Eine Kleine Nachtmusik

Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, 1943
Dorothea Tanning (American, 1910-2012)
Oil on canvas
16 1/8 x 24 in.
Tate Modern, London

We've lost 2 artists this week, one to old age and one to life itself it seems, so I thought I would focus on them for some daily art. Dorothea Tanning died yesterday at the age of 101. Who do you think of when you hear the term Surrealism? Most people start with Dali and go from there. One of my favorites has always been Dorothea Tanning. The painting I've posted is one of her most well known, but I highly recommend spending some time looking at others. There is a great website dedicated to her and her work at www.dorotheatanning.org. I will admit, that while I enjoy spending time with surrealist works, I've never quite gotten the hang of talking about them, though now as I start reading I realize that I never spent much time with Surrealism after I developed my interest in psychoanalysis and art (which would seem like it should have been obvious, but alas). I am going to share quote of Tanning from the short essay about the work from the Tate Modern.

Tanning has said: ‘It’s about confrontation. Everyone believes he/she is his/her drama. While they don’t always have giant sunflowers (most aggressive of flowers) to contend with, there are always stairways, hallways, even very private theatres where the suffocations and the finalities are being played out, the blood red carpet or cruel yellows, the attacker, the delighted victim....’ (Letter to the author, 1999)

Check out the full summary of the work.

I do now have quite the fascination with sunflowers though. One of the things I do love about the paintings of Tanning's I have seen and other surrealists such as Leonora Carrington, Yves Tanguy, and Max Ernst, is how intimate they are, this is not a large painting, you can stand in front of it and really spend time with the strange and wonderful story and detail.

Delhi Durbar of Akbar II

The Delhi Durbar of Akbar II
Mughal Period, ca 1820
India, Delhi School
Painting on ivory with carved ivory frame
Painting: 18 1/4 x 14 1/2 in
Toledo Museum of Art, 2004.55

This beautiful Indian miniature on ivory is one of my favorite pieces at the TMA. It's description in our Masterworks catalogue uses the word dazzling, and it is quite on point. For more close up details check it out here. This painting commemorates a durbar (an imperial audience or state reception) and represents an image of Mughal power with the emperor, Akbar II, the resplendence of court, costumes, jewels and more. The ivory frame is carved in deep relief and depicts vignettes of Hindu deities. These type of paintings were produced in court schools of painters as souvenirs for high dignitaries and emperor's guests at the durbar.

Peggy Guggenheim

Franz von Lenbach
Peggy Guggenheim, ca. 1903
Oil on board, 128.9 x 92.7 cm
Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, Venice
Purchase 98.5247

I came across this painting at the back of an art journal, listing acquisitions by the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice. I loved the expression on the girl's face and then once I realized it was a portrait of Peggy Guggenheim herself, I was quite interested particularly due to the style of the painting since it doesn't mesh well with my thoughts of the 20th century in which the majority of Guggenheim's life spans.

Peggy Guggenheim is a legend in the art world. She amassed one of the foremost collections of Modern art and gave Jackson Pollock his first show and support when she ran The Art of this Century Gallery in NYC. She later moved to Venice where she opened her collection to the public, Peggy Guggenheim Collection.

The painter, Franz von Lenbach, is a new one to me. Born in Schrobenhausen, Bavaria, he eventually settled in Munich and became internationally successful painting portraits like this one of society personalities. In 1900 he won the Grand Prix for painting in Paris. Lenbach's painting is world away from the Modern art that Guggenheim so loved and promoted.

Color Target

Kenneth Noland (American, 1924-2010)
Heat, 1958
image: kennethnoland.com


Noland's work developed out abstract expressionism and he became a significant Color Field painter. Color field painting often consists of solid areas of color covering the entire canvas, many times, the paint stained into the canvas (Morris Louis). Interest lies in the lyrical effects of these swathes of color. Noland was interested in the relationship with the edge of the picture and began his series of Targets, like today's painting.

The Handsome Michallon

Leon Cogniet (French, 1794-1880)
Portrait of Michallon, about 1818-19
Musée des Beaux-Arts d'Orléans
image: http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/artists/achille-etna-michallon


What a handsome young man! I started out looking for a work by the painter Achille-Etna Michallon (1796-1822), the subject of our painting today and quickly discovered this portrait. This young man was only ever handsome as he sadly, only made it to the age of 26 due to illness.

A quick search for additional work by Cogniet shows that this may be, in my humble opinion of course, one of his better works. I seem to only find his portraits aesthetically pleasing, as he captures a wonderful face. More works... and yes, my source is Google images as I can't find more than a couple of his works in any one place. This may also be due to the fact that Cogniet was an academic painter, never my first love.

Tar Beach

Faith Ringgold (American, b. 1934)
Tar Beach (Part I from the Woman on a Bridge series), 1988. Acrylic on canvas, bordered with printed, painted, quilted, and pieced cloth, 74 5/8 x 68 1/2 inches (189.5 x 174 cm).
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Gift, Mr. and Mrs. Gus and Judith Lieber 88.3620
image:

Once again I am going to try to get myself back into the habit of paying attention to my blog. I am thinking about moving to wordpress (so much more capability) though, so you may soon find Art of the Day in a new location.

Faith Ringgold creates story quilts, "a traditional American craft associated with women’s communal work that also has roots in African culture". Her focus is on narrative and not on what be called aesthetic perfection. Her work has a folk-art quality that brings color, design and story to the viewer's eye.

Tar Beach 'depicts the fantasies of its spirited heroine and narrator Cassie Louise Lightfoot, who, on a summer night in Harlem, flies over the George Washington Bridge. “Sleeping on Tar Beach was magical . . .” explains Cassie in the text on the quilt, “only eight years old and in the third grade and I can fly. That means I am free to go wherever I want to for the rest of my life.”' --Nancy Spector, Guggenheim

Ringgold also writes and illustrates children's books.

Scholar by a Waterfall

Ma Yuan (Chinese, active ca. 1190–1225)
Scholar by a Waterfall
Southern Song dynasty (1127–1279), late 12th–early 13th century
Album leaf: ink and color on silk
9 7/8 x 10 1/4 in. (25.1 x 26 cm)
Metropolitan Museum of Art
image: http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/ho/07/eac/ho_1973.120.9.htm

Ma Yuan "was a master of “one-corner” painting, in which visual interest is focused in a corner of the work." (britannica.com). Very much a master, the corner focus is what drew me to this work. I think it creates a greater intimacy in the work, a small delicate world that the viewer can enter.

I have to admit to my complete lack of knowledge in Chinese painting as from what I can gather with a little research, Ma Yuan is one of the most famous and popular Chinese traditional painter known to the western world. Landscape painting in Chinese art.

The cradle

Berthe Morisot (French, 1841-1895)
Le Berceau (The cradle), 1872
oil on canvas
image: Musee d'Orsay http://www.musee-orsay.fr/en/collections/index-of-works/notice.html?no_cache=1&nnumid=001132&cHash=366b77b867

A beautiful picture by Berthe Morisot. Focused on the daily life of the Modern woman, Morisot captured beautiful moments. Morisot's sister modeled for this painting and she is looking down upon her own baby. The simple beauty of the cradle curatin and focused attention of the mother. Admittedly, Morisot falls into a number of artists I neglected for a long time. It took me awhile to develop not only an appreciation for Impressionism but an aesthetic interest in these more quiet paintings.

Along with Mary Cassatt, Morisot is considered one of the most important women painters of the late 19th century. Very good friends with Edouard Manet, Morisot was not just a woman painter but exhibited alongside other Impressionists of her time (she was the first woman to join the circle of French Impressionists). Despite her connections with this group, she was not as well known during her lifetime.

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

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!

Beguiling of Merlin

Edward Coley Burne-Jones (British, 1833-1898)
Beguiling of Merlin, 1872-7
Oil on canvas 186-111 cm.
LL3121
National Museums Liverpool - Lady Lever Gallery

It's normal to find different versions of art images in the web due to a multitude of copying, potentially bad photography and scanning. I tend to trust that the institution that owns a work will have the better quality image, or should have the better quality as well as most true to life (meaning color and tone) that you'll find. I've included 2 versions of the same painting here, but the quirky thing is, they were both found on the National Museums Liverpool's (who owns the painting) website.

I'm inclined to believe that the image on the left is the more true, but I still find the discrepancy very odd. Of course, finding the best image on the museum website is not always true, see wikipedia's version.

As for the image, Edward Burne-Jones was greatly influenced by the early Pre-Raphaelites such as Dante Gabriel Rosetti but evolved into his own artist. While using well-known stories as subject matter the focus of Burne-Jones' painting was beauty and sensuality.

Portrait of a Woman

Portrait of a Woman
Roman from the province of Egypt
Tempera on panel, about A.D. 200
Purchased with funds from the Libbey Endowment, Gift of Edward Drummond Libbey, 1971.130
Toledo Museum of Art

Yes, once again I disappeared from the blogosphere. No excuses, and I do hope that I am back regularly now. I had some family visit recently and of course we went to my museum. A favorite of the collection was this portrait of a woman. What is so amazing to discover when looking a little further is that this portrait was made, around 200 A.D.! Funeral portraits were placed upon the head of mummies. They represented the human who once was. "When a person died, the portrait panel was placed over the face of the mummy with parts of the outermost wrapping holding it in place. This implies Egyptian beliefs about the afterlife." (metmuseum.org)

"The earliest so-called mummy portraits were painted about A.D. 50, but the practice ended in 392 when the Christian emperor Theodosius outlawed mummification." (Toledo Museum of Art)

Often referred to as Fayum portraits (as they are commonly found in the Faiyum Basin), they were painted on wood panel or directly on the linen mummy case. The paint was either egg tempera or encaustic.

The controversy of Mary

The Holy Virgin Mary, 1996
Chris Ofili (British, b.1968)

In celebration of Banned Books Week, I am going to focus on banned or controversial artists. Oh how we wish these recognition weeks weren't necessary but continued controversy over books such as To Kill a Mockingbird, Alice's Adventure's in Wonderland and Tango Makes Three still persist. I'll always remember the controversy set by the Sensation show at the Brooklyn Museum in New York in 1999. Then mayor, Rudolph Giuliani, denounced the show without even seeing it and one of the most talked about works (despite some much more difficult and actually disturbing work in the show) was Chris Ofili's, The Holy Virgin Mary. The work was actually defaced with white paint by a man in the gallery.


"Chris Ofili's Holy Virgin Mary" by Jerry Saltz (artnet magazine 10-8-99)

Flowers

Odilon Redon (French, 1840-1916)
Vase of Flowers, c.1905
oil on fabric
73cm x 59cm
Cleveland Museum of Art
image: http://www.clemusart.com/explore/work.asp?location=14320&recNo=1&tab=2&display=


Another work that I enjoyed discovering at the Cleveland Museum of Art last week. Odilon Redon is more commonly known for dark drawings and lithographs. Redon was a prominent Symbolist. He was inspired by emotions and imagination, strange subjects infusing his work. Later in his career he began to paint and proved to have a wonderful eye for color. The colors of this painting are what drew me to it, the warmth of the orange red predominate and soak you in while bits of cooler blues and whites pop to add to a brightness in the work.

Elizabeth Neel

Elizabeth Neel (b. 1975)
Count to Ten, 2008
Oil on canvas, 83 x 96 inches

A discovery in the most recent issue of Harper's is Elizabeth Neel. A wonderful blend of abstraction and representation. I find her work interesting but am more attracted to this work in particular, due to its sketched out, draughtsman like quality as well as the limitation of color.

Granddaughter of the painter, Alice Neel

Cafe Baby

Wonder Seated, 2008
Mark Bercier
30x40 in.
image: http://cafebabyneworleans.com/artwork.php

Another artist discovered on our road trip, we wandered into a gallery called Cafe Baby in New Orleans. We had quickly fallen for some small paintings of flowers in the front window. (Hope to buy one some day). The gallery was full of wonderful whimsy and luck for us, the man sitting at the desk was the artist. He proceeded to tell us all about Cafe Baby, his unique signs and symbols which he uses in his work and his wonderful obsession with old and handmade paper (the flower paintings are goauche on handmade paper). He opened up his other gallery 2 doors down and we had a wonderful time chatting about art and New Orleans.

More of Mark's work

The Corn Poppy

The Corn Poppy, c.1919
Kees van Dongen (Dutch, 1877-1966)
oil on canvas
21 1/2 x 18 in
Collection: MFA Houston
image: http://www.artchive.com/artchive/D/dongen/corn_poppy.jpg.html

Sorry I've been mia for a bit of time. I was off on a 10 day road trip to Austin for a wedding and then was a bit too beat upon my return to a new job to get myself up and running. Hopefully today we'll start a good solid upkeep to this blog.

We got to see a bit of art (and a respite from the heat) on our road trip to Texas, and this was one of my favorite paintings at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. A museum trip is always worthwhile if i discover a new work or artist, and happily van Dongen and The Corn Poppy fit both categories.

Earl Cunningham

Sunrise Pine Point
Earl Cunningham (American, 1893-1977)
Image: Smithsonian blog


My discovery of Earl Cunningham's work stems from a new exhibition catalog and artist monograph in our library, Earl Cunningham's America. Perfect for a rainy day like the one currently here in Toledo, Cunningham's work bursts with color and richness.

Cunningham's work has been relatively unknown for a long time due to times when his preference was for not selling it. While he once owned an art and antiques gallery he hung his paintings in it, but they were never for sale. Happily many of his works have been pulled together and we can enjoy the work of a wonderfully creative man.

While his categorization as a folk artist surrounds his lack of formal education as well as his simple style and subject matter many see him his work as modernist. Comparisons are made to the flatness of Matisse and the brilliant color of Matisse and Van Gogh. He has also been compared to Mardsen Hartley and Charles Burchfield.

Cunningham embraced the label of folk artist, marketing himself as such and referring to himself as a "primitive artist". ("A Bird’s-Eye Perspective and a Seaman’s Sensitivity to the Sky" NY Times) I don't see the distinction as making much of a difference, the paintings are what they are and I like them very much.

The Duomo

The Duomo, Florence, 1948
Oskar Kokoschka (Viennese, 1886-1980)
oil on canvas
38 x 49 1/2 in. (96.5 x 125.7 cm)
Image: Minneapolis Institute of Arts

I am not exactly sure how Kokoschka came to mind but he did and perusing available images I came across this wonderful painting of the Duomo in Florence. Most of the work I know by Kokoschka are portraits done with the same intensity of color and richness of paint and line.

cup and flower

Cup of Water and Rose on a Silver Plate c. 1630
Francisco de Zurbaran (1598-1664)
Oil on canvas, 21,2 x 30,1 cm
National Gallery, London
image: Web Gallery of Art

I'm back! with a still-life. I did a lot of cataloging this week and built up a list of artists to share. Today's is Baroque Spanish painter, Francisco de Zurbaran. Zurbaran was not known for still-lifes and I was not originally intending on sharing one, but when I was looking for a work, I fell for this simple yet beautiful painting.

This same motif is in a few of Zurbaran's other paintings. "Here the objects may be intended to have a symbolic character: the water in the cup perhaps refers to the Virgin's purity and the flower recalls her title of 'Mystic Rose'." (nationalgallery caption). Most of Zurbaran's works were focused on religious themes.