceramic surfaces I obtain are a vital component of my work through which I intend to confront the viewer's attention with the outermost "skin" of the work. I am attracted to heavily worn, patinated surfaces that reveal the "history" of an object. I see our skin as having the same potential as the surfaces by which I am intrigued. Throughout our life as we age our appearance inevitably and slowly changes and in the process our skin records this story.

Tom Bartel
If interested in contacting Tom Bartel, please send e-mail to tom.bartel@wku.edu
His Bio is at http://www.sherriegallery.com/artistprofile.php?artist=9
http://artscouncil.ky.gov/whtsnew/FellowDec04/bartel.htm

He will in a group show at October 9-November 6, 2008:

Hammes Gallery goes….PINK! A ceramic sculpture exhibition curated by Prof. Sandi Ginter and Helen Otterson. Featuring work by: Tom Bartel, David East, Jeannie Hulen, Lisa Conway, Erin Furimsky, Sandi Ginter and Helen Otterson.

Hammes Gallery is located in the Moreau Center for the Arts at Saint Mary's College in Notre Dame, IN. Gallery hours are Monday through Friday from 10am-4pm; closed campus holidays

Artists Statement : Willamarie Huelskamp

2008-07-13T15:48:00.000-07:00

What is an artist statement? Is it fact's? Is it self opinion? Or self promotion. Here is one I particularlly like:

Willamarie Huelskamp

Statement

My paintings come from my heart. It would be easy to edit out all that is meaningful in art by judging an inspiration as too sentimental, too complicated, funny or just plain crazy. Wrestling with my inner voices, both angels and demons, I struggle to create a visual symbolic language.

Painting affirms from my love of the tactile world, the world of surfaces. The paint becomes my micro-universe where I play with textures, rhythms of line and patterns of form, and more importantly the duality of creation and destruction. I layer the paint and images to create real depth in the pictorial surface. Primitive art inspires my work in its disregard for anatomical correctness and illusionary effects of perspective. An Egyptian frontal view of the shoulders, an Aboriginal dot, an Assyrian eye facing forward in a facial profile and an Anasazi headdress can all be found in my work. Much inspiration comes from the work of Paul Klee, Picasso and Chagall who were each inspired by primitive art.

The imagery sometimes reflects the outer world of my life in Utah with my family but more accurately is a reflection of the inner experience of this mad and joyful journey called my life. I wonder about this humanness I share with all the people who have come before me and who will come after me. Through these simple drawings and rich layering of texture, the painting speaks beyond culture and time, exploring simple relationships. They explore the places where my consciousness overlaps and merges with the consciousness of others and my search for wholeness and connection is reflected in a symbolic language .

Visit her website at: http://www.willamarie.com/

See more of her work at http://www.worthingtongallery.com/default.aspx

High rollers driving up prices: Monet sells -80.5 Million

2008-06-29T13:14:00.000-07:00

Because they can

The big art news last week was, of course, the $80.5 million sale to an anonymous buyer of Claude Monet’s “Le Bassin aux Nymphéas” at Christie’s auction in London.

But it suggested a bigger story to National Public Radio, which reported that although ordinary folks don’t have enough money to buy expensive art, the high rollers are buying more than ever. And by paying huge amounts, they’re driving up the prices worldwide.

Russian billionaire art lover Roman Abramovich, for example, last month snarfed up a Lucian Freud painting ($33 million) and a Francis Bacon triptych ($86 million).

For the average art joes who spend their time at public museums, the trend has ominous implications. NPR quotes University of Illinois art history professor Jonathan Fineberg:

“Museums can no longer afford to buy the great works of art because they have consistently been outbid by private individuals making huge amounts of money in the corporate world.”

The art bubble, NPR surmises, isn’t going to pop anytime soon.

Bollybooty

Let’s see, what if in the middle of “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull,” Harrison Ford and his co-stars suddenly took a cue from Indian movies and broke into song and dance. Hopping, dancing, swooping, crooning. Hey, it could happen. After all, movie titan Steven Spielberg and Indian billionaire Anil Ambani are sniffing around each other, hoping to cut a deal.

Spielberg and his DreamWorks want money, maybe $2 billion, so he can split from Viacom Inc.’s Paramount Pictures and have enough lucre to make five or six films a year. The Wall Street Journal reported he may get $500 million to $600 million of that from Ambani’s massive conglomerate, Reliance Entertainment.

Film is a growth industry in Bollywood. Analysts say “filmed entertainment” in India has grown 17 percent in the past three years and is worth $2.4 billion. But the industry could double in the next five years, according to Time magazine.

Ability, not disability

Years of war have given Cambodia one of the highest ratios of disabled people in the world. Hardly an enviable distinction. But that made it a perfect place for dancer Katie MacCabe to base her charity Epic Arts.

Epic, an acronym for Each Person Is Counted, opened in Phnom Penh in 2006 with a goal to help integrate the disabled into the arts, especially dance.

“This is not about sympathy or therapy,” MacCabe told the International Herald Tribune. “We want to show that impairment can actually enhance creativity and that virtuosity is not just the domain of the able-bodied.”

Epic’s mission is to change public opinion about disabled performing artists by showcasing their work. Currently, 33 artists train with Epic Arts, and eight are professionals.

Above compiled by Bill Luening at 816-234-4740 or bluening@ kcstar.com

Le bassin aux nymphéas is one of the great rarities of Impressionist and Modern art: a painting of Monet's beloved water lilies, forming part of his final painting campaign, that was signed, dated and sold by the artist soon after its execution.

Monet had begun a new series of large-scale Nymphéas in 1914, and these would lead ultimately to his Grandes décorations, the celebrated frieze now in the Musée de l'Orangerie, Paris. The large scale and bold, almost abstracted expressionistic brushwork that characterised those works is equally evident in Le bassin aux nymphéas; these qualities would later come to have a lasting influence on a range of artists including Pierre Bonnard, the Abstract Expressionists and even the ideas behind Informel. Dated 1919, when Monet signed the picture and sold it with three sister-works to Bernheim-Jeune in November that year, Le bassin aux nymphéas is one of the tiny handful of pictures from this period that he relinquished, as he tended to view his paintings of water lilies as a large, cumulative work in progress and guarded them all jealously, seldom allowing them to leave his studio. This, then, is not a study, like so many other works from this period, but instead a highly finished work. The rarity of Le bassin aux nymphéas is reflected by the fact that of its three fellow paintings, one is now in the Metropolitan Museum, New York, while another was sold from the estate of Ralph Friedman at Christie's in New York in 1992 for the then impressive price of $12,100,000; and the fourth was sadly cut into two (becoming W1893/1 and W1893/2).

The provenance of , itself speaks of its exceptional importance as, before becoming the centrepiece of the formidable collection assembled by J. Irwin and Xenia S. Miller, it was owned by Mr and Mrs Norton Simon. The founder of the Norton Simon Foundation that would come to give the celebrated Pasadena museum his name, Norton Simon was an immensely successful and philanthropic businessman whose private collection included a string of paintings by artists including Degas, Picasso and Van Gogh.

Monet's late Nymphéas took a motif that he had long adored and lent them a new scale and a new vigour. Le bassin aux nymphéas has an expressionistic flair that was less evident in his pre-1914 paintings which had evolved over the intervening half decade. The word 'décoratif' which was used in association with these works was less because of an inherent decorative quality, but instead because of the sheer modernity of these engaging and absorbing visions: it was a result of the subjective means of rendering the scene, which viewers felt was less linked than most art with the real world. Pictures such as Le bassin aux nymphéas were almost abstract, rather than realist, and therefore were considered décoratifs.

Monet had long been passionate about his water lilies. Decades earlier, he had successfully battled with local bureaucracy in order to gain permission to reroute the river Epte, damming a section and thereby creating a large pond and a water garden. He filled this with water lilies, selecting special hybrids in order to increase the range of colours of their flowers; the water lilies have roots embedded in the muddy bottom of the pond, hence the recurrence of the same or similar constellation-like arrangements through the period of the Grandes décorations. Monet's gardens at Giverny evolved over the many years that he had lived there; he had deliberately set about creating an area filled with motifs for his Impressionist pictures, filling flowerbeds with myriad coloured plants and creating panoramas, views and water effects. This led to his self-deprecating statement that, 'Gardening and painting apart, I'm no good at anything' (Monet, quoted in D. Wildenstein, Monet or The Triumph of Impressionism, Cologne, 1996, p. 368).

Monet's water gardens marked the pinnacle of his horticultural success and became his most celebrated subject. The play of light and textures condensed many of the interests that informed the Impressionist aesthetic. In Le bassin aux nymphéas, these are clear to see: the water acts as a vehicle for Monet's exploration of the varied textures of the water lilies and the water, as well as the light effects and reflections in the pond surface. Thus, snaking through the centre of the painting, the viewer sees the blue sky while to either side the trees, including what appears to be a weeping willow, are reflected. While Monet has tightly focussed his view on a patch of the pond, creating a closely framed composition that seemingly allows for no foreground or background, he has nonetheless used the water as a form of portal, allowing a complex interplay of the near and the far.

Monet's water lilies had long been an important motif in his paintings at Giverny, and he had already painted and exhibited several series showing them, albeit on a much smaller scale, referring to them sometimes as his 'water landscapes.' However, the paintings towards which he began working in 1914 marked a break from those earlier works. Following a brief lull in his output, Monet had been rummaging in his basement when he saw some old, abandoned pictures which held still the kernel of a great idea. Since his commissions in the 1870s for Ernest Hoschedé, the friend and patron whose wife he had later married, Monet had long contemplated a full 'decorative' frieze, and it was towards this end that the reinvigorated artist now worked. This was clearly already the case by April 1914, as a letter to Gustave Geffroy reveals:

'As for myself, I'm in fine fettle and fired with a desire to paint... I am even planning to embark on some big paintings, for which I found some old attempts in a basement. Clémenceau saw them and was amazed. Anyway, you'll see something of this soon, I hope' (C. Monet, 1914, quoted in R. Kendall (ed.), Monet by himself: Paintings, drawings, pastels, letters, London, 1989, p. 247).

It was as a part of this new concept that Le bassin aux nymphéas came into existence, the fruits of a project that had already occupied the artist for half a decade and which would dominate his output for years to come, culminating in the Grandes décorations at the Orangerie. Two metres wide and a metre tall, Le bassin aux nymphéas is one of a group of large paintings showing the same view that Monet appears to have executed during a single period. Approximately the same view would later be shown on a greater scale in the Orangerie paintings, while the relationship between the present work and the monumental panel in the Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh is striking.

In painting his larger panels for the Grandes décorations, Monet worked in his newly-built studio, specially designed and constructed in 1915 despite the ravages and privations of the First World War, a mark of his passion for the project. While Monet could work on the largest canvases indoors in the studio all year long, come rain or shine, the 'smaller,' more manageable pictures like Le bassin aux nymphéas would often be propped up with an arrangement of ropes and weights so that he could paint them before the pond itself. An insight into this process was provided by René Gimpel, who wrote of a visit he made to Monet's studio in 1918, mentioning a group of pictures that Daniel Wildenstein stated almost certainly included Le bassin aux nymphéas:

'... we were confronted by a strange artistic spectacle: a dozen canvases placed one after another in a circle on the ground, all about six feet wide by four feet high: a panorama of water and water lilies, of light and sky. In this infinity, the water and the sky had neither beginning nor end. It was as though we were present at one of the first hours of the birth of the world. It was mysterious, poetic, deliciously unreal... 'I work all day on these canvases,' Monet told us. 'One after another, I have them brought to me. A colour will appear again which I'd seen and daubed on one of these canvases the day before. Quickly the picture is brought over to me, and I do my utmost to fix the vision definitively, but it generally disappears as fast as it arose, giving way to a different colour already tried several days before on another study, which at once is set before me-- and so it goes the whole day!'' (R. Gimpel, quoted in C. Stuckey (ed.), Monet: A Retrospective, New York, 1985, p. 307).

Monet's plan to surround the viewer with views of the pond and trees, which was finally embodied in the Orangerie pictures, had originally been conceived in peace time with a domestic scope. 'For a moment the temptation came to me to use this water-lily theme for the decoration of a drawing room,' he explained. 'Carried along the walls, enveloping all the partitions with its unity, it would have produced the illusion of an endless whole, of a wave with no horizon and no shore; nerves exhausted by work would have relaxed there, following the restful example of those stagnant waters, and to anyone who would have lived in it that room would have offered a refuge of peaceful meditation in the middle of a flowering aquarium' (C. Monet, quoted in R. Gordon & A. Forge, Monet, New York, 1983, p. 224). This sense of refuge and Monet's sense of mission became all the more integral to the project with the outbreak of the First World War. Monet was extremely self-conscious about the contrast between the turmoil of the Front, where many of his own family and acquaintance served, and the paintings with which he was engaged. To Monet, though, this cemented his sense of duty. He was upholding some of the beauty and some of the spirit of France, and each time an enemy push threatened, he refused to leave Giverny, insisting that he would rather die among his beloved pictures.

It was soon the entire Grande décoration project that would come to be associated with the War, or rather, with the Armistice. For, on 12 November 1918, the day after the Armistice was signed, Monet wrote to his friend, the original enthusiast for the Grandes décorations, the Prime Minister of France at the time, and hence the 'Father of the Peace,' Georges Clemenceau. In his letter, Monet explained that he was:

'... on the verge of finishing two decorative panels which I want to sign on Victory day and am writing to ask you if they could be offered to the State with you acting as intermediary. It's little enough, but it's the only way I have of taking part in the victory' (Monet, 1918, quoted in R. Kendall (ed.), ibid.).

This project gradually evolved into the large-scale offering that resulted in the Orangerie friezes which are to this day monuments to France. They are the culmination of Monet's career, his crowning glory, vigorous and expressive execution, escaping the rigours even of Impressionism in order to create something that is absorbing and subjective. Le bassin aux nymphéas is an important facet of that great project.
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The `Scream' to return

2008-05-27T09:29:00.000-07:00

Oslo, Norway- The main attractions of the Munch Museum’s summer exhibition 2008 are the Edvard Munch's paintings 'Scream' and 'Madonna', which after conservation again will be presented to the public. The stealing of Scream and Madonna during the armed robbery in the museum August 22, 2004, brought shockwaves through the international museum world. After two years of police investigation, the paintings were recovered on August 31, 2006. This joyful occasion was, however, somewhat moderated by the fact that the paintings had received rough treatment and suffered serious damages.

The conservation of the paintings has been a painstaking and time-consuming process. A great quantity of information concerning the physical and chemical composition of the paintings has been accumulated, and the conservation methods used are based on the results of numerous tests and reports, in addition to a meticulous evaluation of the choice of methods.

The most conspicuous damage to Scream is a stain in the lower left corner, which has proved impossible to repair in a justifiable way. Conservation on Madonna is finished, apart from some retouching, which will be completed after the summer exhibition. New evaluation of Scream has led to a new dating of the painting.

“Even after the conservation the paintings are marked by the damages that occurred in connection with the robbery. But the artistic value of the paintings has not been reduced”, says Ingebjørg Ydstie, Chief Curator of the Munch Museum.

The Conservation of Scream and Madonna
The Scream and Madonna were returned to the Munch Museum on 31st August 2006, two years and nine days after the ruthless burglary. The damaged paintings were placed in specially constructed display cases and shown to the public for five days at the end of September. Despite the short duration of the exhibition, it was viewed by 5.500 visitors. Since the exhibition, the pictures have been the subject of comprehensive investigations and a cataloguing of the extent of their damage.

The time consuming work of gathering necessary data was concluded nearly a year after the paintings were recovered. A number of samples were sent abroad for analysis. Small samples of the cardboard that Scream is painted on were analysed to see if it was possible to establish what type of liquid had faded the picture’s lower left corner and caused the stain. This was essential in determining whether the damage would remain stable and not develop further, or whether there was a risk that it might deteriorate over time. Small pigment and binding agent samples were taken from both paintings and sent to laboratories for analysis. All of the information that has arisen from this meticulous work has provided the conservators with a sound basis for the choice of treatment.

Ethical guidelines dictate that the conservation work should entail a minimum of intervention and change to the authentic appearance of the paintings. The conservators wish for a minimum of intervention; that is, they wish to perform only those interventions that are absolutely necessary. An important guiding principle is stability; all of the materials used must have long-term stable properties and not lead to changes in the paint layer or the support. The interventions should also be reversible; the treatment should not limit future treatment possibilities. These guidelines are decisive when deciding – in collaboration with the museum’s art historians – to what degree the damages shall be repaired, both conservation-wise and aesthetically.

Idemitsu Petroleum Norge AS has contributed a significant amount of funding to support the conservation and research surrounding the two paintings. In addition, Nordisk Film AS is working on a television documentary that will present a reconstruction of the events surrounding the burglary, the return of the pictures, the conservation work and a renewed presentation to the public.

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