In Memorandum. Jessye Norman . Dead at 74

Dead at 74:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jessye_Norman

Singing Deep River with Kathleen Battle:     https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPslJMheiPU

Suzanne Valadon., Born in September 1865 - April 7, 1938

A somewhat controversial figure, Suzanne Valadon (born Marie-Clementine Valadon) was the illegitimate daughter of a French domestic worker. Born in September of 1865, Valadon lived to be only 62 years old – but her life was certainly never dull.

As she grew up in the bohemian quarter of Paris, Valadon supported her self by doing such odd jobs as performing in a circus, working as a waitress, and even a nanny. At age 16, a fall from a trapeze sent her life down a different path.

From 1880 to 1893, Valadon modeled for several of the most important painters of her day, including Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Although she could not afford formal art classes, Valadon learned readily from the painters around her. Close friend and mentor Edgar Degas also taught her drawing and etching techniques. Valadon soon transitioned from an artist’s model into a successful artist. Valadon also had a complicated personal life.

 Valadon was what some  would probably call  a ‘loose woman,’ aka, free spirited and independent - causing a stir in the cabarets and clubs of Montmartre. Many articles about Valadon’s life portray her as a woman who constantly drew attention in a provocative way, taking numerous lovers at a very young age. Even her paintings demonstrate her proclivity for what some may have considered shameful at the time, many of them of nude women. Valadon also created landscapes and still lifes which were described as vibrant and powerfully rich in color.

Many believe that her bold renditions of nude women and the representation of their sexuality was born out of her years as a circus performer and artist’s model. While she could not afford formal art training, her close relationships with some of the most prominent artists of the time resulted in her transformation from artist’s model into a successful artist in her own right. She also had sexual affairs with some of the artists she posed for.

At age 18, Valadon gave birth to Maurice Utrillo out of wedlock; Utrillo also became an artist. At nearly 50 years old Valadon married Andre Utter, who was also an artist and 21 years younger than Valadon. While her artwork attracted a substantial amount of attention due to its passion and intensity, her personal life drew just as much attention. Rising to the peak of her fame in the 1920s, during her lifetime she had four major retrospective exhibitions.

In “The Abandoned Doll,” Suzanne Valadon portrays an intimate scene with a strong psychological mood. Seated on a bed, a fully clothed woman towels dry a girl. The girl, clad only in a pink hair ribbon, turns away from the woman and appears to inspect herself in a hand mirror. The pink bow echoes that in the hair of the doll, a symbol of childhood forgotten on the floor near the bed. This visual connection, combined with the girl’s maturing body, suggests that this is a moment of transition in her young life - from innocence to sexual knowledge and possibly abuse. 

Encyclopedia Britannica On Line. 

Marjorie Blamey. born 13 March 1918; died 8 September 2019

Marjorie Blamey, who has died aged 101, was Britain’s most prolific illustrator of wild flowers. She contributed all the color illustrations, amounting to many thousands of paintings, for a succession of distinguished field guides, beginning with Wild Flowers of Britain and Northern Europe in 1974.

It was followed by Alpine Flowers (1979), Mediterranean Wild Flowers (1993) and Wild Flowers of Britain and Ireland (2003). The large-format Illustrated Flora of Britain and Northern Europe (1989), written with her close friend Christopher Grey-Wilson (and revised in 2003 as Cassell’s Wild Flowers of Britain and Europe), was her favorite. It was selected as book of the year by Natural World magazine.

Her favorite flower, one she painted many times, was the Cornish primrose: “It’s such a lovely simple flower. I am not fond of the great big exotic things. They don’t thrill me like wild flowers do.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marjorie_Blamey

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2019/sep/19/marjorie-blamey-obituary

Pavel Tchelitchew

Portrait of 

Edith Sitwell, who became not only his patron, assistant (moral and financial) and close friend for many years. 

The son of a Russian landowner who lost everything in the 1918 Revolution, Pavel Tchelitchew (1898-1957) first gained artistic recognition in Berlin, where he designed sets for Rimsky-Korsakov's The Wedding Feast of the Boyar (1922) and met Sergei Diaghilev, director of Paris's Ballets Russes. He then settled in Paris, where he joined the circle of Gertrude Stein, who hailed him as the next Picasso.

Idiosyncratic and willful,  Tchelitchew,  was celebrated for his eerie geometric studies of heads and sexualized anamorphic landscapes.

Tchelitchew and his work were despised by Surrealism's self-appointed pope and author of the Surrealist Manifesto, Andre Breton.. Breton condemned Tchelitchew's art for being too visceral. Indeed, it is an apt description of the artist's representations of the grotesque, inspired by his fascination with circus "freaks," fostered largely in part by his visits to a 14th Street freak show in Manhattan.

Tchelitchew’s swansong was a color drawing for the label of the 1956 Mouton Rothschild La Tache de Vin. His design featured a golden ram – a reference to the Rothschild’s coat-of-arms – caught in a geometric spider’s web splashed with crimson wine. The artist died from a heart attack the following year; Baron Philippe de Rothschild was one of the many august and eminent mourners at Père Lachaise Cemetery.

Bio from the Tate: https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/pavel-tchelitchew-2029

http://www.artnet.com/magazine_pre2000/features/mmendelsohn/mendelsohn8-27-98.asp

Arthur Rackham. Born on this day in 1878.

Arthur Rackham, (born Sept. 19, 1867, London, Eng.—died Sept. 6, 1939, Limpsfield, Surrey), one of the best known British illustrators for classic fiction and children's literature. 

Alice in Wonderland. Advice from a Caterpillar.

Reared in London, Rackham enrolled in evening classes at the Lambeth School of Art in 1884 and spent seven years studying there while also working full-time in an insurance office. While a staff artist for a newspaper, the Westminster Budget (1892–96), he also began illustrating books. He became skillful using the new halftone process, and his drawings began to reveal a unique range of imagination. 

Alice in Wonderland. The Queen's Croquet Ground. 

Rackham achieved renown with the publication of a 1900 edition of the Grimm brothers’ Fairy Tales featuring his illustrations. He illustrated a limited edition of Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle (1905), which made him known in America as well. In 1908 Rackham was made a full member of the Royal Society of Painters in Watercolours.

Inspired by the early 16th-century German artists Albrecht Dürer and Albrecht Altdorfer, Rackham produced drawings that are distinctive for their angularity and high detail. His illustrations are also noted for their ability to communicate the spirit of each story. Altogether he illustrated more than 60 books, including works of William Shakespeare, James Barrie, Charles Dickens, Jonathan Swift, Izaak Walton, John Milton, and Edgar Allan Poe, as well as Mother Goose rhymes and several further collections of fairy tales.

Mermaids with Sea Green Hair

Ben Shahn, 1898 - 1969, A Lithographer, painter, Muralist, photographer, graphic artist, & an advocate for social justice.

Ben Shahn, "Men are men before they are lawyers or physicians or , 1955, brush and ink on paper mounted on paperboard, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Container Corporation of America, 1984.124.264

Picture a secular Jewish socialist on fire for justice for the poor, the working class, and the immigrant.

The man in question was Ben Shahn, the 20th-century American painter, muralist, photographer and graphic artist and a leader of the social realism art movement.  Born in Lithuania, emigrated to the United States as a child, was apprenticed to a lithographer after high school. 

He studied at New York University and City College, and very briefly at the National Academy of Design. 

Shahn was shaped by his early religious education and informed by his experiences and observations of “the social and political events and history of Jews in America,” His work is about Jewish ethics, not prayer or ritual, said art historian Diana L. Linden, author of “Ben Shahn’s New Deal Murals: Jewish Identity in the American Scene.”

Shahn's first major success came with the 1932 exhibition of his series The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti. Look to Shahn’s series of 23 paintings detailing the controversial trial and ultimate execution of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. They were two radical Italian immigrants of the 1920s, convicted of murder on scanty (and now missing) evidence.

Shahn once said that he paints two things, "what I love and what I abhor," and during the Depression years his scenes of children playing in concrete urban parks, and of miners and construction workers engaged in their trades, reflect his admiration for the working American and his abhorrence of injustice and oppression. Throughout the 1930s Shahn worked for various government programs, and when the United States entered World War II, he joined the Graphic Arts Division of the Office of War Information, although only two of the many posters he designed were published. In the 1940s, Shahn turned to what he called personal realism." His late work is often symbolic, allegorical, or religious and reflects his belief that "if we are to have values, a spiritual life, a culture, these things must find their imagery and their interpretation through the arts."

Shahn’s life work was infused with the political passions of his time. He expressed them by retelling the Hebrew Bible’s stories of slavery, exile and freedom in images of garment workers, cotton pickers, labor organizers, immigrants and refugees.

Ben Shahn, You Have Not Converted a Man Because You Have Silenced Him, 1968, offset lithograph on paper, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Source unknown, 1997.37

While never a Communist or an avowed atheist, Shahn was close to many who were, including his second wife, the artist Bernarda Bryson. Yet he also was fiercely devoted to the First Amendment, with its vaunted four freedoms.

“(It) held special significance for Shahn, as it did for many American Jews who aspired in the United States to achieve civil liberties denied them by European nations,” Linden writes.

He observed the rise of Hitler from a distance with horror, deploying his art to battle the “fervent resistance to open immigration” that kept desperate Jews from a safe haven in the United States, she writes. The doors to freedom were shuttered by Americans’ fear of “unemployment, nativism and anti-Semitism” — fear stoked in the 2016 presidential campaign.

Born September 12, 1898, Kaunas, Russia [now in Lithuania]—died March 14, 1969, New York, New York, U.S.

Sir Peter Lely painter of the beauties of the court of Charles II

Barbara Palmer, one of Charles II's most famous mistresses 

Nell Gwyn

The Kinsey Sicks latest video "Don't Be Happy, Worry"

So many worries, so little time! The Kinsey Sicks latest video "Don't Be Happy, Worry" is released just in time for The Jewish New Year and Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement! To our Jewish fans: it’ll help get you in shape for all the atoning you have to do (and yes, there is something important that you’ve forgotten). To our non-Jewish fans: aren’t you just a little worried that you don’t really know exactly what the Day of Atonement is???

Even the atone-deaf will love this video, filmed in gorgeous San Francisco settings (Do you recognize the house from “Full House” in the backdrop?)!

Please note that our video is NOT kosher to pass over,

There are only 8 days of Chanukah, but 365 days of worrying! The Kinsey Sicks' anthem to anxiety is soon to become a holiday classic on par with Fox News’ War on Christmas and Satan's efforts to take the “Christ” out of “Starbucks”

-The Kinsey Sicks

Ethiopian New Year

11th of Sep is the Ethiopian New Year. #Ethiopia uses its own calendar with 13 months in year. The 13th month has 5/6 days a leap year. Instead of fireworks+champagne They celebrate w/family, traditional food & honey wine #tej. chanting #Enkutatash. #HappyNewYear @BLAsia_Africa

https://billpetro.com/history-of-ethiopian-new-year

9-11

Pieter Bruegel. The greatest Flemish painter of the 16th century

Dulle Griet, motivated by fury and going on the attack. Also Known as Mad Meg, she leads an army of women to attack and pillage Hell. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dull_Gret

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2002/dec/14/art

Dulle Griet is determined to win - she leads her army through a fiery world to plunder at the gates of hell.

A beautiful painting, full of symbolism. Icarus feather's and wax wings fail him at a crucial moment. Hubris triumphs over dubious modernity 

The Painter and The Connoisseur, c. 1565, . Died on this day in Brussels, 1679. Died far too young - between the ages of 39 to 44. Wise, witty, brilliant artist - looking skeptical about the art buyer looking over his shoulder. 

The Peasant Dance (1568), Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, oil on oak panel

The Harvesters (1565), oil on panel, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Pieter Bruegel, the Elder, by name Peasant Bruegel, Dutch Pieter Bruegel De Oudere or Boeren Bruegel, Bruegel also spelled Brueghel or Breughel, (born c. 1525, probably Breda, duchy of Brabant [now in the Netherlands]—died Sept. 5/9, 1569, Brussels [now in Belgium]), the greatest Flemish painter of the 16th century, whose landscapes and vigorous, often witty scenes of peasant life are particularly renowned. Since Bruegel signed and dated many of his works, his artistic evolution can be traced from the early landscapes, in which he shows affinity with the Flemish 16th-century landscape tradition, to his last works, which are Italianate. He exerted a strong influence on painting in the Low Countries, and through his sons Jan and Pieter he became the ancestor of a dynasty of painters that survived into the 18th century

https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/brue/hd_brue.htm

Caspar David Friedrich. A Virgo birthday for this painter of romantic and mysterious landscapes

German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich was born on September 6 in 1774 - another Virgo like Queen Elizabeth 1. Growing up in Europe during a period of disillusionment with society, Friedrich was best known for the themes of nature and spirituality that are prominent in his work. Landscape with an Obelisk, c. 1803

Right-hand window of Caspar David Friedrich's studio in 1805. Site of dreams, and boats.

The tide flows in, the tide flows out, ships great & small navigate it. Periods of life, 1834, by Caspar David Friedrich.

On the boat w/ Caspar David Friedrich in 1818, sailing off to some misty place of promise.

Looking out into infinity from the chalk cliffs of Rügen in 1818 with Caspar David Friedrich.

Contemplating a vast, formless infinity: Wanderer above a Sea of Mist, by Caspar David Friedrich, 1818.

His works were coloured by his imaginative response to the atmosphere of the Baltic coast and the Harz Mountains, which he found both awesome and ominous. In 1824 he was made a professor of the Royal Dresden Art Academy, though not in the capacity he had wished for. In 1835 he suffered a stroke from which he never recovered, and a second stroke in 1837 caused him almost complete paralysis. His reputation was in decline by the time of his death as the Romantic movement gave way to Realism. For a long time his work was forgotten; it was revived in the 20th century, and the artist’s reputation continued to strengthen into the 21st.

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Caspar-David-Friedrich

https://www.artble.com/artists/caspar_david_friedrich