When the levee breaks

 "When the Levee Breaks" is a country blues song written and first recorded by Memphis Minnie and  Kansas Joe McCoy in 1929. The lyrics reflect experiences during the upheaval caused by the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927. Not only was this flood the most destructive flood in the history of the United States, it also created an African-American  mass migration north. Original version by Memphis Minnie and Kansas Joe McCoy  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WSlt8-fmvas

Memphis Minnie (June 3, 1897 -- August 6, 1973) was an American blues guitarist, vocalist, and songwriter. She was the only female blues artist considered a match to male contemporaries as both a singer and an instrumentalist. She was active from the 1920s to the 1950s

The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 was the most destructive river flood in the history of the United States, with 27,000 square miles (70,000 km²) inundated in depths of up to 30 feet (9 m) over the course of several months in early 1927. The uninflated cost of the damage has been estimated to be between 246 million and 1 billion dollars.

From uTube:  Slide show made from images of the time

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=swhEa8vuP6U

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Mississippi_Flood_of_1927

George De La Tour

 March 19, 1593. Georges de La Tour (March 19, 1593 - January 30, 1652) was a French Baroque painter, who spent most of his working life in the Duchy of Lorraine, which was temporarily absorbed into France between 1641 and 1648. He painted mostly religious chiaroscuro scenes lit by candlelight. While artists’ reputations can sometimes decline after their deaths, rare is the case of someone falling into total obscurity. Yet such was the fate of Georges de La Tour (1593-1652), who found fame and fortune in life, but who upon his death was quickly forgotten. So total was the oblivion that surviving works were often attributed to other artists, including one in the Prado, originally thought to have been painted by Francisco de Zurbarán. La Tour was not rediscovered until 1915, when a German academic with a penchant for working in the byways of art history published an article on the artist, laying the foundation for future scholarship.

Changing taste, such as that of the Rocco for froth and frills, made his more somber and thoughtful works unfashionable. He was never taken up by the court, didn't live in Paris and was, according to some things I've read, a bit of a curmudgeon. De La Tour had to wait until 1972 for some scholarly sleuths to turn up a handful of paintings for a first little show in Paris.

Not much is known of his life except that he worked in the Lorraine region of France, and somehow picked up the influence of Caravaggio. He first painted daylight scenes of mainly lowlife characters, but then, came a sea change and his paintings take on an emotional, interior spiritual tone. His only brush with the court came when Louis XIII bought a painting of his of St. Sebastian. 

The Fortune Teller (at the Met) 

While an old gypsy crone tells his fortune, a naive youth is robbed by her accomplices, a subject popular among Caravaggesque painters throughout Europe in the seventeenth century. La Tour’s painting can be interpreted as a genre or theatrical scene, or as an allusion to the parable of the prodigal son. The inscription on the painting includes the name of the town where La Tour lived, Lunéville in Lorraine.

One of his early masterpieces—“The Fortune Teller”—deals with cheating and a con directed at a naive, easily cheated character. The painting is brightly colored, the figures move with stylized gestures and there is a web of conspiratorial  glances between the main characters.

The Cheat with the Ace of Diamonds

Magdalene with the Smoking Flame, Louvre

In the 1640's, his work becomes darker, deeper, richer. He loses interest in the criminal underworld and he became a religious painter. Mary Magdalene, the Holy Family, apostles and others are portrayed against  a black/brown background, lit by a single candle. The palate is somber but not depressing and the mood is one of quiet contemplation, light by a solitary fire.

Joseph the Carpenter The Louvre

The Choirboy

It is possible that the horrors of the Thirty Year's War prompted de La Tour to seek a more spiritual meaning in his life, away from the death and destruction. But we don't know for sure. We will never know unless some relevant document emerges from an obscure hiding place.

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

http://www.artcyclopedia.com/artists/la_tour_georges_de.html

International Women's Day

 "I am in the world to change the world" Käthe Kollwitz (1867-1945)

May Edward Chinn became the first African American woman to graduate from Bellevue Hospital Medical College in 1926. Born in Barrington, Massachusetts in 1896, Chinn moved to New York at a young age. She originally majored in music at Columbia University Teacher’s College until a professor encouraged her to major in science instead. After graduating Bellevue Hospital Medical College, Chinn became the first African American woman to intern at Harlem Hospital and the first woman to ride with the Harlem Hospital ambulance crew on emergency calls. In 1928, Chinn opened a private practice at the Edgecombe Sanitarium. Chinn went on to practice medicine in Harlem for 50 years. During this time, Chinn treated many patients with late-stage cancer. Chinn wanted to learn more about cancer, so she could detect it early on in her patients. However, in the 1930s and 1940s, African American physicians were barred from having any association with the city’s hospitals. Despite this, Chinn would accompany her patients to their clinic appointments and observe the procedures performed to detect and treat cancer. Her story belongs in @womenshistory museum along with so many others. (Photo Credit: George B. Davis, Ph.D.)

Today is International Women’s Day, celebrating women and the achievements they’ve made economically, politically, socially, and beyond around the globe. In 1909, America observed National Women’s Day for the first time. It was a tribute to the 1908 strike where 15,000 women, demanding better working conditions and equality, marched through New York City. This year’s theme is ‘Make it happen.’ (Photo by Charlotte Fairchild)

A fabulous lid from a Late Bronze Age ivory pyxis, discovered in Tomb III at Minet el Beida: ca. 1500-1200 BC. A representation of a female divinity as 'Mistress of Animals

https://www.internationalwomensday.com/

Tintoretto, Renaissance Master

 

Jacopo Tintoretto (c. 1519–94) had a bumpy start. Carlo Ridolfi, his 17th-century biographer, describes how the boy was apprenticed to Titian for mere days before the older artist expelled him from his studio in a fit of jealousy. Undaunted, Tintoretto taught himself by copying the finest artists of the day. To maintain focus, the youth inscribed on a wall: ‘Il disegno di Michelangelo e il colorito di Tiziano’ (the draughtsmanship of Michelangelo and the paint handling of Titian). 

Although some scholars assume this account is apocryphal, the visual evidence of a fusion of Michelangelo and Titian seems persuasive in paintings from Tintoretto’s breakthrough moment, particularly The Miracle of the Slave (1548). Here the formula is embodied by muscular figures confidently drawn and an abundance of varied brushwork exploring the possibilities of oil. Tintoretto’s monumental Miracle was a watershed in Venetian art, sweeping away the measured narrative paintings of earlier generations. From that year on, any account of Venetian painting would need to accommodate Tintoretto’s outsized presence.

Not everyone was always so pleased with Tintoretto. In his own period the innovations of Tintoretto's style were considered by many to be an outrageous break with decorum. According to the norms of Renaissance art criticism, sketchiness and brevity only had a place during the initial design phase of creation. Completed works of art should show the artist's diligence and thoroughness in their execution and finish. Thus Vasari, although impressed by Tintoretto's manifest brilliance, was alarmed and offended by his paintings. Vasari wrote that they were executed by him in a fashion of his own and contrary to the use of other painters.... This master at times has left as finished works sketches still so rough that the brush-strokes may be seen, done more by chance and vehemence than with judgment and design.

In his book The Lament of Painting, written in 1605, eleven years after Tintoretto died in 1594, Federico Zuccaro, the Central Italian artist, even blamed Tintoretto and his followers for the downfall of painting.

When Zuccaro made these remarks, the Baroque, a new period in the history of art, was already dawning. Two of the main instigators of the Baroque, Annibale Carracci and Peter Paul Rubens, looked to Tintoretto as one of their models, and later, Bernini, Vel_zquez, and others joined in the chorus of admirers. Through them the legacy of Tintoretto became an integral part of the Baroque and of the European tradition.  All these artists were attracted to the extraordinary brushwork, the technical mastery, the colossal scale, the visionary sweep, and the forceful detail of Tintoretto's painting. Above all, they were inspired by a fundamental principle they found in Tintoretto's works, the idea that art should be a form of energy made visible.