amistad

“The Venetian master’s Bacchus and Ariadne is an iconic portrayal of falling in love. But it could also contain one of the greatest depictions of breaking wind, reveals Kelly Grovier.

You could easily miss it amid the romp and revelry that surrounds Bacchus, the Roman god of wine, as he leaps from his cheetah-drawn chariot after clapping eyes on the beautiful Ariadne: that tiny detail that transforms Titian's passionate painting of love-at-first-sight into something a little less fragrant.(...)”

(Lido em: BBCNews 2020-08-17)

“Jeff Divine’s best photograph: a wipeout on surfing's greatest wave”

"My best shot”

"Photography”

“‘Other surfers at Oahu kept away from Fred. His eyesight was so bad, they were scared he’d wipe them out too’

‘We knew of no other wave like it’ … Fred wipes out on the Pipeline, at Oahu, Hawaii, in 1979. Photograph: Jeff Divine

This wave is known as the Pipeline. It breaks near the north shore of Oahu, Hawaii’s third largest island. It’s one of the pinnacles of surf culture. In the 1970s, when this shot was taken, it was probably the most radical wave in the world. We knew of nothing else like it.

To catch a wave like this, you need to amass a wealth of knowledge from years on the ocean. In California, the slope of the wave is more gentle, thanks to the gradient of the seabed to the shore. In this part of Hawaii, the waves form on such deep water that when they reach the shallow reefs near the shore, they tower right up and create a ledge at the crest. They go straight up and down.” (Lido em: The Guardian, 2020-07-22)

“Why Sanyu, the 'Chinese Matisse,' is setting the art market alight”

“Written by Oscar Holland”

“A nude painting by Sanyu, hailed as the "Chinese Matisse," sold for over 258 million Hong Kong dollars ($33.3 million) at auction this week, confirming his status as one of the most sought-after names in the lucrative Asian art market.

Painted in the 1950s, "Quatre Nus" features four reclining female figures in the French-Chinese painter's distinctively saturated style. The artwork led Sotheby's first major sale in Hong Kong since the coronavirus disrupted its live auction schedule, becoming the evening's most expensive lot after a 10-minute bidding war between four collectors.(...)” (Lido em: CNN 2020-07-12)

"Les « anthropométries » scandaleuses d’Yves Klein"

"Par Roxana Azimi"

EnquêteEn 1960, le peintre fait scandale avec une performance où il dirige les mouvements de femmes nues enduites de peinture. Le Centre Pompidou-Metz lui consacre une exposition.(...)" ( Lido em: Le Monde 2020-07-04)

“This Victorian painting depicting two women in love was nearly lost in history”

(Lido em: CNN 2020-07-04)

As a new exhibition opens in Helsinki, Cath Pound explores our complicated relationship with masterpieces.

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The reason works of art become iconic are many and varied, from the vagaries of taste to museum acquisition policies and competition between collectors. For centuries, artists were obliged to learn by copying work from an established canon and, although the late 19th Century saw many begin to rebel against this stranglehold, there is no doubt that the best-known, ‘iconic’ works still exert a powerful draw today.

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As a new exhibition at The Ateneum in Helsinki shows, they provide a rich bank of instantly recognisable source material that artists can reference via technique, imagery or subject matter in order to create undeniably contemporary works. Often focusing on issues of race, class or gender, these new works frequently allow us to see the sources of their inspiration through fresh eyes.

 

Single Nights, Annabelle (2007) by Mat Collishaw (Credit: Mat Collishaw)

Mat Collishaw has a long and intriguing history of adapting the imagery of celebrated artists and genres to portray unrelentingly modern themes. The series Single Nights (2007) is styled on Georges de la Tour’s intimate interior scenes of women reflecting on their lives and particularly evokes his portrayals of Mary Magdalene. In place of a woman who was unfairly vilified by the Catholic Church, he has shown a group of women who are all too often equally condemned by modern society – single mothers. In darkened, candle-lit rooms Collishaw highlights their bond while also introducing an air of meditation and contemplation. “They’re thinking what could have happened. Where would I be now if I didn’t have this kid?,” he tells BBC Culture.

Collishaw’s Last Meal on Death Row series recreated the menus requested by US prisoners with death sentences (such as Gary Miller’s, pictured) (Credit: Mat Collishaw)

Although quite different in subject matter, Collishaw’s Last Meal on Death Row, Texas series (2011) has an equally meditative quality to it. The series was inspired by a lurid set of photographs on the same theme Collishaw saw in The Sunday Times Magazine more than 30 years ago. Despite their garishness they “still had this incredible power to them”, he says. He thought if he re-staged them as 17th-Century vanitas paintings, it might encourage people to think about all the things associated with the genre; the meaningless of worldly goods and the transience of life. “And if you can get people thinking about those things while they’re looking at a cheeseburger, that’s quite an achievement,” he says. Of course, because his images are based on real-life choices made by prisoners, they also reference the brutality and innate prejudice of the US justice system. “There’s a lot of African-American food, a lot of Mexican food, because they are overrepresented in the prisoners that are on death row,” says Collishaw.

Yinka Shonibare uses textiles in a subversive way, as with his pastiche of Caravaggio’s 1597 painting of Medusa (Credit: Yinka Shonibare, courtesy James Cohan)

Yinka Shonibare’s use of iconic artworks to explore the construction of cultural identity and the impact of colonialism and post-colonialism seems all the more relevant in the wake of the global Black Lives Matters protests that have shown how little some know about, or want to engage with, their colonial histories. In his Medusa digital prints (2015), Shonibare has taken Caravaggio’s famous head of the Gorgon and replaced it with women of four different ethnic origins. Each has African fabric in place of snakes for hair. This fabric, which has a complex history, is integral to the work of Shonibare, who was born in the UK and grew up in the UK and Nigeria . Although now closely associated with African identity, it has its origins in Indonesia and was factory produced by the Dutch for the African market. “It has become the perfect metaphor for the African diaspora because of the different cultural origins of the fabric,” Shonibare says in the exhibition catalogue.

Desecration or creation?

The Chapman Brothers have created many hundreds of works related to Goya, most notoriously drawing over original copies of his etching series The Disasters of War whose graphic depictions of violence, intended as a warning against the horrors of conflict, were considered too horrific to be shown in his lifetime. But as Jake Chapman tells BBC Culture in characteristically flamboyant prose, they are not conventionally inspired by his work. “To be inspired by something presupposes a certain poetic tinge which – in the case of Goya’s Disasters of war – seems entirely unjustified. In fact, it’s entirely necessary to defend Goya from such poetic redemption since the radicality of the work lies in the disqualification of bourgeois metaphysics… [rejecting] spiritual redemption in favour of the mortal physics of sagging dead flesh,” he says via email.

The Chapman brothers drew over original etches by Francisco Goya in their Disasters of War work (Credit: Jake and Dinos Chapman)

He sees this as particularly evident in Great Deeds Against the Dead, which features mutilated bodies hanging from trees. The brothers have also reinterpreted the work in sculptural form on a number of occasions, often to gruesomely humorous effect. Many have reacted in horror to what they see as the desecration of Goya’s work but Chapman is sceptical that the images could ever have evoked the desired response of rejecting violence. He says their intention in adding to the series was to “re-incriminate the Disasters of War… to depose their institutional appropriation and rescue them from the glib bad conscience that hangs over them, bemoaning ‘man’s inhumanity to man’.” Strange as it might seem, the Chapmans’ work could actually allow us to return to Goya’s work and appreciate it on a guilt-free, purely aesthetic level.

Adam and Adam (2014) by Nancy Fouts (Credit: Nancy Fouts’ Private Collection/Photo Dominic Lee)

The work of Nancy Fouts also allows us to reassess the nature of iconic works, albeit in a far more light-hearted vein. She creates hybrids of two different masterpieces – such as her Brueghel Lowry (2013) or The Thinker (after Rodin/ Degas) (2014) – that playfully challenge the respect we give great works of art. In the former, she places the characteristic stick-like figures of LS Lowry into the type of wintery landscape beloved by Bruegel the Elder, while in the latter she gives Rodin’s famously contemplative figure the pigtail of Degas’s Little Dancer Aged Fourteen and dresses him in her tutu and ballet pumps. These witty mash-ups, fine works in their own right, compel us to question what exactly it is that makes the original so special.

In addition to showing existing works inspired by their iconic forbears, curators at The Ateneum also invited artists, including Mark Karasick, to respond to an artwork of their choice specifically for the exhibition. Like many before him, Karasick was drawn to an image of the crucifixion, choosing Michelangelo’s drawing Christ on the Cross (1538-41) which features a notably upward-looking Christ.

Mark Karasick was inspired by Michelangelo’s drawing Christ on the Cross for his work The Navigator (2018-19) (Credit: Mark Karasick)

“There’s the whole sense of victory, of ascension, and not necessarily of the religious kind,” he says. Karasick has given his Christ-like figure wings that cannot help but evoke Icarus. However, for Karasick they also allude to the aviation pioneer Otto Lilienthal, the first person to make repeated successful flights with gliders. Although the human desire for flight is often associated with hubris, Karasick sees it as an indication of tenacity and hope, the human desire to escape Earthly constraints. The finished work, The Navigator (2018-19), has a magical alchemic quality to it thanks to the ancient encaustic technique Karasick uses which involves using heated beeswax with tinted pigments. Karasick’s monumental, life-size figure soars above the desolate landscape beneath him, a religious icon transformed into a quasi-mythological being with an uplifting message for a secular age. And an enduring symbol of the power of iconic artworks to continue to stimulate, inspire and awe.

(Lido em: BBCNews 2020-06-26)

“Centaure” (1961-1967). “ Five-and-a-half inches (14.2 cm) in height this beautiful but simple model of a centaur has been cast in 18-carat gold. It is one of a limited edition of ten, executed over a six-year period, and bears the goldsmith's mark of Francois and Pierre Hugo. It is not known if this precious objects were private gifts, but it is interesting that the move into gold came in Picasso's 80^th year, a celebrated event, and the year of his marriage to Jacqueline.

The ancient Greek Homeric figure sees a return to Picasso's pictoral quest into mythology, a feature from many of his 1950s studies, in ceramics. This medium allowed him to explore three-dimensional aspects of painting, as in the illustrated plate, Bullfight Arena. This wondeful golden statue ironically reverses the process as the traditional three-dimensional aspect of modelling is reduced to two-dimensional linear relief by employing thin piped effect of the gold. However, despite the simplicity of line, Picasso captures the dynamic action of this half-horse, half-man brillantly. The inclusion of its phallic extra 'leg', a favourite ancient Greek fertility device, continues the artist's 'man as beast' theme as well as emphasising the centaurs' drunken brawl at a wedding.” LAURA PAYNE (Laura Payne, Essential Picasso, Parragon Book, Bath, 2001)

“Dutch researchers coax secrets from Girl with a Pearl Earring”

[Por:]”Mark Brown”

“Although offering insights into the artist’s technique, gallery has yet to solve Vermeer’s biggest mystery

A major research project into one of the world’s most popular and captivating paintings has revealed new secrets but the most tantalising question remains: just who was the girl with a pearl earring?

Researchers at the Mauritshuis gallery in The Hague on Tuesday revealed the results of extensive investigations into its star painting, Johannes Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring, thought to date from about 1665.

The Netherlands’ researchers were stunned to discover, for the first time, delicate eyelashes on the girl’s face and evidence of a green curtain behind her head. They have also gained fresh insights into how Vermeer painted the work, what changes he made and which pigments he used, including discovering that the white for the earring originated in England’s Peak District.

But the biggest mystery endures and that is a good thing, said Abbie Vandivere, the head of The Girl in the Spotlight research project.

“We were able to find out so much about Vermeer’s materials and techniques but we still don’t know exactly who the girl is,” she said. “It is good that some mysteries remain and everyone can speculate about her. It allows people their own personal interpretation of the girl; everyone feels their own connection with the way she meets your eyes.

“The fact that she is still a mystery keeps people coming back and keeps her exciting and fresh.” (...)” (Lido em: Guardian, 2020-01-05)

“Pablo Picasso” (1924). “This portrait, like that of Olga, Paulo's mother, painted in Spanish-style costume in 1917, provides an interesting note of sentimentality in Picasso's career. It is as though a return to naturalism is an interlude in which to recoup and play with the naturalist and figurative techniques of the Old Masters before advancing to the next development.

Here, the boy is dressed as the young pretender, baby harlequin, a literal and metaphorical replica of the artistic master. In fact the work is one of a series of the young boy, sometimes dressed as Pierrot, riding a donkey and even painting, all lovingly capturing the beautiful round face and dramatic eyes inherited from his mother. As he sits demurely poised on the chair, we can wonder if the portrait was completed with the assistance of photographs, as it would have been almost impossible for a child of this age to sit still for so long.

Again Picasso uses the technique of a heavy background against the bright colours of the outfit to throw the boy's form into exaggerated relief. The emphasis is certainly on the harlequin costume. The fine lines of the collar and cuffs, the handkerchief and chair edging also suggest that this picture is unfinished.” LAURA PAYNE               (Laura Payne, Essential Picasso, Parragon Book, Bath, 2001)

“The converging art careers of Henry Moore and Bill Brandt”

“A new exhibition and book explore the intersecting careers of two renowned British artists of the 20th Century: sculptor Henry Moore and photographer Bill Brandt.”

“Image copyright Bill Brandt / Henry Moore “

“The two artists, born ten years apart, were commissioned by the UK government in the 1930s; Brandt as a photojournalist, and Moore as a war artist.

They both created images of civilians sheltering from the Blitz in the London Underground during World War Two, seen above.

Image copyright Bill Brandt Image caption A portrait of Henry Moore, 1948, by Bill Brandt (left), and a self-portrait by Bill Brandt, 1966 (right).

The new exhibition - at The Hepworth Wakefield - explores how the two artists responded to the British landscape and its communities.

The exhibition brings together more than 200 works, including well-known sculptures and photographs, along with drawings, unprinted negatives and photo collages.

"Both artists had a fascination and poetic sensibility for capturing the spirit of place," said Simon Wallis, Director of The Hepworth Wakefield.

"It is particularly poignant to be presenting this exhibition in West Yorkshire, where Henry Moore was born and grew up."

Brandt and Moore met in 1942, when Brandt was commissioned to take a portrait of Moore in his studio for a 10-page spread on the artist in Lilliput magazine. The feature juxtaposed the two artists' images of the Blitz shelters.

Image copyright Bill Brandt Image caption Liverpool Street Extension, by Bill Brandt, 1940. Image copyright Henry Moore Image caption Sleeping Shelterers: Two Women and a Child, by Henry Moore, 1940.

"Both artists developed a strikingly similar visual vocabulary of displacement, isolation, threat, and vulnerability that presages images of larger-scale terror made later in the war," writes Courtney J Martin, the director of Yale Center for British Art, in a foreword to the book Bill Brandt | Henry Moore.

Throughout their careers, they crossed over into each other's predominant creative medium. Moore used photography to present his work, and Brandt looked to sculpture as a way of considering nature, landscape and the human body.

Image copyright Henry Moore Image caption Contact sheet for details of Auguste Rodin's Walking Man, 1877-78, photographed by Henry Moore, 1967.

In their early work, Brandt and Moore were drawn to documenting ordinary people, labour and the home.

Brandt highlighted social deprivation in 1930s Depression-era Britain, with his evocative photographs of impoverished mining communities and families in the North of England.”

(Lido em: BBCNews 2020-02-18)