Mondrian Building

Mondrian Building
Building in Austin, Tx
image: lizardkingdom.org
Piet Mondrian (Dutch, 1872-1944)

While not art per say, I find people's take on art fascinating. Mondrian has never been one of my favorites, though the geometry of his work is quite soothing. I've seen many Mondrian paintings in person and the one thing you expect (or at least I have before seeing one) is that everything about them is exact, squared and picture perfect. Alas, this is not true. You can see a painterliness in his work, the lines, while always straight, have fuzzy edges, and the application of color is not uniform. This actually makes me happy, since, from a distance the paintings look sleek, and I actually find this a bit dull. His work doesn't age well, the solidity of the structure of the lines breaks down when you see that the paint is fading and cracking.

Instead of showing an actual painting (since the digital images surely don't represent what you would see in person, though may be more true to some original intentions) I discovered this house. What was surely an incredibly pedestrian house to start has been given and interest by someone's choice to share a bit of Mondrian. There is no shortage commercialization and application of Mondrian to material objects and products.

A Mondrian at MoMA

Soap Bubbles

Jean Simeon Chardin (French, 1699–1779)
Soap Bubbles 1733-34?
oil on canvas
24 x 24 7/8 in.
Metropolitan Museum of Art

I've always loved this painting. I've discovered that there are multiple versions, with questions over which was executed first, so there is no definitive date on this work. I am pretty sure this is the one that I have seen, since I have yet to get myself to the National Gallery or the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (a pretty sad state in my experience of art museums I have to say).

Aside from the simple beauty of the style and technique, I also tend to love any theme of children (at least in 18th c. art). This was a favorite theme of Chardin ("idle play of children). The existence of 3 versions of this painting reminds me of an interesting inquiry I had at work recently. A patron called asking about a work they had seen in our museum. She had looked for an image of it online and believed she had found it. She called to ask a few questions about the work, one being that she wasn't sure why the image she was looking at online looked so different from what she remembered. It was because it wasn't the same sculpture of course, but she had trouble wrapping her mind around the fact that an artist would create more than one version of the same subject with the same title. She asked, "did they really do that?".

Allegory

Allegory with a Virgin (Allegory of Chastity), 1479-1480
Hans Memling, (b. ca. 1440, Seligenstadt, d. 1494, Bruges)
Height: 38 cm (14.96 in.), Width: 32 cm (12.6 in.)
oil on board

Wonderfully weird image. I can't seem to find out too much about it thought. The virgin/chastity aspect is pretty straightforward due to the elevation of our dear virgin upon the craggy rock (amythest) I will, as I have surely often done, admit my lack of knowledge when it comes to iconography in art. I do think I need to procure myself a good book and spend some time making up for this lack.

A wee bit about the painting: http://www.wga.hu/frames-e.html?/html/m/memling/2middle3/15allego.html

A pair of shoes

Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890)
A Pair of Shoes, 1886
Oil on Canvas, 37.5 X 45 cm
Location: Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam
Image: http://www.vangoghmuseum.nl/vgm/popup.jsp?page=1576&collection=1297&lang=en

Wow, so I knew something would be around to finally posting my potentially favorite painting of all time. I sat down to write this blog entry with no specific art work in mind. Looked around the room for inspiration and a book on Heidegger caught my eye. I pop "Heidegger and art" into Google and not surprisingly come up with as the first hit, a wikipedia entry on Heidegger's Origin of a Work of Art. I scroll down the page and there is Van Gogh's A Pair of Shoes. Yes, I studied art theory at the graduate level but somehow I seemed to have either skipped (which I surely shouldn't be admitting) reading Origin or somehow missed the focus on this painting. Alas, I shall be reading it soon but despite the hurrah and writing about this particular painting I am happy to say that I fell in love with it on my own, without pointers to its perceived importance or the interest it held for a variety of philosophers.

The wonder of the internets, as I link through more information I come across what could possibly be one of the best exhibitions ever "Vincent van Gogh: Shoes" currently at the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum & Fondation Corboud in Cologne, Germany. Currently! How splendid is the wonder of timing and little coincidences! If only I could get myself to Cologne. A recent post in Harper's Magazine online discusses the exhibition, with extensive quotes about the shoes from Martin Heidegger, Meyer Schapiro and Jacques Derrida.

http://www.harpers.org/archive/2009/10/hbc-90005828

All of this is well and good, but this is the kind of painting where I find no need for wordplay. Van Gogh painted a number of pictures of boots and shoes, all of which are rich and and alive and wrenching but this particular painting stands on its own. Oh how I want to go to Amsterdam! Both the Van Gogh Museum and the Rijksmuseum have raised their awesomeness to me today!

59th St. Bridge

George Bellows (American, 1882–1925)
The Bridge, Blackwell's Island, 1909
oil on canvas
Toledo Museum of Art 1912.506
image: Toledo Museum of Art

While I seem to back in the habit of getting art up most days, Tuesdays are tough. I am taking a jewelry class on Monday nights and am usually a bit beat by the time I get home so for now we have Art of the Day, minus Tuesday.

I will also admit to my fall back of hitting up the small collection of works TMA has on their website when I am not feeling particularly alert to finding other art. But! This is never a bad thing since our collection is splendid! I love bridges, despite my still nagging fear of driving over them, I find them beautiful and fascinating, particularly when I am looking at them through a creative's eyes. The caption for this work on TMA's site mentions the Bellow's cropping of the bridge, "emphasizing its towering presence". I completely agree but what I find most comforting in the scene is the familiarity of the bridge. When we think of bridges we most like think of the bridge from a distance, the alluring view of it in its entirety, almost as a vista. Looking at this painting I think of the wonderful experience of viewing bridges from the perspective of the immediate shore. Of course, this bridge in particular holds a specific place in my history as it is was the bridge I traversed most often when I lived in Greenpoint.

I never really paid a lot of attention to this painting and while the image always looked familiar in some way I never realized that this was the Queensborough Bridge (59th St. Bridge) since the title refers to Blackwell's Island. I never knew this was an earlier name for Roosevelt Island.

I doubt I need to mention it, but the blue in this painting is gorgeous!

Winter

Paolo Ventura (Italian, b.1968)
Winter Stories #9
image: http://www.paoloventura.com/work/winter.html

By all appearances this image just looks like a photograph of a bookstore from the past. Looks can be wonderfully deceiving. The scene is actually a miniature set constructed, a diorama, and photographed by the artist. One of a series called "Winter Stories", this image serves as a scene from a story. The images are quiet and beautiful, “Winter Stories,” "referring literally, to the season depicted, but also, more figuratively, to the final season of one’s life. Ventura conceived of the photographs as representing the recollections of an old man as he looks back during his final moments" (Art in America, Nov. 2008, Jean Dykstra)

Gorky

Arshile Gorky (Armenian/American 1904-1948)
The Liver is the Cock's Comb, 1944
Oil on canvas
73 1/4 x 98 in. (186 x 249 cm)
Albright-Knox Art Gallery
image: artnet.com

Upon Gorky's arrival in the United States he lived in Watertown, Massachusetts, my old stomping ground. Watertown has one of the largest populations of Armenians outside of Armenia.

"Arshile" is Russian for Achilles, and "Gorky" translates into "the bitter one."

Part of the Public Works of Art Project in 1933, to give artists jobs during the Depression. This work is seen as crossing between surrealism and abstract expressionism.