Sassetta considered the greatest Sienese painter of the early 15th century

Saint Francis taking leave of his father. And all his possessions. Especially his clothing! Set in a lovely pink palace and painted 1440 by Sassetta

Saint Francis giving his robe to a poor man, & then having a dream about A+ floating castle. By Sassetta of Siena

Just Saint Francis, looking a bit surprised to be here all alone and painted by Sassetta,

Madonna being given a delicate crown by a pair of angels. By Sassetta of Siena

Betrayal of Christ, complete with ear-cutting by Peter, as painted by Sassetta

The Journey of the Magi. 1433-35

Sassetta, original name Stefano di Giovanni, (died c. 1450, Siena [Italy]), Gothic-style painter considered to be the greatest Sienese painter of the early 15th century.

The date and place of his birth are uncertain. He seems to have been trained in Siena, and the force of the Sienese tradition is evident in the vivid colours and elegant use of line in the surviving panels of his first commissioned work, an altarpiece for the Arte della Lana in Siena (1423–26). His interest in the work of the first generation of Florentine Renaissance painters is reflected in the coherent spatial relationships of the monumental altarpiece of the “Madonna of the Snow,” painted for Siena Cathedral in 1430–32. From this point on, under Gothic influence, Sassetta’s style assumes an increasingly decorative character, manifest initially in a polyptych in San Domenico at Cortona (probably 1437) and reaching its climax in a cycle of scenes from the legend of St. Anthony the Abbot. His best-known and most ambitious work was carried out for San Francesco at Sansepolcro (1437–44) and was originally a double-sided altarpiece (now dispersed) with a Virgin and Child and four saints on the front and scenes from the life of St. Francis on the reverse side. The St. Francis scenes mark the peak of Sassetta’s career as a narrative artist and are exemplary of his late style, with their sophisticated colour sense and their subtle, rhythmic compositions. Sassetta never completely abandoned his interest in Florentine painting, and it is thought to be the fusion of traditional and contemporary elements in his work that turned Sienese painting from the Gothic to the Renaissance style.

Wikipedia (what else):  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stefano_di_Giovanni

http://www.visual-arts-cork.com/old-masters/sassetta.htm

https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/437611

Renaissance color palate: http://www.visual-arts-cork.com/artist-paints/renaissance-colour-palette.htm

Holocaust Memorial Day

Today is Holocaust Memorial Day, a time to reflect on the mechanisms that enabled the genocide against Jews & Rom, & not only remember what those mechanisms wrought but that they are still in motion: fear, xenophobia, demagoguery, dehumanization of marginalized groups.

#OnThisDay 75 years ago, Soviet soldiers liberated Auschwitz-Birkenau. They found several thousand emaciated survivors and the smouldering remains of the gas chambers. Approximately 1.1 million men, women and children had been murdered there. Learn more: https://hmd.org.uk/resource/27-january-1945-liberation-of-auschwitz-birkenau/

They were not numbers, triangles or symbols.And we will not let their names be forgotten. (Photo: Czeslawa Kwoka, Vinzent Daniel, Maria Schenker, Walter Degen)

9 January 1940 | Hungarian Jewish girl Sarolta Grünwald (in the picture on the left) was born in Csongrad. In June 1944 she was deported to #Auschwitz and murdered in a gas chamber. She was 4. Her 2-years-older brother Sandor died with her. (Photo:

@yadvashem

18 January 1943 | French Jew Claude Alexander was born in Lyon. In 1944 he was deported to #Auschwitz and murdered in a gas chamber. He was 1 year old. https://www.hmd.org.uk/
https://www.ushmm.org/remember/days-of-remembrance/resources/calendar

Édouard Manet...Born on this day in 1832

Édouard Manet (23 January 1832 - 30 April 1883),  a pivotal figure in the transition from Realism to Impressionism. In this image: Edouard Manet (1832-1883), Le Printemps oil on canvas, 29 1/8 x 20 1/4 in. (74 x 51.5 cm.), painted in 1881 Estimate: $25-35 million. Photo: Christie's Images Ltd 2014.

In his day, he was called the Father of Impressionism,  but he was nothing of the kind. Indulgent and supportive, he bought paintings by Impressionists but he exhibited in none of their exhibitions (1874-1886) and, indeed, at 51, died well before their sequence ended. He preferred the path of long academic training, his ambition to exhibit at the Salon, the Parisian equivalent of the Royal Academy; this he achieved but not without the sour adversity of powerful conservatives and the mocking hostility of influential critics The insiders objecting to his alla prima technique (that is painting directly on the canvas without preliminary studies, the composition adjusted and edited in progress, the brushwork free and fluent and perspective left to chance), the outsiders bemused and angrily disturbed by subjects in which Manet broke all the technical rules and ignored the traditional hierarchies that made, for example, a history painting superior to a still life. 

Manet knew these rules, and others too, for he came from a social background of civil service, diplomacy and the aristocratic reserve of the high bourgeoisie. Intended for the Navy, he failed, and at 18 in 1850 enrolled for six years as a student of Thomas Couture who, at the Salon three years earlier, had sprung to fame (and notoriety) with his enormous and much debated history painting, The Romans of the Decadence. Under Couture he learned the ancestral techniques of his trade (though he was swiftly to abandon them) and copied the painters of Renaissance Venice and 17th-century Spain and Holland who were to be both profound influences and the subjects of respectful subversion in his work. He wanted Couture’s popular success, critical acclaim and commissions.  In this, he was far more bourgeois than the impressionists. 

Déjeuner sur l’Herbe

In 1859, Manet made his first submission to the Salon, He was rejected. In 1861 two works were accepted, but in 1863 he was again rejected — indeed, so many other painters were rejected that Napoleon III commanded the immediate institution of the Salon des Refusés (the first hint that a Salon jury might be fallible), at which Manet’s now celebrated Déjeuner sur l’Herbe caused one of the great brouhahas in the history of art criticism. "What are those people doing?" was the question du jour. Well, they are busy being in a painting was one answer. Of course, that's not the only answer and the painting's ambiguity is want brings people back to it again and again, looking to solve the riddle.  

Until his death 20 years on, the Salon maintained its ambivalence towards his work, but Manet remained convinced that it was the proper place for him to exhibit and be judged, though he was contemptuous of jurors whom he damned as “an ill-mannered lot” for whom he “wouldn’t give a f-”. Conservative in temperament and wealthy enough to go his own way, he could afford to offend the Salonards while wishing to be one of them.

After a working life of only a quarter of a century, Manet could argue in the year before his death that “Concision in art is a necessity and a matter of elegance ... Look for the essential areas of light and shade in a figure and the rest will fall into place ... Don’t make it a chore, no, never a chore!” Yet a chore it often was, and paintings that were not immediately what he wished were often scraped down, a whole day’s work rejected and revised so often and so much that the survivors became records of long conversations between the painter and his canvases, for only they could show him that he was in error. 

For the last five years of his life Manet found it increasingly difficult to stand at his easel, the reason syphilis, either contracted in 1848-49 when on a preparatory training voyage to Brazil for the Naval College, a boy of 16 or 17 being made a man by his mates in one of Rio de Janeiro’s brothels, or inherited from his father, for his later life was one of uxorious devotion and discretion. After many attempted cures gangrene set in and in April 1883 his left leg was amputated. He did not recover.

  

Robert Hughes: "After he died of tertiary syphilis in 1883 at the age of 51, Zola and Monet helped carry his coffin to the grave. His milieu included nearly every French artist of significance as well as many of its great writers. . . For each phase of modernism, there is a new Manet.. . In his best work, Manet's inquisitiveness never failed him. Every inch of surface records an active desire to see and then find the proper translation of sight into mark. 

Info from essays by Brian Sewell and Robert Hughes. 

Nicolas Lancret. Painter of 18th century French manners

January 22, 1690. Nicolas Lancret (22 January 1690 - 14 September 1743), French painter, was born in Paris, and became a brilliant depicter of light comedy which reflected the tastes and manners of French society under the regent Orleans.

Lancret was one of the chief followers of Watteau in early 18th-century France, producing fêtes galantes and conversation pieces in a style similar to that of Watteau. Like his English contemporary, 
Hogarth, Lancret profited from prints made after his paintings. Unlike Hogarth, whose work looked at the underside of life, Lancret painted aristocrats engaged in playful pursuits.

From the 1911 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannicia: Lancret's work cannot now, however, be taken for that of Watteau, for both in drawing and in painting his touch, although intelligent, is dry, hard and wanting in that quality which distinguished his great model; these characteristics are due possibly in part to the fact that he had been for some time in training under an engraver. The number of his paintings (of which over eighty have been engraved) is immense; he executed a few portraits and attempted historical composition, but his favorite subjects were balls, fairs, and village weddings.. . .  In 1719 he was received as Academician, and became councillor in 1735; in 1741 he married a grandchild of Boursault, author of Aesop at Court. He died on the 14th of September 1743. 

https://artuk.org/discover/artworks/search/actor:lancret-nicolas-16901743

In Honor of Martin Luther King, Jr

Elizabeth Catlett

Faith Ringgold

 In Honor of Martin Luther King, Jr

Langston Hughes, 1902 - 1967

 I, too, sing America.

I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.

Tomorrow,
I’ll be at the table
When company comes.
Nobody’ll dare
Say to me,
“Eat in the kitchen,"
Then.

Besides,
They’ll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed—

I, too, am America.
From The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, published by Knopf and Vintage Books. Copyright © 1994 by the Estate of Langston Hughes. All rights reserved. Used by permission of Harold Ober Associates Incorporated.

https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/i-too

Complete works of Jan Van Eyck on line

BRUSSELS.- Thanks to the VERONA project (Van Eyck Research in OpeN Access) of the Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage (KIK-IRPA), the complete painted works, plus the unique miniatures of Jan Van Eyck, can now be admired online in ultra-high resolution. During the presentation of the European Heritage Awards / Europa Nostra Awards 2019 for Research to the VERONA project, photos and scientific images of several of Jan Van Eyck's top works, plus miniatures from the manuscript Turin-Milan Hours, were added to the website Closer to Van Eyck. Almost the entire oeuvre of Jan Van Eyck is now accessible online. And thanks to the entirely updated viewer with optimized zoom function you will not miss a single detail. Last but not least, the digitalized art works will feature in an interactive exhibition this fall in BOZAR – Centre for Fine Arts: Facing Van Eyck. The Miracle of the Detail.

The VERONA project of the Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage (KIK-IRPA) has launched a new chapter in the research of paintings by Jan Van Eyck (ca. 1390-1441) and his atelier, thanks to the production of high-quality, standardized image material. This is accessible in open access on the website Closer to Van Eyck. The paintings were photographed using macro photography (with normal light, grazing light, infrared light and UV fluorescence) and, in some cases, also X-ray photography and macro-XRF scanning.

The presentation of the European Heritage Award / Europa Nostra Award for Research 2019 to the VERONA project on 14 January in BOZAR was the perfect moment to launch the macro photos of 28 folios with miniatures from the book Turin-Milan Hours (Palazzo Madama). The folios from the National University Library in Turin, which were partly burned in 1904, can now also be viewed in colour for the first time. This is the result of a collaboration between the team of KIK-IRPA and Musea Brugge / Kenniscentrum vzw. From now on, you can also browse through the new image material of masterpieces, such as the Arnolfini Portrait and – presumed – Self-portrait from London (National Gallery), the Saint Francis from Turin, the Crucifixion from Venice, two altar panels from New York and a series of lesser-known works emulating Van Eyck. This brings the grand total to 30: the painted oeuvre of Jan Van Eyck can be admired online down to the very last detail.

Visitors can also now enjoy an entirely updated viewer, allowing you to continuously zoom in. Plus, there are more configuration opportunities for the classification of images, support for touchscreens and user-friendly menus. Finally, the miniatures can be compared in minute detail with the much bigger paintings, thanks to the function for comparing images of different scales at the same size.

http://closertovaneyck.kikirpa.be/verona/#home/sub=map&modality=vis

https://www.belspo.be/belspo/fsi/irpakik_en.stm

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jan-van-Eyck

Chaïm Soutine. Born on this day in 1893

January 13, 1893. Chaïm Soutine (13 January 1893 - 9 August 1943) was a Russian-French painter of Jewish origin. Soutine made a major contribution to the expressionist movement while living in Paris. Inspired by classic painting in the European tradition, exemplified by the works of Rembrandt, Chardin and Courbet, Soutine developed an individual style more concerned with shape, color, and texture over representation, which served as a bridge between more traditional approaches and the developing form of Abstract Expressionism. In this image: Chaim Soutine, Two Pheasants.

A splayed carcass and delicately wrought feathers; shimmering herring and a bleating lamb. Each canvas seems to capture the space between life and death, stillness and movement. For many of his 50 years the Jewish artist Chaim Soutine, too, occupied a space between. As a young man in the shtetl he was once beaten for painting. As a painter in Paris he faced discrimination for his religion. He lived in Montparnasse during the bohemian heyday, yet he so preferred the solitude of the Parisian countryside he eventually moved there.

“He was a complicated character. He was to a certain extent a loner. He did of course have friends; you couldn’t live that café life as a hermit. But he started living outside of the city and his life alternated between alienation and isolation,” said Stephen Brown, the Neubauer Family Foundation associate curator at the Jewish Museum.

Soutine was the second-youngest of 11 children born to a tailor in Smilavichy, a Jewish shtetl in the Pale of Settlement (now Belarus). Violence often visited the region; during his childhood thousands of Jews were murdered in pogroms.

While Soutine’s parents weren’t averse to their son’s artistic inclinations — the source of which remains a mystery — the shtetl was less than enamored with the idea. After Soutine painted the village rabbi, the rabbi’s sons beat him severely.

His mother sued the rabbi’s family and Soutine took 25 rubles from a financial settlement to go to Minsk, where he was to be apprenticed to a tailor. He soon left for Vilna where he enrolled in art school.

A few years later, in 1913, the then 20-year-old moved to Paris. There he spent time with other Jewish émigré painters including Amedeo Modigliani, who became a mentor of sorts. In the Louvre he studied countless paintings and drew inspiration from Rembrandt, Goya, Chardin and Courbet.

For nearly 10 years he toiled, getting a commission here and there. His fortune changed in 1922 when he found a patron in Albert C. Barnes, the art collector.  Barnes patronage transformed Soutine from a poverty stricken unknown to a more comfortable living. Although he seldom exhibited during his lifetime, he did participate in an important exhibition in 1937 where he was recognized as a great painter. 

From Wikipedia:   Soon afterwards France was invaded by German troops. As a Jew, Soutine had to escape from the French capital and hide in order to avoid arrest by the Gestapo. He moved from one place to another and was sometimes forced to seek shelter in forests, sleeping outdoors. Suffering from a stomach ulcer and bleeding badly, he left a safe hiding place for Paris in order to undergo emergency surgery, which failed to save his life. On August 9, 1943, Chaim Soutine died of a perforated ulcer. He was interred in Cimetière du Montparnasse, Paris. 

https://www.theartstory.org/artist/soutine-chaim/

John Singer Sargent, born on this day in 1856

John Singer Sargent's family (1856–1925) had deep roots in New England. In 1850, his father married Mary Newbold Singer, daughter of a successful local merchant.another The couple left Philadelphia for Europe in late summer 1854, seeking a healthful climate and a distraction after the death a year earlier of their firstborn child. The Sargents’ stay in Europe was meant to be temporary, but they became expatriates, passing winters in Florence, Rome, or Nice and summers in the Alps or other cooler regions. Their son John was born in Florence in January 1856.

John Sargent was given little regular schooling. As a result of his “Baedeker education,” he learned Italian, French, and German. He studied geography, arithmetic, reading, and other disciplines under his father’s tutelage. He also became an accomplished pianist. His mother, an amateur artist, encouraged him to draw, and her wanderlust furnished him with subjects. He enrolled for his first-documented formal art training during the winter of 1873–74 at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence. In spring 1874, Sargent moved to Paris where he studied with Carolus-Durran, a stylish, progressive painter. More travel in both the United States and Europe followed which Sargent began to make the contacts which led to commissions and eventually fame.  

Although Sargent painted, showed, and won praise for both portraits and subject pictures at the Salons between 1877 and 1882, commissions for portraits increasingly demanded his attention and defined his reputation. Sargent’s best-known portrait, Madame X (16.53), which he undertook without a commission, enlisted a palette and brushwork derived from Velázquez; a profile view that recalls Titian; and an unmodulated treatment of the face and figure inspired by the style of Édouard Manet and Japanese prints. The picture’s novelty and quality notwithstanding, it was a succès de scandale in the 1884 Salon, provoking criticism for Sargent’s indifference to conventions of pose, modeling, and treatment of space, even twenty years after Manet’s pioneering efforts. 

Having gained notoriety rather than fame, Sargent decided that London, where he had thought of settling as early as 1882, would be more hospitable than Paris. In spring 1886, he moved to England for the rest of his life.

Although Degas described him as “a skillful portrait painter who differed little from the better Salon painters then in fashion”, we have to be careful about viewing Sargent as an essentially conservative painter. He went his own way as an artist; nothing about him was simple. He may have been the last in the line that included Velázquez and Ingres, and he may also have been one of the last society portrait painters, but he brought a textural richness, a serious and often startling sense of composition and, at his best, a muscular theatricality, to what he did as a painter.

 After 1900, Sargent stopped painting society portraits and officially closed his studio (1907) although he did complete a few more portrait commissions. 1917, most critics began to consign him to the masters of

the past, "a brilliant ambassador between his patrons and posterity."

Modernists treated him more harshly, considering him completely out of touch with the reality of American life and with emerging artistic trends including Cubism and Futurism.[73] Sargent quietly accepted the criticism, but refused to alter his negative opinions of modern art. He retorted, "Ingres, Raphael and El Greco, these are now my admirations, these are what I like."[74] In 1925, shortly before he died, (April 14, 1925, heart attack) Sargent painted his last oil portrait, a canvas of Grace Curzon, Marchioness Curzon of Kedleston.