by art_in_history , March 2, 2010—12:00 AM
Topics: Art History, Cezanne, Chardin, Constable, Johns, Raphael, Still Life, Turner, innovation, tradition
This is a subject I have worried around before (see for example "Significant Art: What does it Signify?") because it gets to the heart of those subconscious doubts I have about the value of my work. Though I am going to look at it here from the persepctive of art history, I clearly care about it as a kind of self-justification.
My art is not an art of innovation. What uniqueness it has comes unconsciously and inevitably from the personal vision which each of us has, not from any attempt to break new ground. I am not even an experimental artist (a much less demanding standard); many artists who never break new ground nevertheless experiment with different styles and media, doing work that is new for them if not for art as a whole…
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by art_in_history , February 2, 2010—12:00 AM
Topics: Abstraction, Art History, Brancusi, Cezanne, Chardin, Degas, Klee, Le Corbusier, Minimalism, Mondriaan, Rothko, Warhol, multivalent
Back in my days as a student of Architecture, I read with interest the writings of Charles Jencks on Le Corbusier, one of the giants of the modern movement in the 20th century. In advocating for the greatness of Le Corbusier, Jencks did someting much more ambitious: he propounded a theory of value to be applied to all art, based on multiple levels of meaning. All works of art, he says, fall somewhere on a spectrum from "Univalence" (single-leveled) to "multivalence" (multileveled), and truly great works are always multivalent.
He compares in detail Le Corbusier's apartment block in Marseilles, the "Unite d'Habitation", with a contemporary church design (of which I could find no image) in the form of a cross of thorns…
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As we approach the new year, I am realizing that it is now ten years since ArtId took birth (as MindsIsland), and just how many articles I have written and posted over that period. I took a look, and discovered that many of the older ones were not presentable, having been crudely converted from native HTML to our present platform. I have just completed a process of spiffing them up, in high hopes that someone out there might care.
This post is for those who have enjoyed my writings, and are interested in poking around among the many I have done in the past. It is a summary of the main topics I have dealt with, and some instructions on how you can find them. Because if you don't know they are there, you can't even decide whether you care or not…
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by art_in_history , December 15, 2009—12:00 AM
Topics: Academic Realism, Art History, Caravaggio, Leonardo, Monet, courbet, photorealism, realism, van Eyke
It is arguable that, as artists, one of our primary goals is to produce a reflection of what we understand as reality. If we are artists working in the Western Tradition, or simply raised in it, we are heirs to 600 years of realism. Though much Western art in the last 100 years has rejected this tradition, it is still a very powerful force. Whether it is a photorealist like Tennett, or the pervasive legacy of the impressionists, art dedicated to reflecting the real world is everywhere. But there are lots of choices, because there is no single definition of what is real.
The strongest thread since Renaissance times had been to define reality as the world as it appears to us from a certain viewpoint…
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Artists all seem to have a common fantasy: that fame and riches will come to them posthumously. We may not really believe it, but it is a well entrenched part of artistic mythology. We could call it the Van Gogh Factor. This raises another interesting question: if our death is the first day of the rest of our artistic lives, what's the best time to die?
There is abundant evidence that dying young may be a great career move; there is a similar wealth of examples proving that we should live to a ripe old age. Artists who die young may leave a vibrant and untarnished legacy; on the other hand there are many artists who reach new heights in maturity…
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I decided I would do one more post in this series on the origins of Modern art, because without talking about the notion of the avant garde, something is definitely missing. Of all the ideas which led to the phenomenon of Modern Art, the Avant Garde idea is perhaps the most fascinating and revolutionary.
What is the avant garde idea? It is the attitude that artists are an elite in society, specially equipped to sense the pulse of the times and reveal it to their contemporaries. Artists on the cutting edge of stylistic development will be "ahead of their time", will be rejected in their time, but will be vindicated by history.
This is huge! This idea upends the relationship of an artist to his patrons…
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This post is another in my series on the origins of modern art, and my last, at least for a while: I'm not sure who is listening. I hope the title at least is intriguing. I could easily have called it "Modern Art and the Problem of Style", but this title seems sexier! The problem with a sexy title is of course the letdown.
What is the innocence whose loss I see as a major impetus toward modern art? It is the innocence of the artist of his place in the history of art. The villain is historical awareness, and the consequent impossibility of producing art "innocently", without the burden of an everpresent knowledge of one's artistic past.
This became a huge concern in the 19th century in Europe…
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by art_in_history , July 13, 2009—12:00 AM
Topics: Abstraction, Aesthetic Attitude, Art History, Chardin, Gauguin, Kandinsky, Monet, Rembrandt, art, courbet, manet, pollock
In my last post, I promised to put out some additional posts on the major trends which led up to the phenomenon of Modern Art. One of these was a new way of looking at paintings, one which isolated the aesthetic qualities of the work and appreciated them independent of the subject matter.
In 2000 I did an article called "The Aesthetic Attitude" in which I looked at this phenomenon, and I will include a big chunk of that post here:
[QUOTE]One of the most fascinating of the developments that occurred during the 18th century was the recognition of an independent aesthetic attitude toward art, and indeed toward the world. Of course, this is not the first appearance of such an attitude in mankind's artistic history; far from it…
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by art_in_history , July 2, 2009—12:00 AM
Topics: Abstraction, Art History, Colorism, Delacroix, History, Ingres, Kandinsky, Minimalism, Mondriaan, Picasso, expressionism
The moment at the beginning of the 20th century when artists made the lead to pure non-representational art is a fascinating one. It is the culmination of a number of trends over the previous 100-200 years, each interesting in itself, and together creating a uniquely self-aware moment in art.
First, I would like to register my complaint about the term "abstract", which has come to be applied indiscriminately to non-representational art. The term describes very well the process which led up to the leap, but is misleading when applied to "pure abstraction". Abstraction implies a process of generalizing and simplifying from the specific; it presumes a reality from which essentials are being drawn…
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After my recent post on landscape painting of the Romantic period, I want to do a more general piece on the appeal of landscape. I believe this appeal is grounded in the appeal to our age of scenes in nature, and that painted landscapes depend in large part on capturing this appeal. This appeal has many sources, but for me, two of them stand out: empathy and nostalgia.
Even without these two elements, which we bring to nature from within ourselves, landscape would have plenty going for it. It is infinite in variety of texture, form and color, infinite in its possibilities for order, composition and movement. But these possibilities have always been there, and can't explain the immense appeal of landscape in the modern era…
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by art_in_history , May 28, 2009—12:00 AM
Topics: Art History, Constable, History, Landscape, Plein-aire, art, pastoral, picturesque, romantic, sublime
Over the course of the 18th century there was a remarkable change in attitudes toward nature, discoverable in all the arts, especially literature, painting and landscape architecture. It culminated in the Romantic landscape tradition in Europe and America in the 19th century, the golden age of landscape painting. It marked a major change in the relationship of man to nature.
Romantic landscape covers the gamut between the Pastoral - inhabited landscape: comfortable and relatively tame, with shepherds and peasants - and the Sublime - wild nature: vast and powerful, inspiring terror and awe. The Pastoral was not a sea change in attitude…
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The rich interaction between painting and theater is something I have touched on in an earlier post on David and the French Revolution, and I will end by looking into that extraordinary moment of symbiosis at the end of this post. However, another moment of rich interaction occurred in the Italian Renaissance, and it is difficult to claim that either art form was taking the lead.
The lead image, Botticelli's "Story of Lucretia", may be a surprise to those who know his "Birth of Venus" and "Primavera". However, this is one of many works in which he essentially paints an elaborate stage setting and fills it with dramatic action. There is little question that the elaborate architectural frame with its described deep space reflects the stage design of the time…
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by art_in_history , April 13, 2009—12:00 AM
Topics: Art History, Botticelli, Bronzino, Favorite artists, History, Leonardo, Mondriaan, Monet, Parmigianino, Piero, Raphael, art, impressionism
This post is in some ways a response to Gary's post on Raphael's "Descent from the Cross". I agree that Raphael represents a perfect moment in the High Renaissance: fully realized, harmonious and sublime. I then had to ask myself why, of the great masters of his time, he is the least interesting to me. I decided the answer lay in the limitations of perfection itself.
"In praise of Imperfection" is a bit misleading; this post is more in praise of striving, of asking the questions instead of finding the final answer. For the Renaissance, the primary questions were those raised by Humanism, both in the arts and in thought in general (Gallileo, Copernicus, and of course Leonardo)…
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Coming from a background in Art History, I have a number of readymade ways to beat myself over the head about my painting. One is the concept that to be given serious respect a work should be "significant". By this the art historian means that it advances the march of style through its innovations, or expresses its time with particular clarity and depth. It is the work of a leader, not a follower.
A few years ago Amherst college, my Alma Mater, had a show of art by alumni for which I was not approached. I have no idea if my name ever surfaced at all, or how selection was done, but I think it is perfectly likely that my work would not be considered "significant" enough to merit inclusion…
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I'm getting into this idea of successive "French Revolutions"; it's a bit too neat, but it reveals some interesting patterns. The first (David) was primarily a social/political revolution, with Neo-classicism as the engine. The second (Delacroix) was primarily artistic, a reaction against the strictures of Neo-classicism, though it clearly had its social side as well. With Courbet we will see again a primarily social/political revolution, that took Realism as its engine. The fourth would be Manet, whom I've already discussed, and his revolution once again is in the realm of art.
The lead image is Courbet's "manifesto", titled "The Studio: a Real Allegory"…
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So at last I am getting to Delacroix, as promised several weeks ago. Though in fact, I am going to feature Delacroix and his great rival Ingres, inheritor of the Mantle of David as the defender of classical orthodoxy. As I've said before, I think the art of this period is vastly enriched by its context in history, both social and aesthetic.
I've called the period the "second French revolution"; in fact, in Paris at least, it was a period of continual upheaval. The Parisian populace took to the streets at the least provocation, tearing up the coblestones and bringing the city to a halt. Delacroix's "Liberty Leading the people" marks the major uprising in 1830. In fact, so ungovernable was the city that in mid century Housmann was commissioned to build the great Parisian avenues..…
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by art_in_history , January 7, 2009—12:00 AM
Topics: Art History, Colorism, David, Favorite artists, Gericault, Neoclassicism, Rubens, art, revoluion
In his comment on my post about Rubens, Zander reminded me of his influence on Delacroix, and I decided I should take him up next. Then I realized that before looking at his work, I should set the scene with the generation that preceeded him. Because the fact is, no matter how interesting the work of any one artist at this period may be, the art scene in France as a whole is much more fascinating.
I am leading off with the "Oath of the Horatii" by Jacques-Louis David, the "painter of the revolution". Since the work seems "mainstream" and "old-fashioned" to our eyes, it takes a huge effort of empathy to understand what it meant at the time: it was a bombshell!
First we need to realize that the classicism we see in the David was long gone in French art…
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I have been working through the great artists of the European Baroque, and I will be ending with Rubens. The reasons are hot and cold. Cold because Rubens does not appeal to me personally as much as Rembrandt or Velzaquez, or even the little Dutch Masters, though I am always in awe of his work. Hot because, of all the artists of the period, it is probably Rubens who most perfectly represents the age. Following the Renaissance age of invention, the Baroque was an age of utter mastery, taking the discoveries of the Renaissance to their supreme conclusion. And pershaps thearchtypal example of Baroque mastery is command of the human figure.
The Baroque period displayed mastery of the human figure in its most violent action and aggressive foreshortening…
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My most recent blog featured the work of Caravaggio, an artist whose inventions were remarkable and whose influence was enormous, way out of proportion to his brief working life. At that time I mentioned that my next blog would be about another artist whose work was influenced by Caravaggio: the spanish master Diego Velazquez. I am leading off with an image which is not typical of his best know work, but which shows how strongly he was influenced by Caravaggio, and how much farther he was able to carry his realism.
The "Watercarrier of Seville" is one of my favorite works. It has the presence of a caravaggio - massive figures close to the front - but with a subtlety which Caravaggio never acheived in his tumultuous career…
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In my piece on Monet I said that, while he was not as resonant for me as Manet or Cezanne, he was an artist whose inventions were so powerful that all later European artists had to react in some way to their implications. I realize that I have left behind another artist about whom the same can be said: Caravaggio. Coming at a time when the schism in the Christian church was dominating the European political and social scene, and when the implications of Renaissance naturalism were opening new avenues of artistic exploration, Caravaggio, in is short career, was a towering force.
Caravaggio had three great inventions. The first was to abandon the idealizing classicism of the Italian Renaissance in favor of an uncompromising realism…
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I'm going to go back 100 years or so to an artist I passed over: Goya. In the spectrum of artists from those of structure to those of feeling, Goya is definitely the latter. But what is remarkable is the way he anticipated the romantics and 20th century expressionists, working at the height of the Enlightenment.
The Enlightment thinkers of the 18th century believed in the ultimate and inevitable perfectability of man through reason. They largely ignored the existence and power of the bestial side of man, a fatal mistake. The Greeks were wiser: thouogh they elevated reason as man's great gift, they never forgat the other side of his nature. Their image was of the horse and rider - today the Id and Ego - and understood the need to respect and control the bestial side…
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My most recent post in this series was on Claude Monet, who so completely redefined the artistic enterprise that he set a new benchmark against which future artists had to define themselves. By limiting his focus to the facts of perception he created an unusually direct interaction between the artist and the visual world, but in doing so he effectively excluded the interests of most artists preceeding him, whether "classical" or "romantic".
There was, predictably, an almost immediate attempt to blend his new vision with the traditional concerns of artists. I have already discussed Cezanne, who in this context must be seen as a "classicist": concerned with the structure and order behind our perceptual world, what we KNOW as opposed to what we SEE…
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Photos courtesy of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum website.
I am writing today to talk about one of my all time favorite museums: The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. I am also writing in defense of the personal museum, as contrasted to the "scientific" museum which has been the model for the last 100 years. For me, the richness of the total experience in a personal museum outweighs the disadvantage of not seeing all works in a neutral setting and perfect light.
The Gardner museum is a recreated Venetian Renaissance palace, built by Isabella to evoke the Barberi Palace in Venice, which she leased for her trips there, and designed to display her personal collection of art…
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I turn now from Degas and Manet to Claude Monet - THE Impressionist. This is another of those artists, like Leonardo, whom I would not really call a "favorite", but whom I recognize as a towering figure in the development of artistic vision in his time. I respond more to the works of Degas and Manet. But as with Leonardo, no artist in the period following Monet could work without coming to terms with his redefinition of painting. You could follow him or reject him, but you had to deal with the terms which he had established.
Monet redefined painting on several levels: the enterprise, artistic vision, palette and technique. First, he finally stated that the work done directly on the scene was an end in itself…
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I am turning from Degas to Manet, the other "older" Impressionist, though - unlike Degas - he never accepted the term as applied to his work. Like Degas, he had a strong traditional background in form and composition which he used to great advantage. Paradoxically, Manet is in many ways the most radical of the group, certainly the most confrontational.
It is fascinating to compare Manet to Courbet, the great revolutionary of the previous generation. It was Courbet who broke with the Academie, setting up his own competing exhibition, thus blazing the trail which the Impressionists then followed. But while Courbet's revolution was all about class warfare and social justice, Manet's is all about art itself. Manet uses confrontation to force the viewer to look at art in a new way…
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I'm coming back around to where I started, which was with Cezanne...and more generally with late 19th century European painting. I find more to excite me in that period than in any other.
As I think about the Impressionists, and the generations that followed, I definitely learn something about myself and what satisfies my artistic soul. I like structure. I am more excited by Degas and Manet, the two artists who had an "academic" training, than I am by most of Monet, and I like Monet better than Renoir. I can feel the lightness and joy of Renoir's work, its wonderful softness, but ultimately it leaves me wanting more.
In Degas' work, the feeling of carelessness in framing belies the artfulness behind it…
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I seem to be moving from artist to artist in a natural progression, and I will continue that with this post. I looked last at Dutch 17th century work, including still life, with its strong sense of organization and selection, and most recently at Vermeer, where every element in the frame is meaningful and carefully chosen. That leads me naturally to the 18th century Still Life master, Chardin.
Chardin seems to me to have the same sense of careful selection and organization, with another element which makes him special: being "of the earth". His still lives seem to grow out of the earth and to be made of the same substance. The compositions are always rock solid and immovable, seemingly built on a slab of living rock…
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Having written about the "Little Dutch Masters", it is a natural step to move on to Vermeer. He was certainly one of their number - in fact, if you were to judge by the dimensions of his works he could be the littlest of them all - but he is also too great to be lumped among them. He also had a primary specialty - light filled interiors with figures - but also produced exquisite works in other genres, like the "Street in Delft" above. All with a sensitivity to ambient light never equalled before or since.
He is, of course, the center of a huge controversy, because of the strong evidence that he used a camera obscura to view his subjects and perhaps to project them on the surface…
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Hey, I've got a new computer and I'm back in business.
I'm going to continue the theme of my last post: artists who may not be great, but who are wonderful in their more modest endeavors. This time I am going to consider a group: the Dutch 17th century painters who have come to be known as "the little Dutch Masters".
The environment for painters in Holland in the 17th century was unique, and it led to a new and "modern" way of conducting business. For the first time in European art, the creation of paintings was not dominated by the church and the nobility. Instead, art was purchased in quantity by the rising mercantile class, and they were looking for art that expressed their wealth to be sure, but also reflected underlying Calvinist values…
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On to Constable, my kindred spirit. Perhaps not as great in the fullest sense as Cezanne or Rembrandt, but wonderful in his sensitivity to the familiar in nature. He never left England, and did not travel very widely there, going only to Brighton, Weymoutn or Salisbury, within easy reach. How different his subjects are from those of his contemporary Turner, who always sought out the magical transforming moments in nature: sunrise, sunset, monumental storms. Constable made his art from that which was most familiar in his surroundings, seeing it with a sensitivity which was unmatched until the next generation.
Yes, he did break new ground, despite his unambitious enterprise…
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I have been picking out artists who are my favorites, and who also deserve to be called great because of the nature of their enterprise. Many of my favorite artists are not "great" in this sense; they are modest and unassuming in their scope and intentions. A good example is the artist with whom I feel the greatest natural affinity: John Constable. But before turning to Constalbe, I thought I should give homage to his truly great English contemporary, William Turner.
It is hard to like Turner as a human being; is was rather a nasty man, secretive, suspicious, paranoid…
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The decision to include Leonardo is not based on the impact of the work on me viscerally and emotionally; in fact, on one level you could say he is not a "favorite" artist at all. It is more that I stand in awe of what he accomplished as an artist, while so much of his energies and imagination were focussed on other things. And of course, after a piece on Michelangelo, it is only proper to give Leonardo equal time.
Michelangelo and Leonardo were the towering figures of the Renaissance until the younger Raphael rose to join them, great rivals, driving each other to greater heights…
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In each of the previous posts I have asked the question "What challenge did this artist set himself that sets his work beyond good to great?". Not all my favorite artists have such an ambitious enterprise, but I will show one more; Michelangelo. For me, the remarkable thing about his work is how often he rose above crippling external limitations and turned them into glorious oportunities.
The "David" is an excellent example, especially if we accept the story about its creation. According to contemporary sources, a truley magnificent block of Carrara marble, intended for another sculptor, was tragically damaged in transit, with a chunk broken off in the middle almost to the center of the block…
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This will be the third in my series of favorite artists, and I am still following the theme of the major challenge in an artist's enterprise which raises the work from good to great. In this case, however, it is a quiet artist working on a modest scale without earthshaking impact.
Klee's work is nothing if not unpretentious and personal. There is no sense that he was speaking to a wider audience than the one which would seek him out in his artistc seclusion. So why do I put him in a category with someone like Rembrandt?
For me, Klee's work is a marvellous marriage of the analytical and the intuitive…
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This is the second in my new series of my favorite artists, and what it is in their artistic enterprise that sets them above the merely very good. After having started with a self-portrait by Cezanne in my last post, I can't resist starting this post off with another self-portrait, one of many by Rembrandt.
How different they are! The Cezanne self-portrait, though it can captivate you as a work of art for hours, in the end shows you almost nothing about the man beyond his physical exterior. Cezanne clearly was not trying to explore his inner self at all. The Rembrandt, on the other hand, shows you infintely more than a thousand words could tell you about his soul, his humanity, and most importantly our humanity. Just look into his eyes, and get lost in them…
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The other day I was in for treatment at my chiropractor, and he asked me if I had seen "that guy who paints on TV" and what I thought of him. I said I had, that he had mastered the skills of his craft, and had developed visual ideoms for natural elements which were now second nature to him. Then, in an effort to explain why that did not make him a great artist, I told him about Cezanne. Later, I decided that might make a good series of posts to do: artists whose chosen enterprise was such that the challenge of it elevated them way above the norm.
I told my chiropractor that Cezanne, far from whipping off images that he could do in his sleep, set himself a goal that is arguably the most challenging ever set by an artist…
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Once again, I would like to talk about an entirely different kind of patron: an Institution as patron of architects. Yale University is not alone its its enlightened approach to patronage, but it may be the first and most influential. Beginning in the 1950's, if not before, Yale made a conscious decision to take advantage of its unique position as an initiator of major architectural projects to further the careers of the best, but not best known, architects of the period.
The first and arguably most significant of these choices was to hire Louis Kahn to design its new gallery and visual arts building. Completed in 1953, this was the first major commission for an extroardinary architect whose ideas had heretofore been known primarily through his writing and teaching…
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In England at the end of the 18th century, a new kind of patronage emerged which was to have an enormous effect on the careers of artists lucky enough to fall under its favor. This was the practice of English gentlemen, taking the grand tour to the mediterranean, to bring along with them an artist to document their trip, much as today we might bring a camera.
In some cases, if the gentleman had a passion for antiquity, the trip would feature Greek and Roman sites; from such expeditions we have exquisite detailed drawings of temples and sculpture. In other cases, where the patron had a romantic passion for landscape, there would be a detour into the Alps and a concentration on the scenic beauties of the Italian landscape.
William Beckwith was of the latter frame of mind…
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Isabella Stuart Gardner, one of the foremost collectors of art of her period at the end of the 19th century, was not primarily a patron of contemporary artists. She did purchase the work of living artists, including her portrait by John Singer Sargent, but her collecting focused primarily on artists of the European Renaissance. She was, however, a patron of another kind. She was a patron of the Renaissance specialist and connoisseur, Bernard Berenson, supporting him in his travels in Europe in search of art, and buying almost seventy works through his efforts.
Isabella was born in New York city, but, in marrying John Lowell "Jack" Gardner, married into one of the oldest Boston families. Jack's grandfather was the Salem shipping tycoon, Joseph Peabody…
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The role and influence of artists patronage through history is a fascinating subject, and one which may have lessons for the artists and patrons of today. In the following article I will be looking at the impact of the great Renaissance Pope, Julius II, on the artists of his time, an influence which clearly was a mixed blessing, particularly for Michelangelo.
The Renaissance in Italy was the period in which the primary role of the church as patronage for the arts was challenged by the rising influence of the nobility. It seems at first that Pope Julius II would represent a continuation of the influence of the church in art patronage, and on one level this is true…
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What is that thing?
What you see is a detail from a well-known work of art. Can you figure out which? If you can identify the work by Artist and Title, your entry will be added to the pool of entries eligible for a FREE one year silver membership to ArtId! Each month a winner will be drawn from the pool of correct entries. !IMAGE328 !
To submit your entry, send an Email to Peter@ArtId.com . Please include your name, address and phone number, and a little about yourself!
NOTE! Do NOT make your entry as a comment! Everybody else will be able to read it.…
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It is interesting to speculate whether the art of Caravaggio - so stunning in its inventiveness and iconoclasm, yet so much the art of impetuous youth __ would have matured into something more profound with age, had he lived to have a late style. Certainly Rembrandt, who owes so much to Caravaggio for defining the possibilities of light and shade as a tool, was also impetuous in his youth, as evidenced in his earlier essay at the "Emmaus" subject. Ultimately one has to think that Caravaggio, the brawling and hard-living rebel, was not the man to have developed the depth and subtlety that Rembrandt did in his later years…
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Just as kings are inevitably symbols of the state which has elevated them to the pinacle of authority, so the image that kings choose for themselves is a teeling sign of how the nature of that authority is understood. Granted, one could argue that there is a "standard" iconography of kingship in European painting, and that the Rigaud painting on the left fits that standard. But by comparing it with the highly original portrayal of Charles I by Van Dyke, we can sense just how differently royalty was viewed in the two cultures.
Rigaud has given us a view of the most magnificent symbol of the period of absolute monarchy, the Sun King, Louis XIV. The impact of the work comes from the magnificnece of the setting and the trappings…
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The question "Who was the greatest artist ever?" is a kind of idle speculation, an exercise for art lovers with too much time on their hands. To begin with, art and artists have begun from such different contexts, with such different means and intentions, that it becomes impossible to compare across centuries and cultures. Secondly, even to ask the question presupposes some standard of measure, a standard which is inevitably biased by our cultural framework, not to mention our personal taste. However, since we presume to judge the quality of art all the time, the question is almost unavoidable.
I will ask the question here based on some very arbitrary limitations. I am going to ask it for the European art tradition which I know best…
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Still Life has a long history as a subject for the arts, going back in Western art at least to Roman times. For artists dedicated to the description of the real world, still life is to art subjects what billiards is to games with a ball: the ultimate in control. In a still life, everything within the frame is under the control of the artist, from the selection of objects, to their arrangement, to the viewpoint. This allows for an extraordinary control of pattern, color and composition, as well as mood and ambience. However, it also allows the artist to speak powerfully through the objects themselves.
Objects can become the vehicle for layers and layers of meaning: utilitarian, associative, symbolic…
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Perhaps the greatest single contribtion made by Leonardo da Vinci to Italian Renaissance painting was the simple pyramidal composition he developed in his seminal
"Madonna and Child with Ste. Anne". This compositional idea was later perfected by Raphael in his many Madonnas, and became virtually a trademark of Italian painting for a century. We see a variation of it in the "Resurrection" by Piero della Francesca.
The effect of the pyramidal composition is that of the pyramids themselves: stable, massive and timeless. Piero della Francesca uses the pyramid shape to give a feeling total permanance and significance to his subject. Christ is the top of a pyramid of figures, perfectly erect and frontal, looking directly at the viewer…
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When we think of the naturalistic tradition in English landscape painting at the beginning of the 19th century we immediately think of the work of John Constable. Constable's work, done almost entirely in the Dedham valley of his youth, with excursions to nearby Salisbury and Brighton, is a celebration of the ordinary. With its marvelous sensitivity to the nuances of everything familiar, known and loved, he raises to the level of high art that which we see everyday and normally find unremarkable. But we are less likely to connect his great contemporary Turner to the naturalistic tradition. His work is so far from our day-to-day experience of nature, and so exciting in its foretelling of later abstract art, that we can easily ignore its essential naturalistic roots…
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Architectural spaces are a special subset of the spatial realm which comprises our environment. They are by definition human-centered, created by humans for human purposes. Whether strictly utilitarian or primarily symbolic, they give order and definition to the space they enclose, and are a fundamental way in which we make sense out of our relationship to the universe. This is true of the real spaces we build, but also of the spaces described by artists in their paintings.
When an artist creates a space on his canvas, he intends you to inhabit it in your imagination. By making the space comfortable and familiar, or alternately strange and forbidding, he can create a visceral response which draws on our long experience of inhabiting spaces…
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One of the most powerful tools available to the landscape painter is the ability to draw us in to the space he creates, as if it were an extension of our own. There are many devices to make this happen: a powerful perspective rush into depth, a clear pathway leading in, an opening from darkness into light, a series of anecdaote or events along the way. However, an artist can also deny us any entry into the created space, thus assigning us a very different role.
El Greco, in depicting his home town of Toledo, did not wish us to see it as an extension of our space, and therefore ordinary. There is no pathway to follow to get to the city, and nothing nearby to show you what the trip would be like…
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