Maria Sibylla Merian

 

Maria Sibylla Merian. Born on April 2,  1647

Maria Sibylla Merian was a Naturalist, an Entomologist and a Botanical Illustrator and is rated as being one of the greatest ever botanical artists.

Spectacled Caiman locked in combat with a False Coral Snake: fab natural history illustration by artist-naturalist Maria Sibylla Merian, who was born on this day in 1647.

Ananas mit Kakerlake (Pineapple with cockroach) by Merian (c. between 1701 and 1705) Hand coloured copper engraving

Subject : A Parrot Tulip, Auriculas, and Red Currants, with a Magpie Moth, its Caterpillar and Pupa By: Maria Sibylla Merian (1647-1717) Black chalk, bodycolour and watercolour on vellum; 31,6 cm x 26 cm Via Wikimedia Commons

She is best known for her illustrations of plants and insects made as a result of her trips to the tropical country of Suriname on the north eastern cost of South America.

More at: https://www.botanicalartandartists.com/about-maria-sibylla-merian.html

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Maria-Sibylla-Merian

Natalie Zemon Davis:  Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth-century Lives, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995.

https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/animals/maria-sibylla-merian-pioneering-artist-flora-and-fauna

Francisco Goya, Spanish painter of the light and the dark parts of the human soul

The Clothed Maja

The Naked Maja

La Maja Desnuda (La maja desnuda) has been described as "the first totally profane life-size female nude in Western art" without pretense to allegorical or mythological meaning. The identity of the Majas is uncertain. The most popularly cited models are the Duchess of Alba, with whom Goya was sometimes thought to have had an affair, and Pepita Tudó, mistress of Manuel de Godoy. Neither theory has been verified, and it remains as likely that the paintings represent an idealized composite. From Wikipedia

The Third of May

Francisco Goya, in full Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes, (born March 30, 1746, Fuendetodos, Spain—died April 16, 1828, Bordeaux, France), Spanish artist whose paintings, drawings, and engravings reflected contemporary historical upheavals and influenced important 19th- and 20th-century painters. The series of etchings The Disasters of War (1810–14) records the horrors of the Napoleonic invasion. His masterpieces in painting include The Naked Maja, The Clothed Maja (c. 1800–05), and The 3rd of May 1808: The Execution of the Defenders of Madrid (1814).

Robert Hughes wrote that " Goya speaks to us with an urgency that no artist of our time can muster. We see his long-dead face pressed against the glass of our terrible century. Goya looking time at a time worse than his." 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Disasters_of_War

"He was right: Goya feels like our contemporary. In part, this is thanks to the nightmarish, abject plates of his Disasters of War, which, in hindsight, seem to anticipate the atrocities of mechanized conflict that scarred the 20th Century. For many people, Goya’s etchings even provide a pioneering example of tough, first-hand war reportage: plate 44 of the series, for instance, is entitled “I saw it”.

Although they were not published until 1863, the Disasters date from the second decade of the 19th Century, when Goya was already a mature artist with a reputation as a brilliant court painter and satirist. Years earlier, in 1793, he had suffered a mysterious illness, perhaps a series of strokes, which left him permanently deaf. This had a profound impact on his art, which became increasingly visionary and strange – arguably paving the way for the nihilistic worldview expressed in the Disasters of War. But it was the turbulence, hardship and depravity of the Napoleonic occupation of Spain during the Peninsular War (1808-14), when Napoleon’s brother Joseph Bonaparte was proclaimed Kingking, which actually prompted Goya to make the series. In October 1808, aged 62, Goya was summoned by General José Palafox y Melci to Zaragoza, the provincial capital of Aragon not far from his birthplace where he had trained as an artist. Palafox had become a national hero after inspiring thousands of Spaniards to resist French troops who had laid siege to the city. What Goya witnessed there provided the starting point for the series, which he began two years later, around 1810.  http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20140717-the-greatest-war-art-ever

The genius of the Disasters is that they transcend particularities of the Peninsular War and its aftermath to feel universal – and modern. Perhaps this is because, as the British writer Aldous Huxley put it in 1947, “All [Goya] shows us is war’s disasters and squalors, without any of the glory or even picturesqueness.” So should we consider the series as the greatest war art ever created? Wilson-Bareau (curator of the show at the Imperial War Museum in 2014) certainly thinks so. “For me, yes,” she tells me. “I have lived with these prints, which many people consider too shocking, absolutely unbearable, and I find in them – besides the heartbreak and outrage at the unspeakable violence and damage – a great well of compassion for all victims of the suffering and abuses they depict, which goes to the very heart of our humanity.”  http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20140717-the-greatest-war-art-ever

https://www.theartstory.org/artist/goya-francisco/life-and-legacy/

Raphael

 

Raphael Sanzio, Italian painter and master builder (Madonna Sistina School of Athens), born in March 28 in Urbino (d. 1520) Gregorian calendar date. Urbino, Italy was a cultural center that encouraged the Arts. Raphael’s father, Giovanni Santi, was a court painter for the Duke of Urbino, Federigo da Montefeltro.

Giovanni Santi, Raphael's father; Christ supported by two angels, c.1490

His father Giovanni taught the young Raphael basic painting techniques and exposed him to the principles of humanistic philosophy at the Duke of Urbino’s court. It was clear from the beginning that Raphael possesed a prodigious talent. His father died when Raphael was 11 and even at that early age, Raphael was able to take over his father's workshop and later, became an apprentice to Perugino, one of the famous painters of the era. 

In 1504 he moved to Florence and in 1508 he moved to Rome, where he soon attracted the attention of the Pope and nobility of the city. From 1508 to 1511, he created on of the most famous works of the Renaissance, "The School of Athens, " for the pope.

The School of Athens

The School of Athens (Italian: Scuola di Atene) is one of the most famous frescoes in Renaissance art. It was painted between 1509 and 1511 as a part of Raphael's commission to decorate the rooms now known as the Stanze di Raffaello, in the Apostolic Palace in the Vatican. The Stanza della Segnatura was the first of the rooms to be decorated, and "The School of Athens," representing Philosophy, was probably the second painting to be finished there, after La Disputa(Theology) on the opposite wall, and the Parnassus (Literature). The picture has long been seen as "Raphael's masterpiece and the perfect embodiment of the classical spirit of the Renaissance. (Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_School_of_Athens) 

Presumed portrait age 33 (wikipedia) 

His career falls naturally into three phases and three styles, first described by Giorgio Vasari: his early years in Umbria, then a period of about four years (1504–1508) absorbing the artistic traditions of Florence, followed by his last hectic and triumphant twelve years in Rome, working for two Popes and their close associates.

Red chalk study for the Villa Farnesina Three Graces

  

Sistine Madonna (1512). One of the most famous paintings of the Madonna ever made. 

 Dying young (age 37) only enhanced his reuptation. Vasari claims that he died of "excessive Lust" for his mistress. La Fornaria. Well, it makes a nice story but we will never know. Rome was not the most healthy city in the Renaissance and he could have died from the malarial fevers that were epidemic in the city, typhus, typhoid.. you name it, the Renaissance had it and no way to cure it

La Fornarina, Raphael's mistress

Margareti Luti, or the baker's daughter is in this portrait wearing a lot of bare skin with an oriental style hat plus jewel on her dark hair. Her breasts are bare with the left one partially covered by her hand. Her posture of partially covering the breast and the stomach mirrors that of the classical sculptures that were being discovered at the time.

Her left hand rests between her thighs, the fingers splayed out and outlined by the deep, bloody-red of her discarded gown.  On her left arm there is a narrow leather band on which is the name of the artist – RAPHAEL URBINAS.  On the third finger of her left hand she appears to be wearing a ruby wedding band.  The presence of a ring was only discovered in the early part of the twenty-first century when the painting underwent some X-Ray analysis during restoration and cleaning work and which has occasioned volumes of discussion. Whether or not the painting was of Raphael's mistress or of the mistress of his patron Agostino Chigi is also controversial.

Raphael's tomb in the Pantheon. The Madonna is by Lorenzetto.

After his death, the influence of his celebrated rival Michelangelo was more widespread until the 18th and 19th centuries, when Raphael's more serene and harmonious qualities were again regarded as the highest models.

The Raphael cult was helped by the fact that very little is known about his opinions or “inner life”: he was an unsullied blank canvas. Unlike Leonardo and Michelangelo, he didn’t write many letters or poems or theorize or jot down ideas and shopping lists next to his sketches. What admirers had instead, from the beginning of the eighteenth century, was his skull, exhibited in the Accademia di San Luca in Rome. As part of their initiation, each new student had to place his pencil on it. Goethe, as a kind of climax to his Italian Journey of 1786–8, visited the Academy to marvel at the “brain-pan of beautiful proportions” (he had a cast sent home to Germany, to meditate daily on it). This skull worship only stopped in 1833, when Raphael’s tomb in the Pantheon was opened in the presence of the Pope and other dignitaries, and the skeleton was found to be intact; somewhat disappointingly, the large larynx, still intact and pliable, suggested he had a loud voice. He was said to be 5’2” tall, with beautiful teeth, a long neck, delicate arms and chest, with strong legs and feet. 

While his reputation has risen and fallen with the tides of artistic taste, for those who like a certain type of Renaissance religious art, his work has never gone out of fashion. 

Complete Works: http://www.raphaelsanzio.org
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raphael
The Met: http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/artist/raphael-raffaello-sanzio-or-santi/ 
Architecture in Renaissance Italy http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/itar/hd_itar.htm 
Leonardo da Vinci: http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/leon/hd_leon.htm 
Renaissance Drawings: http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/drwg/hd_drwg.htm 

Yayoi Kusama. Multi talented artist

 

Yayoi Kusama. Multi talented Woman artist

 

Yayoi Kusama's life is a poignant testament to the healing power of art as well as a study in human resilience. Plagued by mental illness as a child, and thoroughly abused by a callous mother, the young artist persevered by using her hallucinations and personal obsessions as fodder for prolific artistic output in various disciplines. This has informed a lifelong commitment to creativity at all costs despite the artist's birth into a traditional, female-effacing Japanese culture and her career's coming of age in the male-dominated New York art scene. Today, Kusama reigns as one of the most unique and famous contemporary female artists, operating from her self-imposed home in a mental hospital.

A polka-dot has the form of the sun, which is a symbol of the energy of the whole world and our living life, and also the form of the moon, which is calm. Round, soft, colorful, senseless and unknowing. Polka-dots become movement ... Polka dots are a way to infinity.

—Yayoi Kusuma, in Manhattan Suicide 

She began her career in the late 1940’s in Kyoto but in 1957 moved to the United States, inspired by the abstract expressionists. She exhibited her works next to those of Andy Warhol and Claes Oldenburg.

Kusama's happening at the Statue of Liberty, Liberty Island, New York, 1968 / Image courtesy: Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo / © Yayoi Kusama, Yayoi Kusama Studio Inc.

Born into an affluent family, Kusama started creating art at an early age. An abusive mother and a playboy father left her with a lifelong contempt for male sexual behavior. At the age of 13, she was sent to work in a Japanese military factory, spending her teenage years in what she termed"closed darkness" only lightened by the hallucinations of dots and flowers which she began to experience at the age of 10 or so.

In the 1950's she had an early success in Japan, covering every item that she could with what would become her signature polka dots, based on her childhood hallucinations. But she began to feel that Japanese society was too servile and too scornful of women so she left for first France and then, NY City in 1957.

In New York, she connected with the avant guarde, including Eva Hesse, learned how to manipulate her public image through photos of her with her signature colored wigs and heavy make up, as well as colorful, very stylish fashions. However, she did not profit financially and was hospitalized several times from over work. Nevertheless, she was active in arranging numerous public happenings along with performance art and in 1966, participated in the Venice Biennale.

One of the first Infinity Rooms

 In 1973 she returned to Japan where she wrote novels, poetry and short stories. Her art dealer business folded and she again checked herself into a hospital where she eventually took up permanent residence. From this base, she continued to work, producing huge paintings in a "ramped up" style. She was almost forgotten but her career revived in the 1990's with her work in the Japanese pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 1993, a dazzling mirror lined room filed with small sculptures of pumpkins. From this work, she began to use the pumpkin as a form of an alter ego. From that time to this, the number of her successful exhibitions is too long to list. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yayoi_Kusama

Her "Infinity Mirrors' room at the Hershorn Museum was the most popular exhibit in the museum's history, so popular that one person broke one of the pumpkins, taking her own selfie. Somebody should have pointed out to the visitor that she was no Kusama.

https://hirshhorn.si.edu/kusama/

From an almost unknown, she has become the matriarch of truly avant guard art. Her polka dots and infinity rooms have tapped into the zeitgeist of our culture. While most of those who view her exuberant installations have no idea of the profound philosophical ideas behind them - at least consciously- it is hoped that they are responding in at least a subconscious way. Kusama has said that her spots saved her life; perhaps they can also save some aspect of our threatened culture. Her Infinity Rooms allow people to experience space outside of themselves and possibly both quiet and joy (assuming that they take the ear plugs out long enough to actually interact with the work.) During the 60's, she sent a letter to Richard Nixon....."Our earth is like one little polka dot, among millions of other celestial bodies, one orb full of hatred and strife amid the peaceful, silent spheres. Let's you and I change all that and make this world a new Garden of Eden.... You can't eradicate violence by using more violence." 

Kusama fully embraced Warhol's idea of the artist as celebrity, claiming, "publicity is critical to my work because it offers the best way of communicating with a large number of people... avant-garde artists should use mass communication as traditional painters use paints and brushes."

http://www.phaidon.com/agenda/art/picture-galleries/2012/february/02/the-fantastical-world-of-yayoi-kusama/

http://www.phaidon.com/agenda/art/picture-galleries/2011/april/06/to-infinity-and-beyond-with-yayoi-kusama/

http://www.theartstory.org/artist-kusama-yayoi-artworks.htm


https://play.qagoma.qld.gov.au/looknowseeforever/essays/performing-the-body/

https://www.moma.org/artists/3315

Happy Birthday William Henry Johnson

 

Happy Birthday William Henry Johnson

Children Dance, ca. 1944

 March 18, 1901. William Henry Johnson (March 18, 1901-1970) was an African American painter born in Florence, South Carolina, and is now widely recognized as one of the greatest American artists of the 20th Century.  The work is on loan from the Smithsonian to President Barack Obama.

William Henry Johnson was born on March 18, 1901, in the small town of Florence, South Carolina, to parents Henry Johnson and Alice Smoot, who were both laborers. At an early age, Johnson wanted to become an artist. However, as the oldest of the family's five children, who lived in a poor, segregated town in the South, Johnson tucked away his aspirations of becoming an artist, deeming them unrealistic.

At the age of 17, Johnson South Carolina to pursue his dreams in New York City. There, he enrolled at the National Academy of Design and met Charles Webster Hawthorne, a well-known artist who took Johnson under his wing. While Hawthorne recognized Johnson's talent, he knew that Johnson would have a difficult time excelling as an African-American artist in the United States, and thus raised enough money to send the young artist to Paris, France, upon his graduation in 1926.

Johnson lived for several years in France, studying and gaining recognition.  A return trip to his home town shocked him with a renewed encounter with racism and Johnson returned to Europe, eventually marrying Holcha Krake, a Danish artist. They settled in Denmark and traveled widely in the Middle East and Africa, but due to the threat of war, were forced to return to the US in 1938. 

Johnson and his wife settled in Harlem, probably the only place in the US at the time where an interracial couple could live with some degree of freedom and safety.

Johnson took a job as an art teacher at the Harlem Community Art Center. Transitioning from expressionism to a a sophisticated style of "folk art," characterized by simplicity, flat figured and bright colors. Some of these works, including paintings depicting black soldiers fighting on the front lines as well as the segregation that took place there, served as commentaries on the treatment of African Americans in the U.S. Army during World War II.

In 1941, a solo exhibition was held for Johnson at Alma Reed Galleries. The following year, a fire destroyed Johnson's studio, leaving his artwork and supplies reduced to ashes. Two years later, in 1944, Johnson's beloved wife of 14 years, Krake, died of breast cancer.

 After her death, Johnson became increasingly unstable. He was eventually hospitalized at Central Islip State Hospital, a psychiatric facility in Central Islip, Long Island, New York. He would spend the next 23 years of his life, away from the attention that he'd garnered for his artwork. He died there in 1970.

 After his death, his entire body was work was almost disposed of to save storage fees but at the last moment, was rescued by friends. Over a thousand paintings by Johnson are part of the Smithsonian Collection of American Art. 

Smithsonian: http://americanart.si.edu/collections/search/artist/?ID=2486
William H. Johnson. [Internet]. 2015. The Biography.com website. Available from: http://www.biography.com/people/william-h-johnson-21283799 [Accessed 18 Mar 2015].
http://www.artcyclopedia.com/artists/johnson_william_h.html