Wednesday, December 22, 2010
Holiday greetings from an alumnus in the Netherlands
We just got a Christmas card from Johan Arp including a marvelous drawing. He writes:
I graduated from FAS in Amsterdam in 1970 and directly started designing and making art part time in combination with my regular job as a banker at ABN AMRO. I retired from the bank in 2007 and I’m very happy to be a full time artist and designer now. The 24 Lessons of the FAS Course were very solid and I’m still using the textbooks and working with the FAS methods. It gives me great pleasure!
You can see Johan’s art at his website: www.johanarp.nl
Happy holidays to all—we wish you a creative and art-filled 2011!
Christmas/New Year greeting by Johan Arp. (click to enlarge)
Friday, December 10, 2010
Transported by technology to a monastery in Milan
The great Leonardo completed his masterwork, The Last Supper, in 1498 after several years of work. Sadly, the painting started to crumble as its tempera paint began to dry, and it has not been able to be seen by the general public. But now, in New York City until January 6, contemporary art lovers can visit a multimedia exploration of this painting, complete with a reconstruction of the refectory of the monastery of Santa Maria delle Grazie. Art critics may quibble at the “big production” aspect of this presentation, which features portentous music and moving images, but there’s no arguing with the impact of seeing this iconic work full size (and in enlarged detail). Here’s a review by a skeptical art critic, and here’s an article about the process of creating this experience. What do you think?
Wednesday, December 01, 2010
Artworks that survived Hitler
Today’s New York Times has a front-page article describing a routine excavation in Berlin that turned up a number of pieces of sculpture. At first, the find presented a mystery. Although the pieces were easily identified as early twentieth-century works, it took a while to unravel the connection among them. It turns out that the pieces were victims of the Nazis’ campaign against what they called “degenerate art.” They were seized from museums in the 1930s, exhibited as examples of “degenerate art”—and then they disappeared. It’s possible that they were hidden by Erhard Oewerdieck, who is known to have protected and supported Jews and anti-Nazi activists. One theory proposes that he was sequestering the art in a building where his office was located. In 1944, the building burned in the aftermath of Allied air raids, and the sculptures were buried in the rubble. An exhibition featuring the resurrected sculptures is touching, since it reminds us that the past is not lost—perhaps just temporarily misplaced.
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