list of coronavirus resources.

List of where to get your questions about the Coronavirus answered

https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/coronavirus-websites-online-resources-best-trusted-15094737.php

From The Guardian website.

Balthus. Controversial Polish-French painter, Born this day in 1908

Balthus, pseudonym of Balthazar Klossowski, also spelled Balthasar Klossowsky, (born February 29, 1908, Paris, France—died February 18, 2001, La Rossinière, Switzerland), reclusive French painter who, in the midst of 20th-century avant-gardism, explored the traditional categories of European painting: the landscape, the still life, the subject painting, and the portrait. He is best known for his controversial depictions of adolescent girls.

Balthus was born of artistic Polish parents who were active in a Parisian intellectual milieu that included Pierre Bonnard, André Gide, and André Derain. His father was a painter, an art historian, and a stage designer whose family had left Warsaw in 1830 and settled in East Prussia. His Jewish mother was also a painter and had moved with her family from Minsk to Breslau, Prussia, in 1873. Balthus was taken to Berlin by his parents in 1914 at the beginning of World War I, but, after his parents separated in 1917, his time was divided for years between war-torn Germany and Switzerland. Poet Rainer Maria Rilke, a friend of Balthus’s mother, encouraged the precocious youth to publish an early book of drawings about Mitsou, a lost cat, for which Rilke contributed a preface.

https://www.artnews.com/art-in-america/interviews/balthuss-mitsou-drawings-an-interview-with-sabine-rewald-56347/#!

With the help of Gide, in 1924 Balthus returned to Paris, where he began to study painting (with financial aid raised in part by Rilke). Balthus soon began to support himself by accepting commissions for stage sets and portraits, but, after his first one-man show, in Paris in 1934, he devoted most of his time to large-scale interiors and austere muted landscapes. In works such as The Street (1933), he presented ordinary moments of contemporary life on a grand scale and utilized traditional, Old Master painting techniques. Although his works were formally somewhat conservative, some raised controversy for their subject matter: the scenes often have an erotic, disturbing atmosphere and are often peopled with pensive adolescent girls. The presence of these languid, dreamy girls has often given rise to charges of pedophilic overtones. However, the artist’s depiction of these girls has also been interpreted as a truthful, evocative portrayal of the awkwardness of adolescence.

The King of Cats

Balthus was given a successful show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in 1956, and he served as director of the French Academy in Rome from 1961 to 1977 (earning André Malraux’s praise as France’s “second ambassador to Italy”). He was honoured with huge retrospectives at the Georges Pompidou Centre in Paris in 1983 and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City in 1984. He spent the last two decades of the century as a virtual recluse in Switzerland, where he lived in a grand 18th-century chalet with his second wife. 

At age 83 he received the Japan Art Association’s Praemium Imperiale prize (1991) for painting, and he continued to paint into his 90s.

The Mediterranean Cat. 1949

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2013/oct/21/balthus-cats-girls-paintings-provocations-metropolitan-review

https://www.theartstory.org/artist/balthus/

Damian Pettigrew, Balthus Through the Looking Glass (72', Super 16, PLANETE/CNC/PROCIREP, 1996). Documentary on and with Balthus filmed at work in his studio and in conversation at his Rossinière chalet. Shot over a 12-month period in Switzerland, Italy, France and the Moors of England.

Winslow Homer. Born on this day in 1836

Winslow Homer, (born February 24, 1836, Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.—died September 29, 1910, Prouts Neck, Maine), American painter whose works, particularly those on marine subjects, are among the most powerful and expressive of late 19th-century American art. .. His subjects, often deceptively simple on the surface, dealt in their most-serious moments with the theme of human struggle within an indifferent universe. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Winslow-Homer

Winslow Homer began his art career in 1854 or 1855 as an apprentice to J. H. Bufford, a lithographer in Boston. He left two years later to begin free-lance illustration. In 1859 Homer moved to New York, which remained his winter home until the 1880s, and studied for a brief time at the National Academy of Design and with Frederic Rondel. Between 1862 and 1865 he made illustrations of Civil War scenes for Harper's Weekly and turned seriously to landscape painting after the war's close. Homer was elected an associate of the National Academy of Design in 1864 and in the following year a full academician. His first trip abroad came in 1866 and 1867, with ten months spent in France. During the summers of 1868 through 1881, Homer made several trips to the White Mountains, the Adirondacks, and Gloucester, Massachusetts. In 1881 he went to England, staying near Tynemouth, and returned to America late in 1882. The following summer, he settled in Prout's Neck on the coast of Maine, his home thenceforth. After 1884, Homer made hunting and fishing trips in the summers to the Adirondacks or Quebec with his brother and spent part of several winters in Nassau, Bermuda, or Florida.

No examination of the Barbizon mood in American painting can avoid recognition of Homer's singular contribution, despite the fact that his highly selective and independent course of study had only the most oblique connection with the art of the men from Fontainebleau. That Homer numbered among his few friends several admirers of Barbizon art; that he had ample opportunity to study Barbizon painting in Boston, New York, and Paris; that his favorite subjects included American workers on the farm or in seacoast villages, are all facts, but these facts do not adequately explain the peculiar appeal of Homer's special brand of realism. Nevertheless, during the years between his 1867 visit to Paris and his departure for Tynemouth in 1881, Homer executed several small studies of rural life in New England or Normandy that demonstrate a new sense of finesse in his handling of paint and diffused light, as well as an aura of circumspection usually missing in the artist's earlier work. 

His Two Girls with Sunbonnets in Field [Cooper-Hewitt Museum] from about 1877 is a remarkable achievement in this regard, a work comparable to the portraits of peasant youngsters by Millet that are so often enshrouded in the soft glow of twilight. The earlier Girl with a Pitchfork, [The Phillips Collection] which was probably painted from a Normandy sketch, is a prototype for the heroic fisherwoman in many Homers executed much later at Tynemouth and Prout's Neck.

Peter Bermingham American Art in the Barbizon Mood (Washington, D.C.: National Collection of Fine Arts and Smithsonian Institution Press, 1975)

https://americanart.si.edu/artist/winslow-homer-2283

http://www.winslowhomer.org/

Black History Month via podcast from KQED, Dawoud Beys at SFMOMA

In honor of Black History Month, KQED is taking  you on an audio journey with the artists, activists, educators, culture-keepers and creatives who are making black history every day. You’ll find stories on the historic Black Power salute at the 1968 Olympics, a freshly painted Nipsey Hussle mural, a guide for living with joy and the origins of the word “hella.”

So grab your headphones, hit that subscribe button and dive into these stories from the Bay Area and beyond.

 https://www.kqed.org/arts/13874566/a-podcast-playlist-for-making-black-history-every-day

Dawoud Beys at SFMOMA 

https://datebook.sfchronicle.com/art-exhibits/blackness-is-the-subject-in-dawoud-beys-thoughtful-haunting-sfmoma-show

Happy Valentine's Day

Happy Valentine's Day. Peter Paul Rubens self-portrait with his first wife Isabella Brandt.

Alison Saar

Snake Man

 Saar’s work is personal, but so deeply informed by myth and history that its narratives become universal and inclusive. The eyes of her figures are generalized or turned inward, so the sculptures don’t meet our gaze, yet their presence registers viscerally. In all their power and vulnerability, these women embody essential conditions of being-social, political, biological. They represent humanity, distilled.  (Art in America). 

From National Museum of Women in the Arts:  Alison Saar creates artworks that frequently transform found objects to reflect themes of cultural and social identity, history, and religion.

Saar credits her mother, acclaimed collagist and assemblage artist Betye Saar, with exposing her to metaphysical and spiritual traditions. Assisting her father, Richard Saar, a painter and art conservator, in his restoration shop inspired her learning and curiosity about other cultures.

Saar studied studio art and art history at Scripps College in Claremont, California, receiving a BA in art history in 1978. In 1981 she earned her MFA from the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles. In 1983, Saar became an artist-in-residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem, incorporating found objects from the city environment. Saar completed another residency in Roswell, New Mexico, in 1985, which augmented her urban style with Southwest Native American and Mexican influences.

Saar’s style encompasses a multitude of personal, artistic, and cultural references that reflect the plurality of her own experiences. Her sculptures, installations, and prints incorporate found objects including rough-hewn wood, old tin ceiling panels, nails, shards of pottery, glass, and urban detritus. The resulting figures and objects become powerful totems exploring issues of gender, race, heritage, and history. Saar’s art is included in museums and private collections across the U.S.  https://nmwa.org/explore/artist-profiles/alison-saar      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alison_Saar

Ending a difficult week by admiring beautiful calligraphy

Ending a difficult week with a beautiful 'B' and a lovely 'L' from the beginning of Jerome's letter to Pope Damasus & Matthew's Gospel.
Egerton MS 609; 9th century; The Four Gospels; Brittany or Tours; ff.1r, 8r @BLMedieval http://bl.uk/manuscripts/FullDisplay.aspx?ref=Egerton_MS_609

Celebrate February through many traditions.

Snowdrops' by artist Flora Mclachlan

Imbolc is a Gaelic traditional festival marking the beginning of spring. It is held on 1 February. A time of celebration and ritual, often honoring Brighid, the goddess of the hearth.

February derives from februa, the instruments of purification that were used to regain the favor of the gods of the underworld and prepare for spring, which can be seen on this Roman mosaic from ancient Thysdrus, present-day El Jem in Tunisia.

Sunday 2nd February is the Feast of the Presentation of the Lord or the Purification of the Virgin aka Candlemas. Add 49598;963-984; f.34v BnF MS Latin 9438; 12th century; f.29r

@GallicaBnF

Add MS 60629; 13th century; f.160r Stowe 12; 14th century; f.242v

@BLMedieval

It's February! Month of much snow and cold, cold woe. Here from the Tres Riches Heures of Jean, duc de Berry.

They don't make calendars like this anymore! #February in the Hours of René d'Anjou (Paris, c. 1410) Egerton MS 1070, f. 6v https://bl.uk/catalogues/illuminatedmanuscripts/ILLUMIN.ASP?Size=mid&IllID=48413