painting of the month

Young Woman Drawing -- Marie-Denise Villers, 1801 (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

reverently creative

If you're going to be in the NYC area anytime from mid-February through May 26th, Manhattan's Museum of Biblical Art is featuring "Ashe to Amen:  African-Americans and Biblical Imagery."  The exhibit includes works of inspiration by such fine artists as Romare Bearden, Clementine Hunter, Henry Ossawa Tanner and the pictured Holy Mountain III by Horace Pippin, one of Pippin's deeply spiritual visions on canvas finished shortly before his death in 1946.  

I will preach with my brush.  -- Henry Ossawa Tanner 

Pictures just come to my mind...and I tell my heart to go ahead.-- Horace Pippin

Pictured:  Holy Mountain III -- Horace Pippin, 1945 (Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden Permanent Collection)

painting of the month

Four Aces: Simultaneous Image -- Olga Rozanova, 1915 (State Russian Museum)

brilliant oranges

 

Like an orange, Henri Matisse's work is a fruit of brilliant light. 

Guillaume Appollinaire

 

Pictured:  Open Window at Collioure -- Henri Matisse, 1905 (National Gallery of Art) & Still Life with Oranges -- 1913 (Musee du Louvre)

painting of the month

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

RIP to one cool cat

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

pablo and georges

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

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

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