Category: ARTviews
Friday, February 05, 2010
A new look at Van Gogh
The popular view of Vincent Van Gogh, which probably most of us share, is of a wild-eyed mad genius, creating paintings full of colorful outbursts and eventually committing suicide while in the throes of mental illness. In their broad outlines, these facts are true, but there is so much more to know about this seminal artist. And once we know him better we can admire him even more for what he accomplished in spite of poverty and struggles with illness—and his early death becomes even more poignant.
The current exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, The Real Van Gogh, provides a very complete and full impression of Van Gogh the man, providing 35 of his original letters alongside 65 paintings and 30 drawings. For perhaps the first time, art lovers will have a glimpse into the life of this driven and conflicted great talent.
Van Gogh’s artistic career lasted only ten years. He was largely self taught, and the exhibition traces the development of his talent from early drawings of still life, landscapes, and the peasants who were his neighbors, to the stunning output of his last years, when he was tormented by mental illness but still managed to paint daily. And all the time he was drawing and painting, he was writing letters to his family and friends. Since he was a solitary person by nature, these letters were his way of staying in touch with the world around him. He was very well read, and his letters (in Dutch, French, and English) demonstrate his literary as well as artistic interests.
Van Gogh cared deeply about words. He wrote to a friend, Emile Bernard, in 1888: ‘There are so many people, especially among our pals, who imagine that words are nothing. On the contrary, don’t you think, it’s as interesting and as difficult to say a thing well as to paint a thing.’
An article, “A Beautiful Mind”, in the Royal Academy magazine has more detail on Van Gogh’s letters
Monday, December 21, 2009
Art for escapism
Sitting in snowy Connecticut. looking out at a wintry landscape, I wish I could substitute my view for the one a friend just emailed from her beach vacation south of the border. I understand that there’s even more snow in Washington, DC, but at least inside the Corcoran Gallery lucky viewers can escape the weather by visiting the seaside with John Singer Sargent. The exhibition, Sargent and the Sea, will end on January 3, but even browsing the website gives a brief impression of sunshine, warm sand, and salty breezes.
Most of Sargent’s seaside paintings were created when he was still quite young, between the ages of 18 and 23. From a privileged family, he had the oppportunity to study in Paris as well as spend summers in Brittany, Normandy, and Capri. Later paintings become less romantic and more detailed, showing Sargent’s interest in the details of ship rigging and the life of working sailors and those who fish for a living.
Turquoise waters and fluffy clouds in a soft blue sky—I could escape for those!
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
More on the amazing Mrs. Delany
Just found an article in an October New York Times that gives even more reason to admire our Mrs. Delany. Take a look and see what she accomplished in the last decade and a half of her long life.
Friday, December 11, 2009
Inspiration from an 18th century “senior citizen”
Our friend Beth came back from a visit to New Haven, CT, recently, raving about “Mrs. Delany’s Flowers.” I’d never heard of Mrs. Delany or her flowers, but my curiosity was piqued. Turns out that the exhibition, at the Yale Center for British Art, features the work of Mary Granville Delany, who was born in 1700 and died in 1788. She was best known for creating nearly 1000 botanical “paper mosaics”, a project she began at the age of 72! Not content with making only these exquisite paper montages, she also produced landscape drawing sand textile designs, and used her craft activities to nurture friendships with people in artistic, aristocratic, and court circles. Her work is unique and beautiful—and inspiring. You see, it’s never too late to discover a passion and talent, and to make a mark on the world.
Friday, December 04, 2009
Next up after Christo’s “Gates” ...
It wasn’t long ago that 7500 gates bearing saffron fabric panels were installed by the artist Christo on the pathways of Central Park. The latest entry in New York’s public art arena comes from England’s Antony Gormley. Gormley is best known for his most recent project, “One and Other”. He arranged for real people to occupy a bare plinth in London’s Trafalgar Square for an hour each for 100 days. Twenty-four hundred people were selected to participate, from 35,000 applicants. Gormley had proposed that people would come together to do something extraordinary and unpredictable—and in fact the participants more than fulfilled that rubric, with everything from speeches to drama to striptease.
Now, Gormley brings his first public art project to New York. From March 26 to August 15, 20010, New Yorkers will be catching glimpses of 31 different sculptures of a naked man in and around Madison Square Park. According to Gormley, “It’s about where the human body fits into the scheme of things.” Welcome to the Big Apple!
Monday, November 30, 2009
Van Gogh’s letters on line
The newest edition of the letters of Vincent van Gogh—all 902 of them!—can now be found online, at a site that offers an amazing depth of information about the artist, his times, his influences, and his inspirations. The letters are provided in the original language, with translations and annotations, and shown in facsimile. Background information and access to visuals appear at the click of a mouse. The letters are organized by period, correspondents, place, and those having sketches. Explanatory material investigates Van Gogh as a letter writer, his correspondents, biographical and historical context, and publication history.
What a marvelous opportunity to get to know this great artist—up close, and in his own words!
Monday, November 02, 2009
Familiar paintings made new
It’s well known that familiar music has the power to transport us back in time, into memories, fantasies, experiences from the near or distant past. It’s also true that familiar music may seem new again, depending on the interpretation, the performers, the orchestration. Maybe the same thing is true of familiar art. All of us may feel that some of Monet’s paintings are like old friends. We’ve seen them often in reproduction, and perhaps once or twice we’ve seen the actual works in museums. Have they, then, lost the power to surprise us, to have a refreshed and startling effect on our senses?
A new exhibition at MoMA , New York’s Museum of Modern Art, does help us see Monet’s revered Water Lilies with fresh eyes. Shown in conjunction with some small paintings which are closeups of flowers and the famous bright Japanese bridge, the huge triptych of watery blues, greens and mauves lets our eyes hover and zoom over its surfaces like a dragonfly. We can see anew how Monet, even in these late paintings, remained engrossed in the challenge of looking and painting, painting and looking. For the viewer, the pleasure in the looking is both familiar and new.
Monday, October 19, 2009
Cezanne in America
What’s that you say? Cezanne never visited the United States? Very true—but like all seminal artists, his influence was strongly felt by early twentieth-century American artists. A current exhibition at the Montclair Art Museum, “Cezanne and American Modernism”, demonstrates convincingly that many American artists sought to emulate Cezanne, especially in terms of a new concept of pictorial space, freed from the constraints of Renaissance perspective. The exhibition doesn’t show the American artists at their best, however, since many works which show a direct legacy from Cezanne indicate that the painters picked up on the more superficial aspects of Cezanne’s work: the simplification of objects and the diagonal brushstrokes.
Cezanne represented different things to different people: he was seen as a materialist, a mystic, a realist, a formalist, a primitive savage, a paragon of European sophistication, and much more. But his position as the bridge between the Impressionist and the Modernists is unquestioned, with his perception of space, use of color, and contrasts of light and shadow. The works on exhibit in this show present a convincing case.
Friday, October 16, 2009
Leonardo da Vinci would have loved this!
A fascinating tale of art history detection is unfolding in Florence, where a lost masterpiece by Leonardo da Vinci has been discovered through a combination of luck and high-tech ultramodern techniques. Leonardo, a true Renaissance man who combined a mastery of art with creating inventions that were well ahead of their time, would certainly be fascinated by the story—and by the fact that his masterpiece may well have stood the test of time better than anyone could have guessed. Pictures, diagrams, and discussion can be found on the New York Times blog by John Tierney, TierneyLab.
Monday, September 28, 2009
Cezanne and Picasso—together again for the first time
What was the influence of Cezanne on the work of Picasso? Even though art historians have been considering this question for decades, there has never been an international exhibition which took this question as its subject—until now. At the Musee Granet, in Aix-en-Provence, a major gathering of works by these two giants shows clearly the ways in which Picasso, both overtly and implicitly, showed his admiration and respect for Cezanne.
The two artists never met—although it would have been possible for them to have done so between 1901 and 1906, when they shared the same dealer in Paris, Ambrose Vollard. However, throughout his career, Picasso revered Cezanne and, in 1959, actually moved into Cezanne’s “neighborhood” when he and his wife, Jacqueline, bought the Chateau de Vauvenargues. From his new home, Picasso looked out on the scene made famous by Cezanne—the Mont Ste. Victoire—although Picasso chose not to paint it, perhaps in deference to the master.
