Georges Rouault

 

Georges Roualt (5/27/1876 - 2/13/58). Though he joins the ranks of the major artists linked to the heroic avant-garde years in Paris, Rouault cut something of a solitary figure amongst his peers. He nevertheless formed early career associations and friendships with Henri Matisse, Albert Marquet, Henri Manquin and Charles Camoin and this brought him into the fold of the Fauvists with whom he exhibited at their famous 1905 exhibition at the Salon d'Automne. However, his work carried strong elements of Expressionism, which had never found much favor outside of Scandinavia and Germany. By the beginning of the First World War Rouault was turning more and more away from watercolor and oil on paper towards oil and canvas and he applied his paint through thick, rich, layers which helped amplify his raw and bold forms. His colors, awash with deep blues, contained within heavy black lines, produced art that was reminiscent of stained glass windows and supported subject matter that became more overtly religious with a strong recurring theme of the power of redemption. The majority of his career was devoted to the human figure - specifically clowns, prostitutes and Christ - but during the last decade of his life his palette allowed for pastel shades of green and yellow to impinge on canvases that placed his figures in charming mystical landscapes.

• As was the norm amongst modernists who wanted to represent the lives of "ordinary" workers, Rouault's prostitute paintings treated his sitters with a genuine, non-judgemental, empathy. Rouault represented his workers with an honest, unadorned, realism that allowed for (or, in his view, insisted upon) an emphasis on naked sensuality. He was thus able to eclipse the aims of his peers by the way he drew attention to the contradictions at play between his models' Rubenesque seductiveness and their societal exploitation.

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• In an age of science and reason; and age in which faith was considered the philosophical property of only innocent minds, Rouault treated the figure of Jesus, not with irony, nor even distain, but rather as the true saviour of all mankind. His masterpiece is considered to be a book of 58 collated illustrations. Revealing the strong influence of German Expressionist woodcuts, Miserere (1922-1927) lays bare the stark spectacle of everyday human suffering with the figure of Christ presented in these pages as the redeemer of all the wretched souls.
• https://www.theartstory.org/artist/rouault-georges/

Dorothea Lange

 

Best known for her iconic photograph Migrant Mother, photographer Dorothea Lange (1895-1965) had a career that spanned more than four decades. In 1919 at the age of 23 she daringly opened a portrait studio in San Francisco. Meeting her husband, the painter Maynard Dixon, who was 20 years her senior, exposed her to the bohemian art world and the wild southwest, where she photographed Hopi country.

Migrant Mother 

Dorothea Lange at work,

Bread line 1933

After living in Taos with Maynard, their two sons and a step-daughter Constance, they returned to San Francisco at the height of the Depression. Stresses on their marriage and livelihood led to their divorce. With the advent of the Great Depression, Lange felt compelled to take her camera out on the streets of San Francisco. The resulting photographs led to work with the Farm Security Administration as a documentary photographer.

In 1935, Lange married Paul S. Taylor, an economics professor at the University of California with whom she worked with in the field. Taylor and Lange lived, loved and worked together in intense collaboration until her death in 1965.

During World War II, Lange photographed the horrible dislocation and internment of the Japanese Americans. An early environmentalist, she photographed in the ’50’s what she called “The New California” – the massive changes and pressures on the golden state.

Lange's health declined in the last decade of her life.^[4] Among other ailments she suffered from was what later was identified as post-polio syndrome.^[7] She died of esophageal cancer on October 11, 1965, in San Francisco, at age seventy.^[13][34] She was survived by her second husband, Paul Taylor, two children, three stepchildren,^[35] and numerous grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

Three months after her death, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City mounted a retrospective of her work that Lange had helped to curate.^[36] It was MoMA's first retrospective solo exhibition of the works of a female photographer.^[37] In February 2020, MoMA exhibited her work again, with the title "Dorothea Lange: Words and Pictures,"^[38] prompting critic Jackson Arn to write that "the first thing" this exhibition "needs to do—and does quite well—is free her from the history textbooks where she’s long been jailed."^[8] Contrasting her work with that of other twentieth century photographers such as Eugène Atget and André Kertész whose images "were in some sense context-proof, Lange’s images tend to cry out for further information. Their aesthetic power is obviously bound up in the historical importance of their subjects, and usually that historical importance has had to be communicated through words." That characteristic has caused "art purists" and "political purists" alike to criticize Lange's work, which Arn argues is unfair: "The relationship between image and story," Arn notes, was often altered by Lange's employers as well as by government forces when her work did not suit their commercial purposes or undermined their political purposes.^[8] In his review of this exhibition, critic Brian Wallis also stressed the distortions in the "afterlife of photographs" that often went contrary to Lange's intentions.^[39] Finally, Jackson Arn situates Lange's work alongside other Depression-era artists such as Pearl Buck, Margaret Mitchell, Thornton Wilder, John Steinbeck, Frank Capra, Thomas Hart Benton, and Grant Wood in terms of their role creating a sense of the national "We".^{[8].   From WikiPEDIA.} 

https://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/dorothea-lange-biography-with-photo-gallery/3097/

https://www.theartstory.org/artist/lange-dorothea/

World Bee Day

 

The United Nations has designated May 20th as World Bee Day, or "Beeday".

Tacuum sanitatis is a medieval textbook on health, based on Taqwīm al- wi Taa, an Arabic medical treat written by Ibn Butlân circa 1050. In fact, Tacinum gave birth to two series of Latin manuscripts. The first series, dating from the second half of the XIII century, consists of Latin translations, relatively faithful to the Arabic text. The second series, began in the late fourteenth century, consists of simplified versions of the text, enhanced by many illustrations, one for each subject covered. The first Latin translation of the Arabic manuscript is carried out around 1250 at the request of the Court of Sicily. Latin and German manuscript illuminated on parchment. National Library of France. Department of Manuscripts. Latin 9333 Foil : 91v

For #WorldBeeDay here's the Bee Pendant from the Chrysolakkos cemetery at Mallia, a piece of Middle Minoan II craftwork! 

Image: Heraklion Archaeological Museum, 559

The Bees and their hives. BL Sloane 4016; Herbal; c.1440 CE; Italy, N. (Lombardy); f.57v

Bees in good order ..Bodleian Library MS. Ashmole 1511; 'The Ashmole Bestiary'; 13th century;  England; f.75v

Bees, beehive, and a bear on #WorldBeeday

BL Harley 3448; Flore de virtue de costumi (Flowers of Virtue and of Custom); 15th century; Italy, N. (Padua?); f10v

Français 1877 f. 21v

Bl Kings MS 24; 'the King's Virgil'; 1483-1485 CE; f.47V