painting of the month

The White Veil -- Willard Leroy Metcalf, 1909 (Detroit Institute of the Arts)

RIP to one cool cat

Jazz great Dave Brubeck died this morning, just a day short of turning 92.  I know that this is generally an art blog, but I grew up seeing the cover of The Dave Brubeck Quartet's classic Take Five among my mother's pretty extensive record/CD collection and it was one of my first perceptions of modern art.  The cover was done by graphic designer  Sadamitsu "S. Neil" Fujita (1921-2010) for the original 1959 album, and Brubeck and his quartet also used a work by Joan Miró for their follow-up Time Further Out.   Here's a YouTube video of Take Five the composition featuring Fujita's cover, if you literally want to take five in memory of all the talent involved -- musically and visually.    

pablo and georges

"Two figures stand out among the creators of Cubism--Picasso and Braque...Picasso represents the adventurous and chimerical exaggeration of Spain.  His genius is informed by an insatiable creative power.  He is full of vagaries and fantastic imaginings, but he has always been a self-critic even in his most brilliant phases of negation.  Braque, on the other hand, brought to Cubism a constructive, positive and logical element that is typically French.  Picasso denies, Braque accepts...."

From The Holiday Painter -- J. Martin-Barbaz (Emerson Books, 1961)

Pictured:  The Accordionist, Pablo Picasso (Wikimedia Commons) and Aria de Bach, Georges Braque (National Gallery of Art)