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Lily... where did the rest of your post go off to? You declared a love for "modern" art, and as a contemporary art I surely share a love of a great many Modern and Contemporary artists... although they might not be my absolute favorites from among the entire history of art.
Quote:
Originally Posted by stlukesguild
I deleted it because the mods merged that other thread with an art thread that I posted in previously and I mentioned much of the same stuff in it.
Hence the ^^;
Are you sure you had mentioned all that previously Miss Lily? I'm certain you didnt mention one or two of those before. should have left it to refreash our memories! I do that all the time! :p
Ha ha, okay, here's something along the lines of what I had:
Mark Mothersbaugh
http://i198.photobucket.com/albums/a...ync/genius.jpg
http://www.mutatovisual.com/
Keyth Ryden
http://i198.photobucket.com/albums/a...c/krkryden.jpg
http://www.krkland.com/
Roy Lichtenstein
http://i198.photobucket.com/albums/a...chtenstein.jpg
http://i198.photobucket.com/albums/a...n_hopeless.jpg
Bruce Conner:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bxLcZStUCus
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8QLXTsviMxk
Last summer I went to a modern art museum and it blew my mind and I really got into modern art. I was brought up on impressionism because of my parents, and I still like it. But I like modern now, too, even though my parents hate it. At that museum there was a piece of art that was a black room with a projector showing a single sine wave progressing along. That was great. You could walk into it. Awesome. I like abstract stuff because you can get so much from it. Usually it's nothing, like just images or sounds, but I like it. I like the look and sound of things falling apart.
Andy Warhol is a given.
I don't really much care for cubism, though. Some of it is alright. I like Dada.
I like cartoons, too. That's one reason why I like Keyth Ryden so much.
http://www.edu.pe.ca/rural/class_web...mages/goya.jpg
This is my favorite painting, though bear in mind that I don't know much about art. I love the defiant look in the man's eyes.
I like 'Little Cinders' by Salvador Dali, too:
http://www.encore-editions.com/artis...circa_1928.jpg
I must admit that as a contemporary working artist I certainly have been interested, prodded, even inspired by endless modern and contemporary artists. Again, it would be more than challenging for me to select a list of the modern/contemporaries whom I imagine to be the best (although Picasso is certainly a given), but I can reasonably offer up a selection of the artists who have had (and continue to have) the greatest impact upon me.
6. Paul Klee-
Paul Klee was the first true Modernist artist whose work I admired. As a first year art student I worshiped the great old masters (still do) and struggled to grasp the innovations of Impressionism... and Post-Impressionism (Van Gogh, Gauguin, etc...) Modernism, however, was another beast altogether. With my love of the well-rendered figure or landscape what was I to make of the distortions and fragmentations of Picasso, Matisse, and Beckmann... to say nothing of the absolute abandonment of imagery with Abstract Expressionism?
In spite of this I attended a major Paul Klee exhibition that had come to Cleveland. Logically, I should have disliked everything this man did... but for some reason it piqued by curiosity... I actually found I liked it,,, even without knowing why. Today I am certain that it had something to do with the manner in which Klee played with many of the same influences that were central to me: books, writing, games, music, etc... Klee continues to stand as one of the greatest influences upon my work, and I am happy to see that his reputation within the history of art has also continued to grow. I can hardly come across a well-stocked selection of art books without there being at least one or two books on Klee. One artist wrote that Klee had virtually invented the whole of 20th century art... on a miniature scale. It would be hard to refute this. I can think of no other artist, not even Picasso, that has conveyed himself masterfully in such a varied manner.
Writing/Texts/Books- Klee was one of those artists who are not locked solely into a single genre. He was trained and quite talented as a musician and was also deeply in love with books, reading and literature (His own journals are certainly worth reading for anyone interested in the artist's thought process). From the start Klee struggled to find a visual language that might blur the boundaries between painting and other art forms. He was long fascinated with writing and from early on in his career made attempts at infusing the written word with a visual impact:
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k2...rayofNight.jpg
In Once Emerging from the Gray of Night... Klee took a poem he had composed and not only infused them with a visual element, but building upon some of the theories of synchronism currently being explored by the French artist, Robert Delaunay, he sought to also convey something of the movement, rhythm, counterpoint, and harmony of music.
In the painting, Ad Marginum...
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k2...AdMarginum.jpg
Klee playfully echoes the flora and fauna grotesques that were commonly slipped into the margins of medieval illuminated manuscript.
The simple pictographic form was an element that would fascinate Klee for most of his career. In a painting such as Arrow in the Garden...
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k2...ld/3I01631.jpg
Klee built up the surface of his painting with plaster (or some such material) into which he scraped simple pictographic forms reminiscent of some ancient writings... like a tablet from Mesopotamia. In other instances, such as the painting, Contemplating...
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k2...templating.jpg
... the pictographic forms dance across the filed-like surface in a manner that would have a profound impact upon Abstract Expressionism. Late in his career Klee would reduce his images to a single bold pictograph...
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k2...bracesmall.jpg
...painted in a manner that suggested Asian Zen painting and surely influenced painters such as Gorky, Gottlieb, and Motherwell.
Geometry/Architecture- One of the most fascinating aspects of Klee's work is the manner is which he could freely move from total abstraction to figurative work... and from playful biomorphic imagery to hard-edged geometric abstractions at ease... and yet always maintain an ineffable something that was clearly his own.
His earliest breakthroughs as an artist came in responding to the landscapes/cityscapes of Tunisia...
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k2..._kleesmall.jpg
... in which forms began to shatter under the blinding light as if the colors were seen through a prism.
These geometries of architecture became more and more complex until they danced across the surfaces playfully:
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k2...-und-sonne.jpg
Color itself could lend a variety of mood to these images... such as the more mysterious Dream City:
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k2...-citysmall.jpg
Architecture was a key element of his most famous... perhaps his most important painting, Ad Parnassum...
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k2...AdParnasum.jpg
...in which the ancient mythic worlds of the Egyptian and Greco-Roman Empires are reduced to the architectural elements of the arch, the pediment, and the pyramid... all seen under the brilliant red Mediterranean sun as if shattered into a million points of light... like a Byzantine mosaic.
... to be continued...
Music- Music was a central element of Klee's entire life. He had studied as a musician himself, and his wife supported him early on in his career through her own efforts as a music teacher. Klee was highly fond of musical theater, and produced any number of paintings based upon the opera or puppet theater, such as the mysterious Carnival in the Mountains...
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k2...ild/klee11.jpg
the silly Bavarian Don Giovanni...
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k2..._large_507.jpg
or the Battle Scene from the Comic-Operatic-Fantasy, "The Seafarer":
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k2...tleScenesm.jpg
Music had an even more profound impact upon Klee than merely the subject matter of operas or theatrically staged scenes. Klee was very much of the same belief as Walter Pater who had declared that "All art constantly aspires toward the condition of music." Music, unlike any other art form, was seen as having succeeded in attaining a perfect merger of form and subject (or content). Klee stated early on, "What an attractive destiny it would be to master painting today (just as musicians once did)...Achievements made in music by the end of the 18th century remain (for the present) in their infancy in the visual arts." Klee's notion of a visual art that might convey ideas, movement, passion, emotion through the purely abstract elements of color, form, repetition, rhythm, texture, line, etc... were reinforced by the writings of others with whom he was well aware. Tieck and Wackenroeder spoke of a "poetry" that might be attained by elimination the imitative element in art and replacing it with the purely formal organization of colors and forms. The French painter, Robert Delaunay, and his compatriots at the Bauhaus school, especially Vassily Kandinsky were exploring similar concepts.
Much of Klee's geometric work was inspired by musical concepts of repetition, counterpoint, gradual transition, variation, and harmony. The titles themselves often made this link obvious:
Color Table in Gray Major:
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k2...nGrayMajor.jpg
Nocturne:
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k2.../nocturnal.jpg
Fugue in Red:
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k2...guild/bild.jpg
Aeolian Harp:
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k2...eolianHarp.jpg
New Harmony:
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k2...ld/75_4_lg.jpg
Harmony in Blue=Orange:
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k2...rangesmall.jpg
... to be continued...
Poetry- Klee was certainly inspired by poetry... read poetry... even wrote poetry... but his works also have a constant poetic strain that runs through them. Like a great lyrical poem they are often quite small in scale, and yet display a heightened sensitivity to the most subtle nuances of visual form. The images themselves are often quite suggestive in symbolic or metaphoric ways. Klee also made great use of the poetic title. While many artists are somewhat ambiguous... even hostile toward the idea of titling their works... many feeling that the visual image should not need words to clarify or explain it... Klee, on the other hand... took full advantage of the use of the title. Certainly the paintings succeed without any recourse to words... nevertheless, in many cases the title seems just as much a part of the work and an element key to its understanding as the title might be in certain lyrical poems. One cannot look at the title of some paintings without arriving at that state of "Aha!" where one nods in full agreement with the artist... acknowledging that what his title spells out is just exactly what the image conveys:
Twittering Machine-
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k2...twittering.jpg
Ghost of a Genius-
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k2...eniussmall.gif
Ancient Sound-
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k2...soundsmall.jpg
Wintry Mask-
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k2...interyMask.jpg
Refuge-
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k2...efugesmall.jpg
Fire at Evening-
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k2...eningsmall.jpg
The Art of Children- Children develop their artistic abilities at set stages. There are certain abstractions... certain stylizations or ways of attempting to depict objects, people, and space that in the large sense follow observable stages of development. Obviously even the greatest old masters once drew like a child. Rembrandt and even Michelangelo must have produced drawings like this at some stage of their development:
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k2...d/foster02.jpg
Children's art certainly lacks a certain finesse of finish, and surely we accept that it will not display a mastery of anatomy or illusionistic depictions of form and space. Children's art is also often erratic... largely because the child lacks the experience to recognize when something is truly brilliant. On the other hand... children's art has a certain audacity... a willingness to try anything... simply because "they don't know any better". In other words... they haven't reached that state that most people eventually head toward around the age of late-middle-school (and that most never abandon)... the state in which they begin to master certain rules for "drawing well" ... for achieving a degree of veracity to the visual object they are depicting. The younger child doesn't yet think this way. Objects are often depicted pictographically or symbolically... The scale of images and objects will often have little to do with the logic of perspective and everything to do with the "importance" of that element to the child. Colors need not have anything to do with reality, and people, animals, objects can be readily bent, twisted, or otherwise deformed in order to make them fit the confines of the space. I find it almost miraculous that none of these elements of children's art were ever appreciated prior to the 20th century. We have little or no examples of children's art from the past... even from the most talented artists. There is almost no mention of children's art... and certainly none that is in any way appreciative... until the last century. Perhaps one of the greatest contributions of artists such as Picasso, Matisse, and Klee is that they recognized the value of children's art. Conversely... their art was profoundly influenced by the art of children... and through them, the whole of Modern art.
Western artists have long been inspired by the notion of the "other"... the Moor or Turk or Japanese or African or Native American Indian whom they imagined as something more savage... but certainly also closer to the real passions and emotions that inspire "real art". Gauguin found such inspiration in the art of the peasants of Breton and the natives of the Pacific Islands. Matisse was profoundly inspired by Islamic and Asian art. The Surrealists sought out inspiration from any source outside that of the logical/rational world: the art of the insane, self-taught artists, the art of "outsiders" such as William Blake and Henri Rousseau. Pablo Picasso, Matisse, Max Beckmann, Paul Klee, Joan Miro, and Jean Dubuffet were all profoundly inspired by the art of children. Klee saved art by his own children and children in the family... but also collected art by other children. There is an element in children's art that is almost impossible for the adult to mimic. Almost any experienced art teacher can discern the art of a child from that of an adult mimicking the look of children's art. The strength of Klee (and the other Modernists inspired by children's art) lie in his/their ability to synthesize the influences of childrens art and make it his/their own.
Paintings such as Ventriloquist and Crier on the Moor...
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k2...rintheMoor.jpg
...Adam and Little Eve...
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k2...dLittleEve.jpg
...or Portrait of Mrs. P. in the South...
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k2...intheSouth.jpg
... as well as any number of paintings posted above, were profoundly influenced and informed by the art of children... an fact that has often led to the comments of certain Philistines that "a child could draw that"... but they also display elements... a mastery of color harmonies... a certain sureness to the surface and materials... a compositional control... a crispness of line... a sophistication of pattern, design, balance... that is unquestionably adult... and quite masterful.
Klee's influence upon my own work is quite obvious. His impact upon subsequent art has been profound. The Abstract Expressionists, the Surrealists, Joan Miro, Adolf Gottlieb, Matta and certain other South American Modernists, Jean Dubuffet and the "Art Brut" movement, the CoBrA, Geometric Abstractionists, Henri Michaux and other "text/calligraphic" artists, and many more have had to acknowledge Klee as an important predecessor.
What a great thread. I'm not sure if you want modern artists or old masters, but I love so many of them anyway. Just a few that come to mind....
Henri Matisse
www.mathewlu.com/mat_blue_nude.jpg
I have this one on my stairs, (not the real one obviously)
I really love Matisse and the Fauves, and he's the only artist Picasso was ever professionally concerned about, wanting to know what he was doing etc.
I'll be back, I just want to check these links have worked, as I'm finding it difficult to add the pics.
I've removed some of the links that didn't work.
Oops, a couple of them haven't worked. :blush: I'll try again.
www.ngv.vic.gov.au/orangerie/images/46_389.jpg
https:/.../Assets/4creati1_michaelangelo4.jpg
I have this in my lounge.
I love the Pre-Raphaelites too, I have a really eclectic taste in art, loving lots of schools, periods, styles etc. I have lots of PR stuff around the place.
persephone.cps.unizar.es/.../Big/Proserpine.jpg
www.arbib.org/.../JWW_TheLadyOfShallot_1888.jpg
Whoops, I'm rubbish at this....I'll be back later. :blush:
You can simply make an account at a hosting site such as Photobucket:
http://photobucket.com/login/?link=topmenu
At that site you simply download an image that you have saved to your hard-drive. You can then simply copy the IMG code beneath your saved image (all you have to do is click on it at Photobucket) and paste it to your post here at LitNet. Of course you always have to worry about some Puritan with nothing better to do sending in a complaint for the least nude posted and Photobucket will delete the image.:(
Stlukesguild, I agree with what you have said about Rembrandt - human beings... I am excited when I look at almost every single one of his paintings. I love ''Man with a golden hat'', and now I've read it wasn't made by him.
Attribution of older art is a slippery game. The "experts" far too often have reasons that go beyond a mere search for the truth (establishing their own reputations as "experts" often being foremost among these) for attribution of works of art to one artist or another... or for questioning such attributions. Certainly Rembrandt had a number of very talented followers and students... the best of whom could certainly imitate the master's manner quite well. Willem Drost, for example, produced some exquisite paintings that echo Rembrandt's manner quite well:
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k2...d/visionda.jpg
Starting in 1968 and continuing through the 1980s the Rembrandt Research Project sought to make the most trustworthy catalog raisonne of Rembrandt's paintings utilizing the state of the art scientific techniques. They brutally de-attributed endless paintings such as The Man in the Golden Helmet and even the Frick Museum's great Polish Rider. Obviously if one discovers a painting pigment or canvas or some such material that does not fit into the proper time-frame (or documentation proving the creation by another artist) then attribution is an easy matter. In many case, however, the proof is not conclusive. One expert or group of experts feel a painting does not display the artist's signature manner of applying paint and attribution is called into doubt. This often ignores equally persuasive arguments in the opposite direction. The Polish Rider, which the Frick refused to list as "Attributed to Rembrandt" or "School of Rembrandt", insisting all the time that it was authentic... now appears to be seen as an autograph work by the majority... with the possible assistance of efforts by students. The Man with the Golden Helmet still seems to remain as a work from a follower of Rembrandt, in spite of the fact that it has long been, and still is, a greatly revered paintings among art lovers. Then again, as an article in the New York Times put it "Hamlet is Hamlet whether it was written by the shadowy figure known as Shakespeare or by Sir Francis Bacon or even by one of those lesser claimants like the Earl of Oxford." Unfortunately the "cult of personality" in art is always such that even those who should know better... even those institutions that act as caretakers of our cultural heritage... are often more interested in the name than in the actual art. Most museums would rather own a really bad painting by a great or important artist, than a really good or even great painting by a mediocre... or unknown artist.:confused: :(
7. Joseph Cornell-
Although there are a number of Modern artists I prefer to Cornell (Picasso, Matisse, and Max Beckmann being the most obvious) I thought I'd throw something out here about ol' Joseph because he was such a fascinating figure. Cornell was born in 1903 and died in 1972 and lived most of his life in Flushing, Queens. He never left the U.S. and probably never traveled further than some 40 miles from his own back yard during his entire adult life. In spite of this he created a body of work that evoke a magical, poetic, old world charm, and yet remain uniquely American.
Cornell was born into a wealthy family and attended the Phillips Academy, Andover. Cornell had no formal art education but was exposed to a good many literary figures, especially the French Symbolist poets, who would be deeply influential upon him. At age 13, Cornell's father died and several years later Joseph went to work as a textile salesman, and became the virtual head of the family that included his mother, sister, and brother who had been stricken with cerebral palsy. Cornell's job entailed constant trips through Manhattan, during which time Cornell took up the habit of collecting a vast array of bric a brac, Victorian chintz, and other paraphernalia. The small Cornell home that he would live in all his life was overrun with books, classical music recordings, old reels of film, magazines, and all the "prizes" found by Cornell on his various journeys into the city.
At some point in his 20s Cornell began to assemble various objects and images together into three-dimensional collages (or "assemblages") which acted essentially as toys to entertain Cornell's mentally handicapped brother. He also began to create his own two-dimensional collages drawing imagery from various old Victorian book engravings. These images were combined in a manner that created a new fantastic dream-like image that defied any logic and certainly echoed what the Surrealist artist were then doing at the same time in Paris.
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k2...uild/43024.jpg
In 1932 Joseph Cornell witnessed the unloading of a collection of Surrealist art objects and collages, most importantly Max Ernst's La femme 100 têtes, which was essentially the first collage novel... constructed of 100s of steel plate engravings reassembled in a disconcerting manner. Cornell went up to Julian, the proprietor, and announced that he had similar works himself. Thinking to humor a mere eccentric, Levy invited Cornell to bring them by the gallery. Upon doing so, Levy was immediately enthralled and offered to exhibit the artist in his gallery along with the work of the Surrealists. By 1940 Cornell was largely able to leave his full-time job and focus solely upon his art.
Cornell has been passed off by many as something of an "outsider artist"... a talented lunatic, an uneducated visionary poet, etc... The reality is that although Cornell was certainly eccentric... and deeply protective of his privacy... and although he had no formal training in art and could not draw, paint or sculpt, he was nevertheless a highly educated and culturally sophisticated figure. He kept a vast library which included endless books of French poetry, Victorian novelists and story-book writers, writings by visionaries such as Novalis, Nerval, and Mary Baker Eddy, books on astronomy and botany, etc... He owned thousands of classical music recordings and regularly attended the opera, the theater, and the ballet. More importantly, he maintained continual contact and friendships (often via the mail) with many of the central figures of Surrealism, Dada, and Abstract Expressionism... as well as talented figures in other artistic fields: photographers, film-makers, poets, writers, ballet dancers, actors and actresses.
Cornell's real breakthrough occurred upon the discovery of several empty shadow boxes initially used to mount butterflies. Cornell utilized these shallow boxes in creating what essentially was a collage within a stage. The various objects he collected were carefully selected for their poetic resonance... for their metaphorical suggestiveness... and for the way in which they triggered various associations in his mind. In a way, he used objects like actors on the stage in a magical miniature theater... but also in a manner that echoed the way in which poets...especially of the Sybolist/Surrealist strain... might use a specific word or verbal image. Cornell's works have been repeatedly refered to as visual poetry or "poetic objects". It should be no surprise then that Cornell has been one of the most beloved artists among poets. Octavio Paz, Elizabeth Bishop, Raphael Alberti, John Asberry, Richard Howard, Stanley Kunitz, etc... have all written poems in homage of his work:
Hexagons of wood and glass,
scarcely bigger than a shoebox,
with room in them for night and all its lights.
Monuments to every moment,
refuse of every moment, used:
cages for infinity...
Joseph Cornell, inside your boxes
my words became visible for a moment.
Octavio Paz-from Objects and Apparitions-tr. Elizabeth Bishop
Any apartment lobby is a necropolis,
every dresser drawer a forbidden city-
so much you taught me, intimated, warned:
colors are trite, edges not to be trusted,
textures behind glass, refuse to explain
a world where fate and God himself have grown
so famous only because they have nothing to say.
The tiny is the last resort of the tremendous.
-Richard Howard from Closet Drama
Jonathan Safran Foer, author of Everything is Illuminated, began his literary career with A Convergence of Birds... a collection of writings edited by Foer that were "inspired" by Cornells "aviaries" or "dovecotes." The poet Charles Simic offered up the greatest homage, acknowledging that his own initial attempts at poetry (which admittedly failed) were attempts at combining "found" verbal images in the same manner as Cornell constructed his physical "poetic objects", ended in writing an entire book of poetic meditations and poems upon Cornell, entitled, Dimestore Alchemy, one of his most lovely works.
Cornell's boxes drew inspiration from a world of source materials... artistic, poetic, historical, literary, etc... He was repeatedly inspired by astronomy... the stars and the heavens, and repeatedly combined old astrological and astronomical maps with spheres (suggesting the sun and moon and planets) and old pipes through which one might smoke... or blow soap bubbles... either act suggestive of the passage of time in the face of infinity:
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k2...pBubbleSet.jpg
-Soap Bubble Set
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k2...ld/32_4_lg.jpg
Untitled (Solar Set)
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k2...53fabf30c3.jpg
Untitled (Solar Set)
...continued...
Cornell also built upon the image of the Victorian writing box from which the sophisticated young man would probably compose his love letters while traveling the world. This results in L'Egypte de Mlle Cleo de Merode cours elementaire d'histoire naturelle:
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k2...gypt-small.jpg
... in which the artist collects various images and items (sand, images of the nile, locusts, etc...) related to the tale of of the ballerina (Cleo/Cleopatra) for whom an Egyptian prince purportedly falls madly in love.
The jewelry box offers other possibilities as in Taglioni's Jewell Box:
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k2...oni-756648.jpg
From the brief narrative enclosed in the box lid we can immediately understand Cornell's poetic interpretation:
On a moonlight night in the winter of 1835 the carriage of Marie TAGLIONI was halted by a Russian highwayman, and that enchanting creature commanded to dance for this audience of one upon a panther's skin spread over the snow beneath the stars. From this actuality arose the legend that to keep alive the memory . . . TAGLIONI formed the habit of placing a piece of artificial ice in her jewel casket . . . where, melting among the sparkling stones, there was evoked a hint . . . of the starlit heavens, over the ice-covered landscape.
Even something as mundane as the medicine cabinet in the old pharmacy becomes something altogether wonderful in Cornell's imagination as we wonder what sort of magic is being doled out of this "Pharmacy" with jars of colored marbles, cork balls, butterfly wings, red sand, letters and notes, etc...:
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k2...l-pharmacy.jpg
Pharmacy
Perhaps Cornell's greatest works are the so-called DeMedici Slot Machines. In these works Cornell blends the image of the old slot machine where the gypsy might tell one's fortune with portraits of DeMedici children painted by Renaissance masters staged in boxes that are clearly structured upon the floor-plans of DeMedici churches (the floor-plans themselves included in the boxes) and surrounded by toy balls, blocks, etc... The child princess and princesses... children of the DeMedici who most probably were forced into growing up fast are now presented as eternal children surrounded by toys in what is essentially a poetic game for adults:
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k2...ncesssmall.jpg
DeMedici Slot Machine (DeMedici Princess)
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k2...guild/dsm1.jpg
DeMedici Slot Machine (Pinturicchio Boy)
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k2...uild/747bg.jpg
DeMedici Slot Machine (DeMedici Prince)
Among Cornell's later works are endless "hotels"... boxes which evoke the subtle colors and peeling paint and imagery suggestive of a now-lost... perhaps never-existent world of French hotels as imagined by an American in love with the French culture of poetry and fairy tale and beloved literature and art... an American who had never traveled to France and probably never would have wanted to do so, and chance destroying his dreams and illusions:
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k2...guild/erez.jpg
Hotel du Nord
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k2...uild/72527.jpg
Hotel Etoile
I have always imagined Cornell as a visual artist who was most akin with a writer such as Emily Dickinson. Like Dickinson, Cornell was a very private individual... almost reclusive... who never really traveled, except such as he did in imagination. Like Dickinson, he exhibited a characteristic New England sensibility: somewhat stark... minimal... even severe at times. Both the poet and the artist are often imagined in romanticized or sentimental terms by those who have not spent time with their work... but in both the poet and the artist have the ability to have shaped an entire world within tiny "boxes" that are formally rigorous... austere... and hard as diamonds, resulting in a truly original American art that seems unprecedented... and has never been emulated.
Further looks at Cornell:
http://pem.org/cornell/
http://www.artseditor.com/html/featu..._cornell.shtml
http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/cornell/
http://www.josephcornellsdreams.com/
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/s...toryId=1523240
Wow! Thank you so much for all the info and art you have contrabuted to this thread St Lukes! There are some real gems! I cnat stop staring at some of klee's paintings!:thumbs_up keep the info coming and links to sites about the Artists too would be great!:D
Any thank you to everyone else who has posted some of their chocolate favourites for all of us to look at!:)
You're right, thank you!Quote:
Originally Posted by stlukesguild
8. Max Beckmann-
Beckmann ranks among the giants of early Modernism just behind Picasso and Matisse... yet he is certainly far less well-known than many artists of less influence or genius. This was certainly due in large part to the fact that he was German at a period of time in which being German was not something popular with a good majority of the world. Unlike many of the artists of Europe, Beckmann was unable to negotiate a passport to Britain or the United States during the Nazi era, and as such he sat out more than a decade in Holland, before and during the war, isolated from most of the art world. Beckmann was damned by the Nazis for not being German enough, his manner of painting was not French/formalist enough (too German) to gain him the support of figures such as Alfred Barr (director of the Museum of Modern Art) or Peggy Guggenheim in assisting him with an escape from Europe, and after the war his manner of painting... Expressionism... was damned by his native country for being "too German" at a time when Germany wished to present itself as a good international partner... following whatever was the dominant international style.
But in all of this I'm getting ahead of myself. Max Beckmann was born in Germany in 1884. He attended art school and was academically trained as a painter. By the time he had entered his mid-twenties he was earning recognition by both collectors and the state. His ambition was to be a great history painter in the manner of Rubens or Delacroix, and he was openly dismissive of a great majority of Modern art, including German Expressionism... of which he would become the greatest practitioner. When he was 30, the First World War broke out and Beckmann was sent to the trenches as a medical orderly. Initially he was excited... looking forward to witnessing the sort of acts of grandeur and heroism that he had long read about, and that he imagined would inspire his work. Quickly, however, his excitement turned to horror as he witnessed the absolute grotesque destructiveness, waste, death, suffering, and stupidity that was the first major war of the modern, mechanized world. Like many, Beckmann left the war an absolutely changed man. He had a nervous breakdown, and upon returning home was unable to function living with his wife, a talented and successful opera singer. For almost 7 years he lived with a close friend and family and struggled to create an art that could speak of this new world as he now saw it.
Where Beckmann had once dismissed the distortions of Modernism and Expressionism as so much "fancy", he now saw it as a means of conveying the fragmented, broken world. His paintings from the late 19-teens are among his first mature works. In these he combined the distortions of German Expressionism and Cubism with those of Munch, Van Gogh, and the German Gothic painters and sculptors such as Mathias Grunwald, Tilman Riemenschneider, and Lucas Cranach.
His breakthrough painting... and one of the most harrowing masterpieces of Modern art... was the large canvas entitled Night:
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k2...ild/1small.jpg
This painting portrays the sort of random acts of violence committed in Germany during the unsettled days following WWI. (A good film that offers a similar view of the time is Fritz Lang's M). In Beckmann's painting a group of thugs have broken into a family's apartment and they begin to reap havoc. The father is strangled and hung, the mother half-stripped in preparation for rape, no doubt, and tied to a support beam. A young daughter is thrown out of the window while another daughter/relative witnesses it all in horror. The shallow space, the stark coloring, and the gaunt and wooden forms of the figures recall medieval paintings...
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k2...ltarpieces.jpg
and sculpture...
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k2...pitalsmall.jpg
... especially scenes of martyrdoms and brutal crucifixions. The father in Beckmann's Night distinctly recalls a Christ-like figure... with his rigid limbs (ala the Grunwald's Rigor mortis-laden Crucifixion), and palm open to us... shadowed in such a way as to suggest the very wounds of Christ.
A good many of Beckmann's paintings of this era utilized Christian iconography as a sort of analogy to the sort of suffering of the war and post-war era. At the same time... he made great use of the theater/stage/night club. Beckmann began to take on an absurdest philosophy... believing that all the world was most certainly nothing more than a stage... a meaningless, but somehow brutally beautiful show... a noisesome sound and fury... "signifying nothing". Nightclubs, clowns, masked carnival revelers, trapeze artists, and magicians all began to populate his paintings... which grew as crowded and shallow as puppet theaters:
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k2...kesguild/7.jpg
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k2...sguild/14b.jpg
By the mid 1920s, Beckmann's paintings began to take on a calmer, more "classical" look. There was a greater simplicity of form and an opening up of the space... and the figures themselves began to grow more robust... healthy. In part this was in response to the general shift toward classicism or Neo-classicism during this time, and it echoes the similar directions taken by Picasso, Matisse, and many others. It was also due to the revival of Beckmann's love life through his marriage to a second far younger wife, "Quappi":
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k2...esguild/21.jpg
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k2...esguild/24.jpg
The greatest "tension" in his paintings at this time are sexual in nature... usually taking the form of powerful, muscular, Amazon women. Beckmann was a prolific reader a was deeply fascinated with philosophy, theology, mysticism, gnosticism, psychology, and mythology. His images of these powerful "femme fatales" were certainly rooted, in part, in his readings. They also mirrored his own feelings of being somewhat at the mercy of his own passions when it came to his young wife... to sex... to his animal urges... and he may have recognized that there was perhaps something universal in such feelings:
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k2...esguild/18.jpg
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k2...esguild/27.jpg
continued...
While the male figures in many of these paintings were certainly surrogates for Beckmann himself, the artist was also more direct in exploring himself through self-portraits. Only Rembrandt and Picasso may equal Beckmann in the intensity and number of self-portraits. Beckmann explored all the various guises of himself. The artist as entertainer/performer (dressed in a gymnastic/trapeze costume beneath his dressing gown and clutching his saxophone):
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k2...esguild/35.jpg
The artist as the intense young man with empty eyes... a powerful woodblock print that gives some notion of the artist's abilities in the graphic media:
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k2...tWoodblock.jpg
most important was the artist as a success:
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k2...esguild/67.jpg
This painting of the artist dressed in his tuxedo, nonchalantly smoking (an image that would be echoed in the famous photograph of Marlena Dietrich) perfectly conveyed the image of Beckmann as the most famous German artist of his time... a Modern success story. And shortly before his fall. Beckmann had only a few more years of attending soirées with well-to-do art collectors and beautiful young women:
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k2...sguild/55b.jpg
With the rise of the Nazi party and Adolf Hitler, who adamantly despised Modern Art, Beckmann was declared a "cultural Bolshevik", and dismissed from his teaching posts. His paintings were soon confiscated from museums across Germany, and he became the best represented artist in the so-called "Degenerate Art Show", an exhibition staged by the Nazis to mock Modernism in art. Beckmann fled Germany for Amsterdam, never to return to his homeland.
The works of this period are very telling of the political upheavals of the time. The self-portraits show the artist in shackles:
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k2...guild/118b.jpg
... as a clown or circus performer in a hellishly lit circus:
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k2...sguild/119.jpg
... or trapped in his apartment... the landscape outside his window reduced to an empty black... a void... his ear held to his horn listening for the tramp of marching boots:
...http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k2...guild/116b.jpg
The key painting of this period was his first triptych (a three-panel painting format usually reserved for altarpieces), Departure. This painting portrays a central group with a woman and child that echoes a Madonna and Christ-child and a Christ-like fisherman/king and protective masked Greek hero. This group stands in a a small boat before an open sea... before an unknown but open and free future, as the artist flees his homeland. The two flanking panels portray an enclosed, crowded space filled once more with noise and acts of violence.
Similar ominous images show up during this period. Figures caged or imprisoned:
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k2...sguild/100.jpg
Still life paintings on the traditional Memento mori ("remember death") theme with skulls and other images such as burning candles suggestive of the continual march of time:
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k2...sguild/106.jpg
continued...
Two of the most powerful paintings of the war-years are the huge Bird's Hell and Death. In the former, Beckmann portrays a crowded hell (his compositions growing ever more crammed and echoing the horror vacuii or "fear of emptiness" ..."of the void" that is a common element of medieval art) in which giant Heironymus Bosch-like birds torture and kill their human prey before a great German Eagle, a noisy marching band, and arms/wings raised in a sieg heil!salute:
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k2...uild/128sm.jpg
Deathis a surreal scene in which the deceased is surrounded in a darkened room by an upside-down choir and various monstrous sea-creatures and figures carrying out obscene acts... all overseen by a black, multi-footed priest:
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k2...uild/131-1.jpg
During the war, Amsterdam was occupied by the Germans and Beckmann was under orders not to create any art under penalty of death. In spite of this... and in spite of the difficulties he faced in earning an income, obtaining supplies, or selling his art... he continued to paint... and paint prolifically. He produced at least 6 of his triptychs during this period and dozens, if not hundreds, of other paintings... many of them quite large. His paintings grew increasingly crowded as figures butted up against each other, interlocked like so many puzzle pieces. His imagery grew increasingly dense and symbolically-laden, as he built upon his knowledge of history, mythology, gnosticism, etc... These paintings immediately strike one as powerful and darkly brooding... the lush and sensuous colors (purples, oranges, neon-greens) glow brilliantly like stained glass surrounded by the bituminous black leading... yet a specific or easily defined "meaning" of the symbolism often alludes the viewer. Such paintings certainly include the triptych, The Actors, in which a King-like actor unexpectedly commits suicide on the stage before his horrified co-star, while the director checks his notes looking for a scene that obviously wasn't in the script... while to the right a scene almost certainly suggesting Christ's arrest is underway:
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k2...uild/137b2.jpg
It might be noted that these paintings are all quite sizable...
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k2...guild/137b.jpg
...heroic-scaled mythologies prooving that Beckmann had surely achieved his goal of becoming a great history painter... unfortunately a history painter in an age in which history had become horror.
The last 5 years of Beckmann's life were spent in the United States. There the artist captured images of the immediately recognizable landscape of the American South-West:
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k2...guild/148b.jpg
... or images of the modern urban landscape/cityscape of highways, high-rises, and high-tension bridges surrounding great cities such as San Francisco:
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k2...d/147small.jpg
Beckmann taught painting at the graduate level (in spite of his severely limited abilities in English) in San Francisco and in St. Louis, where the painter, Philip Guston, one of the rising stars of Abstract Expressionism, recommended the artist... as a personal hero. The great muscular Amazon women again make their appearance in his painting... inspired by what he imagined as a uniquely American type of woman as witnessed in the cinema and on the beaches:
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k2...kmannsmall.jpg
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k2...uild/151sm.jpg
The artist continued to paint himself... now as something of the cool and collected American sophisticate, dressed in his casual dress jacket... still sucking on the very cigarettes that would speed his early death. Beckmann spent his final year in New York City... a city that awakened in him his former love of extreme spectacle. He spoke of the city as a Babylon beyond anything imagined by the "provincial" Europeans, where he could hear the wild beasts roar. He died in New York of a massive heart-attack... on the way to take another final look this last self-portrait as it hung in a gallery space. In his apartment on an easel was his final completed painting, The Falling Man:
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k2...uild/153-1.jpg
The painting portrays a partially-nude male figure falling through the skies... flanked by towering buildings that billow with smoke and flame... high-rise buildings that could only have been found in New York. The painting again leaves one partially puzzled... but moved. The image echoes that of the "Hanged Man" and "The Tower" from the tarot deck (imagery that Beckmann was certainly familiar with). Perhaps even more disturbing for the contemporary viewer is what almost amounts to a premonition of the fall of the World Trade Center buildings and the people falling after leaping from the flames. And yet what does one make of the winged angel-like figures in the distance? As Babylon's towers eventually crumble and fall and and mankind with them... something in the distance... on the horizon... waits?
Beckmann's reputation after his death rapidly faded. His style of painting placed him firmly at the head of the German Expressionist movement at a time when German artists/art collectors/art critics were seeking to avoid anything that looked "too German"... or too intense or powerful. German art of the era preferred to present a weak shadow of American abstraction... the new "International Style". In the United States, on the other hand, Beckmann was simply too much representative of the "old world" at a time when American painting was asserting itself as the dominant and most advanced art of its time. The Museum of Modern Art and the Met (among other Museums) would both turn down the chance for a Beckmann retrospective as recently as the early 1980s. By the mid-1980s, however, Beckmann's reputation began to grow. Philip Guston's late figurative work, Francis Bacon's Expressionistic triptychs and Picassos late paintings began to have a major impact upon young artists of the so-called Neo-Expressionist movement. Major new figures suddenly burst upon the scene out of Germany... painters such as Anselm Kiefer, George Bazelitz, Jorge Immendorf, Gerhard Richter, etc... who all rejected the cool, detached formalism and minimalism of the current "international style", and began to discover their own artistic roots in earlier German art. It soon became obvious that Beckmann was a forgotten precursor and giant to all of these. Once "rediscovered" his reputation continued to grow (there have been at least 3 retrospectives of his works at major American museums in the past decade or so) until he now stands deservedly among the greatest painters of the 20th century.
I'll be leaving for a brief trip to New York and Washington D.C. so no new postings 'til next week.
I like the Goya that Trystan posted earlier:
The way he dehumanizes the soldiers on the right by grouping them together is very clever. They become a faceless battery rather than individual people. Meanwhile, between the agonizing peasants about to be executed and the pile of bodies is the single man with his arms in the air. He's in this oddly heroic and simultaneously despairing pose, too. Also, we know he's about to be murdered. The body directly to his right is in almost the same pose--prefiguring the white-shirted man's death. This adds something dramatic. It's not just a moment of confrontation between the man and the soldiers. It's also a process that can't be stopped. Above the drama, though, is the cityscape which is solemn looking. Its dignity contrasts with the gruesome action in the foreground.Quote:
Originally Posted by Trystan
Altogether, I really enjoyed the painting. Thanks for posting it Trystan.
Oops... double post.
Yes... the Goya is certainly a powerful painting. The artist masterfully leads our eye... down the sloping hill to the faceless phalanx of soldiers who stand more as a "thing"... a machine... than as individual beings. From them we are lead along their rifles and bayonets to the poor souls awaiting imminent execution. These persons are seen as distinct individuals. The central figure, dressed in white, gestures in a manner that shows no fear... no cowering to these mindless purveyors of death and destruction. He is also clearly portrayed as an almost Christ-like figure... his pose echoing that of the crucifixion... the monk with his clutched crucifix before him reinforcing this symbolism and his left arm leading the eye to the church tower in the background which acts as a symbolic and visual axis upon which the painting is divided. Like the painting of the Execution of Lady Jane Gray, which we discussed earlier, the stark white of Goya's "martyr" creates a great deal of tension as we cannot help but recognize that this virginal color will soon be stained in the blood of the wearer. The painting is a marvelous Romantic-era masterwork: loosely or boldly painted... dramatic... theatrical... emotionally charged. :thumbs_up
I like the various portraits of Ezra Pound by Wyndham Lewis:
Quote:
Originally Posted by stlukesguild
I think it is from the series called 'The Horrors of War' or something. Goya only gets better with Saturn Devouring One of His Sons:
And who can forget the two Maja paintings? I incorporated the above painting of Saturn in an essay on Lautreamont once, I think he makes use of it in Maldoror.
The Goya painting with the man in white is startling. Notice that his shirt is so brilliantly white, while the others are so dark. He is in the moment of truth. His comrades are dead, they are lifeless (and so is their colour). He is about to become a martyr, and this is his time to shine. While the others, aside from the monk, are trying to escape and avoid death, he is not. He is (like Christ) putting his hands up in acknowledgement and acceptance of his death. That is why his shirt is so white.
Also, notice the monk praying beside him. This also leads me to the Christ-like comparison that Goya gives. I think he is there so that we can make that connection. Is he just praying, or is he praying for protection and exemption? His anxious expression lead me to the latter. I think that he is there so that we make the religious connection and to amplify and accent the faith of the man in white.
I think it is from the series called 'The Horrors of War' or something.
It was one of two paintings. The first portraying the Spanish uprising against the Napoleonic forces on May 2nd. The second displaying the Napoleonic response. The painting was certainly one of many works "inspired" by the horrors of the French invasion of Spain, but the series you are referring to, The Disasters of War, is actually a series of prints:
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k2...uild/goya3.jpg
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k2...uild/goya7.jpg
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k2...ild/goya11.jpg
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k2...ild/goya19.jpg
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k2...ild/goya29.jpg
There are many more prints from this series... a good many far more explicit in their violence: scenes of rape, executions, mutilations... on both sides of the conflict. Goya's graphic portrayal of the horrors of war combined with his expressive handling of his media... and the expressive distortions of his later "Black Paintings" such as Saturn Devouring his Children, made him a major influence upon Modern art and especially upon Expressionists such as Otto Dix:
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k2...uild/Dix01.jpg
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k2...uild/Dix02.jpg
... George Grosz:
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k2...totakeamer.jpg
... and Max Beckmann (who we looked at above).
... continued...
Goya's late painting... including the Saturn Devouring his Children... are often referred to as his "black paintings"... both because of the predominance of the color black, but also because of the darkness of the themes of most of these paintings, including witchcraft...
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k2...tchssabbat.jpg
...exorcism...
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k2...d577433568.jpg
...religious fanaticism and the inquisition...
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k2...ild/goya62.jpg
...the asylums for the mentally disturbed...
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k2...a_de_locos.jpg
One of my favorites is The Dog:
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k2...ld/goyadog.jpg
In this stark and almost empty painting a lone dog... seemingly lost at sea and facing the swelling waves that threaten to drown him... looks up... with very little hope... for a non-existent master... God?
Returning to the painting of Saturn Devouring his Children I must say I have always been struck by the fact that in spite of the horrific image, Goya's painting strikes me as less shocking than Ruben's version of the same theme:
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k2...ens_saturn.jpg
... because of the realism that the elder master brings to the subject that strips away a distance between us and what is portrayed.
9. Sultan Muhammad, Bihzad, the Shanameh and Classical Persian Book Illumination.
So let's leave the modern era... and let's leave the art of the West and turn to the Middle-East. As an admitted and unrepentant bibliophile I have long been enamored of the book as an art object: everything from William Morris’ Kelmscott Chaucer, Aldus Manutius’ Hynerotomachia Poliphili, Albrecht Dürer’s Apocalypse, Henri Matisse’s Jazz, Dore’s illustrated classics, Chagall’s Four Tales from the Arabian Nights, and of course William Blake’s visionary illuminations of his own poetry... on through contemporary works of "book arts" have in their way, been as familiar and as important to me as an artist as almost any work in the more traditional genre of painting. Being something of a medievalist as well (medieval art offered me the first real understanding of the world of art beyond “realism”) I must admit that it has been the medieval book more than anything that has kept me obsessed with the book as a visual art form.
I have had a long love affair with the medieval book in all its splendid variety: the Anglo-Saxon and Celtic manuscripts (the Book of Durrow, the Book of Kells, the Lindesfarne Gospels) with their ornate calligraphy woven into the most magical of knotted and intertwined abstractions… the boldly graphic, expressively colored and often horrific Hiberno-Islamic illuminations of the Commentaries of Beatus of Liebana on the Book of Revelations (works which most certainly were a major source of inspiration for Picasso), the marvelous French Gothic manuscripts such as the beautiful Paris Psalter and the expressionistic Hours of the Rohan Master. Of course I was forever enchanted with the exquisitely delicate works of the Limbourg Brothers, especially the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, perhaps THE masterwork of late medieval book arts in Europe.
Naturally, I was equally drawn to the wonders of the book as an art form as it existed beyond the West… especially the Moorish, Turkish, Arabic, and Persian books. The marvelous gilded labyrinths of Islamic calligraphy to be found in the finest volumes of the Qu’ran dazzled me like nothing else...
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k2...ild/1412-1.jpg
...save perhaps the most ornate examples of Anglo-Saxon/Celtic interlace. Even more fascinating were the magical manuscripts illuminating the most illustrious work of Persian poetry: Nezami (Nezami-ye Ganjavi),Omar Khayyám, Attar (Abū Hamīd bin Abū Bakr Ibrāhīm), Shams (Shams-e-Tabrīzī Ab'ul Hasan Yamīn al-Dīn Khusrow), Saadi (Saadi-Muslih-ud-Din Mushrif ibn Abdullah), Rumi (Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Balkhi-Rumi), Hafez (Khwāja Šams ud-Dīn Muhammad Hāfez-e Šīrāzī). These enchanting illuminated miniatures, gilded and spectacularly patterned, teeming with tiny, elegant figures and staged in the most sumptuous bedecked interiors or the most sensuous and idyllic garden settings immediately brought to life the whole resplendent, exotic, and sensual atmosphere of the Arabian Nights... the exotic Middle-east as a Westerner might dream it. These were the most fabulous of visual fairy tales and dreamscapes in which one might lose oneself for hours.
Persian culture is ancient and Persia had existed as a stable empire for some 1300 years, far outlasting its great rivals, Greece and Rome. From 643-650 the Persian Empire under the Sasanian rulers suffered a devastating defeat at the hands of the Byzantine Empire which so weakened them as to result in their subsequent subjugation by the small and numerically inferior Islamic Arab forces, and later by invading Mongols. It isn't until the 11th century and the rise of the great classical Persian poets, especially Abolqasem Ferdowsi, whose Shahnameh is the epic poem of Persia/Iran, that Persian culture once again began to assert itself. Persia had accepted the Arab religion of Islam, but contrary to Muhammad ibn Ismail al-Bukhari's iconoclastic strictures as put forth in his "Life of the Prophet", the al-Jaami al-Sahih, and the influence of the rise of iconoclasm in the Byzantine Empire beginning in the 8th century under the emperor, Leo II, the tradition of imagery and visual narrative was deeply ingrained in Persian culture.
With the rise to power of the Safavid rulers in 1501, and a growing awareness of their own Persian history and culture, Persian poetry and art entered a "golden age". Manuscript illumination became thought of as the highest form of art, combining calligraphy:
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k2...1254dsmall.jpg
... magnificent endsheets:
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k2...b_6726678R.jpg
... marvelous landscapes:
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k2...ld/RiverB1.jpg
... ornate interwoven abstractions:
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k2...d/Abstract.jpg
... even collage!:eek: as in this page in which each shape in the design and the very lettering itself is produced from cut paper!
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k2...edImage-24.jpg
Three great schools of painting and book production arose in the cities of Shiraz, Herat, and Tabriz. The school of Shiraz was especially known for a more symmetrical/geometric approach to painting and page layout, and a frieze-like approach... even early on, as can be seen in the “Demotte Shanameh.”
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k2...d/hb_34241.jpg
The Shiraz school would reach its artistic peak with the production of an illuminated copy of Nezami’s Kahmseh, produced in 1491.
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k2...guild/shrz.jpg
The details, clarity, and confidence of this work surpass anything before seen in Persian miniatures. Painting of Shiraz would have a major influence throughout Persia.
The school of Tabriz under the Turkoman workshops was especially known for expressionistic or even “Dionysian” paintings in which figures are staged in the most sensuous, and florid landscapes. Faces and creatures (“grotesques”) are often found hidden in the rocks and vegetation. The luxuriant and lush foliage and rolling clouds were clearly influenced by Chinese art. To this the Turkoman artists at Tabriz added the most brilliant coloring.
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k2..._6321011-1.jpg
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k2...siah1624-1.jpg
continued...
One of the most spectacular manuscripts to have been produced at Tabriz was an unfinished Shanameh (1515-1522) of which only a single image remains: Rustam Sleeping while Rakhsh Fights the Lion,attributed to the painter Sultan Muhammad:
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k2...ild/Rustam.jpg
The scale and quality of this painting,, are enough to substantiate its claim to having been one of the greatest masterworks of Turkoman style at Tabriz. Sultan Muhammad, the leading painter of the Turkoman style, is credited with several other exceptional works, perhaps most brilliant being the luminous image of the Miraj or the heavenly ascension of the prophet Muhammad, painted for an illuminated text of Nezami’s Khamseh (c. 1540):
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k2...d/MirajB1z.jpg
The painting school of Herat was established in the early 15th century drawing upon many of the best artists from Shiraz and Tabriz. The artists of Herat were especially accomplished at painting people staged within complex settings beautifully composed. The greatest of the artists at Herat was Kamal ud-Din Behzad Herawi or Bihzad (c. 1460–1535), generally acknowledged as the greatest of all Persian painters. Bihzad had a special talent for not only portraying people but also in conveying a clarity of action or narrative, and staging this within a sophisticated space that drew great attention to the surroundings of everyday urban life. In this scene of a beheading (below) Bihzad's use of color and positioning of the figures leads the eye to the central drama... and then around the picture where we find a great variety of personalities and their differing... even conflicting responses to the event unfolding before us:
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k2...ild/ek9803.jpg
In this scene Bihzad explores the everyday actions of urban life in a major Persian metropolis:
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k2...ld/Bihzad1.jpg
The eye is led around through scenes of beggars, barbers, bathers, and carpet sellers. Bihzad adds the sophisticated element of the architectural detailing breaking out of the rectangular picture plane.
One of the best examples of Bihzad’s work from Herat is to be found in his painting of Joseph and Zulaykha (the Hebrew Joseph and Potipher’s wife):
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k2...zad-Yusefs.jpg
In this painting the virtuous Joseph flees the amorous advances of Zulaykha running through a labyrinthine space in which the viewer is given a simultaneous interior and exterior view. Bricks, patterned tiles, Persian rugs, and steep stairwells are at once dazzling and disorienting… perhaps conveying Joseph’s own feelings as he seeks to escape from Zulaykha. The artist allows towers and balconies to again break out of the rectangular space while also weaving the text throughout the image in the most sophisticated manner.
Under the Safavid rulers, and the examples of Sultan Muhammad and Bihzad, there is a brilliant synthesis of the various Persian miniature styles that would result in what is arguably THE masterwork of Persian painting, the so-called Shahnameh of Tabriz (or the "Houghton Shahnameh"). Entire workshops of calligraphers, painters, gilders, leather workers, book binders, etc... were employed under the oversight of masters, including Sultan Muhammad and Bihzad. The format for each individual illustration was conceived of independently and involved the input of many different hands… some with quite dissimilar methods of working, and so for a book to maintain any sense of continuity and coherence demanded clear thinking, planning, and foresight on the part of the masters. This must have been especially challenging considering the fact the text and paintings could not always be completed in sequence. In order to maintain a degree of continuity of style, the artists in the workshops employed scrapbook collections or anthologies of calligraphy styles...
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k2...graphyBook.jpg
...painting styles for rendering various flora, fauna, or figures...
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...as models in creating a work as complex as an illuminated manuscript. Something similar to these examples of calligraphy and imagery collaged into compositions may have even served as a mock-up or proto-codex in preparation for the final book. The stringent demands placed upon the workshop artists for major illuminated manuscripts can be clearly witnessed by the quality of the works rejected, as in this unfinished folio page:
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The Shahnameh of Tabriz is the most brilliant realization of the Persian book arts. No other book comes near to its level of polish, refinement and decorativeness. The work is the most stunning merger of painting, design, and calligraphy in the service of the singular masterwork of Persian poetry. Any number of the individual folio miniatures certainly rank among the finest examples of Persian painting… of painting in general. Among the most splendid miniatures one might wish to look particularly to The Court of Gayumars:
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This painting is the culmination of the Turkoman style, and echoes many of the most striking elements of Rustam Sleeping while Rakhsh Fights the Lion. Both works show the influence, if not the hand of the painter, Sultan Muhhamad. The Court of Gayumars is considered by many to be the greatest of Persian manuscript paintings. The painting represents Gayumars, the first king of Persia, who ruled from the mountaintops and in whose presence the wild beasts became meek as lambs. Gayumars is seen sitting atop his mountain before a backdrop of flowering trees silhouetted against a gilded sky. He looks down mournfully at his son, Siyamak, who will be killed in battle with the Black Div. Beneath him his courtiers stand organized in a circular manner around a center of leafy, luxuriant vegetation. The court is bracketed by further exuberant flora and vividly colored rocks which burst forth from the limits of the rectangular frame.
continued...
The contributions to the Shahnameh of the painter, Sultan Muhammad are further seen in several other equally magnificent paintings beyond the possible attribution of the aforementioned tour de force (The Court of Gayumars). Among these is the splendid painting of Hushang Discovering Fire:
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Like The Court of Gayumars this painting is unmatched in its vigorous portrayal of sensuous flora and fauna. The work also exploits a similar circular/organic organization of the figures beneath the central figure of Hushang. An equally marvelous painting (also possibly by Sultan Muhammad) that repeats the sumptuous and organic Turkoman style is the painting Rustam, aided by his Horse, Rakhsh, Slays a Dragon:
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Here we find a Chinese-inspired dragon writhes in a serpentine knot as he wrestles with Rustam’s trusty steed, while the great warrior strikes the death blow with his sword. This arabesque of action takes place in a brilliantly colored and opulent landscape where the very fauna and the swirling clouds repeat the twisting and snaking motion of the central drama. The color alone would certainly inspire jealousy in an artist such as Matisse, Bonnard, or Gauguin.
In contrast to these, paintings such as The Nightmare of Zahhak...
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...clearly reverberate with the influence of Bihzad and the painting school of Herat. The viewer is presented with a geometrically constructed depiction of Zahhak’s palace that is at once an interior and exterior view. There is the most exquisite attention given to details of the setting and the decorative architectural patterns. The most refined element, however, is the artist’s mastery with the human figure. The scene illustrated in the narrative is of that moment at which Zahhak, the evil “snake king” awakes screaming from a dream in which he envisions his own death at the hands of a great hero wielding an ox-headed mace. Rather than focus upon Zahhak, the artist (quite possibly Bihzad himself) gives all his attention to the reaction of Zahhak’s court. Courtiers in the magnificent royal palace look up in surprise; Guardsmen in the towers glance over the balconies in an effort to discern just what the commotion is all about, while the women of the harem hold their fingers to their lips in a gesture of surprise or whisper to each other as they pass on the stairwells:
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Many of the finest paintings of the Shahnameh and later Persian manuscripts of the "classical" period combine elements of both the lush Turkoman manner of Tabriz and the more cultured and urbane style of Bihzadian Herat. The dynamic, fervid, and “Dionysian” approach of Sultan Muhammad, the leading painter of the Turkoman school, was influenced by the balanced, harmonious, and humane school of Herat under the elder Bihzad. In the painting of Zahhak Receiving the Daughters of Jamshid whose Throne he has Usurped, (attributed to Sultan Muhammad):
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... there is a marvelous merger of the two modes of working. Zahhak, the “snake king” is seen enthroned in the most ornate and luxurious of palaces and surrounded by courtiers and servants. The almost gothic/baroque sensory overload or horror vacuii of the fabulous patterned architectural setting continues into the surrounding landscape where twisting trees bloom and clouds spiral and dance against a gilded sky. The gold itself carries over back into the architecture so that the sophisticated, urbane setting and organic natural surrounding almost become one.
In the Folio representing The Murder of King Mirdas:
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...one may discover another marvelous example of the merger of styles. The painting presents the brutal patricide of Mirdas which occurs in a lush garden orchard. Mirdas lies with his back broken in a pit dug by his son, Zahhak while unseen observers peer out from doors and balconies of the palace, suggesting the evil deed did not go unnoticed. Spectators, often women, concealed behind doors and balconies, or peering from behind veils and curtains are suggestive of a sophisticated view of the intrigues of the court and were quite expressive of the influence of Bihzad and the urbane style of Herat. A similar balance of the organic and the geometric… the landscape wilderness and the sophistication of civilization can be found in the painting of Sam and Zal are Welcomed into Kabul, Where the Latter is to be Betrothed to Rudabe, a Decendant of Zahhak.(Now there's a title!):
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In this painting the mounted warriors under Sam and Zal move diagonally across the desert landscape. This diagonal is picked up and reiterated by the rigidly ordered line of figures welcoming them into the city. This rigidity itself restates the strict geometry of the fortified architectural setting. Perhaps the most remarkable detail is to be found in the balcony which juts out from the severe structure of the architecture in profile against the most gestural and organic element of the entire painting, the twisting tree silhouetted against the gilded sky which swirls in an arabesque that immediately draws ones eye to the very place where Zal’s wife-to-be observes the hero’s entrance unnoticed.
The Shahnameh of Tabriz remained intact and in near-perfect condition well into the 20th century. The calligraphy remained crisp, the paper flawless and the brilliant colors remained virtually unchanged, due in part, no doubt, to the fact that the book had seldom been opened for reading thanks to a lack of understanding of the Persian language (Farsi) and only upon rare occasions for the display of the paintings to honored visitors. In 1959 the Baron Edmond de Rothschild, sold the intact book to the American collector, Arthur Houghton. Rothschild, who had taken special care to ensure that the miniatures were always well-protected had initially turned to the Metropolitan Museum of Art with the belief that a work of such importance deserved to be housed in an appropriate institution. The Met, however, on the recommendation of the board of trustees (headed by Houghton!) passed on the prospect, at which time Houghton snatched it up it for himself.
Initially Houghton placed the book at Harvard with the understanding that an elegant and scholarly facsimile would be published by the university’s academic press. It was thought that Houghton might eventually donate the work to his alma mater. Harvard’s Fogg Museum contained a renowned collection of Islamic art, an ideal setting for the work. In 1972, however, Houghton became “piqued” with the university’s delay in the production of the book and he pulled the Shahnameh and brought it to New York. At that time, after remaining intact for over 400 years, Houghton inexplicably tore 78 of the finest paintings from the book and presented them as a gift to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Thomas Hoving, then director of the Met states, “I was flatly opposed to the breaking up of the book in any fashion. I confronted Arthur physically, personally on the matter, but he was determined to do this, and he was the chairman of our board of trustees, after all.” On the other hand, Hoving also admitted that Houghton’s gift “was like getting a whole bunch of Michelangelo paintings from out of the blue.”
As the museum held non-profit status Houghton sought to claim a sizeable tax reduction. Unfortunately the bequest came at a point at which the government was becoming increasingly suspicious of deductions claimed for the donation of art. A gift this size was enough to trigger an audit by the IRS, who disallowed Houghton’s claim. Houghton became terrified that the government would eventually begin to investigate all of his business dealings… especially his various charitable foundations which had acted as fronts for the CIA during the Cold War.
Houghton’s fears (“unbelievably paranoid” according to Hoving) led him to the irrational decision to dispose of the remains of the Shahnameh. He initially offered it to the Shah of Iran, but the $20 million asking price was rejected. At this point he began to consign a few pieces at a time (prudently to avoid “flooding the market” and hurting his price) to Christie’s of London for public auction. The £785,000 realized by the sale of thefirst seven folio pages should certainly have proved to the IRS that Houghton’s claim as to the monetary value of his donation to the Met was in no way inflated. Over the next decade or so Houghton continued to remove further folios from the Shahnameh and consign them to the auction block. This wholesale pillage of one of the greatest masterpieces of world art only came to a halt when Houghton died in 1990. By that time only 120 of the plates remained. All that exists today to suggest the coherent magnificence of the book as it originally existed is the scholarly limited edition facsimile eventually published by Harvard.
In spite of the irreparable vandalism that the Shahnameh had suffered, the Iranians were still more than eager to get what remained of their cultural patrimony. The estimated $20-million price tag, however, was impossible to justify for a mere work of art, especially following the prolonged and devastating war with Iraq. Eventually an ingenious barter was worked out between Houghton’s estate and the Iranian government. The Iranians had been attempting to get rid of certain “decadent” paintings that were “unsuitable” for public exhibition under the Islamic rule. Among these was the painting, Woman III, by the Abstract Expressionist, Willem de Kooning, to which a like value of $20 million had been arbitrarily assigned. The trade took place under clandestine conditions upon the neutral turf of the Vienna airport. The remains of the Shahnameh were returned to in Iran in triumph and proudly put upon public display in Tehran, in the Museum of Contemporary Art which had sacrificed the de Kooning. The de Kooning, on the other hand, was privately sold for an undisclosed sum to the media executive, David Geffen, and immediately disappeared from public view. The great British art critic, David Sylvester, a champion of Modernism, was quoted as saying that “the Shahnameh was worth at least 20 paintings by de Kooning, and that the Houghton Foundation had been the loser in exchanging the work for one painting by de Kooning, and that the Iranian government had actually recovered the Shahnameh gratis.” One cannot easily question Sylvester’s claim, considering the fact that in 2006 just a single folio painting of the Shahnameh was auctioned off for $1.7 million, making it the 7th most-expensive book or part of a book sold that year… in spite of it being but a single page.
The parts of the Shahnameh can be found in collections around the world, including not only the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but also The State Hermitage Museum in Russia and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tehran. The book was a entire art gallery between two covers and almost every individual painting is worthy of careful examination. It was one of the most magical works of art ever created; a virtual visual fairy-tale. Looking at the paintings one can easily see why artists as diverse as Ingres, Delacroix, Gauguin, Matisse, Klee, Beckmann, Kandinsky, etc… were greatly impressed with and inspired by Persian painting. At the same time one would hope that the tragic events surrounding the Shahnameh rooted in greed and a disregard for the cultural achievements outside one’s own culture would have taught us a lesson not soon forgotten. Unfortunately the looting of the Baghdad Museum following the invasion of Iraq suggests that we may still have far to go.
Bibliographic sources:
Basbanes, Nicholas A., A Splendor of Letters; The Permanence of Books in an Impermanent World, HarperCollins Publishers, NY 2003, ISBN:0-06-008287-9
Blair, Sheila S. and Bloom, Jonathan M., The Art and Architecture of Islam, 1250-1800,
Yale University Press, NY 1994, ISBN: 0-300-05888-8
Danby, Miles, Moorish Style, Phaidon Press, London 1995, ISBN: 0-7148-3861-6
Davis, Dick (translation and Introduction) Abolqasem Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh, The Persian Book of Kings, Penguin Books, NY 2006, ISBN: 978-0-14-310493-3
Ferrier, R.W. ed., The Arts of Persia, Yale University Press, NY 1989, ISBN-10: 0300039875
Piortrovski, M.B. and Rogers, J.M. editors, Heaven on Earth: Art from Islamic Lands, Prestel Verlag, Munich, Berlin, London, NY 2004, ISBN:3-7913-3055-1
That's what I was expecting Stlukesguild, bravo! Excellent post. Very, very enlightening. I have been indirectly and discreetly egging you on to write something like this because I knew since the day one that you had it all inside your head. Excellent, chapeau bas! The last lines are very, very touching. Some day we will discuss another similar topic very close to my heart: Moors in Spain. That was another great chapter in the history of human artistic achievement. All the propaganda around us tells that we are out to civilize the world whereas the truth lies in the fact that we can still learn a thing or two from those 'stone-age fanatics'. Yet another interesting thing: art saves the truth. Whatever we are led to believe is negated in the above paintings. Beauty is truth, indeed, and truth beauty. Beauty saves!
Kafka... Thanks. Of course I had the advantage of being able to use a somewhat edited version of the essay I had written for a class on Non-Western Art I took this Spring as part of the requirements for renewing my teaching license. The art of Arab-Andalusia or Moorish Spain, you say? Truly a fascinating period. I'm actually reading a good amount of poetry from that time, and I do very much admire the architecture and the Romanesque book illuminations. Perhaps not so far down the road.
My favourite artist would be Caspar David Friedrich.
http://www.onlinekunst.de/wetter/sch..._Friedrich.jpg
http://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/2001/spirit/large/02.jpg
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These are three of his pictures. I like the monk by the sea best. That's the third one.
Caspar David Friederich. Yes! The great German Romantic landscape painter. Personally, I prefer Turner... but Friederich is certainly no slouch. If anything he is underrated... largely because most of his paintings are still in Germany limiting their exposure to French, Spanish, British, American (etc...) artists. Both he and Turner capture that Romantic feeling of the "sublime" in nature. Turner more often achieves this with the turbulent even violent: storms, avalanches, fires, the churning sea, the blinding light of the sun... although there are a good many examples where he unveils the sublime in the more subdued... "elegiac" side of nature. Friederich's work is continually elegiac: the light of day or the moon seems to be just rising... or more often waning. His light bathes everything in a feeling of melancholy... which is further heightened quite often by his choice of imagery: lone figures standing before the vast expanse of the sea... before the void?.. ruins of Gothic cathedrals or Greek Temples, etc...
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Monk before the Sea may just be my favorite as well. It his paintings one can surely see links with a painter such as Mark Rothko.
I remember carrying a print of The Wanderer above a Sea of Clouds in my college folder as a spotty 16 year old teenager (back in 1985). This was my favorite painting then. Later on I fell in love with Ginevra Benci and that love is still going on after 14 years of obsession with one painting:
That is an exquisite painting. The only Leonardo painting in the entire Western Hemisphere. I certainly make a point of seeing it on every visit to the National Gallery in Washington. I don't think its much bigger than the reproduction you've posted. Leonardo certainly does capture a sphinx-like unearthliness in this and a few other paintings... an element that Rossetti was able to put so well into words when responding to Leonardo's equally mysterious Virgin of the Rocks:
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For Our Lady of the Rocks by Leonardo Da Vinci
by Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Mother, is this the darkness of the end,
The Shadow of Death? and is that outer sea
Infinite imminent Eternity?
And does the death-pang by man's seed sustained
In Time's each instant cause thy face to bend
Its silent prayer upon the Son, while He
Blesses the dead with His hand silently
To His long day which hours no more offend?
Mother of grace, the pass is difficult,
Keen are these rocks, and the bewildered souls
Throng it like echoes, blindly shuddering through.
Thy name, O Lord, each spirit's voice extols,
Whose peace abides in the dark avenue
Amid the bitterness of things occult.
I used this painting a while back in the Chekhov discussion. About two weeks into a conversation on a short story called "The Black Monk" I remembered that a German had painted a masterpiece that would go perfectly with the story. I'll have to dig up what I wrote about it. Wait, here it is:Quote:
Originally Posted by stlukesguild
and Janine added:Quote:
Originally Posted by Quark
It's an excellent painting. Thanks for bringing these up. I'll try to come up with an image myself to add to the conversation.Quote:
Originally Posted by Janine
I like very much impressionists like Auguste Renoir,Claude Monet,Edgar Degas.
My favourite Renoir's painting:
http://www.poster.net/renoir-auguste...rs-9701659.jpg
Some works of Monet:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Claude_Monet_040.jpg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:C...ing_Willow.JPG
And Degas' painting:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi..._Degas_009.jpg
And one of my favourite artists is also Vermeer:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...ing_(1665).jpg