Félix Edouard Vallotton

 

Félix Edouard Vallotton (December 28, 1865 – December 29, 1925) was a Swiss painter and printmaker associated with Pierre Bonnard, Jean-Édouard Vuillard and their Paris-based Les Nabis art group. Les Nabis (Hebrew for The Prophets) were inspired by the decorative, Post-Impressionist, bold, flat style of Paul Gauguin and the simple clarity of Japanese woodblock prints. At some point Valloton was dubbed “the singular Félix Vallotton” by Thadée Natanson, co-founder of the avant-garde cultural journal La Revue blanche, for which the artist created stylish woodcuts and graphics, often satirising the fashion-conscious Parisienne and the city’s street life

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

The Feast of St John the Evangelist

 

27th December is the feast of St John the Evangelist who is here depicted in contemplative mood and seated beside his writing equipment. BL Harley 2820; the 'Cologne Gospels'; 11th century; Germany, W. (Cologne); f.191r

@BLMedieval

10th Century Germany . f115.v

Latin 257; Evangelia quattuor (Gospels of Francis II); 9th century (third quarter); Abbey of Saint-Amand-en-Pévèle; ff.147v-148r

December is the feast of St John the Evangelist who here gazes at the hand of God. His portrait is followed by a lovely initial 'I'(n) at the beginning of his gospel BL Add MS 11850; 'The Préaux Gospels'; 12th century; North West France (Préaux); ff.138v, 139r

@BLMedieval

27 December is the feast of St John the Evangelist who is here depicted with his symbol in the intial 'E'(cclesiam) at the beginning of the Collect of the Mass. BnF MS Latin 9428; Sacramentarium of Drogo; 9th century (between 826/837 CE & 855 CE); Metz; f.29r

@GallicaBnF

Traveling to Bethlehem

 

Mary and Joseph travel to Bethlehem, by camel because how not? From a Mir’at al-quds of Father Jerome Xavier, Uttar Pradesh, 1602.

Publius Sulpicius Quirinius, legate of Judaea and adminstrator of the census, registering Mary and Joseph. Byzantine mosaic, Chora Museum, Istanbull.

 

Year zero: very energetic innkeeper's wife turns away Joseph and Mary in 1558 painting by Jan Massys.

Fab world landscape that contains, if you look carefully, not just the Holy Family arriving in Bethlehem (OTD 2022 years ago!) but several other scenes from their tale. Painted in 1540 by Lucas Gassel.

Ox: trying to get into the picture. Ass: fed up. City gate: feral. Holy family enter Bethlehem, 2022 or so years ago.

From the King James Bible: In those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be registered. This was the first registration when Quirinius was governor of Syria. And all went to be registered, each to his own town. And Joseph also went up from Galilee, from the town of Nazareth, to Judea, to the city of David, which is called Bethlehem, because he was of the house and lineage of David, to be registered with Mary, his betrothed, who was with child. 

Wassail to the Winter Solstice

 As it's 21st December, here's Stonehenge being built with Merlin's aid. BL Egerton 3028; Wace, Roman de Brut, a verse epitome; England; 14th century; f.30r @BLMedieval

On a more contemporary note. Today is the winter solstice – the shortest day of the year in the northern hemisphere 

The word solstice comes from the Latin words sol, meaning sun, and sistere, meaning to stop.

For millennia, humanity has used this moment in the sun’s apparent motion as a means of seasonal timekeeping, according to Ed Krupp, director of the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles.  It gives people a signal about the cosmic order that surrounds them and seems to govern their lives, and also gives them an opportunity to anticipate what is coming next,” Dr. Krupp said (director of the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles.

May all beings everywhere plagued

with sufferings of body and mind

quickly be freed from their illnesses.

May those frightened cease to be afraid,

and may those bound be free.

May the powerless find power,

and may people think of befriending

one another.

May those who find themselves in trackless,

fearful wilderness--

the children, the aged, the unprotected--

be guarded by beneficent celestials,

and may they swiftly attain Buddhahood.

John Constable (1776–1837), drawing on paper of Stonehenge. Watercolour with graphite and black chalk, England, 1836.

The World of Stonehenge: https://www.britishmuseum.org/exhibitions/world-stonehenge

Paul Klee. Modern Visionary

 

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 was 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.

Klee’s resilient personality kept him going. In 1936 he was so ill, from what would later be diagnosed as scleroderma, a degenerative skin disease, that he made only 25 works of art. Three years later, he painted 1,253 oils and watercolors. All told, during a career spanning four decades, and ending at age 60 on June 29, 1940, the artist executed 9,000 works of art: almost 4,000 paintings and more than 5,000 works on paper.
             
The sheer numbers might be one reason his art has been so enduring. To explain who Paul Klee was, many different strands based on, say, subject matter or quirky imagery or formal invention can be isolated from the whole. You can see the Paul Klee you want to see: an artist who was whimsical, grave, stylish, evasive, audacious, diaristic, challenging. Barr got it right when he noted, “For a work by Klee is scarcely subject to methods of criticism which follow ordinary formulae. His pictures can not be judged as representations of the ordinary visual world. Usually, too, they can not be judged merely as formal compositions, though some of them are entirely acceptable to the esthetic purist.”
            
Perhaps Klee summed up his legacy best with the inscription on his tomb: “I can not be pinned down here and now/because I live as well with the dead/as with the unborn/Somewhat closer to the heart of creation than usual/and still not close enough.”

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

Hundertwasser

 Born Friedrich Stowasser on December 15, 1928 in Vienna, Austria, Friedensreich Hundertwasser was one of the best-known Austrian painters and architects of the 20th century.

Hundertwasser studied briefly at the Montessori school in Vienna, and in 1948 he studied 19th century watercolour landscape at the Fine Art Academy. He was influenced by the art of the Vienna Seccesion, the Austrian figurative painter Egon Schiele, and Gustav Klimt.

In 1949, Hundertwasser traveled to Italy and met the French artist René Brô, with whom he later painted murals in Paris. During this time his work became more abstract but still contained symbolic figurative elements. Hundertwasser had his first solo exhibition in 1952 at the Art Club in Vienna.

In 1953, Hundertwasser’s spiral motif began to appear in his work and was a reference to the creation of life. This motif became a constant element in his paintings, which included a combination of contrasting colors and vibrant pigments. In 1953, Hundertwasser developed his “transautomatism” theory which focused on the innate creativity of the viewer.

It wasn’t until the 1950s that Hundertwasser began focusing on architecture. This began with manifestos, essays and demonstrations. In his view, the welfare of human beings depended on the style of architecture in which their houses were built. He believed that “architecture would be the people’s third skin and that everybody must be enabled to design this skin as he likes, just as he may design his first (his natural skin) and his second skin (his clothes).”

In 1958, Hundertwasser released his treatise against rationalism in architecture titled “Verschimmelungmanifest”. In the 1960s he traveled to Europe and Asia and began producing architectural models for ecological structures. He also started refurbishing and decorating public and private buildings. He successfully took part in the Tokyo International Art Exhibition in 1960, and the following year he showed at the Venice Biennale.

Hundertwasser became interested in graphics during the 1970s and designed the poster for the 1971 Monaco Olympics. Hundertwasser also created flags, stamps, coins, and posters. His most famous flag is the Koru Flag. Along with designing postage stamps for the Austrian Post Office, he also created stamps for the Cape Verde islands, and for the United Nations postal administration in Geneva for the 35th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

In 1973, he published a portfolio of woodcuts by various Japanese artists who had used his paintings as inspiration. In 1972, he published a manifesto on “the right to a window space” and in 1978, the Manifesto of Peace. Both reflected the artist’s ideology about searching for harmony between man and nature.

In 1998, the Institue Mathildenhöhe of Darmstadt held a retrospective of Hundertwasser’s work. The following year he moved to New Zealand and continued to work on architectural projects. In 1999, Hundertwasser started his last project named Die Grüne Zitadelle von Magdeburg. He never finished this project although the building was constructed a few years later in Magdeburg, Germany, and opened on October 3, 2005.

Friedensreich Hundertwasser died of a heart attack while on board the Queen Elizabeth II on February 19, 2000.

François de Nomé’s Imaginary Ruins

A cathedral collapses. The fires of hell rage. Fantastic ruins stand in unrecognizable surroundings. Above it all, the sky swirls with ominous clouds.

These baroque paintings, with their theatrical chiaroscuro, saturated colors, and love of columns of every kind, were forerunners of the fantastic architecture depicted in Piranesi’s capricci — though for us they perhaps more immediately bring to mind the work of surrealists and futurists such as De Chirico, Dalí, and Ernst.

They are the work of François de Nomé. Born in Metz (present-day France) in 1593, Nomé moved to Rome while still a child and studied there with the Flemish artist Balthasar Lauwers. In 1610, he relocated to Naples, where — as far as anyone can tell — he would remain for the rest of his life.

https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/francois-de-nome-imaginary-ruins 

Zinaida Serebriakova. Ukranian-French painter.

Apples on branches, 1910, by Zinaida Serebriakova, who was born OTD in 1884. What a sense of pattern & color!.

Born this day in 1884, on Neskuchnoye estate in Russia, the marvelous painter Zinaida Serebriakova. Here by herself at mirror in 1909. She was born on the estate of Neskuchnoye near Kharkov (now Kharkiv, Ukraine) into one of the most refined and artistic families in the Russian Empire.

 

Eugene, the artist's son, looking pensive in 1909, with his miniature livestock & soldier

So sleep Binka -- her son Eugene and his friend, sleeping, in 1908.

In 1914–1917, Zinaida Serebriakova was in her prime. During these years she produced a series of pictures on the theme of Russian rural life, the work of the peasants and the Russian countryside which was so dear to her heart: 

The most important of these works was Bleaching Cloth (1917, Tretyakov Gallery), which revealed Zinaida Serebriakova's striking talent as a monumental artist. The figures of the peasant women, portrayed against the background of the sky, gain majesty and power by virtue of the low horizon.

At the outbreak of the October Revolution in 1917, Serebriakova was at her family estate of Neskuchnoye, and suddenly her whole life changed. In 1919 her husband Boris died of typhus contracted in Bolshevik jails. She was left without any income, responsible for her four children and her sick mother. All the reserves of Neskuchnoye had been plundered, so the family suffered from hunger. She had to give up oil painting in favour of the less expensive techniques of charcoal and pencil. This was the time of her most tragic painting, House of Cards, which depicts her four orphaned children.

She moved to St Petersburg where she was able to get work sketching items in the Kharkov Archaeology Museum. Her daughter, entered ballet school. So she survived - one of the few who did. 

In the autumn of 1924, Serebriakova went to Paris, having received a commission for a large decorative mural. On finishing this work, she intended to return to the Soviet Union, where her mother and the four children remained. However, she was not able to return, and although she was able to bring her younger children, Alexandre and Catherine, to Paris in 1926 and 1928 respectively, she could not do the same for her two older children, Evgenyi and Tatiana, and did not see them again for many years.

After this, Zinaida Serebriakova traveled a great deal. In 1928 and 1930 she traveled to Africa, visiting Morocco. 

In 1947, Serebriakova at last took French citizenship, and it was not until Khruschev's Thaw that the Soviet Government allowed her to resume contact with her family in the Soviet Union. In 1960, after 36 years of forced separation, her older daughter, Tatiana (Tata), was finally allowed to visit her. 

It was not until 1966 that any of her work was exhibited in the Soviet Union but to this day, most of her art remains in France. Zinaida Serebriakova died in Paris on 19 September 1967, at the age of 82. She is buried in Paris, at the Russian cemetery at Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois.

https://museumstudiesabroad.org/zinaida-serebriakova/

Maerten de Vos. Painter of lions, unicorns and nativity scenes.

 

Fierce leopard, painted by Maerten de Vos, who died on this day in 1603. With maybe a little idol-worship happening beyond his tail.

Delightfully cheerful baby & angels to brighten your day, in this Nativity

One of nicest pages in any Adoration scene accompanies Maerten de Vos's African king, although wearing American feather gear.People weren't too savvy about geographical fashions in 1599.

Dignified dromedary, 16th century style

Unicorn.

Exceptionally glorious (and enormous) Adoration of the Magi, 1599. Just so you can see how big it is. Figures are nearly life-sized!

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