painting of the month

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

jean and cane

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

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

painting of the month

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

rivera at the rock

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

Pictured: Sorceress -- Lucien Lévy-Dhurmer

painting of the month

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

and the cotton is high

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

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

"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

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

"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

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

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

early edgar

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

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

Cauliflower and Pomegranates -- Pierre-Auguste Renoir, 1890

arthur's august moon

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

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

on the half shell

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

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

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

canadian moonscape

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

99 and counting

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

A Summer Shower -- Charles Edward Perugini, 1888

cleaning hydrotherapy

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

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

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

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

stuart's seven stairs

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

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

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

June Glory -- Theodore Clement Steele, 1920

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)

painting of the month

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

veiled beauty

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

The Green Parrot -- Vincent van Gogh, 1886

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

abstractly postal

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

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

Slow Down Freight Train -- Rose Piper, 1946

enter the tiger

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

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

newly distinguished

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

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