David and his musicians are rehearsing wildly for their #NewYearsEve performance

David and his musicians are rehearsing wildly for their #NewYearsEve performance. Harley 2804; the 'Worms Bible', Psalms-Acts 16:17; Germany; 12th century; f.3v @BLMedieval

Happy Chanukah

ix13 - Bohemian Chanukah (a Queen adaptation)

https://research.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collection_object_details.aspx?objectId=30402&partId=1&

Joshua Johnson. The first African-American painter to become commercially successful.

Born (possibly) on this day in 1763, in Baltimore, Joshua Johnson. The first African-American to become a commercially successful painter. Here, his portrait of Benjamin Franklin Yoe with his son.

Joshua Johnston, also known as Joshua Johnson, was a portraitist active in Baltimore, Maryland between 1790 and 1825, and the first African American to gain recognition as an artist. Primarily a painter of members of the slave-holding aristocracy, he was rediscovered by Baltimore genealogist and art historian J. Hall Pleasants in 1939.

According to Baltimore County court chattel records, Johnston was the son of a white man, George Johnston, and an unknown enslaved black woman owned by William Wheeler Sr., a small farmer. Wheeler sold Joshua Johnston to George Johnston in 1764 for 25 pounds, half the price of an adult male field slave. George Johnston arranged that Joshua would be freed after completing a blacksmith apprenticeship, or on turning 21, whichever came first; Joshua would go on to complete his apprenticeship with William Forepaugh, and was freed on July 15, 1782. Between 1796 and 1824, he was listed in most Baltimore City directories as a painter or limner.  In the 1817-1818 directory he was also recorded as a “Free Householder of Color.” 

Mrs. Abraham White and her daughter, Rose. Painted in 1808

Johnson's identity as an African American has been questioned as well. In editions of the directory in which an asterisk designated a person of color, there is no asterisk by Johnson's name. Johnson may have been biracial and fair enough to elude identification as an African American by publishers of the directory. In the directory of 1817, however, Johnson's name appears among the "free householders of Color" listed separately in the publication.

Sarah Ogden Gustin

Johnston was light-skinned and was easily mistaken for white, which may explain why some of his subjects at the time did not note his race. He advertised himself in the Baltimore Intelligencer as a “self-taught genius” who had “experienced many insuperable obstacles in the pursuit of his studies.” There is no record of him being formally trained as an artist. He moved often within Baltimore, but as a free man was able to spend some time outside the city.  For example, he is generally believed to have painted a portrait of Sarah Ogden Gustin in Berkeley Springs, West Virginia at some point between 1798 and 1802. Johnston may have supplemented his income by decorating furniture.

Regenia A. Perry Free within Ourselves: African-American Artists in the Collection of the National Museum of American Art (Washington, D.C.: National Museum of American Art in Association with Pomegranate Art Books, 1992)

https://americanart.si.edu/artist/joshua-johnson-2479

https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/johnston-joshua-c-1763-1832/

Paul Cadmus. Social Realism with a touch of the erotic

Paul Cadmus (December 17, 1904 - December 12, 1999) was an American artist. He is best known for his egg tempera paintings of gritty social interactions in urban settings. He also produced many highly finished drawings of single nude male figures. His paintings combine elements of eroticism and social critique in a style often called magic realism. He also produced many highly finished drawings of single nude male figures. His paintings combine elements of eroticism and social critique in a style often called magic realism.

As an open gay man during an intolerant era, Cadmus ran into a lot of controversies with his art but as the saying goes, there is no such thing as bad publicity. In 1934, at the age of 29, he painted The Fleet's In! while working for the Public Works of Art Project of the WPA. This painting, which featured carousing sailors and women, included a stereotypical homosexual solicitation and erotic exaggeration of clinging pants seats and bulging crotches. It was the subject of a public outcry led by Admiral Hugh Rodman, who protested to Secretary of the Navy Claude A. Swanson, saying, "It represents a most disgraceful, sordid, disreputable, drunken brawl.” Secretary Swanson stated that the painting was "right artistic" but "not true to the Navy.” The painting was removed from exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery by Henry L. Roosevelt, the Assistant Secretary of the Navy at the time, and kept in his home until Roosevelt's death in 1936.

The publicity helped to launch his career, and he stated at the time, "I had no intention of offending the Navy. Sailors are no worse than anybody else. In my picture I merely commented on them – I didn't criticize.” The painting, which after Roosevelt's death hung over a mantel at the Alibi Club in Washington for more than half a century, was kept from public view until 1981, temporarily displayed at the Wolfsonian Museum in Miami, and eventually found a home at the Naval Historical Center.

In 1938, his painting Pocahantas Saving the Life of John Smith, a mural painted for the Parcel Post Building in Richmond, Virginia, had to be retouched when some observers noticed a fox pelt suggestively hanging between the legs of an Indian depicted in the painting. Cadmus used his then lover, Jared French, as the model for John Smith in the mural.

In 1940, two paintings, Sailors and Floozies (1938) and Seeing the New Year In, were removed from public view because the Navy "didn't like it" and there was "too much smell about it.”  The paintings were being exhibited at the Golden Gate International Exposition and were removed, while a third, Venus and Adonis, remained. The office of Commissioner George Creel was told by the Navy that the painting, Sailors and Floozies, was "unnecessarily dirty.”  Now Cadmus' work is in the Smithsonian. 

In 1965, Cadmus met and began a relationship with Jon Anderson, a former cabaret star, in Nantucket that lasted until Cadmus' death in 1999.  From the beginning of their 35-year relationship, the then 27-year-old Anderson was Cadmus' model and muse in many of his works. Cadmus was also close friends with many illustrious artists, authors, and dancers including: Christopher Isherwood, W. H. Auden, George Balanchine, George Platt Lynes, George Tooker, Lincoln Kirstein(his brother-in-law), and E. M. Forster,  who was said to have read his novel Maurice aloud while Cadmus painted his portrait. 

In 1999, he died at his home in Weston, Connecticut, due to advanced age, just five days shy of his 95th birthday. 

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

https://americanart.si.edu/artist/paul-cadmus-704

http://www.muddycolors.com/2019/10/paul-cadmus-painting-gay-male-identity-into-american-art/

Io Saturnalia

Saturnalia, held in mid-December, is an ancient Roman pagan festival honoring the agricultural god Saturn. Saturnalia celebrations are the source of many of the traditions we now associate with Christmas.

Temple of Saturn. 

1. Saturnalia began as a farmers’ festival to mark the end of autumn planting, in honour of Saturn, who was a god of agriculture.

2. The first Saturnalia was in 497BC when the Temple of Saturn in Rome was dedicated.

3. Starting as a one-day feast, it expanded to three days, then a whole week, from December 17 to 23.

4. The 1st century Latin poet Catullus described Saturnalia week as “the best of days.”

5. During Saturnalia is was customary for slaves and masters to exchange roles, with the slaves relaxing as their masters did the cooking for them.

6. The standard greeting during this period was “Io Saturnalia!”

7. There is a theory that Santa Claus’s ‘Ho, ho, ho’ has its origins in this cry of “Io”.

8. The 2nd century Greek poet Lucian told us that the serious is barred and no business allowed at Saturnalia but singing naked is encouraged.

9. Each household would elect a King of Chaos or King of Misrule to preside over the festivities.

10. The celebration of Christmas on December 25, just after Saturnalia, began in Rome after the conversion of Emperor Constantine in AD312.

https://www.history.com/topics/ancient-rome/saturnalia

https://www.ancient.eu/Saturnalia/

Vermeer died OTD in 1675, Master of the sacred within the mundane

43-year-old Jan Vermeer died #OTD 1675. He was broke, his possessions had to be sold off to pay debts, he had no apprentices or pupils & was largely forgotten for 200 years. Be glad we can enjoy these details from his Milkmaid / Art of Music / Officer & Laughing Girl.

His works are among the most mysterious paintings in the history of Western Art. But it is very hard to say why. Nothing much happens in the paintings. People engage in simple tasks. A man and a woman sit at a table and speak. A woman smiles. A woman reads a letter. A girl looks at us over her left shoulder. A woman sews. A woman pours some milk out of a jug. That’s it. One task, one episode, one moment in each painting.

Vermeer used various painterly tricks to make these moments – these mundane tasks – look special. He expended a great deal of time and energy capturing the effects of light. He studied the way light comes in through a window, bathing a room. He seems to have painted most of his pictures in one or two rooms in his own home. He knew that light well. He analyzed that light, meditated on it. Using that light, he projected images through a camera obscura and probably through other kinds of lenses and mirrors available in 17th-century Holland. This allowed Vermeer to concentrate on every sparkle, shine and glimmer. He concocted different methods for reproducing those glimmers and shines. Sometimes he would render an object, like a knob or finial, simply as an effect of light. That’s to say, we only know the object is there because of how Vermeer painted the light shining upon it.

Art historians love to wax poetic about “brushstrokes” and a particular attitude to canvas and pigment they like to call “painterly.” But the funny thing about Vermeer is that many of his paintings were probably made by the careful application of small splotches of paint, in an almost paint-by-numbers attempt to reproduce, inch by inch, the image of a camera obscura. Oh, and genius. A engineer made a film showing how Vermeer used the camera obscura. What he ended up was dull, boring and routine. Anybody can use that camera; it takes a genius to make art that we still look at and marvel over 300 years later. 

The struggle to have the right disposition, to be attentive to what we are doing in the face of our hovering subjectivity, is the sacramental struggle. That’s what Vermeer wanted to show us, and why his paintings don’t look quite like anything else from 17th-century Holland. Vermeer’s paintings stand outside of time by being so utterly attentive to the specifics of one moment. They show us the sacred as it is hidden, in plain sight, on the surface of the profane.  Morgan Meis, 2014

Mark George Tobey. Born December 11, 1890

Mark George Tobey (December 11, 1890 - April 24, 1976) was an American painter. His densely structured compositions, inspired by Asian calligraphy, resemble Abstract expressionism, although the motives for his compositions differ philosophically from most Abstract Expressionist painters. His work was widely recognized throughout the United States and Europe. In 1921, Tobey founded the art department at The Cornish School in Seattle, Washington.

Abstraction and spirituality are intimately entwined in the delicate works of Mark Tobey, whom, along with Morris Graves, Life magazine described as a mystical painter. Canticle refers to liturgical hymns from the bible. Tobey acknowledged that the abstract harmony of music was an important source of inspiration: “When I play the piano for several hours, everything is clarified in my visual imagination afterwards.” The intricate pattern of delicate marks that animate the surface (critics called it “white writing”) was inspired by the artist’s study of Arabic and Japanese calligraphy.

Modern American Realism: The Sara Roby Foundation Collection, 2014

Works by Mark Tobey at the Internet Archive: