Art

Between the two world wars, Renger-Patzsch was one of the champions of straight photography in Germany and an advocate for a modern aesthetic style known as Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity). He believed that photography’s chief value lay in its ability to render the texture and detail of physical objects with absolute precision. This close-up of the suffering face of Christ from a German Gothic Pietà was reproduced in the artist’s landmark book Die Welt ist Schön (The World Is Beautiful), published in 1928. The book’s sequence of one hundred tightly cropped and sharply focused images of plants, animals, landscapes, and industrial subjects suggested that the camera could disclose aspects of the essential nature of objects that were otherwise invisible to the naked eye.

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Born to a mixed-race family in rural Georgia, Benny Andrews rose from impoverished conditions and the anti-Black discrimination of the Jim Crow South to become a leading figurative painter of American life and a social justice advocate. He learned to draw as a child from his father, a self-taught artist and sharecropper. After serving in the Korean War, Andrews studied painting at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, using funds from the GI Bill, and moved to New York in 1958. There, he befriended a group of artists exploring figuration, including Red Grooms and Alice Neel, and developed his signature technique of "rough collage," combining bits of paper and fabric onto his painted canvases.

This startling and satirical scene of a patriotic woman astride a nude soldier forms part of Andrews’ ambitious Bicentennial Series, begun in 1970 in response to the 200th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. The painting cycle combines a potent confrontation of racial inequities with a critique of unguarded patriotism. Andrews created this particular work in response to the Vietnam War, saying that it represented a powerful image of "the military being used by misguided citizenry." It depicts a woman clutching a miniature American flag as she straddles a gaunt figure clad only in boots, a helmet, and the insignia of a US Army sergeant. Here, the military—represented by the helmeted form—submits to the will of "the people"—the patriotic woman. Crushed under the weight of jingoistic fervor, the person on its hands and knees turns this anti-war allegory into a scene of sexual domination and submission.

American Gothic takes its name from a more famous painting by Grant Wood that hangs at the Art Institute of Chicago, where Andrews would have seen it. While that work represents a farmer and his daughter stiffly posed in front of their house and has been interpreted as a positive depiction of Midwestern spirit, Andrews portrays a similarly enigmatic but more skeptical view of American values. The main figures also bear an unexpected resemblance to depictions of Aristotle and Phyllis, a moral tale of the Medieval period in which the ancient Greek philosopher debases himself before the seductive mistress of Alexander the Great, allowing her to ride him like a horse. Though the story has no relation to this painting’s contemporary anti-war message, it provides a powerful basis for the figurative group at the center of American Gothic.

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Meryon was plagued by mental illness and spent the last years of his brief life in an asylum. The dark, gothic tenor that characterizes many of his prints has been interpreted as symptomatic of his tumultuous life. This print, taken from his album Eaux-fortes sur Paris, shows a grotesque gargoyle from Notre-Dame Cathedral against an aerial view of the expanding French capital. Surrounded by a flock of darkly colored birds, the sculpture takes on a menacing, monstrous appearance, especially as it dominates the right half of the composition. Meryon added a verse of his own creation to this later state of the print, describing the figure as an "insatiable vampire, eternal lust" who "covets its food in the great city." The artist continued to revise the plate over the course of a decade, producing a total of ten states of the etching before his untimely death in 1868.

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Even the story is Halloween appropriate.

Early 20th century.

It seems doubtful that this Angel Applicant, resembling the offspring of a bulldog and a Halloween mask, will ever reach heaven. In 1939, Klee composed twenty-nine works that feature angels, having in earlier years only sporadically depicted them. His angels were not the celestial kind but hybrid creatures beset with human foibles and whims. Klee's angels are "forgetful, "still female, "ugly," incomplete," or "poor"—as the titles he gave these pictures indicate.

Suffering from an incurable illness and sensing himself hovering between life and death, Klee possibly felt a kinship with these outsiders. In this work, he covered a sheet of newspaper with black gouache on which he then drew the outlines of the figure and of the crescent moon with a thick, soft graphite pencil. Then he filled in these forms with a thin white wash. It is the black ground peeking through the white pigment that gives this creature its ghostly shimmer.

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Big fan of Paul Klee here as you can probably tell by my posting history. Lovely read there, do give it a go. Also, Happy Halloween folks!

I like the use of a blurry look to show movement in still art. Find it very effective.

Edgar Degas, Répétition d’un ballet sur la scène, 1874

There are three similar versions of this scene, and their precise relationship has bedeviled scholars for decades. The largest, painted in grisaille (Musée d’Orsay, Paris), appeared in the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874. The two others, tentatively dated the same year, are in the Metropolitan’s collection. This painting probably preceded the version in pastel (29.100.39), which is more freely handled. The importance that Degas attached to the composition is evident in the preparatory drawings that he made for almost every figure, from the dancer scratching her back in the foreground to the woman yawning next to the stage flat.

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Maybe the first artist I would've called a favourite of mine. Still love his style.

Against the towering background furnace that radiates sparks and flames, the lean but muscular bodies of two laborers glow under more dramatic lighting as they go about smelting metals in a crucible. The print thus juxtaposed and celebrated two kinds of raw energy—one human, the other industrial—as China began to modernize.

The print’s dense texture, vivid details, and layered visual effects recall Soviet wood engravings, which Huangyan greatly admired.

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Belovezhskaya Forest belongs to Qiu Xiaofei’s recent series investigating the intersections of personal and political history through magical realism. With influences from nineteenth-century European painting and Chinese figurative painting traditions, and forms taken after socialist architecture, Qiu lays out a fantastical, psychological drama drawing upon his family history and childhood in Harbin, in Northeastern China. The story of his maternal grandfather, a former Trotskyist whose career in China suffered due to that association, drives the narrative. Belovezhskaya Forest lies on the border of Poland and Belarus, where watershed moments during the Nazi occupation and history of the Soviet Union took place. Obscured portraits of Marx, Göring, Lenin, and Trotsky—who had direct or indirect history with the forest—are blended with Qiu’s grandfather’s visage and posted on the anthropomorphic trees. They watch over a pastel-colored figure representing a kind of arhat, one who is on the threshold toward enlightenment. Yet this character is entangled with amorphous monsters and surrounded by skulls, pointing to the forest’s sinister past. On the right and in the background appear abstracted Russian Orthodox churches and socialist-style workers’ dormitories, the latter memories from Qiu’s childhood that are slowly vanishing from the Harbin cityscape. A wormhole-like vortex, with its concentric circles, symbolizes the spiraling of time and imagination. The dizzying juxtaposition of these fragmented scenes weaves politics, allegory, and memory into a melancholy landscape.

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Anastasia Samoylova came of age as part of Russia’s first post-Soviet generation and has lived in the United States for most of her adult life. Straddling the line between insider and outsider, she wields a dual perspective that enriches her artistic vision and drives her passionate interest in exploring the particularities of place: how a region’s values, ideologies, and ecologies change and challenge each other over time.

Samoylova began photographing Florida in 2016. From her home base in Miami, traveled by car from the southernmost Keys to the state borders with Alabama and Georgia and up and down the Gulf Coast. The first result of these road trips was FloodZone, a book and series of exhibitions responding to the problem of rising sea levels and the fragility of the built environment in the southern United States. Her next project, Floridas, to which this work belongs, delves deeper into the state’s complexity and contradictions.

With their lush colors, layered surface, and collage-like compositions, Samoylova’s photographs and mixed-media paintings temper the shimmering seductions of the Sunshine State with an awareness of the troubling consequences of climate change, gentrification, and political extremism. The work is layered with subtle references to Florida’s complex history and to the ways it has been represented by others, most notably by the American photographer Walker Evans (1903-1975), who traveled there for commissions, book projects, and family visits from the 1930s through the 1970s.

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Beginning in 1905, Matisse spent the summers—and sometimes even the winters—in Collioure and continued to do so intermittently until about 1914. It was in Collioure that the sitter for The Young Sailor, a local sardine fisherman, caught his eye. In this second version of the painting (the first, dated 1906, is in a private collection), the contours have been sharpened, the forms are more defined, and the colors have been reduced to large, mostly flat areas of bright green, blue, and pink—a decorative style and palette adopted by Matisse from this point on. Matisse also drastically altered the sailor's mood and expression. His stylizing brush wiped off the earlier round-cheeked youthfulness of the fisherman's face, replacing it with a masklike expression of savvy cunning from which a touch of licentiousness seems not absent. The sitter's rather theatrical looks and his colorful costume, set against the pink candy-colored ground, combine to make this work one of Matisse's most decorative portraits in the Fauve manner.

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Among the most celebrated works of art at The Met, this painting conveys Rembrandt’s meditation on the meaning of fame. The richly clad Greek philosopher Aristotle (384–322 BCE) rests his hand pensively on a bust of Homer, the epic poet who had attained literary immortality with his Iliad and Odyssey centuries before. Aristotle wears a gold medallion with a portrait of his powerful pupil, Alexander the Great—perhaps the philosopher is weighing his own worldly success against Homer’s timeless achievement. Although the work has come to be considered quintessentially Dutch, it was painted for a Sicilian patron at a moment when Rembrandt’s signature style, with its dark palette and almost sculptural buildup of paint, was beginning to fall out of fashion in Amsterdam.

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After almost five years of brutal conflict, World War II came to an end with Germany surrendering on May 8, 1945, followed by Japan on September 2 after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This poster celebrates the victory of the Allies and the Soviet Red Army and the "total destruction of fascism." Triumph is expressed through striking imagery: a bayonet stuck in Hitler’s eye socket, chaotic surrounding debris, and rays of light in the background that suggest a new dawn. The text describes the jubilation of the artists at the TGP, the workers, and all those who fought for progress in Mexico.

This rejection led Monet to organize impressionist exhibitions. It’s now considered a masterpiece of early Impressionism.

There is something about snow in the impressionist style that I just find unexplainably beautiful.

I love great painters of light. Especially light on water. Similarly backlit subjects, the way light interacts with the image and impacts what we see while only backlighting.

I havent read much about him but i feel like he really likes triangles, often we see very sharp triangles in water and the general shape of his subjects too. Hence I added an image of the pyramid. You can also notice it in the water and the building and the people. Just a little theory.

Witches' Sabbath is one of Francisco de Goya's "Black Paintings," created between 1820 and 1823 on the walls of his home, the Quinta del Sordo. This series of works reflects the artist's dark and pessimistic vision in his final years. ​In the painting, a large he-goat represents the devil, presiding over a gathering of witches. The work not only depicts a scene of witchcraft but is also a social critique of the ignorance and fanaticism of the era. ​The painting inspires deep reflection on the darker side of humanity, the fear of the unknown, and madness. It is a testament to Goya's personal anguish and his view of Spanish society as a place dominated by superstition and evil.

Has been used as reference and as an inspiration for a lot of art. The witch by Eggers for example used this image as inspiration for it's ending too. A movie I love and a scene that left me pointing at my screen.