Thursday, December 30, 2021
Wednesday, December 29, 2021
Félix Edouard Vallotton. Born December 28, 1865
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| Sunset |
Félix Vallotton, in full Félix Edouard Vallotton, (born December 28, 1865, Lausanne, Switzerland—died December 28, 1925, Paris, France), Swiss-born French graphic artist and painter known for his paintings of nudes and interiors and in particular for his distinctive woodcuts.
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| Road at St Paul (Var) 1922 |
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| Le Bois de la Gruerie et le ravin des Meurissons (1917) |
Monday, December 27, 2021
George Romney. Born the day after Christmas in 1734.
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| Emma Hamilton as Circe. |
George Romney born on the day after Christmas in 1734. An English portrait painter and the most fashionable artist of his day, making his sitters, no matter how plain, look romantic and beautifully glowing. Emma Hamilton, the mistress of Lord Nelson, was his particular muse but his portraits of children are the very epitome of romantic innocence. (images from Wikipedia)
In 1762 Romney settled in London, leaving his wife and son behind, and henceforward saw them only on his few visits to the north. He won premiums for his historical paintings from the Society of Arts in 1763 and 1765, and exhibited at the Free Society between 1763 and 1769, and with the Society of Artists from 1770 to 1772. During a visit to Paris in the autumn of 1764 he was deeply impressed by the classicism of Eustache Le Sueur. His portraits were chiefly influenced by Ramsay. In 1773 he traveled to Italy with the miniaturist Ozias Humphry, remaining there until 1775, chiefly in Rome.
On his return to London Romney was patronized by the Duke of Richmond, in whose celebrated gallery of casts he had formerly studied, and took the grand house in Cavendish Square, with its large painting room, previously occupied by Francis Cotes. He achieved an instant success, and his unremitting application as a society portraitist is amply documented by his sitter books, which survive for the years 1776 to 1795. He never bothered to exhibit at the Royal Academy of Arts, though this was partly due to an antagonism with Reynolds. His health affected by overapplication, he gave up portrait painting at the end of 1795 and retired to Hampstead. In 1798 he sold the lease of his London house and returned to Kendal, where he died insane on 15 November 1802.
[Hayes, John. British Paintings of the Sixteenth through Nineteenth Centuries. The Collections of the National Gallery of Art Systematic Catalogue. Washington, D.C., 1992: 229-230.]
Saturday, December 25, 2021
The Nativity According to Luke: For unto us a child is given
and on earth peace to those on whom his favor rests.”
Friday, December 24, 2021
Coming to Bethlehem to be taxed
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Snowball fight in Bruegel's version of Bethlehem which sure looks a lot like 16th century Amsterdam.  Bruegel's ChristmasEve details: Peddlers with heavy packs, moving slowly across the ice to reach frigid Bethlehem.  Joseph and Mary are almost lost in the chaos as they make their way into the city |
The Holly and the Ivy
Holly and ivy were brought into the home during the harsh winter months as a sign of luck and life, as the evergreen plants were hardy and strong. Holly and ivy were also used as decoration in churches in the 15th and 16th centuries.
1 The holly and the ivy
when they are both full grown,
of all the trees that are in the wood
the holly bears the crown.
Refrain:
The rising of the sun
and the running of the deer,
the playing of the merry organ,
sweet singing in the choir.
2 The holly bears a blossom,
white as the lily flower,
and Mary bore sweet Jesus Christ,
to be our sweet Saviour. [Refrain]
3 The holly bears a berry,
as red as any blood,
and Mary bore sweet Jesus Christ
to do poor sinners good. [Refrain]
4 The holly bears a prickle,
as sharp as any thorn,
and Mary bore sweet Jesus Christ
on Christmas day in the morn. [Refrain]
5 The holly bears a bark,
as bitter as any gall,
and Mary bore sweet Jesus Christ
for to redeem us all. [Refrain]
6 The holly and the ivy,
when they are both full grown,
of all the trees that are in the wood
The holly bears the crown. [Refrain]
Source: Complete Anglican Hymns Old and New #645
Monday, December 20, 2021
Happy Birthday Pieter de Hooch
This is a week for great artists. First Klee who I posted about yesterday, now de Hooch whose work so impressed me in the traveling show from the Hague.This was one of the best shows that I have seen in San Francisco and not only because they were exhibiting “The Girl with the Pearl Earring.” 17th century art is a genre that I can view over and over - so many masterpieces that pull you in by their skill, their love of ordinary life and their understated mystique.
December 20, 1629. Pieter de Hooch, also spelled "Hoogh" or "Hooghe" (baptized December 20, 1629 - 1684) was a genre painter during the Dutch Golden Age. He was a contemporary of Dutch Master Jan Vermeer, with whom his work shared themes and style. Most scholars believe that de Hooch's work after around 1670 became more stylized and deteriorated in quality. It may be that his grief at his wife's death at age 38 affected his work.
In any case, his health was now deteriorating, and he died in 1684 in an Amsterdam insane asylum, though the direct cause of his admission there is unknown. In this image: A Couple Walking in the Citizens' Hall of Amsterdam Town Hall (aka Départ pour la promenade) - circa 1663-65 oil on canvas, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Strasbourg.
De Hooch is noted for his interior scenes and use of light and best known for his early works, which he painted in Delft. His favorite subjects were middle-class families in ordinary interiors and sunny courtyards, performing their humble daily duties in a calm atmosphere disrupted only by the radiant entry of natural light penetrating a door or window. Critics believe that it was De Hooch who influenced Vermeer rather than the contrary. De Hooch repeated his basic compositions many times, so that some consider his later works less interesting. Alejandro Vergara, Vermeer and the Dutch Interior. Madrid, 2003, p. 211
"De Hooch's paintings have complex structures, which create the illusion of real perspective. Rectangular architectural frames and blocks give the impression of distance, and lead the viewer's eye to the main focus of the painting...receding floor tiles also help to create this impression of perspective.
"As well as his mastery of perspective, De Hooch was skilled in the portrayal of natural light falling on a scene. His light is warm - more intense than Vermeer's - and his color range is richer, with fewer cool tones."
- From Kirsten Bradbury, "Essential History of Art"
http://www.essentialvermeer.com/dutch-painters/masters/dehooghbase.html#.VJW54sADA
https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/explore-the-collection/overview/pieter-de-hooch
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pieter_de_Hooch
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_art
Sunday, December 19, 2021
Paul Klee. Modern Master of mysterious riddles within profound art
Paul Klee (German: [paʊ̯l ˈkleː]; 18 December 1879 – 29 June 1940) was a Swiss-born German artist. His highly individual style was influenced by movements in art that included expressionism, cubism, and surrealism. Klee was a natural draftsman who experimented with and eventually deeply explored color theory, writing about it extensively; his lectures Writings on Form and Design Theory (Schriften zur Form und Gestaltungslehre), published in English as the Paul Klee Notebooks, are held to be as important for modern art as Leonardo da Vinci's A Treatise on Painting for the Renaissance. He and his colleague, Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky, both taught at the Bauhaus school of art, design and architecture in Germany. His works reflect his dry humor and his sometimes childlike perspective, his personal moods and beliefs, and his musicality.
https://www.moma.org/artists/3130
Paul Klee’s paintings and works on paper initially may look light-hearted and whimsical. Radiant and colorful, many of the Swiss artist’s small-sized masterpieces feature meandering lines. Then too, as they defy gravity to float in space, his idiosyncratic figures are often as buoyant and festive as balloons.
Unfortunately, such interpretations shortchange Klee’s subtle, elusive work. It’s not comic, much less benign. When the artist portrayed a wide-eyed cat pondering a bird, Hitler was rising to power, scoping out his own prey.
To be sure, Klee embraced Modernism. Robert Delaunay, who rendered Paris with fetching blue, yellow, and green geometries, and Wassily Kandinsky, the Russian abstractionist, were cherished colleagues who played significant roles in his career. And, upon returning from a trip to Tunisia, the Swiss artist declared, “Color has taken hold of me…It will possess me always…Color and I are one. I am a painter.” As for his graphic flourishes, he once suggested that in his work, a line “goes out for a walk, so to speak, aimless only for the sake of the walk.”
Klee was a 20th-century visionary who belongs among the heroes he admired early on. Like his pantheon of European predecessors --William Blake, Henry Fuseli, Odilon Redon, James Ensor, and Francisco Goya -- he stressed subject matter. He depicted angels, monsters, ghosts, perversities, a tormented soul or two, even barbarians. Klee had a gift for caricature and for rendering complex notions as vivid tableaux. Would this have been clear had he lived deeper into the 20th century?
Klee belonged to a generation of achievers. However, it took him longer than many contemporaries to find himself. Unlike, say, Pablo Picasso, the drawings he made with pencils and crayon as a child look like the work of an adolescent. Even the prints he etched when he was in his mid-20s are unremarkable. Yet he thrived in a community of like-minded artists. (Phyllis Tuchman, Obit).
Paul Klee (1879-1940) has been called many things: a father of abstract art, a Bauhaus master, the progenitor of Surrealism, and—by many an art historian and fan (members of his cult following affectionately refer to each other as “Klee-mates”)—a very hard man to pin down. "Art does not reproduce the visible; rather, it makes visible."
Ambiguity was his natural element and he played in it the way a dolphin plays in water. He saw everything in terms of opposites trying to coexist. It was the artist's job to understand that every up implies a down, and to bring them together in some kind of harmony. "The demoniacal,' he wrote in his diary, in the unfortunate oracular tone that infects the prose style of so many modern artists, "shall be melted into simultaneity with the celestial, the dualism shall not be treated as such, but in its complementary oneness. . . . For truth asks that all elements be present at once.' He put it more engagingly in a lecture to his Bauhaus students in which he explained how lines of different character might be made to converge. He drew a firm, slightly curved line that had little loops at the ends, then he drew a random squiggly line twisting back and forth across it. This, he said in a totally characteristic comment, was "rather like the path of a man with a dog running free.'
The orderly man and the anarchic dog might find their parallels in Klee himself, a blending of opposites. It is hard to believe that there are not two separate Klees looking out at us from his photographs. In some of them he is mystical and wild-eyed, vaguely Oriental --he did like to claim that he had Saracen blood--and this is the Klee who was so far-ranging, playful and unorthodox on canvas. In others he looks like a typically solid square headed bourgeois, Klee the good family man, the respectable, conventional citizen. "Shall I never lead any but an inner life?' he asked despondently in his diary; "As for outside, shall I always walk my way in discreet, average fashion?'
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| Death and Fire. |
Knowing that the end was near, Klee painted his own grimacing death mask without compassion. A silhouette moves forward from the background on the right, and in the foreground, dominating the work, a death's head on top of a skeleton comes out of the earth, brandishing a golden ring with which it tries to catch the attention of the silhouette, which is going to go across the fire of life. But this is merely an interpretation; whereas the shock of the image hits one immediately. Using well-tried plastic means, Klee managed to transpose the ultimate human challenge into artistic form. Death's face recalls the tormented features of a earlier pastel self-portrait of the same year subtitled Hold Fast.
The German word for death, Tod, makes up the features of the white face in the center of the picture, so powerfully, yet simply reminiscent of a human or an animal skull. "Tod" may be found again in the "T" shape of the figure's raised arm, the golden orb in its hand, and the D shape of its face. Perhaps a minimally described man walks toward Death, or perhaps towards the glowing sun held in Death's hand. The image juxtaposes the cold white with the warm reds and yellows, perhaps symbolic, like a kind of cave painting, of the creation of man and the image of his sad mortality. Inspired by Klee's interest in hieroglyphics, Death and Fire suggests that abstraction and representation have been mutually accommodating, or otherwise complementary means of expression, since time immemorial.
Klee died on June 29, 1940, Muralto, Switzerland. He had suffered from a wasting disease, scleroderma for some time.
The words on his tombstone, Klee's credo, placed there by his son Felix, say, "I cannot be grasped in the here and now, for my dwelling place is as much among the dead as the yet unborn. Slightly closer to the heart of creation than usual, but still not close enough." He was buried at Schosshaldenfriedhof, Bern, Switzerland.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4025051/