the keen eyes of dennis hopper

And so the one and only Dennis Hopper is no longer with us and—because whom we die with is often as curious as who shares our birthday—he is perhaps now hanging out in the great Afterlife Green Room with the also recently departed Gary Coleman.

Some quick art facts about Dennis:

• not (immediately) related to Edward Hopper
• did study painting early on with American Regionalist Thomas Hart Benton
• played art dealer Bruno Bischofberger in the 1996 biopic Basquiat
• one of the first artworks he bought as a collector in the 1960s was an Andy Warhol soup can print
• aside from his acting, was a photographer and painter—with more info on his work here.
  

painting of the month

Yerres, Effect of Rain -- Gustave Caillebotte, 1875 (Indiana Museum of Art)

mary's lilacs

Lilacs in a Window -- Mary Cassatt (b. May 22, 1844 - d. 1926)

who was that masked man

It sounds like a French heist film-to-be starring maybe Jean Reno and Mathieu Kassovitz, and it ended with the Paris Museum of Modern Art losing five major paintings to a hooded, masked, after-hours bandit. I wrote a Suite101 blog entry about the art theft earlier today, and pictured here is the 1911 Picasso work that was stolen -- Le Pigeon aux Petits Pois. The paintings were said to be slit from their frames for faster access, which also means permanent damage to the canvas edges. Still, to make off with a Picasso, Matisse, Modigliani, Leger and Braque in one fell swoop is formidable for an art thief -- but truly just awful for the museum.

day of the Dalí

May 11th was once the birthday of a very famous Catalonian, the moustachioed attention-loving eccentric genius known as Salvador Dalí. I wrote an article for Suite101 on Dalí's famed 1931 melting time dreamscape The Persistence of Memory and it has always gotten the most page views of all my articles every single day for almost two years. Nobody ever beats him -- not even Picasso. Because that's just the enduring power of Dalí's supposedly headache and gooey cheese-induced vision, expressed upon a canvas that's much smaller than most people expect it to be. This Dalí alarm clock can help you start your day off in a pleasantly bizarre manner, and since Dalí himself seemed to love the combination of art and enterprise, I'm sure he'd approve.

The only difference between me and the Surrealists is that I am a Surrealist. -- Salvador Dali

Pictured: Mother and Child -- Harold Gilman, 1918 (Auckland Art Gallery)