Renoir

 

Pierre-Auguste Renoir; 25 February 1841 – 3 December 1919) was a French artist who was a leading painter in the development of the Impressionist style. As a celebrator of beauty and especially feminine sensuality, it has been said that "Renoir is the final representative of a tradition which runs directly from Rubens to Watteau."

Renoir once said, ‘it is the eye of the sensualist that I wish to open.’ The tactile intelligence of Renoir’s brush makes no hierarchical distinction between the delicate skin on a woman’s neck, the curling smoke from a man’s pipe, or the itchy coarseness of a tweed cap. Each stroke matters, but there are instances when the interplay between the strokes threatens to blur the distinction between people, places, and things. Renoir stated that he wanted to ‘try to create much out of little’ and in paintings like Portrait of Madame Claude Monet (c. 1872–74) and The Rowers’ Lunch (1875), the boundaries shimmer and disintegrate, only to reappear immediately thereafter. In works like these Renoir seems to be asking how little definition he can get away with before the subject dissolves altogether – as if entering into a pact with the viewer in which we are left to do the visual and emotional work of completing the composition.

When he was about 47, Pierre-Auguste Renoir began to suffer from terrible pain in his eyes and teeth. He knew something was wrong, possibly permanently wrong. ‘What’s going to happen after this? I really can’t travel in the state I’m in… Tomorrow, I hope my eye will open up and I can finish my paintings,’ he wrote to his friend and dealer Paul Durand-Ruel, in December 1888. It was the onset of severe rheumatoid arthritis that would curtail the ways he could use his hands and body almost immediately.

Renoir lived to be 78 years old, and he went on painting nearly every day that he was not confined to bed. In her book, Barbara Ehrlich White details the ingenious techniques that allowed him to do so. Renoir had his model or his children put the brush into his hand and take it out when he was done; sometimes he painted with both hands together cramped around the brush. White dispels the rumour that the paintbrush was tied to his hands. There was no need, his hands were so contracted, but ‘to avoid ripping the fragile skin of his palms with the wooden handle of his paintbrush, a little piece of cloth was inserted in his palm held in place with linen strips tied round and knotted at his wrists.

Renoir’s career could be characterized as a roller-coaster of success and rejection, and of connection with and distance from the Impressionist group. But to this day, his art continues to pose the question he once voiced himself: “Why shouldn’t art be pretty? There are enough unpleasant things in this world.”

Renoir: An Intimate Biography by Barbara Ehrlich White 

https://www.theartstory.org/artist/renoir-pierre-auguste/

Rembrandt Peale

 

Born on this day in 1778, Rembrandt Peale. One of 4 artistically-named artist-sons of Charles Wilson Peale. Painter of portraits, including here his own in 1828.

In 1822, Peale moved to New York City, where he embarked on an attempt to paint what he hoped would become the "standard likeness" of Washington. He studied portraits by other artists including John Trumbull, Gilbert Stuart and his own father, as well as his own 1795 picture which had never truly satisfied him. His resulting work Patriae Pater, completed in 1824, depicts Washington through an oval window, and is considered by many to be second only to Gilbert Stuart's iconic Athenaeum painting of the first president. Peale subsequently attempted to capitalize on the success of what quickly became known as his "Porthole" picture. Patriae Pater (Latin for "Father of Our Country") was purchased by Congress in 1832 for $2,000. It currently hangs in the Old Senate Chamber.

In 1826, he helped found the National Academy of Design in New York City.

Peale went on to create over 70 detailed replicas, including one of Washington in full military uniform that currently hangs in the Oval Office. Peale continued to paint other noted portraits, such as those of the third president Thomas Jefferson while he was in office (1805), and later on a portrait of Chief Justice John Marshall.

His brother, Rubens Peale, with a geranium.

George Washington, circa 1856. Oil on canvas, 36-1/2 x 29 in. 

Rembrandt Peale was born in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, in 1778 and grew up in Philadelphia. Like his brothers and sisters, he was taught to paint by his father, Charles Willson Peale. In 1795 when Rembrandt was only seventeen years old, he painted a life portrait of George Washington, the first of many portraits he would do of the first president. Indeed he supported himself later in his career by making copies of his Washington portraits. He completed at least seventy-nine replicas of his portrait Patriae Pater, which in 1832—the centennial of Washington's birth—was purchased for the United States Capitol.

Several trips to Europe widened Peale's artistic horizons, and in Paris he was introduced to the encaustic technique, an ancient method of painting that used wax as a medium. While in Paris, he studied the works of the old masters in the Louvre and the Luxembourg Gallery, which inspired him to take up history painting despite the difficulties of finding a receptive audience in America for this type of picture. In 1812 he established the Peale Museum in Baltimore in an effort to provide public education in the arts. Owing to heavy debts, in 1822 Peale turned over management of the museum to his brother Rubens and moved to New York City, where he hoped to find more opportunies for exhibiting his work and obtaining portrait commissions.

By 1826, however, he decided to relocate to Boston, where his work was influenced by Washington Allston, the city's most prominent artist. A few years later he visited Italy, where he made copies of paintings by Renaissance and Baroque masters. Inspired by their work, Peale hoped to establish a Gallery of Italian Paintings in America to educate his countrymen, but found little interest in this endeavor. In 1831 he settled in Philadelphia, where he died in 1860.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rembrandt_Peale#cite_note-2

https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/11739

 

Jimmy Carter and the end of democratic capitalism

The myth and reality of our 39th president…Robert Reich 

Friends,

I’m honoring Presidents’ Day by sharing with you some thoughts about Jimmy Carter, who is now in hospice care. 

Carter’s administration marked the end of 45 years of democratic capitalism, whose goal had been to harness the private sector for the common good. 

It’s important to understand what happened and why. 

For years, the rap on President Carter has been that his presidency failed yet his post-presidency was the best in modern history. 

This is way too simplistic. 

Carter’s life after his presidency was exemplary for the same reason he was elected president after the disasters of Richard Nixon and Nixon’s vice president, Gerald Ford (who unconditionally pardoned Nixon for any crimes he may have committed): Carter’s modesty, decency, and humanity. 

Not only were these traits the opposite of Nixon’s, but they would shine even brighter 40 years later in contrast to the loathsome Donald Trump. 

One-term presidents are always presumed failures because voters didn’t reelect them. But Carter lost his reelection bid (as would George H.W. Bush 12 years later) not because his presidency failed but because the Federal Reserve Board hiked interest rates so high as to bring on a recession. Recessions do not just choke off inflation; they also choke off presidencies. 

During Carter’s term of office, the OPEC oil cartel raised oil prices from $13 a barrel to over $34, resulting in double-digit price increases across the economy. Paul Volcker, Carter’s appointee as Fed chair, was determined to “break the back of inflation” by hiking interest rates to nearly 20 percent by 1981, bringing on a deep recession and causing millions of people to lose their jobs — including Carter. 

It was not Carter’s fault that democratic capitalism ended with him. To the contrary, he appointed many consumer, labor, and environmental advocates to his administration. 

Full disclosure: I was a Carter appointee, but met him only twice, once at a Rose Garden ceremony and years later at a dinner party at the home of Sen. Dianne Feinstein. (He was uncharacteristically late for dinner but made a surprise entry, coming down the stairs from a bedroom where he had taken a nap. He apologized profusely, making two un-Trump-like concessions in a single sentence: “I’m getting old and need my nap,” he said with a self-effacing grin, “but I should have told someone I was heading upstairs.”) 

Many of his initiatives — ending funding for the B-1 bomber, seeking a comprehensive consumer-protection bill, proposing broad-based tax reform, opposing traditional “pork barrel” spending, establishing a “superfund” to clean up toxic waste sites, and deregulating the airline, trucking, and railroad industries (resulting in lower transportation costs for industry and consumers) — were commendable. 

But much of what he did seemed to justify Lewis Powell’s warning to corporate America in a 1971 memo to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce that corporations must bulk up their lobbying muscle in Washington or suffer political defeat. 

The untold story of the Carter years is the vast increase in corporate political firepower during this time. Trade associations, law firms, lobbying firms, political operatives, and public-relations specialists swarmed Washington, offering executives so much money that most retiring members of Congress also became lobbyists. 

The city went from being a sleepy if not seedy backwater to the hub of America’s political wealth — replete with tony restaurants, upscale hotels, expensive bistros, and 25-bedroom mansions (one of them now owned by Jeff Bezos), and bordered by two of the richest counties in the nation. 

With the defeat of Carter’s consumer protection legislation in 1978 at the hands of corporate lobbyists, Richard Lesher, then president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, presciently boasted that: “30 to 40 years from now people will look back and say ‘These were the years when the transition took place.’ … We're waking up. And big business is going to be in the forefront of this drive.”

Perhaps Carter could have staved this off had he been more politically cunning, but I doubt it. After 45 years playing defense, corporate America was eager to grab back the reins of power. Despite his best efforts, Carter paved the way for Ronald Reagan — and America’s return to the corporate capitalism that had dominated the nation before the Great Depression and Franklin D. Roosevelt.

https://robertreich.substack.com/p/jimmy-carters-democratic-capitalism?fbclid=IwAR1SUGgtLAPAPW6feK9Ow--YI2icSXb5OEFyoiYK8TODSkp9Hw2qB6ez66g

Earthquake in Turkey and Syria

 

Aula Al Ayoubi, contemporary Syrian artist.

Donate to World Central Kitchen:  https://donate.wck.org/give/465127#!/donation/checkout?c_src=turkiye-earthquake-1

Amalia Mesa-Bains at the Berkeley Art Museum.

 Amalia Mesa-Bains’s groundbreaking practice as a founding mother of Chicanx art has revolutionized installation art for more than  six decades, particularly through her elevation of the home altar to the realm of fine art, all the while creating important scholarship for Chicanx artists at a time when most mainstream institutions ignored or outright disdained them. Her first career retrospective, titled “Archaeology of Memory,” presents 10 large-scale installations, as well as related prints and books, including her important “Venus Envy” series created over decades and displayed here in its entirety for the first time.

Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, CA, Feb. 4–July 23, 2023

https://www.berkeleyside.org/2023/01/31/bampfa-presents-five-decades-work-chicana-artist-amalia-mesa-bains

https://www.kqed.org/arts/13924934/amalia-mesa-bains-archaeology-of-memory-bampfa-review

Happy Birthday Gertrude.

 Today marks the 149th anniversary of the the birth of Gertrude Stein (1874–1946), modernist writer and art collector — and one of the most celebrated lesbians of the 20th century. Born in Pennsylvania, Stein spent most of her childhood in Oakland, attending Franklin Elementary School and Oakland High School. Her family home and the buildings where she attended school are long demolished. Stein moved to Paris in 1903 at age 29, not returning to the Bay Area until April–May 1935 for a triumphal lecture tour. 

Many Bay Area sites associated with Stein's 1935 visit exist to this day, including the Mark Hopkins Hotel (InterContinental Mark Hopkins), where Stein and her partner, Alice B. Toklas, stayed for eight days; the Bohemian Club, where the couple attended a dinner of the P.E.N. Club as the guest of California novelist Gertrude Atherton; International House at U.C. Berkeley, where Stein lectured on English literature; and Roble Gymnasium at Stanford University, where Stein gave her last-ever public talk in the U.S.

Picasso's portrait of Gertrude Stein. Since it's her birthday, it seemed appropriate. Picasso's portrait of the expatriate writer was begun in 1905, at the end of his Harlequin Period and before he took up Cubism. Stein is shown seated in a large armchair, wearing her favorite brown velvet coat and skirt. Her impressive demeanor and massive body are aptly suggested by the monumental depiction.