Charles Schulz. Happy Birthday to the father of the Peanuts gang

 

Happy Birthday to the father of Charlie Brown. November 26, 1922. Charles Monroe Schulz (November 26, 1922 - February 12, 2000), nicknamed Sparky, was an American cartoonist best known for the comic strip Peanuts (which featured the characters Charlie Brown and Snoopy, among others). He is widely regarded as one of the most influential cartoonists of all time, cited as a major influence by many later cartoonists, including Jim Davis, Bill Watterson, and Matt Groening. In this image: Good Grief, Charlie Brown! Celebrating Snoopy and the Enduring Power of Peanuts © Somerset House.

“[Charlie Brown] reminded people, as no other cartoon character had, of what it was to be vulnerable, to be small and alone in the universe, to be human — both little and big at the same time.”

https://www.themarginalian.org/2015/01/20/charles-schulz-peanuts-biography-david-michaelis/?fbclid=IwAR1SRxWQFZvy65aPTsqIWED_Smj8Ql-HDc_O54TqckbRsPzNs3z_UVRyP-g

José Clemente Orozco , Mexican Social Realist and Muralist

 

On this day in 1883. José Clemente Orozco , Mexican Social Realist and Muralist

 Today's birthday guy is José Clemente Orozco (November 23, 1883 - September 7, 1949). A few years ago I saw a show of his drawings down in San Jose and was so impressed by his bold vision. As with so many artists of the last century, he deserves to be better known. He was a Mexican social realist painter, who specialized in bold murals that established the Mexican Mural Renaissance together with murals by Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and others.

Orozco was the most complex of the Mexican muralists, fond of the theme of human suffering, but less realistic and more fascinated by machines than Rivera. Mostly influenced by Symbolism, he was also a genre painter and lithographer. In this image, he looks over some of his drawings in his New York City apartment on Dec. 4, 1945.

Prometeo del Pomona College

Mural "Omnisciencia", 1925

Of "Los tres grandes" (The Three Greats) of the Mexican Muralists, José Clemente Orozco, notoriously introverted and pessimistic, is in many ways the least revered. One possible explanation for that is that, unlike his colleagues, David Siqueiros and Diego Rivera, Orozco openly criticized both the Mexican Revolution and the post-Revolution government. What was perceived as standoffishness was, by all accounts, the profound despair of a person who felt deeply for others. Orozco's style is a mixture of conventional, Renaissance-period compositions and modeling, emotionally expressive, modernist abstraction, typically dark, ominous palettes, and forms and iconography deriving from the country's indigenous, pre-colonial, pre-European art. Orozco's skill as a cartoonist and print maker is detectable not only in his style but also in his ability to communicate a complex message -- generally, timely political subjects -- simply and on a massive scale. The Mexican Muralist movement as a whole asserted the importance of large-scale public art and Orozco's murals, in particular, made space for bold, open social and political critique. 

http://www.theartstory.org/artist-orozco-jose-clemente.htm 

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

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/jose-clemente-orozco-career-timeline/83/

Corita Kent, the pop art nun and political activist

 

She shook up the church and the art world with her expressive, exuberant and boisterous work

On a summer’s day in 1962 a nun in her mid-40s went to see Andy Warhol’s breakthrough exhibition of soup can paintings; later, she recalled that “coming home you saw everything like Andy Warhol”. It was a seminal moment in the transformation of Sister Corita Kent from a convent school teacher into the artist who became known as the Pop Art nun.

Among the many original, mould-breaking, stand-alone characters the art world has produced, Kent more than holds her own. A fully habited nun, complete with veil and wimple, her monochrome outfit was a stark contrast to the vibrancy of her colour-charged silkscreens, which burst with the kind of joie de vivre, risk-taking and trenchant politicisation that seems to sit strangely with a woman who had made a vow of obedience. That was certainly what some of her church superiors felt; they denounced Kent’s work, forcing her to leave her religious order. But she didn’t leave art, didn't stop making art. 

According to Donna Steele, the curator of an exhibition of her work at Ditchling Museum of Art and Craft in Sussex, Kent’s work is “as important as that of Warhol” to the Pop Art movement. “It stands up there with the work of the Pop Art greats – people like Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Richard Hamilton and Peter Blake. It’s big and bold and it’s of the moment.” Kent used advertising slogans and song lyrics, as well as biblical verses and quotes from literature, to create vibrant silkscreens with trenchant political messages about racism, poverty and injustice. “What you get is this visual feast of twisted text and messages, and the more you look, the deeper you realise the messages go,” says Steele. “She picked up on everyday language and advertising slogans – this was the 1960s, and consumer culture was exploding; she used words like ‘tomato’, ‘burger’ and ‘goodness’ and she made them into messages about how we live, and about humanitarianism and how we care for others.”

 Born Frances Kent in November 1918, the fifth of six children, her strongly Catholic family moved from Iowa to Hollywood in 1923. At school there, her art work was praised for its originality; and at the age of 18 she entered the order of nuns whose school she had attended, the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. There, in their convent in Los Angeles, her artistic talent was picked up by one of the senior nuns, Sister Magdalene Mary, who encouraged Kent to train as an art teacher. She went on to work in the order’s college, a liberal arts institution well known for its avant-garde views, and became head of its art department in 1964. 

Los Angeles in the 60s was an exciting place at a momentous time: Kent’s work brought contact with figures such as filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock, composer John Cage, architect Buckminster Fuller, and designers Charles and Ray Eames, who became her close friends and champions. Her work became more prominent, and in the winter of 1967 she was featured on the cover of Newsweek – ‘The Nun: Going Modern’, read the strapline. The nun was indeed going modern; and for a while, it seemed the institution she was part of, the Catholic Church, was going modern, too. In 1962 – the same year Kent saw Warhol’s soup cans – Pope John XXIII was convening Vatican II, the great reforming council that many liberal Catholics, like Kent and her community, thought would bring the Latin-using, medieval-rooted church into the 20th century, making it relevant and liberal; Christian, as Kent would have seen it, for the 20th century. 

She was excited around Vatican II, and the hopes for lasting, liberal changes in the Catholic Church. But the Archbishop of Los Angeles, Cardinal James McIntyre, was a diehard traditionalist who disapproved strongly of the views of the nuns of Kent’s order, and particularly of the art of Kent herself. He took particular offence to a piece called the juiciest tomato of all (1964) in which Kent likes the Virgin Mary to a luscious tomato. The following year, McIntyre wrote to the head of the order to complain that “The Christmas cards designed by your art department and the sisters are an affront to me and a scandal to the archdiocese.” 

Kent tried to brush off the criticism, but coming from such a prominent figure in the church made it hard. In the summer of 1968 she took a sabbatical, spending the summer in Cape Cod; at the end of that time, she decided it wasn’t possible to go back to the convent. “It wasn’t only because of the tension of the backlash from the church,” says Dowling. “Corita had also been getting very little time for her own creative work. I think it all added up, and she realised she needed more time to herself, rather than running a busy art department.” Many other nuns, women who like Kent (and Dowling) were liberal Christians, also left the order around the same period; they established a much broader, more inclusive kind of religious community and Kent remained close to the new group until the end of her life, eventually leaving her work and royalties to them.

But from the age of 50 she lived alone, for the first time in her life, moving into an apartment in Boston. From now on her work becomes quieter, includes nature-inspired watercolours, and reflects her search for meaning from other religious traditions as well as pieces that reflect her experience of cancer, with which she was diagnosed in 1974 and again three years later. The yellow exuberance of live the moment light and out of the darkness (both 1977) speak movingly of her struggles in this period: “Out of the darkness/of one moment/grows the light/of another moment/perhaps in some distant time/if not in the next moment/love the darkness” are the words on the latter piece. 

 What then of her legacy? Some of the graphics were of their time: but the messages are still very relevant today. Kent knew the power of a few well-chosen words, and in the world of text-messaging and Twitter, a world she never knew, that has a particular resonance. Perhaps most significant of all, though, is her belief in activism. We live in a time when popular action seems complicated and confusing; and Kent’s simple, heartfelt message rings down the decades. Because for her, there is no doubt about it. Feelings, and owning feelings, really can change the world.

https://www.themarginalian.org/2021/11/01/make-meatballs-sing-corita-kent/?fbclid=IwAR2J4b791mVVnk0yfRQNx_0kbGDtYpt4Gukqkk78gnSSxg7DCMxBN6KMRqM

Agnolo Bronzino. Painter to the Medici & the elite of 16th century Florence.

Young man poised against a pink curtain. What's up with that, Agnolo? 

He did like to paint a certain kind of young man. Aristocrats probably.  Portrait of an intense young man with a statuette — Venus Or Susanna?

Poet Laura Battiferi of Urbino, Rome, and Florence, painted in 1560 holding a book of Petrarch's sonnets, by Agnolo Bronzino.

Agnolo Bronzino was the man to hire for a power portrait in mid-16th-century Florence. He could turn toddlers into potentates and make new-money Medicis look like decent people. His painting shaped late Mannerism, the profane, twisty, prosthetic style that erupted, like a repressed libido, between the humanist sanctities of the Renaissance and the smells and bells of the Counter-Reformation. (Holland Cotter.) 

but even he couldn't make fat faced Medici babies attractive. 

Exquisite lady in red and her son

Bronzino — a nickname — was born Agnolo di Cosimo di Mariano Tori in 1503, the son of a Florentine butcher. After initial training with so-so artists, he had the luck to be taken on by Pontormo, who was only nine years his senior and on the cutting edge of new Florentine art. Temperamentally they were opposites, Pontormo a misanthrope, Bronzino a people person. Yet they developed a close bond, and collaborated on and off for decades.

Portrait of a lady with her lapdog, in 1537

Eleanora of Toledo, wife of Cosimo d'Medici 1, in a glorious dress, w/ her son Giovanni de’ Medici, in 1544

What Eleanora looked like after having 11 children,.
She died with her sons Giovanni and Garzia in 1562, when she was only forty; all three of them were struck down by malaria while traveling to Pisa.

Bronzino’s “Portrait of a Young Man,” owned by the  Met. Done in the 1530s, it is a portrait of an unknown but superbly supercilious member of Florence’s elite, someone who wears his basic black with arrogant, aristocratic flare. 

Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time: the painting that defines all that is weird and wonderful about Italian mannerism. Painted in the 1540s by Agnolo Bronzino

He was a favorite student and assistant of Jacopo Pontormo, was influenced by Michelangelo. In 1530 he received an order in Pesaro, but two years later he returned to Florence. In the art of Bronzino, mannerism reaches its highest peak. The paintings are filled with figures that form in their outlines a beautiful, complex drawing; they are located in friezes parallel to the picture plane; while the master does not seek to transfer the real three-dimensional space. The verticals and diagonals are underlined, the figures are artificially elongated, their modeling is rigid, sculptural. These features are clearly visible in the paintings of the Piet (1565) and The Descent into Hell (both in the Uffizi Gallery).

In Palazzo Vecchio, Bronzino designed the chapel of Eleonora of Toledo with scenes of the Creation of the World and the faces of saints.

In the years 1540-1555 Bronzino drew sketches for tapestry workshops in Florence, among them - 16 scenes from the history of the Old Testament Joseph, on which he worked together with Francesco Salviati. The tapestries Giovanni Rost and Nicholas Carher created their works for the motives of his sketches.

At the same time, Bronzino wrote altarpieces for the Florentine churches and allegorical canvases for the duke, the most famous of which is the “Allegory of Love."

Claude Monet. Born this day in 1840

 

Claude Monet, to many art lovers, calendar connoisseurs and collectors of museum postcards, is Impression itself. For them, it's all about light in his paintings -- morning light and moonlight, blazing summer sunshine and a pallid winter glow, light reflected in water and refracted into a prismatic dazzle of color. The subjects that he painted again and again -- haystacks, water lilies, a cathedral facade -- are often seen as scaffolding for his real preoccupation: light, in all its infinite manifestations and glory.  Stephen Winn, SF Chronicle, 2006

Claude Monet was a key figure in the Impressionist movement that transformed French painting in the second half of the nineteenth century. Throughout his long career, Monet consistently depicted the landscape and leisure activities of Paris and its environs as well as the Normandy coast. He led the way to twentieth-century modernism by developing a unique style that strove to capture on canvas the very act of perceiving nature.

When he was 5, Monet's father moved the family from Paris to Le Havre. Monet's early artistic efforts there were charcoal caricatures. He met the legendary regional painter Eugène Boudin when he was 18 and learned to paint landscapes in oil from him. Following a productive stint in Argenteuil, near Paris, in the 1870s, Monet returned to Normandy and began his serial paintings (of haystacks and other subjects) in the 1880s and '90s. He spent the last 40 years of life in Giverny, the site of his oft-painted garden.

 

Broadly viewed, Impressionism was a celebration of the pleasures of middle-class life; indeed, Monet’s subject matter from this period often involved domestic scenes featuring his wife, son, and garden. Yet, painting la vie moderne(“modern life”) was not to be the primary aim of Monet’s art. Of more significance in his case was his ceaseless search for painterly means to implement his radical view of nature. More so than his ambitious figure paintings, such works as On the Bank of the Seine, Bennecourt (1868) or The Beach at Sainte-Adresse (1867) give a clear accounting of Monet’s advance toward the Impressionist style. In the beach and sea pictures of 1865–67 Monet was plainly not trying to reproduce faithfully the scene before him as examined in detail but rather attempting to record on the spot the impression that relaxed, momentary vision might receive—what is seen rather than what is known, with all its vitality and movement. Boats, buildings, incidental figures, and the pebble beach are swiftly brushed in as 

flat colour patterns, with little attention paid to their weight or solidity.

Lee Bontecou

 “I just got tired of sculpture as a big thing in the middle of a room,” the artist once said, adding that she “wanted it to go into space.”

Her use of what one critic called “a three-dimensional form that was neither painting nor sculpture” earned the kind of praise typically reserved in the 1960s for male art stars.

Lee Bontecou — an artist who sculpted paintings, welded drawings, and responded to interview questions with the affect of a Beat poet — died in her home in Florida at the age of 91 on Tuesday, November 8. 

Bontecou achieved acclaim for her work in the early 1960s, joining an exclusively male cohort of Abstract Expressionist and Pop Art painters including Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Andy Warhol who were also being exhibited at Leo Castelli Gallery. Her career took off not long after she presented her work in a solo show at the gallery, with her art included in numerous shows at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), and a commission at Lincoln Center in the subsequent years.

She produced her best-known works during this time, assemblages of found industrial materials like canvas conveyor belts, welded steel, copper wire, saw blades, and rope. Many of them centered a cavernous opening set against black velvet, a sinister motif that some described as vaginal but which she herself saw as a reference to the universe beyond planet Earth. The wall-mounted constructions defied gendered expectations of what a woman artist of the time should make.

“Art is art and it doesn’t mean whether it’s woman or man. It doesn’t matter,” Bontecou said in an interview in the Chicago Reader in 2004.

At a time in history when notions of space and time were being exploded by forays into outer space and the introduction of the atomic bomb, Bontecou’s artistic investigations reflected ennui with earthly restriction. “I just got tired of sculpture as a big thing in the middle of a room,” the artist said, adding that she “wanted it to go into space.”

As a young artist, Bontecou--the only woman showing alongside Johns, Rauschenberg and Warhol at Leo Castelli Gallery in the '60s--received a great deal of critical attention for her formidable canvas reliefs made from sections of discarded laundry conveyor belts and army surplus goods stretched onto welded frames. Crisply angled in built-out forms resembling 3-D topographical maps, these works seem to give shape to postwar anxieties. 

With their cubistic, angular planes, the reliefs climax in craterlike cavities, sometimes lined with black velvet that completely absorbs light. They have evoked a variety of political and psychosexual interpretations, serving as images that extend, as Donald Judd put it in a 1965 review, "from something as social as war to something as private as sex, making one an aspect of the other.” 

The same prominence that made her a star in downtown New York’s mid-century art scene frustrated Bontecou, who soon began to feel the constriction of her fame. When she produced different work later that decade — a series of plastic fish and flowers with heads like gas masks and stems like life-support tubes — she was urged to continue to pump out works like her earlier ones at a steady pace, a suggestion she chafed against. In the 1970s, she relocated her practice to a barn in rural Pennsylvania, where she spent decades fashioning wire-and-ceramic sculptures that hung in space. She moved with her husband and daughter to Long Island and began teaching at Brooklyn College at the City University of New York, which she continued to do for almost twenty years, a job she said she took “as a way of having no galleries.”

Bontecou became notoriously hard to track down. Few knew her address and she rarely responded to curators or press.  Many speculated about what she was doing. but few knew.  Finally, independent of the artist, in 1993 Smith put together a small show of pre-1971 work at L.A.'s Museum of Contemporary Art [see A.i.A., Sept. '93] and succeeded in gaining Bontecou's trust. Elizabeth Smith gained her confidence and six years later, was invited to the farm studio and proposed a full retrospective.

That show provided a sampling of Bontecou’s uncategorizable, heterogeneous, life-spanning work. “My most persistently recurring thought is to work in a scope as far-reaching as possible, to express a feeling of freedom in all its necessary ramifications — its awe, beauty, magnitude, horror, and baseness,” Bontecou said in 1993. “This feeling embraces ancient, present, and future worlds: from caves to jet engines, landscapes to outer space, from visible nature to the inner eye.”

In another interview, she stated. "I never left the art world. I AM the art world." 

1.) Donald Judd, "Lee Bontecou," reprinted in Lee Bontecou: A Retrospective,

New York, Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 2003, p. 199.

(2.) Elizabeth A.T. Smith, "Abstract Sinister," Art in America, September

1993, p. 87.

(3.) For another take on Bontecou's life in Pennsylvania and her reemergence,

see Calvin Tomkins, "Missing in Action," The New Yorker, Aug. 4, 2003, pp,

36-43. In 2001, Bontecou exhibited new drawings at Daniel Weinberg Gallery,

Los Angeles [see A.i.A., July '02].

(4.) Mona Hadler, "Lee Bontecou--Heart of a Conquering Darkness," Source:

Notes in the History of Art, vol. 12, no. 1, fall 1992, p. 42.

(5.) Donald Judd, "Specific Objects," 1965, reprinted in Donald Judd: Complete

Writings 1959-1975, p. 18/89.

(6.) Judd, "Lee Bontecou," p. 198.

From Hyperallergic and https://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/13/arts/design/13bontecou.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/08/arts/lee-bontecou-dead.html?searchResultPosition=1

US Charts: What will today's election bring? It will be a wild and crazy ride

 

The 2022 Midterm Elections: Expect the Unexpected

The eclipses are here!  The eclipses are here!!

The day features multiple activations of Uranus, the planet of the shocking and unexpected, disruption, turmoil, revolution and change, including a conjunction by the Moon and oppositions from the Sun and Mercury.  As well, it’s the day of the Sun/Mercury conjunction, and the Sun/Moon opposition, which just happens to be a total Lunar Eclipse!

A potent total Lunar eclipse takes place bright and early election morning, November 8.  It has an enormous t-square that will fire all week long as Venus, Sun and Mercury first oppose Uranus and the Moon in Taurus and square Saturn in Aquarius.  The eclipse on the South Node of Fate lets loose and releases a number of energies as the other planets dance and sing wild songs in the heavens. The t-square started last week with Venus, gets amplified with the eclipse energy and revolts and objects to the world's energy all week long. 

Mars, Pallas Athena and Lillith are out of bounds making it a wild and crazy ride. 

Sun, Venus and Mercury sitting on the South Node of Fate release, release, release. Eclipses bring encounters with fate. Fated events happen this week.   . 

Saturn is direct and moving forward, away from Uranus. The moment for changing your habits has arrived. For the past year and nine months, Uranus and Saturn's square has been urging you to change your life. Time to go for the dream. 

We can go through it or we can grow through it.  Choose growth!    From Anne Orteelee