the smallest color

the success of curiosity

2012-02-08T21:42:00.000-08:00

Artist and diarist Marie Bashkirtseff's reaction to first seeing John Singer Sargent's 1884 Portrait of Madame X or Portrait of Madame Pierre Gautreau:

"It is a success of curiosity; people find it atrocious. For me it is a perfect painting, masterly, true. But he has done what he saw. Beautiful Mme. ____ is horrible in daylight...."

the individualist

2012-02-02T19:38:00.000-08:00

Author and philosopher Ayn Rand was born today in 1905 and died in 1982 at the age of 77. Her perhaps best known work is the architectural epic The Fountainhead, which follows the career of the intense and uncompromising Howard Roark along with many other less idealistic yet occasionally more intriguing side characters. This uncompromising cat enjoys idling by the novel for some reason and tries her best to shred its 695 pages. She may be identifying with The Fountainhead's (anti)heroine Dominique Francon -- and like Dominique is also willful, beautiful, and gets a twisted pleasure out of destroying things.

painterly spirit of the place

2012-02-01T21:19:00.000-08:00

Above all, the outdoor painter should get the character and feeling of the place he portrays on his canvas. If in Spain, his picture must look like Spain. The air must be transparent, the architecture clean-cut against the azure. If it be Holland, the atmosphere must be moist, the air like a veil, and with all this there must be nothing in the work that will be mistaken for the smoke-laden air of England. Only thus, by this fidelity to the very nature and spirit of a place, can the picture be made to express the essence of its life, which is really the heart of the whole mystery.

Excerpt from Francis Hopkinson Smith's Scammon Lectures at the Art Institute of Chicago given in 1914, which is probably why the outdoor painter portrayed scenes on his canvas while all the ladies perhaps stayed indoors and made a nice pitcher of lemonade to quench the outdoor painter's deep artistic thirst.

Pictured: The Port of London -- Claude Monet, 1871

painting of the month

2012-01-14T09:41:00.001-08:00

Colored Forms II -- August Macke, 1913 (Wilhelm Hack Museum)

mary and the bullfighter

2012-01-13T09:52:00.000-08:00

As a young woman, Mary Stevenson Cassatt was determined not to let her gender keep her from becoming a serious artist. Following her graduation from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, she trained with Academic painter Jean-Léon Gérôme in Paris and in 1872 visited Italy and Spain to study the works of the Old Masters. In Madrid, Mary greatly admired the 17th century art of Diego Velázquez at the Museo del Prado. Mary was perhaps also inspired to travel to Spain by the work that Edouard Manet had exhibited following his own 1865 Spanish visit. Manet had a strong influence on younger painters of his time, and his striking Dead Toreador and The Bullfight no doubt caught Cassatt’s eye.

The Spanish culture and visual landscape were exciting to Mary and after Madrid she went further to Seville. Cassatt’s subtlety comes through in her 1873 painting Spanish Dancer Wearing a Lace Mantilla, while her skill with color and detail can be seen in On the Balcony, where two young women flirt with a suitor. Cassatt captures the flowered dresses, bright shawls and coy expressions of the women, while making the male presence less facially detailed yet still dominating as he extends his arm proprietarily. The woman in red seems wistful as the man focuses attention on her companion, and she gazes down at life beyond her railed perch with perhaps a longing to find a truer love.

In the same year’s Offering the Panale to the Bullfighter, Cassatt set up a scene between another woman with a flower in her dark hair giving a bullfighter a panale, or sweet treat. In this painting, Cassatt minimizes the girl while fully showing the bullfighter, his expression just a shade arrogant and expectant. He is, after all, a killer of the bulls (!) and women surely adore him. Cassatt again offers a fine sense of masculine/feminine physical stances, with the bullfighter’s dominant posture and the woman’s more yielding position.

Cassatt’s After the Bullfight could be considered her most intriguing Spanish-influenced painting, mainly because of the artistic statement it makes. In Cassatt’s day, a kind of artistic decorum allowed men to paint nudes, dancers, actresses, or whatever female they happened to be obsessed with — as long as the work kept within the boundaries of what was then considered decency. 19th century women artists, however, generally had to limit their paintings to still-lifes, landscapes, classical or Biblical scenes, portraits of other women, children or animals, with maybe an occasional husband, brother or fatherly study.

In Cassatt’s After the Bullfight, a toreador smokes a cigarette and savors his latest triumph. He looks confident both inside the arena and beyond it, yet he is not a romantic caricature. Here Cassatt not only chose a subject equal to the Spanish works of Manet, she asserted her right as a female artist to depict a virile and attractive man.

Cassatt’s knowledge of bullfighters is presumed to not have come from actual attendance but from Théophile Gautier’s 1845 Travels in Spain. Gautier’s guidebook gives extensive and graphic details of the bullfight tradition and the ornate outfits of those involved, noting how the toreador “has no defensive armour, he is dressed as if for a ball…a pin could pierce his satin jacket; all he has is a bit of stuff and a frail sword.” Gautier also notes the crowd’s enjoyment of the sport’s violence and love for the man who either kills or is gored by the enraged and tormented bull.

After her Spanish sojourn, Mary Cassatt returned to Paris. She was eventually invited to exhibit independently with the French Impressionists by Edgar Degas, and she would become close friends with Degas and linked with the Impressionist group throughout the rest of her life.

Sources:

suzanne and somerset

2012-01-04T21:01:00.000-08:00

Suzanne Valadon was born in 1865 and grew up fatherless in Paris. She learned to fend for herself early on and held various jobs, including being a circus trapeze artist. Her striking looks made her a sought-after model to such painters as Renoir and Toulouse-Lautrec, and she also found a teacher and patron in Edgar Degas. Suzanne had many romances and eventually gave birth to painter Maurice Utrillo, though it was never clear as to who Maurice’s real father was. Suzanne’s art showed a fine use of color and unique perception, and as a feline lover, she did a truly outstanding job in depicting cats.

Somerset Maugham often included artist characters in his novels, and in The Razor’s Edge it seems pretty likely that Suzanne Rouvier came from Suzanne Valadon. Maugham describes his Suzanne’s independent yet resourceful nature and her own artistic work, both as muse and creator. In the novel, Suzanne has an affair with Larry, but when Larry is ready to say goodbye, she doesn't question his need to move on.

Suzanne Rouvier is one of the more vibrant characters in The Razor’s Edge, though Maugham does tend to minimize her artwork. He describes Suzanne as essentially mimicking her artist lovers’ styles, “landscape like the landscape painter, abstractions like the cubist,” until her present lover and patron tells her not to imitate men but to use a more feminine style, and to not “aim to be strong; be satisfied to charm.” And while the real Suzanne Valadon encouraged her son to take up painting to challenge his often self-destructive behavior, Razor’s Edge Suzanne has a daughter instead and pragmatically urges the girl to learn to type and study stenography.

Click to see Suzanne Valadon’s portrait of composer Erik Satie, another of her boyfriends and one who apparently was quite crazy about her. It seems that her perception of Satie was quite good and not just imitative -- and unlike Suzanne Rouvier -- that her pursuit of art might have been more than a hobby “she got a lot of fun out of.”

(Pictured: Suzanne Valadon by Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen)

painting of the month

2011-12-30T16:26:00.000-08:00

The Reverend Robert Walker
Skating on Duddingston Loch
a/k/a The Skating Minister --
Sir Henry Raeburn, circa 1790
(National Gallery of Scotland)

festive fezziwigs

2011-12-25T17:22:00.000-08:00

In came a fiddler with a music-book, and went up to the lofty desk, and made an orchestra of it, and tuned like fifty stomach-aches. In came Mrs Fezziwig, one vast substantial smile. In came the three Miss Fezziwigs, beaming and lovable. In came the six young followers whose hearts they broke. In came all the young men and women employed in the business. In came the housemaid, with her cousin, the baker. In came the cook, with her brother's particular friend, the milkman. In came the boy from over the way, who was suspected of not having board enough from his master; trying to hide himself behind the girl from next door but one, who was proved to have had her ears pulled by her mistress.

In they all came, one after another; some shyly, some boldly, some gracefully, some awkwardly, some pushing, some pulling; in they all came, anyhow and everyhow. Away they all went, twenty couple at once; hands half round and back again the other way; down the middle and up again; round and round in various stages of affectionate grouping; old top couple always turning up in the wrong place; new top couple starting off again, as soon as they got there; all top couples at last, and not a bottom one to help them.

When this result was brought about, old Fezziwig, clapping his hands to stop the dance, cried out, 'Well done,' and the fiddler plunged his hot face into a pot of porter, especially provided for that purpose. But scorning rest, upon his reappearance, he instantly began again, though there were no dancers yet, as if the other fiddler had been carried home, exhausted, on a shutter, and he were a brand-new man resolved to beat him out of sight, or perish....

(A Christmas Carol, Mr. Dickens)

great blake things

2011-12-21T21:12:00.000-08:00

Great things are done when Men & Mountains meet
This is not Done by Jostling in the Street.

William Blake

once upon a kandinsky birthday

2011-12-04T18:57:00.000-08:00

The artist must train not only his eye, but his soul.

(Wassily Kandinsky, December 4, 1863* -- December 13, 1944)

*December 16 is also noted as Kandinsky's birthday, apparently depending on whether you use the Julian or Gregorian calendar.

Pictured: Yellow-Red-Blue -- W. Kandinsky, 1925 (Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou)

the peaceable trio

2011-11-26T07:07:00.000-08:00

I've never willingly made it through a whole rerun of Three's Company but while flipping past the zany swinging 70s hangover with the remote, I did notice that it looks like a print of Edward Hicks' 1826 The Peaceable Kingdom might be on the wall of Janet, Jack and Chrissie's apartment? Since Hicks was a Quaker he'd have surely been troubled by the whole threesome and smarmy joke set-up, but beyond that they were all trying to live peaceably, I guess.

painting of the month

2011-11-19T07:29:00.000-08:00

Vegetable Dinner -- Peter Blume, 1927 (Smithsonian American Art Museum)

poetry and parking

2011-11-13T08:31:00.000-08:00

The jewel-like words of poets and city parking garages generally don't have much in common, unless you're leaving your car at 201 West Madison in Chicago, also known as the Poetry Garage. Here while you're off on an urban adventure, your vehicle waits on garage levels dedicated specifically to poets like Robert Frost, Langston Hughes, Emily Dickinson and Carl Sandburg, the man who conjured up visions of Chicago fog and little cat feet. You still have to pay for the parking, of course, but it's a much more aesthetic experience and probably easier to remember that you parked your PT Cruiser up with W.H. Auden -- instead of just somewhere on Level 3.

(Pictured: Calliope, muse of poetry and The Poetry Garage; painting by Cesare Dandini, 1595-1658)

vincent, again

2011-10-23T09:41:00.000-07:00

This past week a new theory and book about the death of Van Gogh made the media scene, with the alternate ending that Vincent did not commit suicide but was the victim of two teenaged boys who shot him by accident. The boys had been teasing Van Gogh all summer like teenagers can do if they encounter someone perceptive and unique, and the shooting was just the culmination of their young men behaving badly dynamic. Compassionate to the end, Van Gogh apparently covered for these youths and claimed to have shot himself, and with his troubled mental history the suicide wasn't challenged.

So if you also factor in the other alternate theory that Van Gogh didn't cut off his own earlobe and was covering up for Gaugin's lopping it off with a sword, the life of Vincent seems even more victimized. Not only did his wonderful talents go unrecognized throughout his 37 years, but he was physically abused by others. I'd prefer that he'd had the warped self-determination and righteous rage to have at least either mutilated his own ear or shot himself, but when you read his letters to his brother Theo and consider his deep longing to connect with others, it's not too far-fetched that he would protect those who had wronged him. Whatever the case, Van Gogh and his artwork continue to fascinate the world more than a century after his death -- no matter how that final moment happened to come about.

painting of the month

2011-10-21T16:08:00.001-07:00

The Red Maple -- A.Y. Jackson (1914), National Gallery of Canada

sharp-dressed koloman

2011-10-05T09:44:00.001-07:00

Koloman Moser (March 30, 1868 – October 18, 1918): artist, designer, craftsman -- and looking good here in his elegantly casual coat and hat

(1904 photo of Kolo by Friedrich Victor Spitzer, from Wikimedia Commons)

the artful theatre

2011-10-02T10:41:00.000-07:00

Chicago's Goodman Theatre is presently showcasing John Logan's Red, with its reincarnation of artist Mark Rothko holding court on stage (I'm not calling him an Abstract Expressionist because he apparently didn't want to be minimized by a label). Last week would have been Rothko's birthday on September 25th, and then Mayor Rahm (I'm calling him by his first name because he just seems to be a first-name mayor) declared "Paint the Town Red Day" in honor of the play, and it was all a dramatically fun, art-centered crimson tide.

However, though I haven't seen Red Rothko yet, three diverse Chicago theater-goers I've spoken to have noted that the play that recently and quietly won their hearts is The Pitman Painters at the Timeline Theatre. Lee Hall of Billy Elliot fame is the author, and the story involves a group of British miners from Ashington who took a sponsored art appreciation class during the 1930s. Their instructor found the miners to be less than interested in the appreciation aspects of the lessons, so he urged them to approach the subject directly and create their own works. The men became the Ashington Group and ultimately found critical success and a patron, along with broadening their own horizons and sense of collective and personal identity. Yet they still stayed in the mines and true to their "pit" roots, and if this doesn't sound like the next The King's Speech-type movie adaptation that will net plenty of Academy Award nominations I don't know what does.

Here's a link to the Ashington Group's website, and the tiny pictured work is by Pitman Painter Harry Wilson (Ashington Colliery)

painting of the month

2011-09-23T11:16:00.001-07:00

Autumn -- Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1573)

painting of the month

2011-08-14T17:38:00.000-07:00

The Passage -- Kay Sage, 1956

urban gardening

2011-08-09T15:21:00.000-07:00

Here are some excerpts from an interesting piece in the July 1925 issue of The Century, a magazine which seems to have been read by many intelligentsia of the day. "The Wildness of New York" is by Lewis S. Gannett, who seems to have been one of those same intelligentsia of his day and who lived from 1891-1966. And along the way he had a backyard garden, "literally within a stone's-throw of Brooklyn Bridge."

In his Wildness essay, Gannett was noting how despite all the brick and concrete, he could still spot plenty of birds, butterflies, grasshoppers and even bats around his 15 foot "square of grass," with a paper mulberry tree that "seems to enjoy the daily deposit of soot from the neighboring chocolate-factory." His house and yard too were formerly a "medicine factory" back around 1900, leaving his soil full of heaps of broken tonic and iodine bottles and brick shards. (Not much environmental concern during the Robber Baron era.) Vegetables were hard to keep going in the sooty earth, and only after a couple years of failure did petunias begin to thrive.

Weeds did well as they always do, and so did "asters and goldenrod, both indifferent to clouds of dust and soot," like they once bloomed in a "whole hillside...behind the old Tiffany Building to greet the New York Central tracks." Exceptionally pretty or unique plants tended to be stolen by the Gannett's neighbors. Some things never change.

Pictured: Meadow Flowers (Goldenrod and Wild Aster) -- John Henry Twachtman, 1893 @ The Brooklyn Museum

painting of the month

2011-07-22T19:25:00.001-07:00

The Balloon -- Maurice Prendergast, 1898

days at the beach

2011-06-30T19:30:00.000-07:00

Artists Joaquin Sorolla (1863-1923) and Illinois-born Jane Peterson (1876-1965) did not share the same style of painting, but the Spanish Sorolla was one of Peterson's instructors and they both seemed to love their beach scenes. Sorolla offers a beautiful use of white here and a fine sense of rippling breezes and rushing tides in his work, but Peterson's beach bunch looks more relaxed and sun-splashed -- and much less encumbered by unnecessary clothing.

Pictured: Walk on the Beach -- Joaquin Sorolla, 1909 and Beach Scene -- Jane Peterson, 1935

painting of the month

2011-06-17T07:59:00.000-07:00

Vegetable Garden and Donkey -- Joan Miró, 1918

art and the house of mirth

2011-06-08T09:15:00.001-07:00

More Suite101 blog reposting....

I’ve always loved the chapter from Edith Wharton’s 1905 novel The House of Mirth, where ladies of New York society take part in an evening of "living pictures" or tableaux vivants. For the entertainment of their guests, and for the presumed showcasing of themselves, the costumed women pose within sets designed to resemble classic paintings. These illusions depend "not only on the happy disposal of lights and the delusive-interposition of layers of gauze, but on a corresponding adjustment of the mental vision. To unfurnished minds they remain, in spite of every enhancement of art, only a superior kind of wax-works; but to the responsive fancy they may give magic glimpses of the boundary world between fact and imagination."

By this point in the novel, we’ve become familiar with the female characters and to link some of them with art is aesthetically fun — and a nice fictional device by Edith Wharton. We know about the translucent-skinned "frailer Dutch type" of old New York money, perfect for bringing a van Dyck to life. We also know about the resourceful and resilient Carry Fisher, who despite being a divorcee when divorce was still questioned has managed to keep herself within society circles. With her earthy dark looks she becomes one of Goya’s women for the night, from the "exaggerated glow of her eyes" to the "provocation of her frankly-painted smile."

Then there’s Lily Bart, The House of Mirth’s heroine — beautiful, capricious, determined to find a rich husband yet not quite calculating and manipulative enough to pull that feat off. Lily chooses Sir Joshua Reynolds’ Mrs. Lloyd as her tableau, knowing that its simpler lines and similarity to her own loveliness will be a show-stopper. Which it is, and Lily is a true vision — with some of the men of course wondering privately about whether she’s got any underwear on beneath those "pale draperies" that outline "dryad-like curves."

The tableaux evening is a high point in Lily’s otherwise troubled quest to become one of New York's truly powerful society women — and to no doubt eventually have her own beautiful, slightly haughty portrait painted by John Singer Sargent.

Pictured: La Maja Vestida (Francisco de Goya, ca. 1800) & Mrs. Richard Bennett Lloyd (Sir Joshua Reynolds, ca. 1775) -- click on each painting to get a closer look

unconsciously brilliant

2011-05-29T20:23:00.001-07:00

"The unconscious should not be thought of as a limbo where vague, cloudy, and amorphous notions swim hastily about. There is every reason to believe, on the contrary, that it is the great home of form; that it is quicker to see types, patterns, purposes, than our intellect can ever be...[I]f you are to write well, you must come to terms with the enormous and powerful part of your nature which lies behind the threshold of immediate knowledge."

Words: Becoming a Writer -- Dorothea Brande, 1934
Image: Dream Vision -- Albrecht Dürer, 1525 (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna)

that lunatic impressionist gang

2011-05-21T13:30:00.000-07:00

(More Suite101 blog reposts....)

The French Impressionists initially had to organize their own exhibits because the official Paris Salon wouldn’t consistently accept their works. When those indie shows were reviewed by certain art critics of the day, the feedback could be downright nasty. While some admired their new perspective, others sniped how:

“Here five or six lunatics deranged by ambition -- one of them a woman -- have put together an exhibition…They take canvas, paint and brushes, splash on a few daubs of color here and there at random, then sign the result. The inmates of the Ville-Evrard Asylum behave in much the same way…Try telling M Pissarro that trees are not purple, or the sky the colour of butter…Try to explain to M Renoir that a woman’s torso is not a rotting mass of flesh, with violet-toned green spots all over it...There is also, as in all famous gangs, a woman. Her name is Berthe Morisot, and she is a curiosity. She manages to convey a certain degree of feminine grace in spite of her outbursts of delirium.”

That was critic Albert Wolff behind that 1876 rampage, and as a result of it, Berthe Morisot‘s husband Eugene (also painter Edouard Manet‘s brother) challenged Wolff to a duel, though I don’t think any swords were ever drawn or pistols fired. Clearly, Mr. Wolff would be horrified by the crowds who still flock to museums to view French Impressionist paintings, and by all the Monet tote bags and Degas and Renoir calendars for sale in the gift shops.

Wolff’s tirade is included in Sue Roe’s very interesting and smoothly flowing The Private Lives of The Impressionists (HarperCollins). The book gives factual and biographical information, but it also heightens the personalities and friendships of the artists so that it reads more like a novel. Definitely worth checking out.

(Pictured: Buttery sky by Camille Pissarro -- Apple Pickers at Eragny, 1888 -- Dallas Museum of Art)

painting of the month

2011-05-17T19:08:00.001-07:00

White Shoes -- Eva Gonzales, ca. 1879

the mystery guest

2011-05-11T16:16:00.001-07:00

Born May 11, 1904 (d. 1989), Surrealist Salvador Dalí knew how to market himself and his work and was never too reticent or aloof to miss a worthwhile opportunity to get his wild eyes and curious mustache out there. He seemed to really love the spectacle and drama part of being an artist, and if he were still with us he’d no doubt be delighted to learn that you can find his 1950s What's My Line? appearance on YouTube, along with a few other interesting Dalí TV moments. You can see in the What’s My Line? clip how Dalí easily maintains his somewhat perplexed poise throughout the questioning, then how he’s sure to suavely kiss the hands of all the women on the panel as he goes over to introduce himself.

pigeons, pollock and other talented creatures

2011-05-03T10:41:00.000-07:00

Again, our Suite101 Feature Writer blogs are due to be shut down soon so I'm reposting some of the entries here....

There are new and unusual schools of art -- and then there are the spoofs that follow. Click here to see if you can recognize the works of either some spirited and colorful chimps or bonafide human painters. Back in 1964, the canvases of an emerging French talent named Pierre Brassau came upon the art scene in Sweden, with one critic praising Brassau's style as having the “delicacy of a ballet dancer.” Pierre eventually turned out to be a chimp named Peter from the zoo, who probably didn’t even get any of the money earned from the sale of his stuff before the big revelation. This same website also gives you the chance to guess whether you’re looking at a Pollock or some abstractly messy pigeon crap -- or if you want to get literary, whether text is oddly computer-generated German translation or actual William Faulkner prose.

(Pictured: Study of Birds and Monkey, J. van Kessel, circa 1660)

dolling it up

2011-04-27T09:32:00.000-07:00

It wouldn’t seem likely that the names Gustav Klimt and Barbie would ever be used in the same sentence – but then again, why not? In the Barbie® Museum Collection due out this summer, distinctly designed Barbies wear outfits fashioned after such classic paintings as Van Gogh’s The Starry Night, Da Vinci’s La Gioconda and Klimt’s Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I. Starry Night Barbie is strapless and swinging, Mona Lisa Barbie is more demure and subtly elegant, and the Klimt Barbie is quite the stunner in her resplendently detailed and shimmering wrap, choker and long gown.

I hope they continue the series and personally would very much like to see a Dalí Barbie, with maybe a melting clock necklace or some busy little ants crawling up and down her legs? The Gauguin Tahiti Barbie, or the Jackson Pollock-style hipster, with a multicolored splattered minidress and black Abstract Expressionist sunglasses. It also might be nice to see Barbie as the artist herself with an easel and smock, rather than the exclusive object of beauty.

national poetry month!

2011-04-25T20:06:00.000-07:00

To be in love
Is to touch with a lighter hand.
In yourself you stretch, you are well.
You look at things
Through his eyes.
A cardinal is red.
A sky is blue.
Suddenly you know he knows too....

You cannot look in his eyes
Because your pulse must not say
What must not be said.
When he
Shuts a door-
Is not there-
Your arms are water.
And you are free
With a ghastly freedom....

(From "To Be in Love" -- Gwendolyn Brooks)(Pictured: Cardinalis cardinalis, Wikimedia Commons)

2011-04-24T09:28:00.000-07:00

Russian Empire Easter postcard, circa 1900 (from Wikimedia Commons)

whistler's special sauce

2011-04-20T09:08:00.000-07:00

Our Suite101 Feature Writer blogs are being removed from the site as of May 1, so I'll repost some of the entries that got the most traffic here....

For many artists, the creation of a unique persona and lifestyle is often as interesting as creating the art itself. Never one to quietly accept what he’d been handed, the great James McNeill Whistler rejected the notion of being born in sensible Lowell, Massachusetts and instead invented alternate backdrops for his coming into being. ("I shall be born when and where I want, and I do not choose to be born in Lowell….") While Whistler's actual and not fabricated childhood was in Europe, he found himself putting in an incongruous stint at West Point Academy following the death of his father. He then headed to Paris to pursue the whole bohemian artist experience before eventually making London his home base.

Robert M. Crunden’s book American Salons features fascinating characters like Whistler who reinvented themselves between the 19th and 20th centuries, and in the process changed the course of art, fiction, poetry, music and life in general. Here's an excerpt regarding Whistler’s painting method:

Nature gave him its inspiration, while the Japanese gave him intuitions about what to do with it…He had a large palette, a board two feet by three with a butterfly inlaid at one corner, on which he laid out his colors, the pure at the top. He then mixed large quantities of the prevailing color in the intended picture, producing results so juicy that he called it “sauce”…[h]e had to lay his canvas on the ground because the sauce would run if the canvas were in any way tilted -- sometimes it did anyway, and he often accepted the accidental results….

"If the man who paints only the tree, or flower, or other surface he sees before him were an artist, the king of artists would be the photographer. It is for the artist to do something beyond this." (James McNeill Whistler, 1834-1903)

Pictured: Whistler's 1900 Gray and Gold -- The Golden Bay (Hunter Museum of American Art)

painting of the month

2011-04-17T12:12:00.000-07:00

Wild He-Goats Dance (Arthur Bowen Davies, ca. 1915 -- Maier Museum of Art)

national poetry month!

2011-04-11T10:24:00.000-07:00

Some spiders spin webs as beautiful
As Japanese drawings, intricate as clocks, strong as rocks:
Others construct traps which consist only
Of two sticky and tricky threads. Yet this ambush is enough
To bind and chain a crawling ant for long
enough:
The famished spider feels the vibration
Which transforms patience into sensation and satiation.

from Spiders -- Delmore Schwartz (1913-1966) (Pictured: The Smiling Spider -- Odilon Redon)

a visit to the hot l baltimore

2011-04-09T09:52:00.000-07:00

Steppenwolf Theatre's revival of the late Lanford Wilson's 1970s hit The Hot L Baltimore is currently happening through the end of May, with direction by Tina Landau and a cast of many fine actors. The set is also impressively rundown and offers a two-story action view, featuring stairs leading to rooms without doors to allow for a kind of voyeuristic, back of a dollhouse effect. If you can sit close to the stage and you're fascinated by authentic props, you'll enjoy noting how magazines leafed through are truly from the 1970s, and that the TV set shows Pringles commercials of the era -- and that some super-groovy ribbed blue bellbottoms are worn by Bill, the desk clerk. And if you lived through the seventies or have a more youthful retro interest in them, the timeline boards of the decade's major events and hit songs set up in the theater lobby will likely round out your nostalgic experience.

Back in the real day, The Hot L Baltimore debuted in March of 1973 and ran through 1976 at New York's Circle in the Square. It showcased the then-new talents of forever tough cookie Conchata Ferrell (who so refreshingly dominates Charlie Sheen on Two and a Half Men), and Judd Hirsch as Paul, a young man in search of his elusive grandfather. At that time, the play surely had a very different vibe, because it was an immediate representation of 1970s upheaval and change, and America wasn't so familiar with the lives of sassy hookers and/or needed to come to terms with the fact that many of its former glories were crumbling and in the line of the wrecking ball.

So essentially, The Hot L's revival now is pretty much evocative and not a social slice of life, with a note of melancholy added due to the recent death of playwright Lanford Wilson. The play is further deepened by many primary roles being filled by African American actors in this production, including standout performances by de'Adre Aziza, Alana Arenas, Namir Smallwood, Jon Michael Hill, James Vincent Meredith, TaRon Patton and Jacqueline Williams.

Still, if the play is truly supposed to take place in the early 1970s, changing the racial makeup of the cast would have--at the time--caused all sorts of alternate issues and dynamics. Yes, Baltimore has a larger black population than other cities, but perhaps the elderly Mr. Morse might harbor some old school inherent prejudices, or perhaps the fact that Bill the desk clerk is attracted to The Girl might create a greater interracial frisson of conflict -- and the idea of a brash young black woman and her timid brother planning to farm acres in predominately white 1970s Utah seems even more worrisome. Mrs. Oxenham is into making a traditional African fashion statement -- what consciousness-raising led her to that? And why does Mr. Katz dislike Jackie so much? Is it hard knocks disapproval or just, as she complains, because of the way she dresses?

I have to wonder whether being in the front row made me connect more with some of the characters and have more questions about them. Probably too many questions, because in the long run it seems best to just take The Hot L Baltimore as a retro piece -- to enjoy the team effort, the set, the props and the onstage radio crackling out soul tunes, and don't really think that much about the rest.

Pictured: Bill (Jon Michael Hill) and The Girl (Alison Torem) in The Hot L Baltimore

national poetry month!

2011-04-02T07:48:00.001-07:00

The city sleeps and the country sleeps,
The living sleep for their time, the dead sleep for their time...
And such as it is to be of these more or less I am,
And of these one and all I weave the song of myself.

Walt Whitman (1819-1892)

vincent and gregor

2011-03-30T07:54:00.000-07:00

Today was once the birthday of Vincent van Gogh, an artist of great emotion and intense colors -- and an unfortunately tragic ending. And an unfortunately never-ending association with the loss of an earlobe, but that's just how the world turns. Van Gogh has been played by various actors, most famously by Kirk Douglas in Lust for Life, but which actor has taken on the role of both Vincent and Gregor Samsa, Kafka's hapless man-turned-beetle in The Metamorphosis? Whoever sends in the first correct e-mail answer (see profile link for address) will win a free GPSmyCity iPhone app for walking tours of either Chicago, London or Paris (be sure to specify which city you'd like when you send your reply).

Pictured: The Bedroom -- Vincent van Gogh, 1889 (Art Institute of Chicago) and Self-Portrait -- Vincent van Gogh, 1887

born today

2011-03-24T20:18:00.000-07:00

...on March 24th, 1834 was William Morris, long-reigning Knight of the Arts & Crafts Round Table -- a table which he most surely would have designed. Known as Topsy to his Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood friends, Morris was a writer, poet, Socialist and genius of organic form and function whose beautiful textiles, tapestries, wallpapers, furniture, stained glass and printworks attest to his claim that the “true secret of happiness lies in taking a genuine interest in all the details of daily life.” He also produced literary translations, including major sagas in Icelandic, though I doubt that the word "idle" (in any language) was ever part of the personal vocabulary of this remarkable creative dynamo.

Pictured: William Morris (1834-1896)

musings on camille

2011-03-23T20:29:00.000-07:00

Mary Mathews Gedo's Monet and His Muse (University of Chicago Press) examines the pivotal relationship between French Impressionist master Claude Monet and his first wife Camille. Before Monet's ascent to fame and eternal association with water lilies, haystacks and Giverny, the artist was just another aspiring young painter full of ambition and conflict. He was rebellious and enjoyed la vie bohème, but he also needed his father's financial support. "I wish you see you in an atelier, under the discipline of a well-known master," Adolphe Monet cautioned his son. "If you resume your independence, I will stop your allowance without more ado."

Though Monet obeyed and worked with mentors for a while, fortunately he and his fellow Impressionists kept enough of their independent spirit and vision to change the world of art. Monet also became involved with a dark-haired, quietly beautiful young woman named Camille Doncieux, a liaison which would have highs and lows for both parties. Camille proved to be an excellent muse; she was perceptive and receptive, able to tolerate Monet's mood swings and to pose for long stretches of time. She bolstered his confidence and satisfied his romantic desires, and she was devoted to helping him succeed. Camille's distinctive stance in the 1866 Woman in a Green Dress brought Monet quite a bit of favorable attention at the annual Paris Salon, and she would later grace the canvases of other memorable Monet paintings like The Red Kerchief, Springtime and La Japonaise.

And then Camille became pregnant. Monet was thrown into turmoil, faced with the possibility of being cut off financially by his family and having to support a wife and baby. He fought the obligation for as long as he could yet apparently upon first seeing his newborn "big beautiful boy" Jean, Monet relented and gave his son his legitimate name. In Camille's case, despite her eventual marriage to the father of her child, her role as Madame Monet would not always be an easy one.

Monet and His Muse is a fine read for Monet lovers, especially those prepared to accept a somewhat flawed reflection of the genius. (But what genius is not flawed?) A fascinating chapter in collaboration with artist William Conger analyzes Monet's 1868 On the Bank of the Seine, Bennecourt (currently at the Art Institute of Chicago), reexamining the painting in terms of its various incarnations and underlying layers, and in context of Monet's feelings toward his wife and son at the time—and possible need for creative catharsis.

Camille Monet died in 1879, about a year after the birth of her second son, Michel. The cause was presumed to be complications from cervical cancer, and at Camille's deathbed was Alice Hoschedé, the then-wife of Monet's patron Ernest Hoschedé. Alice later became Monet's wife and evidently felt compelled to destroy nearly every photograph or document connected to her no longer-living rival. Alice wasn't able to destroy the paintings, however, and so Camille's artistic legacy continues. The grieving Monet even painted Camille in repose following her death, perhaps again looking for creative catharsis and closure.

The woman who truly wore the green gown has always cast such an intriguing backward glance towards us all, and Ms. Gedo's book offers a rich companion narrative and adds new dimensions to the mystery of Camille and her many portraits.

painting of the month

2011-03-22T21:06:00.000-07:00

Japanese Children -- Lilla Cabot Perry (ca. 1900)

forget the map and try an app

2011-03-19T09:45:00.000-07:00

Spring is just a few hours away and with it comes the need to venture out and explore -- and if that involves spring travel, perhaps to take a walking tour of a new or even familiar city. These GPSmyCity.com iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch apps are a great way to tour an area at your own pace, with an impressive variety of walks and cities available. GPSmyCity.com is sponsoring the following quiz about Chicago here; e-mail your answers to quiz@gpsmycity.com and you could win three city walk apps to use this spring, summer, fall...or whenever you choose.

1) Chicago is known by several names. What isn't it called?

a) the Windy City
b) the City of Big Shoulders
c) the City of Lights

2) Chicago’s downtown area is known as ________. The nickname refers to the area encircled by the elevated train tracks.

a) the Loop
b) the Hook
c) the Ellipse

3) Chicago is the birthplace among others of McDonalds, the chewing gum giant Wrigley’s and the cell phone giant Motorola. What sport has been invented here:

a) 16-inch softball
b) baseball
c) squash

4) At the time of its completion in 1974 the Willis Tower was the tallest building in the world, surpassing the World Trade Center towers in New York, and it held this rank for nearly 25 years. How many states are visible from its roof?

a) 3
b) 4
c) 5

5) Chicago is the third largest city in United States, its metropolitan area, commonly named "Chicagoland," being the 27th most populous metropolitan area in the world. What American cities are more populous than Chicago?

a) New York and Houston
b) Los Angeles and New York
c) Philadelphia and New York

6) Chicago is home to the largest population of _______ in the world, except Warsaw:

a) Poles
b) Czechs
c) Serbs

7) In 1900, Chicago successfully completed a massive and highly innovative engineering project. Since then the Chicago River is the only river in the world that:

a) flows North in the Northern Hemisphere
b) flows backward
c) the only river in the world that flows both northwards and southwards across the line of the Equator

8) Each year, the Chicago River is dyed green to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day. St. Patrick is the patron saint of what country?

a) Ireland
b) Scotland
c) Poland

9) The Art Institute of Chicago has one of the largest and most extensive collections of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings in the world. Which of these painters was not an Impressionist:

a) Monet
b) Cezanne
c) Dali

10) The University of Chicago is the site of the world's first:

a) atomic reaction
b) unmanned flight
c) extraterrestrial encounter

Good luck -- and I'll also be featuring an art-related question next week on this blog for another chance to win a GPSmyCity.com walking tour app for the city of your choice.

(Pictured: Chicago's Prudential Plaza at night)

olden days

2011-03-14T17:10:00.001-07:00

Awaking from a dream
I grieve.
My sleep no more is so peaceful
As in the olden days.

Words: Ishikawa Takuboku (1885-1912)

Image: One Hundred Famous Views of Edo, #45. The Yoroi Ferry (Hiroshige, ca. 1856)

[If you're able to donate, please help Japan through this horrible crisis and give whatever funds you can to the American Red Cross or other reputable charitable organizations.]

more tarbell

2011-02-20T20:08:00.001-08:00

FYI: more Tarbell is supposed to sound like more cowbell for any Christopher Walken/Saturday Night Live fans.

Still and nonetheless, it always seems like American Impressionist Edmund Tarbell should be a better known name in the world of art, though he is well-respected and well-represented in museums. So many of his paintings have subtly unusual poses or compositions that make them memorable, and in that way he reminds me somewhat of French Impressionist Gustave Caillebotte. And here is a bit more Tarbell for us all, namely The Blue Veil (1898), Across the Room (1891), and In the Orchard (1891).

if a picture equals a thousand words

2011-02-02T10:26:00.001-08:00

...this is a fine one for today.

Sunshine After a Snowstorm -- Walter Launt Palmer (1854-1932)

painting of the month

2010-12-27T20:17:00.000-08:00

Skating in Central Park -- Agnes Tait, 1934 (Smithsonian American Art Museum)

jean and cane

2010-12-26T19:46:00.000-08:00

Today would have been the birthday of author Jean Toomer, born on December 26, 1894 in Washington, D.C. You can read more about Toomer's unusual life here, and one of my favorite books is a short collection of stories and moments called Cane that Toomer published in 1923. It's really beautiful writing, with a haunting moodiness and resonant characters. Like Fern, who watches the world from her rural Georgia porch, her eyes resting "idly where the sun, molten and glorious, was pouring down between the fringe of pines...If it were dusk, then they'd wait for the search-light of the evening train which you could see miles up the track before it flared across the Dixie Pike, close to her home...Like her face, the whole countryside seemed to flow into her eyes."

I didn't see the recent Lifetime Georgia O'Keeffe bio-pic starring Joan Allen, but O'Keeffe knew Jean Toomer and in the Joan Allen version Toomer was played by Henry Simmons. To me, Giancarlo Esposito always seems like the perfect actor to play Jean Toomer, but I'll have to Netflix Henry Simmons' take on the role and maybe he'll change my mind.

christmas morning, breakfast

2010-12-25T20:11:00.000-08:00

Christmas Morning, Breakfast -- Horace Pippin, 1945 (Cincinnati Art Museum)

painting of the month

2010-11-16T18:39:00.001-08:00

The Fortune Teller -- Georges de La Tour, ca. 1633 (The Metropolitan Museum of Art)

rivera at the rock

2010-11-06T11:22:00.000-07:00

I just finished writing a Suite101 article about Diego Rivera's Rockefeller Center mural in the old RCA now GE Building a/k/a 30 Rock, and how he somehow thought that he could showcase a major tribute to Lenin in 1930s Bolshevik-hating Depression-era midtown Manhattan. Nelson A. Rockefeller on behalf of the Rockefeller Dynasty said no way, and though Rivera was able to keep his commission, the work was ordered demolished.

Rivera wanted to take photos of the mural for future reference but was barred from going near the site again, although one of his assistants--the intriguingly talented Lucienne Bloch--snuck in and managed to snap some pictures herself. Rivera later replicated the project at Mexico City's Palacio de las Bellas Artes and José Maria Sert took over in New York to produce a non-controversial backdrop for the Rockefellers and their Center.

This incident was part of the storylines of Tim Robbins' The Cradle Will Rock, with Ruben Blades as Rivera, and in Salma Hayek's Frida, which cast Alfred Molina as the Mexican mural master. Rivera has been played by a variety of actors, but my favorite painted portrait of him was done by Modigliani when Rivera was younger and looks sort of roundly kind-hearted and mischievous at the same time.

(Pictured: Portrait of Diego Rivera -- Amedeo Modigliani, 1914)

happy halloweening

2010-10-31T21:33:00.001-07:00

Pictured: Sorceress -- Lucien Lévy-Dhurmer

painting of the month

2010-10-20T10:45:00.000-07:00

The Pool -- Tom Thomson, 1915 (National Gallery of Canada)

and the cotton is high

2010-10-17T11:08:00.000-07:00

Degas made the front page of the weekend Wall Street Journal with his 1873 painting The Cotton Exchange in New Orleans; the price of cotton is spiking due to an anxious market, with share numbers rising to amounts last seen around the Civil War era. Or around the time that Degas packed his trunk and set sail to visit family living in New Orleans, making him the only French Impressionist (of the original Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, et al group) to ever go to the United States.

ten power

2010-10-10T11:04:00.000-07:00

Pictured is Willard Leroy Metcalf's The Ten-Cent Breakfast (Denver Art Museum), painted in 1887 when Metcalf was hanging out in Giverny with various other American artists. Metcalf would later return to the States to become part of The Ten American Impressionists and to otherwise lead a professionally productive yet occasionally personally troubled life.

Metcalf was a tall, strapping guy with an individualist streak; he had marital and financial problems every now and then and sometimes drank too much, but he nonetheless always seemed to be working and painting and focused on his art. In this breakfast club scene, Metcalf's Giverny companions at the time are included, namely author Robert Louis Stevenson and fellow artists Theodore Robinson and John Twachtman. (The standing man with the pipe is apparently unknown.) I read Elizabeth De Veer's splendid biography of Metcalf a few years ago, however, and while I'm not 100 or even 10 percent sure of my recollection, I thought she suggested that the man at the table watching Stevenson read the newspaper is Metcalf himself and not Twachtman. And that Metcalf's less than welcoming stare came from his dislike of Stevenson, which began as a gut feeling and intensified with circumstances that followed. Again, this is my total unsubstantiated recollection from the bio (Sunlight and Shadow), which unfortunately I don't own a copy of and which actually had to be brought in on interlibrary loan to the Chicago Public Library. No matter what the case, it's still an intriguing painting -- especially on 10-10-10.

the full gamut

2010-10-07T19:22:00.000-07:00

"I was trying to fill what they call the full gamut, or the race as a whole...in all my paintings where you see a group of people you'll notice that they're all a little different color. They're not all the same color, they're not all black...they're not all brown. I try to give each one of them character as individuals."

Archibald Motley, Smithsonian Archives Oral History Interview, 1979

Pictured: Barbecue, Howard University Art Collection (Archibald Motley, b. October 7, 1891 -- d. January 1981)

luminous luma

2010-10-06T19:21:00.000-07:00

The Loyola University Museum of Art (LUMA) is one of Chicago's museum gems, and this week they're featuring tours by candlelight of their Martin D’Arcy Collection. As LUMA itself details: "Walk through the medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque galleries and see the art with new eyes, viewing the work as it would have been seen when it was created hundreds of years ago." The pictured The Penitent Magdalen by Georges de la Tour is at the Met and not LUMA, but thoughts of Baroque art by candlelight brought it to mind. It all sounds great, especially at this time of year with candles and bulbs flickering a little bit earlier each night.

she's listening

2010-10-02T13:17:00.000-07:00

"A painting in a museum hears more ridiculous opinions than anything else in the world." Edmond de Goncourt

(Pictured: La Grande Odalisque -- Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, 1814, Louvre Museum)

technical anxieties

2010-09-26T11:41:00.000-07:00

There's something strange going on with this blog in that it was imported back from Wordpress and while all the post text made it across the blogosphere successfully, many of the images did not. But even though I keep cleaning out the Wordpress photo code and replacing the images and reposting to make sure all is right, a week later I'll look through the entries and the images show up as little white boxes. And the Wordpress code is back again! Bizarre -- but hopefully all the cryptic white boxes will soon be gone.

painting of the month

2010-09-21T06:53:00.000-07:00

On the Beach -- Georges Lemmen, 1891 (Musee d'Orsay)

early edgar

2010-09-15T19:41:00.000-07:00

This Degas self-portrait from when the artist was in his early 20s has an interestingly bohemian look -- Degas always seems detachedly serious in his self-portraits, but there's a hint of something else here that's kind of intriguing.

Pictured: Self-Portrait, c.1857-58 (Edgar Degas, Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute)

back to the blogger bowl

2010-09-05T09:33:00.000-07:00

Was over at Wordpress for a while but it didn't seem like the best fit for this blog, so I was able to export all entries made there and have swum (swam?) home to Blogger again. Some of the links may have been lost in translation but I'll double-check them all later, and, unrelatedly, while I like these Matisse goldfish I just noticed that it is a bit crowded in there. He was probably focusing more on color and composition than actual fish well-being, though.

19th century food porn

2010-08-30T13:06:00.000-07:00

Cauliflower and Pomegranates -- Pierre-Auguste Renoir, 1890

arthur's august moon

2010-08-25T14:59:00.000-07:00

Arthur Wesley Dow (1857-1922) was an artist and teacher whose theories on composition and form are often noted as being strongly influential. Hilton Kramer feels he's a tad overrated, and he slipped in a nice zinger in his review Major Show for Minor Guy: "Georgia O'Keeffe made a point of acknowledging Dow's influence as a teacher on her own early artistic development. But we needn't hold that endorsement against him." I just happen to like this August Moon by Dow, especially because we're presently under another August full moon, and because it also kind of reminds me of another Arthur's work, i.e., Arthur Dove who painted Me and the Moon. And then there's always the Arthur who got caught between the moon and New York City.

painting of the month

2010-08-22T10:49:00.000-07:00

Travelling Carnival, Santa Fe -- John Sloan, 1924 (Smithsonian American Art Museum)

on the half shell

2010-08-18T15:20:00.000-07:00

This week's Free Will Astrology column by Rob Brezsny had an interesting horoscope for Aries, working in the French Impressionists:

In the 18th century, the French Academy laid down rules about the differences between professional and amateur paintings. For example, it was decreed that true artists must create a "licked surface," hiding all evidence of their brushstrokes. The illusion was more convincing that way; viewers could sink their attention fully into the image without being distracted by thoughts about the artist's process. When the Impressionists barged into the scene in the 1870s, one of their rebellions against convention was to reject the licked surface. By making some of their brushstrokes visible, they declared they weren't interested in upholding the artifice. They wanted their audience to get involved in their subjective interpretation of the scene that was portrayed.

This plate of oysters by Gustave Caillebotte looks more interesting and appetizing (at least to me) because of the visible brushstrokes and the artist's process, which probably involved being increasingly hungry and hoping to finish painting soon and eat his models.

summer morning

2010-08-12T15:53:00.000-07:00

Charles Burchfield (1893 – 1967) was an American artist who preferred to work in watercolors and at varying points in his career created uniquely intense nature studies. 1917 was one of his most prolific years with an output that included the pictured Summer Morning, from the Midwest Museum of American Art. Charles also designed wallpaper in Buffalo as a day job for a while, and he later expressed his firm opinion that Pablo Picasso was the "evil genius of modern art" who "wittingly or unwittingly, brought about a decadence that is really terrible to behold."

arrangement in grey, black and tallulah

2010-08-07T02:39:00.000-07:00

The less I behave like Whistler's mother the night before, the more I look like her the morning after. (Tallulah Bankhead)

canadian moonscape

2010-08-05T15:05:00.000-07:00

Pictured: Hot Summer Moonlight -- Tom Thomson, b. August 5, 1877 - d. July 1917 (National Gallery of Canada)

99 and counting

2010-07-30T13:53:00.000-07:00

Will Barnet is a Massachusetts-born artist and art educator; his career has both evolved and endured, his style is smoothly intriguing—and beyond all that, he'll be celebrating his 100th birthday next year. He began focusing on art at an early age, attended the Art Students League in New York and later became an instructor at the League himself. I like this particular pictured work of his very much and I look forward to wishing Mr. Barnet a happy century of being next May.

Pictured: Soliloquy -- Will Barnet (Canton Museum of Art)

painting of the month

2010-07-26T10:52:00.000-07:00

A Summer Shower -- Charles Edward Perugini, 1888

cleaning hydrotherapy

2010-07-15T19:39:00.000-07:00

Whenever it gets this hot I wish I could reenact that scene from Marguerite Duras' novel The Lover, wherein the mother goes on a water-wash cleaning binge in their house in 1929 French colonial Vietnam. Duras writes how the house was raised above the Mekong, so it "can be cleaned by having buckets of water thrown over it, sluiced right through like a garden. All the chairs are piled up on the tables, the whole house is streaming, water is lapping around the piano in the small sitting room. The water pours down the steps, spreads through the yard toward the kitchen...[we] splash each other, then wash the floor with yellow soap. Everyone's barefoot...[the] whole house smells nice, with the delicious smell of wet earth after a storm, enough to make you wild with delight...."

Pictured: Waterfall, Blue Brook -- John Henry Twachtman, ca. 1895 (Cincinnati Art Museum)

white zone

2010-07-12T13:53:00.000-07:00

There are lots of people visiting Chicago in the summertime, and whenever I happen to see any interesting city place that's strangely and briefly empty in the midst of crowds, I try to get a picture of it (kind of an eye of the hurricane effect). Like this was a pure white noiseless view of the Art Institute's Modern Wing last week before a wave of museum-goers came off the elevator....

a minute of georges

2010-07-07T20:45:00.001-07:00

The 1952 film Moulin Rouge isn't as glittering or fast-paced or romantic as the 2001 version, and it is heavily weighted with moments of melodrama and the mental and physical anguish of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. It also has poor José Ferrer doing a wonderful job suffering for his art and playing Lautrec on his knees without even winning the Oscar he was nominated for, which seems like a travesty. Still, according to Wikipedia, John Huston wanted the movie to look as if Toulouse-Lautrec had envisioned it himself, and it truly does with beautiful or striking scenes and intense color combinations. And it features a young Christopher Lee, one of the great lords of horror films, in the role of pipe-smoking Pointillist Georges Seurat. Lee as Seurat has only about a minute of screentime, but he looks very fine and painterly and not particularly menacing at all.

painting of the month

2010-06-29T21:22:00.000-07:00

Still Life on Corner of a Mantelpiece -- Vanessa Bell, 1914 (Tate Collection, UK)

stuart's seven stairs

2010-06-25T19:48:00.001-07:00

Stuart Brent, one of Chicago's great booksellers, died at age 98 this week. His first shop opened in 1946 and was a frequent hangout for the then up and coming Nelson Algren, who had just finished a collection of short stories known as The Neon Wilderness. Algren's biographer Bettina Drew describes Brent's Seven Stairs at that time as "a tiny literary bookstore on the Near North Side with a woodstove, a barrel of apples, a hanging salami and a knowledgeable owner...."

Brent soon became an Algren fan and hosted "Neon Wilderness parties" when the book was finally published. Beyond his relationship with Nelson, Brent was friends with many other Chicago writers and even the proud recipient of an oak desk given to him by The Front Page author Ben Hecht. An item in Chicago Breaking News also notes how Brent would sometimes "rise from behind a pile of invoices on the table to offer browsers a bit of advice -- or criticism. Sometimes he'd take a book from a customer's hands, quickly substituting one he thought better."

He closed things down because the world of book sales and publication had changed and Michigan Avenue turned too sleek and upscale. He lamented that the Garrett Popcorn shop had outlived his small book oasis, but that kernel-popping place has seen the closing of many other stores, and in its own way Garrett is one of the few Mag Mile locales that attracts all kinds of people who share a democratic love of their rich gooey caramel or super-cheesy mix.

Brent's 1962 autobiography was titled Seven Stairs: An Adventure of the Heart and details how his shop and career came more from a love of reading and writers than any desire to make money. Brent noted that "I have never had what the public wanted to read, and I lost out because of it," but without doubt Brent's loss was Chicago's literary gain.

sun moon solstice

2010-06-21T13:59:00.001-07:00

Since today is the longest day of the year, pictured is Robert Delaunay's 1912 Simultaneous Contrasts: Sun and Moon (Museum of Modern Art). Happy summer solstice!

louise who almost lived for a century

2010-06-14T21:57:00.001-07:00

I was in effect a runaway girl. I was a runaway girl who turned out all right.

Louise Bourgeois (b. Dec. 25, 1911, d. May 31, 2010)

june glory

2010-06-01T21:54:00.001-07:00

June Glory -- Theodore Clement Steele, 1920

the keen eyes of dennis hopper

2010-05-30T09:36:00.001-07:00

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

2010-05-28T10:06:00.001-07:00

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

mary's lilacs

2010-05-22T17:14:00.001-07:00

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

who was that masked man

2010-05-20T20:53:00.001-07:00

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

2010-05-11T20:02:00.001-07:00

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

2010-05-09T21:56:00.001-07:00

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

painting of the month

2010-04-26T21:21:00.001-07:00

Light and Colour (Goethe's Theory) - The Morning after the Deluge -- J.M.W. Turner, 1843

veiled beauty

2010-04-07T20:53:00.001-07:00

The Milwaukee Art Museum will be hosting Raphael's La Donna Velata or The Veiled Woman through June and they seem really and rightfully excited about it. This beautiful work was painted circa 1516 in response to Da Vinci's Mona Lisa, featuring a model named Margherita Luti who was probably Raphael's lover. That gold detail on the sleeve is gorgeous, along with the veiled one's intriguing expression and the wisp of hair by her arched eyebrow.

Back to Mona Lisa, just noting another excerpt from Robert Hughes' American Visions about how La Gioconda first came to the U.S. in 1962 and scads of people, i.e., over a million, went to see her at the Met in NY, averaging less than 8 seconds per view. Hughes included Andy Warhol's comment at the time: "Gee, why don't they just send a reproduction? Nobody would know the difference." Or maybe Nat King Cole put it more eloquently when he sang about all those dreams brought to Mona Lisa's doorstep--or really to the thick pane of protective glass surrounding that "cold and lonely/lovely work of art."

painting of the month

2010-03-30T15:58:00.001-07:00

The Green Parrot -- Vincent van Gogh, 1886

2010-03-21T20:05:00.001-07:00

Pictured: A Study in March (In Early Spring) -- John Wm. Inchbold (1830-1888)

abstractly postal

2010-03-10T20:10:00.001-08:00

I just wrote a Suite101 blog bit about the U.S. Post Office's latest visual arts series being issued tomorrow, with ten paintings by Abstract Expressionist (or Abstractionists, as one of my professors used to call them) notables like Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell and Arshile Gorky. Chicago native Joan Mitchell is the lone female in the group and the Suite101 post is mainly about her. In terms of Gorky, he was born Vostanik Manoog Adoyan on April 15, 1904 in Armenia; he survived his homeland's horrific genocide, immigrated to America and reinvented himself as Arshile Gorky. His work was fascinating and haunted yet often vibrant with color; his later life was troubled with personal problems and devastating physical ailments and he hung himself in 1948 surely just to escape it all. His featured painting among the Abstract Expressionist stamp series is the intriguingly-titled 1944 The Liver is the Cock's Comb (Albright-Knox Art Gallery), pictured here.

the small-towner, the farmer and the ozark hillbilly

2010-03-01T20:23:00.001-08:00

I tend to like the American Regionalists, because of their historical context and the epic kind of declaration that their artworks send forth. I've written Suite101 articles on Grant Wood and Thomas Hart Benton and John Steuart Curry's John Brown mural, but I found it interesting to read Robert Hughes' section on Regionalism in his juicy 600+ page art history American Visions book. The myth of Regionalism tends to be that it sprang up naturally from the earth like Benton's wheaty inspiration pictured here, reasserting America's presence in art and rejecting European "isms". Apparently it was a more calculated egg hatched within the mind of Mr. Maynard Walker; Walker was from Kansas originally, but by the 1930s he had established himself in New York as an art dealer. Walker figured that making art more accessible and "homegrown" would tap a whole new audience and could exploit social anxieties during the Great Depression.

Regionalism promoted America's past and future energy and gave art back to the people. Or so the general buzz went, particularly Time Magazine's December 1934 feature on Regionalism with Benton on the cover. But Benton himself would confess that the real deal was that: "A play was written and a stage erected for us. Grant Wood became the typical Iowa small-towner, John Curry the typical Kansas farmer, and I just an Ozark hillbilly. We accepted our roles." And they kept those roles throughout the rest of their careers, even when Regionalism lost its initial momentum. Over the years, however, the collective dynamic of Benton, Curry and Wood resurged and became important in a different sense -- still mythic and exaggerated, but perhaps in a uniquely mythic and exaggerated American way.

(Image: Wheat -- Thomas Hart Benton, Smithsonian American Art Museum)

painting of the month

2010-02-22T10:55:00.002-08:00

Slow Down Freight Train -- Rose Piper, 1946

enter the tiger

2010-02-14T19:45:00.001-08:00

2010 brings the Chinese Zodiac's Year of the Tiger, tigers of course being known for their fiery nature and distinctly beautiful striped coat. Legend has it that the lion once ruled the Chinese zodiac, but either the lion's cruelty or laziness caused an overthrow and the brave yet compassionate tiger came in instead. This 1884 Tiger in the Moonlight was done by the French Academic painter Jean-Léon Gérôme, who I don't believe was born in the Year of the Tiger but seemed rather fond of the big cats and put them in several of his works.

marc of excellence

2010-02-08T21:59:00.002-08:00

Foxes -- Franz Marc (b. February 8, 1880 - d. March 1916)

newly distinguished

2010-02-03T19:39:00.001-08:00

Abstract painter William Conger became part of the Chicago Union League's roster of Distinguished Artists last month, joining such other notables as Ed Paschke and Ruth Duckworth. I had the chance to interview Bill Conger last spring for Suite101.com -- a really enjoyable experience because he's a great conversationalist and can talk about anything. Click here to read the interview and here for Bill's official website.

(Pictured: Chinatown -- Wm. Conger, 2007)

painting of the month

2010-01-20T16:07:00.002-08:00

Mae West (Face of Mae West Which Can Be Used As An Apartment) -- Salvador Dali, 1934 @ The Art Institute of Chicago

violet femme

2010-01-14T15:21:00.001-08:00

Long-ago birthday girl Berthe Morisot was born January 14, 1841, and during her artistic career she would become associated with the French Impressionists. She was good friends with Edouard Manet and there may have even been more to their relationship; Manet was married, however, and Berthe herself later wed Manet’s brother Eugene. Edouard was a guiding and occasionally overbearing influence, but this black-hatted portrait he did of Berthe in 1872 (Berthe Morisot with a Bouquet of Violets) is really lovely and shows his fondness for her and the unique character of her face.

august born in january

2010-01-03T18:31:00.001-08:00

August Macke is definitely on my list of favorite artists, born January 3, 1877 in Meschede, Germany. A key member of the German Expressionist group Der Blaue Reiter, Macke was an amazing colorist whose death at the age of twenty-seven in World War I was such a huge loss. Macke was drafted and it's doubtful that he wanted to go off to fight, and he perhaps even had a premonition of impending tragedy which he conveyed in Farewell, one of his last works. This painting is called Turkish Cafe II and was done on a trip Macke made to Tunisia, just before reluctantly joining the German armed forces. His good friend and fellow Blaue Reiter member Franz Marc was also killed in World War I in 1916, about two years after August's death.

happy new year

2010-01-01T15:47:00.003-08:00

Roses in a Champagne Glass -- Edouard Manet

hopper probably would have eaten at the orange garden

2009-12-29T10:01:00.004-08:00

Every time I see Edward Hopper's 1929 Chop Suey (pictured here) I think of an old-school Chicago Chinese restaurant called The Orange Garden, which was retro before retro was even a concept. The painting has more windows and light than The Orange Garden does, but there's still a shared days-gone-by Chinese restaurant atmosphere, with lots of rich red tones in the decor. And chop suey on the menu, along with the classic CHOP SUEY sign out front.

2009-12-25T20:55:00.001-08:00

The Journey of the Magi -- James Jacques Joseph Tissot, 1894 (Minneapolis Institute of Arts)