Jewish dancer Paula Rüthling survived horrific conditions in Auschwitz. After the war, she reestablished her cabaret show alongside her husband and daughter
A dancing class in Ancient Greece for teenagers. The boy does a gymnastic stunt (could you drink from a wine-dish in this position?), the girl an Irish straight-back step-dance, and lovely ladies accompany them on castanets and double pipes. Naples wine bowl.
Degas is considered one of the founding artists of the Impressionist movement. He was particularly taken by the subject of dance, with over half of his work depicting dancers.
'Dancers' 1970, a screenprint by British pop artist Nicholas Monro
Anna Pavlova as a Bacchante
by John Lavery
Ostracon depicting an Egyptian dancer, found at Deir el-Medina. New Kingdom of Egypt, 19th or 20th Dynasties, (c. 1200 BCE).
Egyptian Museum, Turin
Lyubov Popova. Born on this day in 1889. "We are breaking with the past, because we cannot accept its hypotheses."
Russian avant-garde painter and designer Lyubov Popova was born on this date in 1889. This is "The Model. I am not sure that I was aware of Popova until I saw a piece of her’s at the Norton Simon some years ago. I was awestruck and have continued to love her work and feel that it was one of the many tragedies of the Russian Revolution that she was diverted from painting and worked as a designer, creating Communist propaganda and textiles, before her early death of 35 from scarlet fever.
Her 1915 painting The Traveler teeters on the edge of abstraction, though like other Cubists, never crosses the line into the non-objective. While the composition is broken into fragments, we can still discern remnants of reality.
In a 1991 review of Popova, Christopher Knight wrote, “The 55 paintings and 67 works on paper […] confirm Popova’s stature as an artist who […] ranks with Kazimir Malevich, Alexander Rodchenko and Vladimir Tatlin.” In the 2009 Tate Modern catalogue, Rodchenko and Popova: Defining Modernism, Magdalena Dabroski concurred, “Along with Kazimir Malevich, Vladimir Tatlin, and Alexander Rodchenko, she stands out as one of the four most accomplished artists of the Russian avant-garde in the first quarter of the twentieth century.”
First, a brief biography: Popova was born in 1889. Her father was a textile merchant and performing arts patron, and her mother belonged to a prominent, cultured family. She studied at private art studios in Moscow beginning in 1907, making lifelong friendships with future members of the Constructivist group.
Popova traveled extensively during the pre-World War I period, absorbing past and present art: Mikhail Vrubel’s religious Symbolism from the 1880s at the Church of St. Cyril, Kiev (1909); early Renaissance painting during lengthy trips throughout Italy (1910 and 1914); medieval icon painting in Novgorod, Pskov, and other ancient Russian cities (1910-12); the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg (1911); and Sergei Shchukin’s collection of modern French masters (1912); She and Nadezha Udaltsova lived together in Paris (1912-13), studying at La Palette under Cubists Jean Metzinger and Henri Le Fauconnier, where additionally, she first saw Futurist art and was particularly inspired by Boccioni. In 1916 she explored Islamic architecture in Samarkand, Uzbekistan.
When she returned to Moscow, she worked with a group called “The Artists Studio,” creating works that pre-figured cubism but were far more dynamic. After the Bolsheviks gained power in 1917, she worked for their version of revolution, creating murals, propaganda posters, embroidery and fabrics for workers’ co-ops. In 1918, she married and had a child; her husband died in the typhoid epidemic of 1919 and Popova did not paint for a year..
In 1924, her young son died of scarlet fever during another virulent epidemic, and Liubov Popova died four days later, at age 35. She was vivacious, audacious, and passionately political, idealistic about the Russian Revolution. After Lenin’s death in 1924 and Stalin’s subsequent rise to power, Popova’s colleagues either emigrated or adapted to the changed circumstances, producing the Socialist Realist art demanded by the regime. Due to her early death, she was never faced with that choice.
In May 1991, Deborah Solomon wrote in The New Criterion, “Popova seems so very young: something about her face, her expression, suggests qualities of a child — naïveté, innocence, or just plain earliness. She looks like an incarnation of the childhood of modern art.”
She was an artist during the childhood of the Russian Revolution - her early death was a tragedy for art but probably a good thing for her as she avoided what Stalin did to the revolution that she idealized and the destruction he brought upon the Russian people. Including the Ukraine.
April 20, 1840. Odilon Redon (born Bertrand-Jean Redon (April 20, 1840 - July 6, 1916) was a French symbolist painter, printmaker, draughtsman and pastellist
Odilon Redon self-protrait
Odilon Redon (1840 – 1916) french printmaker, draughtsman and painter.
An individualist who believed in the superiority of the imagination over observation of nature, rejected the Realism and Impressionism of his contemporaries in favor of a more personal artistic vision.
Born as Bertrand-Jean Redon, he acquired the nickname "Odilon" from his mother, Odile. Redon started drawing as a child, and at the age of ten he was awarded a drawing prize at school. Aged fifteen, he began the formal study of drawing, but on the insistence of his father he changed to architecture. His failure to pass the entrance exams at Paris’ École des Beaux-Arts ended any plans for a career as an architect, although he briefly studied painting there under Jean-Léon Gérôme in 1864. (His younger brother Gaston Redon would become a noted architect.)
Back home in his native Bordeaux, he took up sculpture, and Rodolphe Bresdin instructed him in etching and lithography. His artistic career was interrupted in 1870 when he joined the army to serve in the Franco-Prussian War.
At the end of the war, he moved to Paris, working almost exclusively in charcoal and lithography. He called his visionary works, conceived in shades of black, his "Noirs". It would not be until 1878 that his work gained any recognition with Guardian Spirit of the Waters, and he published his first album of lithographs, titled Dans le Rêve, in 1879. Still, Redon remained relatively unknown until the appearance in 1884 of a cult novel by Joris-Karl Huysmans titled, À rebours (Against Nature).
In the 1890s, pastel and oils became his favored media, and he produced no more noirs after 1900. In 1899, he exhibited with the Nabis at Durand-Ruel's. In 1903 he was awarded the Legion of Honor.
He became a celebrated figure in fin-de-siècle Paris, greatly admired by artists and writers of the Symbolist movement with whom he shared an enthusiasm for the fantastic, mystical, and sublime forces found beneath the surface of everyday life.
He was greatly inspired by such authors as Edgar Allan Poe and Gustave Flaubert, whose unusual sensibilities were well suited to the artist's own. Redon was so moved by Flaubert's 1874 prose poem The Temptation of Saint Anthony that he created three separate projects based on it.
His popularity increased when a catalogue of etchings and lithographs was published by André Mellerio in 1913 and that same year, he was given the largest single representation at the New York Armory Show.
Redon died on July 6, 1916.
****
"Those were the pictures bearing the signature: Odilon Redon. They held, between their gold-edged frames of unpolished pearwood, undreamed-of images: a Merovingian-type head, resting upon a cup; a bearded man, reminiscent both of a Buddhist priest and a public orator, touching an enormous cannon-ball with his finger; a spider with a human face lodged in the centre of its body. Then there were charcoal sketches which delved even deeper into the terrors of fever-ridden dreams. Here, on an enormous die, a melancholy eyelid winked; over there stretched dry and arid landscapes, calcinated plains, heaving and quaking ground, where volcanos erupted into rebellious clouds, under foul and murky skies; sometimes the subjects seemed to have been taken from the nightmarish dreams of science, and hark back to prehistoric times; monstrous flora bloomed on the rocks; everywhere, in among the erratic blocks and glacial mud, were figures whose simian appearance--heavy jawbone, protruding brows, receding forehead, and flattened skull top--recalled the ancestral head, the head of the first Quaternary Period, the head of man when he was still fructivorous and without speech, the contemporary of the mammoth, of the rhinoceros with septate nostrils, and of the giant bear. These drawings defied classification; unheeding, for the most part, of the limitations of painting, they ushered in a very special type of the fantastic, one born of sickness and delirium."
À rebours, chapter V
sources: moma.org; wikipedia.com
Guardian Spirit of the Waters The Crying Spider, 1881 The Smiling Spider, 1891 Spirit of the Forest, 1880 Cactus Man, 1881 The Eye Like a Strange Balloon Mounts Toward Infinity. Chimera 1883 Head of Orpheus Floating in the Water 1881 Swamp flower The Raven, 1882 From the Cycle "The Temptation of Saint Anthony": Anthony: What Is the Point of All This? The Devil. There Is No Point! , 1896 The origins Head of a martyr, 1877 Many Different People Inhabit the Lands of the Oceans The Egg, 1885
Noli me tangere: graceful Christ appearing to Mary Magdalene in garden. Meanwhile in the background, other women still trying to get a straight story from the angels. By Paolo Veronese, whose day is today.
Paolo Veronese (born 1528, Verona, Republic of Venice [Italy]—died April 9, 1588, Venice) was one of the major painters of the 16th-century Venetian school. His works usually are huge, vastly peopled canvases depicting allegorical, biblical, or historical subjects in splendid colour and set in a framework of classicizing Renaissance architecture. A master of the use of colour, he also excelled at illusionary compositions that extend the eye beyond the actual confines of the room.
I
In this banquet scene, Paolo Veronese (d. OTD 1588) creates a vast tableau of incredible opulence for the lucky Dominican friars of SS. Giovanni e Paolo. But is it Biblical? The Inquisition wants to know!
Oh no, it's the Last Supper! Inquisition: Mr. Veronese, with what justification did you include all these details Not Mentioned In The Bible?? Veronese: Would it be OK if I just changed the title to Feast in the House of Levi?
Inquisition: Heretic, nowhere in the Bible does it say there were jesters at the Last Supper! Veronese: Look, I have retitled this painting Feast in the House of Levi, and feasts have jesters! Painters know these things.
Lucrecia
n the history of art the term Triumvirate is used too loosely as a convenient means of establishing the importance of artists as the leaders of their day. For the Italian Renaissance we have Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael; for the Baroque, Rubens, Rembrandt and Van Dyck; for the late 20th century in England, Bacon, Freud and Hockney, and so on — useful to the lazy but inaccurate and misleading. Let us set aside the term’s ancient Roman origin in Antony, Octavian and the hapless Lepidus III, and ask the simple question: "Why is Titian not in the Renaissance triumvirate?" — Titian, who did more than any of his peers to elevate the gestural acts of the painter and the substance of paint itself. The lazy art historian’s immediate response is to invent a Venetian triumvirate with Titian as its head, and Tintoretto and Veronese his supporters. "Where, then, are Giorgione and Giovanni Bellini?" asks the first sceptical enquirer. "And was Veronese even a Venetian?" asks the second.
No. He was not. He was born in Verona, 50 miles away, in 1528, Paolo, the son of Gabriele Bazaro, a stonecutter from a family of stonecutters (if not quite sculptors, nor is this the lowly profession that the term perhaps implies), and Caterina, the illegitimate daughter of Antonio Caliari, of a local noble family. His father, it seems, handed on the family skills and taught him modelling in terracotta, but by the age of 13 he was described as a painter, the pupil of a local master, Antonio Badile IV (whose daughter he was to marry). At 16, Vasari has him as an apprentice with the better known Giovanni Battista Caroto, still in Verona. He did not move to Venice until 1553, when he was 25, but by then he had already had a number of commissions from Venetian patrons, and it is clear that Venetian influences far outweighed those of the city of his birth.
Faith Ringgold, the barrier-breaking artist and author who created a sprawling body of work dedicated to the stories of Black Americans, died on Saturday at age 93.
Ringgold is best known for her groundbreaking “story quilts,” which have been exhibited in museums around the world. Later in her career, she used her storytelling talents to write and illustrate a series of award-winning children’s books.
As an artist, one of the hallmarks of her style was a “keen, often tender focus on ordinary Black people and the visual minutiae of their daily lives,” writes the New York Times’ Margalit Fox, adding: “For Ringgold, as her work and many interviews made plain, art and activism were a seamless, if sometimes quilted, whole.”
Born on October 8, 1930, Ringgold grew up in New York City’s Harlem neighborhood, surrounded by figures who had risen to fame during the Harlem Renaissance. Her mother, Willi Posey, was a fashion designer who nurtured her daughter’s creative spirit—and would later become one of her frequent collaborators.
“There was so much creativity around me: music, art, dance,” Ringgold told BBC Culture’s Arwa Haider in 2019. “But there was also the fact that, as Black people, we were denied a position in the art world.”
In 1950, Ringgold applied to the City College of New York, where she hoped to study art. Officials only let her enroll after she agreed to study “art education,” then thought to be a more socially appropriate path for a woman, per the Guardian’s Ellen Jones. After completing her bachelor’s degree, she earned a master’s in fine arts from the institution in 1959. In school, Ringgold painted “a lot of boats and trees and whatever they taught you in school—not political at all,” as the artist told the Guardian in 2021. She went on to teach in New York City’s public school system between the ’50s and the ’70s. During this period, she started bringing social activism into her art, beginning a series of paintings called American Peoplein 1963.
Mixed media artworks from Faith Ringgold's Jazz Stories series at Art Basel Miami Beach in 2023 Sean Drakes / Getty Images
“I couldn’t paint landscapes in the 1960s—there was too much going on,” Ringgold told Hyperallergic’s Ken Tan in 2019.
This series included one of her most famous works, American People #20: Die(1967),which the New York Times’ Holland Cotter described as “an explosive scene of blood-spattered biracial carnage.” The painting drew heavily on Picasso’s frantic anti-war piece Guernica (1937) and shocked one viewer into a “wild scream of terror” in the middle of an art gallery, per the Guardian.
“I wasn’t used to painting blood,” Ringgold told the publication. “But I found it very easy and very interesting. Because I saw it all the time, you see. People were having these riots, but nobody was painting them.”
Nevertheless, Ringgold did not achieve widespread renown until more than a decade after the American People series. In 1980, the artist collaborated with her mother to create her first quilt, Echoes of Harlem, which depicts 30 Black faces. The so-called “story quilts” would become Ringgold’s signature art form in the years that followed,
Ringgold’s art is often narrative-driven: Street Story Quilt (1985), for instance, uses three panels showing the same building facade in Harlem to tell the story of several Black residents living there. Ringgold took the concept a step further in 1991, when she adapted Tar Beach into a children’s book, which became a Caldecott Honor Book and winner of the Coretta Scott King Award, among other accolades. She went on to write more than a dozen books for children.
For the remainder of Ringgold’s career, activism frequently permeated her creative endeavors. She also fought for Black representation in the art world, participating in a number of demonstrations against the exclusion of works by women and Black artists from the walls of major museums and galleries.
Ringgold in her studio at her home in Englewood, New Jersey, in 2013 Melanie Burford / Prime for The Washington Post via Getty Images
“Ringgold has always been important, urgently connected to her moment,” wrote the Boston Globe's Murray Whyte earlier this year. “As institutions do the hard work of building overlooked episodes of cultural history back into an increasingly fluid canon, she’s never been more important.” A number of Ringgold’s works reside in the collections of the Smithsonian Institution’s museums, including the National Portrait Gallery and the American Art Museum. The Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art also holds two oralhistory interviews conducted with Ringgold about her art.
One of the pieces housed at the National Portrait Gallery is a self-portrait quiltfrom 1998, which features a series of images representing Ringgold’s childhood in Harlem. In the center image, a young girl is seen soaring above the city skyline.
Taking flight is a recurring theme in the artist’s work. Flying, as she once said, “is about achieving a seemingly impossible goal with no more guarantee of success than an avowed commitment to do it.”
April 12, 1885. Robert Delaunay (12 April 1885 - 25 October 1941) was a French artist who, with his wife Sonia Delaunay and others, co-founded the Orphism art movement, noted for its use of strong colours and geometric shapes. His later works were more abstract, reminiscent of Paul Klee. His key influence related to bold use of colour and a clear love of experimentation with both depth and tone.
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