Art

About Nighthawks Edward Hopper recollected, “unconsciously, probably, I was painting the loneliness of a large city.” In an all-night diner, three customers sit at the counter opposite a server, each appear to be lost in thought and disengaged from one another. The composition is tightly organized and spare in details: there is no entrance to the establishment, no debris on the streets. Through harmonious geometric forms and the glow of the diner’s electric lighting, Hopper created a serene, beautiful, yet enigmatic scene. Although inspired by a restaurant Hopper had seen on Greenwich Avenue in New York, the painting is not a realistic transcription of an actual place. As viewers, we are left to wonder about the figures, their relationships, and this imagined world.

-art institute Chicago.

source https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Chat_noir

This pair of screens portraying the Thirty-Six Poetic Immortals is one of the earliest and finest surviving examples of the subject in the full-size folding-screen format. In compiling his roster of thirty-six eminent Japanese poets, the courtier-poet Fujiwara no Kintō (966–1041) sought to identify those who had been the most esteemed in the composition of waka, or court poetry. Two were famous monks, five were court ladies, and the rest were men of the court.

The leftmost poem on the right-hand screen is by Kakinomoto no Hitomaro (ca. 660–724): ほのぼのと　あかしのうらの　 朝霧に しまがくれゆく　 船をしぞおもふ

Dimly, dimly through the morning mist across the bay of Akashi, my thoughts follow the boat now hidden beyond the islands.

The rightmost poem on the left-hand screen is by Ki no Tsurayuki (872–945): 桜ちる　木のしたかせは　寒からて　 空にしられぬ　雪ぞふりけり

Cherry blossoms scatter in the breezes not chilly, a type of snow flurries unknown to the heavens continue to fall.

This double-sided strut from a stupa gateway at Mathura is adorned on both faces with a tree spirit (vrksadevata), a bountiful female nature-spirit (yakshi) who grasps the flowering branch of a sala tree. Her pose invokes the power of nature; in other versions she kicks the trunk, causing the tree to flower and bear fruit. Yakshis embodied notions of feminine beauty and fertility in early India, and the prevalence of their cult is suggested by references in Vedic as well as early Jain and Buddhist sources, all of which name them as the presiding deities of specific locations. These yakshis belong to a relatively short-lived tradition of stupa gateway building.

This tranquil portrait of the artist’s mother, Ernestine Faivre, is a tour de force of modeling in Conté crayon, Seurat’s favorite graphic medium. The work is drawn entirely without line in tonal passages of velvety black. Scarce atmospheric light, subtly evoked by lessening pressure on the crayon, illuminates the interior where the woman sews, creating a serene ambiance of quiet domesticity. The abstract beauty achieved in such works earned the praise of fellow artist Paul Signac, who called them "the most beautiful painter’s drawings that ever existed."

This landscape is based on one of Kiefer’s photographs of northernmost Norway, which the artist visited in 1974. Referencing historical landscape painting, the work presents a panoramic view onto which are inscribed two lineages of German-language thinkers: ascending the rainbow are G. W. F. Hegel, Ludwig Feuerbach, and Karl Marx; and running through the murky river are Arthur Schopenhauer, Richard Wagner, Friedrich Nietzsche, Carl Jung, and Martin Heidegger. Both lines of thinkers believed in the idea of redemption, the former through the emergence of an extraordinary leader and the latter through individual recognition of one’s being.

In his influential treatise Concerning the Spiritual in Art, Kandinsky theorized a new form of artistic expression that would reject the materialist world in favor of emotional and spiritual ideals. Abstract forms and color symbolism would be used to evoke an inner, preconscious realm. Improvisation 27, composed of dark lines and colorful abstract masses, features three iterations of an embracing couple surrounded by serpentine forms. Kandinsky hints at the painting’s possible subject in the subtitle, Garden of Love II, likely a reference to biblical Eden.

If you have little experience of Kandinsky, atleast watch a yt video first that'll explain his relationship bw music, color, forms, shapes and abstraction.

You'll see a lotta cubism on this community. I'm to blame lol.

After experimenting with a variety of styles in the year following his arrival in Paris, Picasso developed a style properly his own in autumn 1901. He painted six canvases, all about the same size, with either a single figure or a couple seated at a café table, that together constitute one of the greatest achievements the twenty-year-old artist had yet accomplished. The paintings derive from the 1870s café scenes of Degas and Manet, as reworked by Van Gogh, Gauguin, and Lautrec in the 1880s and 1890s. For this one, Picasso borrowed the flowery wallpaper from the background of Van Gogh's La Berceuse (1889, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1996.435), which he would have seen at the Galerie Vollard.

Picasso revised the painting a great deal before settling on the final arrangement: he first depicted Harlequin without ruffs at the neck or cuffs; a large glass stood on the table where the match striker now appears; Harlequin's bicorne hat originally rested behind his right hand; and the floral wallpaper was more extensive and not hidden by the high banquette.

By 1901 Harlequin was a ubiquitous figure in popular culture. He usually carried a baton, or slapstick, and wore a black mask. However, Picasso gave his Harlequin a white face and ruffs: the attributes of Pierrot, the melancholy, cuckolded clown who inevitably loses his love, Columbine, to the nimble and lusty Harlequin. Many writers have suggested that the pensive mood of this picture and the series to which it belongs were the result of Picasso's brooding on the suicide of his friend Carles Casagemas, who, like Pierrot, was unrequited in love.

Van Gogh produced more than twenty self-portraits during his Parisian sojourn (1886–88). Short of funds but determined nevertheless to hone his skills as a figure painter, he became his own best sitter: "I purposely bought a good enough mirror to work from myself, for want of a model." This picture, which shows the artist's awareness of Neo-Impressionist technique and color theory, is one of several that are painted on the reverse of an earlier peasant study.

This painting from February/March 1885, with its restricted palette of dark tones, coarse facture, and blocky drawing, is typical of the works Van Gogh painted in Nuenen the year before he left Holland for France. His peasant studies of 1885 culminated in his first important painting, The Potato Eaters (Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam).

The carved wooden dome, balconies and supports of this architectural ensemble belonged to the gudha-mandapa (meeting and prayer hall) of the Vadi Parshvanatha Jain temple in Patan, Gujarat. The temple was dedicated on May 13, 1596. During the renovation and enlargement of the temple in the early twentieth century, this portion of the building was discarded; nothing of the original structure survives in Patan. Some of its elements—in particular, the eight large figures of musicians and dancers that rose toward the dome—were lost and are known only from early photographs. The figures carved around the dome are the ashtakikpalas (eight regents of the directions). Traces of pigment suggest that the interior of the structure was once painted.

The location of the Museum's structure in the original mandapa is uncertain; it probably rested on top of the flat roof and allowed sunlight into the building. In this installation, one of the four sides, which has had a great many plaster restorations, has been left off so that the ensemble can be easily viewed. The original metal grillwork that kept bats and birds from the interior of the mandapa has not survived; it has been replaced with wider wooden grating.

This particularly fine and elaborate early Gujarati wood carving is the type that was translated into stone by craftsmen of the great Mughal emperor Akbar in the sixteenth century on some buildings at Fatehpur-Sikri (City of Victory) and at the harem at the Red Fort in Agra.

Adorned with his portrait or signs of the zodiac, the coins issued by Jahangir (r. 1605–27) are a development from the epigraphic, aniconic coins issued by most Muslim rulers. His father Akbar (r. 1556–1605) had also experimented with different imagery, including hawks and ducks

During the American Civil War, the United States warship Kearsarge made headlines after sinking the Confederate raider Alabama off the coast of France. Manet did not witness firsthand the widely-covered event but devoted two paintings to the subject: a scene of the naval battle (Philadelphia Museum of Art) and this picture, prompted by his subsequent visit to the victorious ship at anchor near Boulogne. They were his first depictions of a current event.

This painting, which reflects the Parisian vogue for Spanish art and culture during the Second Empire, won Manet his first popular and critical success in his debut at the Salon of 1861. Though the picture was admired for its realistic detail, Manet did not disguise the fact that it was composed in a studio using a model and props. The left-handed singer holds a guitar strung for a right-handed player, and his fingering suggests that he was unfamiliar with the instrument. His outfit was fashioned from costumes that Manet kept on hand; several accessories reappear in paintings in this gallery.

For a long, long time, women were systematically written out of art history. 

From the 16th to the 19th centuries, after the rise of ‘Academic’ art institutions in Italy, France, and Britain, women weren’t allowed to train properly as artists.

They were rarely admitted to academies, barred from formal apprenticeships, and forbidden from studying the nude model (until the 19thC), which was considered essential for mastering painting. 

Of course, this did not stop them. 

Since the 1970s, feminist art historians have been making up for lost time. Although lots more research is yet to be done into women artists (especially in the realms of craft, folk, and naive art), there are some great books that have been published, particularly in the last few years, that shed some light on these brilliant women. 

• Linda Nochlin, Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists? (1971) — groundbreaking essay, arguing that the exclusion of women from the ‘canon’ of art is not because they don’t make good artists, but rather because of historic, institutional barriers.

• Leonora Carrington, The Hearing Trumpet (1974) — not an art history essay at all: a bizarre, hilarious novel by the surrealist painter Leonora Carrington… all about an old woman who leads a feminist revolution. 

• Gina Siciliano, I Know What I Am: The Life and Times of Artemisia Gentileschi (2019) — a rich, graphic-novel biography of the Baroque painter, Artemisia Gentileschi, addressing her struggles with patriarchy, family expectation, and sexual assault. 

• Katy Hessel, The Story of Art Without Men (2022) — a response to the art historian E.H. Gombrich’s ‘The Story of Art’ and its woeful lack of female artists. 

• Franny Moyle, Mrs Kauffman and Madame Le Brun (2023) — dual biography of the eighteenth-century Academic painters, Angelica Kauffman and Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, following their parallel and intertwined careers.

• Jill Burke, How to Be a Renaissance Woman (2023) — a thoroughly-researched, conversational account of what it was like to be a woman in Renaissance Italy. 

Enjoy!

The Seated I is one of four bronze sculptures created by Mutu for The Met's facade in September 2019, part of a commission titled The NewOnes, will free Us. The works consist of two kneeling and two seated female figures, simultaneously celestial and humanoid, strange and familiar. In the case of The Seated I, one of the figures' knees is raised, while the other meets the floor. The arms and hands rest gently on the legs. The head and fingers are attenuated, the facial features stylized. The figure is graced with a variety of embellishments, including abstract ornamentation on its head and ears; a polished disc at its mouth; and horizontal coils sheathing most of its body. The coils, which respond with great sensitivity to the curve and slope of the figure’s musculature, animated by virtue of the single bent knee, serve as garment and armor all at once. When conceiving the figures' adornments, likewise the proportions of their necks and heads, Mutu took inspiration from a variety of customs practiced by high-ranking African women, such as beaded bodices, circular necklaces, lip plates, crowns, hair styles, and skull elongation. The body of work from which The Seated I derives was also inspired by the tradition of load-bearers, sometimes referred to as caryatids, frequently but not always women carved out of stone or wood and designed to physically or symbolically support either buildings or male rulers. Female load-bearers appear in various guises across times and places, and they are omnipresent in The Met's Greek, African, American, and European collections. In the case of The Seated I, Mutu has staged a feminist intervention, liberating her load-bearer from the tasks she was historically assigned to perform. Belonging to no one time or place, the sculpture is stately, resilient, and self-possessed, announcing her authority and autonomy. When considered in the context of the original commission, moreover, The Seated I represents the "new ones" who bring word of new ideas and new perspectives, encouraging viewers to look forward to a better, more just future. Here the polished disc plays a key role, serving as a beacon that brings visitors into conversation with the sculpture, either by reflecting light or reflecting them back to themselves, occasioning moments of intersubjective conversation and critical self-awareness. A work of great importance in the context of Mutu’s career, The Seated I represents the culmination of two decades of sustained artistic experimentation and rigorous research into the relationship between power, race, gender, and representation.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/28445116