Jacques-Louis David. Artist of the French Revolution

 

Jacques-Louis David. Artist of the French Revolution

Jacques-Louis David, (born August 30, 1748, Paris, France—died December 29, 1825, Brussels, Belgium), the most celebrated French artist of his day and a principal exponent of the late 18th-century Neoclassical reaction against the Rococo style.  Here he is looking very romantic and revolutionary. 1794

David won wide acclaim with his huge canvases on classical themes (e.g., Oath of the Horatii, 1784). When the French Revolution began in 1789, he served briefly as its artistic director and painted its leaders and martyrs (The Death of Marat, 1793) in a style that is more realistic than classical. Later he was appointed painter to Napoleon. Although primarily a painter of historical events, David was also a great portraitist (e.g., Portrait of Mme Récamier, 1800).

Death Of Marat. 1793

Napoleon admired The Intervention of the Sabine Women and saw possibilities for self-aggrandizement in the talent displayed. Soon David, without acquiring political office, was again a government painter, first under the Consulate and then, after 1804, under the Empire. He was not, however, the only prominent Frenchman to move from the Jacobin left to the Bonapartist right, and he had evidently always been a worshiper of historical heroes. His most important Napoleonic work is the huge Consecration of the Emperor Napoleon and the Coronation of Empress Joséphine on December 2, 1804 (1805–07), sometimes called Coronation of Napoleon in Notre-Dame; in it Neoclassicism gives way to a style that combines the official portraiture of the old French monarchy with overtones—and occasional straight imitation—of the masters of the Italian Renaissance. 

Napoleon in his study 

This picture was followed in 1810 by the large Napoleon Distributing the Eagles and in 1812 by The Emperor Napoleon in His Study at the Tuileries, a sharply perceptive portrait notwithstanding its conspicuously propagandistic intention.

After the fall of Napoleon in 1815, David was exiled to Brussels. Cut off from the excitement and stimulus of the great events he had lived through, he lost much of his old energy. Toward the end of his life, he executed, probably with considerable help from a Belgian pupil, François-Joseph Navez, one more remarkably convincing portrait: The Three Women of Gand.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_paintings_by_Jacques-Louis_David

Caravaggio. Rebel and genius

This is Wikipedias' factual blurb on Caravaggio. Michelangelo Merisi (Michele Angelo Merigi or Amerighi) da Caravaggio, known as simply Caravaggio 29 September 1571^[2] – 18 July 1610), was an Italian painter active in Rome for most of his artistic life. During the final four years of his life he moved between Naples, Malta, and Sicily until his death. His paintings have been characterized by art critics as combining a realistic observation of the human state, both physical and emotional, with a dramatic use of lighting, which had a formative influence on Baroque painting.

Possibly Self Portrait 

That's one way to approach him. But look at his life. He seems to have thrown himself into risk and danger – in palaces and slums, with influential patrons at the top of society and the worst sorts at the bottom, driven by rage, anger, diversion, sexuality and a passion for work – until he was murdered before the age of 40 on a beach north of Rome, in a no-man's land. Such a life of lust, revolt, escapism and struggle - the outsider rebel hero par excellence.

He shifts our  perspective to well known events in the history of Christianity. In Caravaggio's Supper at Emmaus, we are looking not at the long side of the loaded table – as conventional composition would dictate – but at the narrow end. The question now is not how the figures position themselves; what matters here is how they relate to one another. What they want from each other. And how much wine they've drunk. Are they arguing or pleading with Jesus? What do they want from him? He's supposed to be dead but they don't seem particularly surprised. 

Medusa's head of snakes, is bloodily separated from the torso; she is dead and undead, an image and more from her shocked look at the destruction of her beauty. The same strands of blood emanate from the severed neck in "Judith Beheading Holofernes" where Judith's expression speaks of the necessary but heavy, barbaric labour of killing). Caravaggio paints the body at the moment that Holofernes realizes that his death, the death that he has visited upon thousands, is now upon him. His death. 

It is not hard to imagine why Cardinal Del Monte supposedly broke down in tears before Caravaggio's "Basket of Fruit, " before a picture that shows fruit in various stages of putrefaction, threatened by decay, insects, destruction. Until then death was the other. A merciless certainty and a part of life. Caravaggio paints time, and in so doing he shows, perhaps for the first time, death not as the end of the subject but as a part of it. We live and as we live, we decay and die. 

So Caravaggio paints desire in time and as it visits the bodies that he desires, against all the teachings of Papal Roman. Observe his passion for the "ragazzi di vita" who as lutenists have very different tunes in their heads, who are bitten by lizards, who also otherwise feel pleasure in pain and pain in pleasure, still in the ailing Bacchus (a direct report by the painter). It is a desire indeed – how could it be any different in a painter of the body and the moment – that circles a narcissistic catastrophe. In Caravaggio's "Narcissus" this awful yearning for the self as other is certainly not to be mistaken for a triviality like "vanity", and even his "Penitent Magdalene" does not simply put jewelry and perfume aside. She closes her eyes and collapses.

To the frustration of generations of art students, Caravaggio is not interested in showing off his knowledge of anatomy. His bodies do not seek the heroic pose, nor do they follow any kind of scientific clarity. They writhe in all their ambiguity, turn to their opposite, to the viewer, but at the same time in on themselves. And if something does not interest Caravaggio he does not paint it either. He does not fill out his paintings.  His windows are empty light sources, his backgrounds boundaries. The world is everything that touches the subject and nothing else. 

I do not believe that Caravaggio painted one single "pretty picture." And not a single untruthful one.

St Matthew is writing his gospel. He's standing at his writing table where there is an open manuscript waiting for his pen to touch paper. But Matthew isn’t looking at the blank page. This angel gestures with his fingers as if counting — one, two, three, this, then that, then the next — as if establishing and clarifying the narrative of the life of Jesus that Matthew is attempting to set down. It is patient angelic aid for an author trying to get this right. In effect, the angel is consoling him, saying, “Okay, Matthew, first comes the Sermon on the Mount, then the loaves and the fishes, then his entry into Jerusalem, then  "Supper at Emmeus."

Caravaggio's life during the 17th century is certainly among the most adventurous ever led by the world's great creators. His life story takes place between shadow and light: a man of a passionate nature, he ran the gamut from provocation to murder. A reward was offered for his capture, sending him into perpetual flight and hiding.  Given his love of the low and the lowly, it's a miracle that he portrayed the sacred and timeless among the filth and suffering. His Christ has dirty feet. 

The works he produced were so deeply mystical and essential, testifying to such a true sense of the sacred and, above all, such a heartfelt comprehension of the message of Christianity, that the Roman people were ready to forgive Caravaggio all. Happily forgiven his last transgression, the artist set off for Naples without remembering to officially declare himself a passenger. In other words, he became a stowaway, and, in order to ensure his fare, was obliged to hand over his possessions as security. This was something he was not prepared to do. His reaction toward being questioned or asked to do anything he didn't want to (and there were many things he didn't want to do) was rage. he attacked one of the sailors (after all what was one sailor - he'd already murdered three people. The crew were not pleased and  threw him off the ship . Wounded, he left the ship at Porto Ercole where, furious and desperate, he ran up and down the beach under a scorching sun, trying to pinpoint on the vast sea the vessel sailing off with his belongings. By noon, fever forced him to lie down and there, after three days, without the least human assistance, he died alone. The day was July 8, 1610. He was 38.

But he cast a long shadow. By the next generation, Caravaggio's once-shocking realism (see the filthy bare feet of the saint in Claude Vignon's "Martyrdom of St. Matthew") and dramatic film-noir spotlighting had spread over all Western Europe—notably to Holland, France and Spain—and were being used for vivid secular paintings of prostitutes, pickpockets, gamblers, gourmands, smokers and drinkers. His bi-sexual denizens of the underworld became a popular subject. 

Following Caravaggio's bisexual path, artists working alongside or after him painted recumbent, spot-lit male nudes pretending to be St. Sebastian or the naked man saved by the Good Samaritan. (Orazio Riminaldi's "Daedalus and Icarus" is as homoerotic as any important 17th-century Italian painting I've seen. I give high marks to painters who did justice to aging, wrinkled, thin-limbed subjects, like Simone Vouet's St. Jerome and Jusepe de Ribera's St. Mary of Egypt.

While most other Italian artists of his time slavishly followed the elegant balletic conventions of late Mannerist painting, Caravaggio painted the stories of the Bible as visceral and often bloody dramas. He staged the events of the distant sacred past as if they were taking place in the present day, often working from live models whom he depicted in starkly modern dress. He accentuated the poverty and common humanity of Christ and his followers, the Apostles, saints, and martyrs, by emphasizing their ragged clothing and dirty feet. He also developed a highly original form of chiaroscuro, using extreme contrasts of light and dark to emphasize details of gesture or facial expression: an outflung arm, a look of despair or longing. His influence on the course of Western art has been immense and has not been limited to the field of paintingalone. Caravaggio’s work shaped that of many later artists, ranging from Rembrandt in Holland and Diego Velázquez in Spain to Théodore Géricault in France. His dramatic sense of staging and innovative treatment of light and shade have also directly inspired many leading figures in the medium of cinema, including Pier Paolo Pasolini and Martin Scorsese.

https://caravaggio.org/

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Caravaggio

Suzanne Valadon

 

Suzanne Valadon.  Born in September 1865 - April 7, 1938 

A somewhat controversial figure, Suzanne Valadon (born Marie-Clementine Valadon) was the illegitimate daughter of a French domestic worker. Born in September of 1865 (date unknown) , Valadon lived to be only 62 years old – but her life was certainly never dull.

As she grew up in the bohemian quarter of Paris, Valadon supported her self by doing such odd jobs as performing in a circus, working as a waitress, and even a nanny. At age 16, a fall from a trapeze sent her life down a different path.

From 1880 to 1893, Valadon modeled for several of the most important painters of her day, including Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Although she could not afford formal art classes, Valadon learned readily from the painters around her. Close friend and mentor Edgar Degas also taught her drawing and etching techniques. Valadon soon transitioned from an artist’s model into a successful artist. Valadon also had a complicated personal life.

 Valadon was what some  would probably call a ‘loose woman,’ aka, free spirited and independent - causing a stir in the cabarets and clubs of Montmartre. Many articles about Valadon’s life portray her as a woman who constantly drew attention in a provocative way, taking numerous lovers at a very young age. Even her paintings demonstrate her proclivity for what some may have considered shameful at the time, many of them of nude women. Valadon also created landscapes and still lifes which were described as vibrant and powerfully rich in color.

Many believe that her bold renditions of nude women and the representation of their sexuality was born out of her years as a circus performer and artist’s model. While she could not afford formal art training, her close relationships with some of the most prominent artists of the time resulted in her transformation from artist’s model into a successful artist in her own right. She also had sexual affairs with some of the artists she posed for.

At age 18, Valadon gave birth to Maurice Utrillo out of wedlock; Utrillo also became an artist. At nearly 50 years old Valadon married Andre Utter, who was also an artist and 21 years younger than Valadon. While her artwork attracted a substantial amount of attention due to its passion and intensity, her personal life drew just as much attention. Rising to the peak of her fame in the 1920s, during her lifetime she had four major retrospective exhibitions.

In “The Abandoned Doll,” Suzanne Valadon portrays an intimate scene with a strong psychological mood. Seated on a bed, a fully clothed woman towels dry a girl. The girl, clad only in a pink hair ribbon, turns away from the woman and appears to inspect herself in a hand mirror. The pink bow echoes that in the hair of the doll, a symbol of childhood forgotten on the floor near the bed. This visual connection, combined with the girl’s maturing body, suggests that this is a moment of transition in her young life - from innocence to sexual knowledge and possibly abuse. 

Encyclopedia Britannica On Line. 

Robert Indiana. Love images everywhere

 Though considered one of the most famous American artists of the 20th century, Robert Indiana (1928–2018) is perhaps best recognized by one singular motif: the word “LOVE,” represented in stacked serif capital letters within a perfectly square format, and featuring a slightly tilted “O.” For Indiana, love was an irreducible and universal theme, and his signature work has unsurprisingly won the world over.

Indiana, who was born Robert Clark, showed a proclivity for art starting in childhood, and he attended a technical high school with an art-focused curriculum. Following graduation, he spent three years in the U.S. Air Force before continuing his study of art at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Skowhegan School of Sculpture and Painting, and the Edinburgh College of Art respectively. He eventually relocated to New York, and in 1956, met Ellsworth Kelly, who suggested that he move to Coenties Slip on the south of Manhattan, which was home to pioneering artists such as Agnes Martin, James Rosenquist, and Cy Twombly. Living and working within this tight-knit community of artists significantly influenced Indiana’s work, and in the early 1960s he began experimenting with the word that would ultimately have a profound impact on his life and career.

In 1961, Indiana completed 4-Star Love, his very first painting that featured the word “love.” In his 1964 painting Love is God, the spiritual element of the word was brought to the fore, inspired by a refrain frequently reproduced in the Christian Science churches of his childhood. Over the next few years, he would reimagine the word again and again in silkscreens, as greeting cards, and ultimately, as the sculptures that gained him a global audience.

In honor of the universal and transformative power of love this Valentine’s Day, we revisit Indiana’s seminal LOVE works to bring you three intriguing facts about the beloved motif.

 

Indiana’s LOVE motif first became famous as a MoMA holiday card

Robert Indiana, LOVE (1964). Gift from the Gene Swenson Collection. © 2023 Morgan Art Foundation Ltd. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Although we tend not to equate fine art with stationary, that is exactly where LOVE got its big break. Initially, Indiana experimented with various stylistic approaches to the stacked letters by forming “love” through a series of rubbings; he included one of these rubbings done in red crayon in a Christmas card that he gave to art critic Gene Swenson in 1964. Meeting Kelly, however, proved pivotal for the design, as he introduced Indiana to Hard Edge abstraction, which ended up being the stylistic catalyst for the design of LOVE that we know today. In 1965, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) invited Indiana to submit a design for its Christmas card, and LOVE in red, blue, and green was chosen. “With the red, blue, and green paintings, the interaction in the eyes is of such a nature that with the slightest change of light, the fields automatically interchange, the positive becomes negative and vice versa, with almost a violent effect in the eye,” said Indiana. It became one of the museum’s most lucrative cards ever produced, and it allowed the work to be disseminated to a huge audience.

 

Following the runaway success of the MoMA holiday card, LOVE took on a life of its own as a hallmark of the Pop art movement and as a symbol of the “Love Generation.” Indiana continued to experiment with the motif—including working with Marian Goodman to produce the first versions of the work in aluminum—and it was reproduced on an eight-cent postage stamp in 1973. The first iteration of the work in Cor-Ten steel was created in 1970, and acquired by the Indianapolis Museum of Art. Over the following decades, Indiana went on to produce over 50 editions of the sculpture that have been installed worldwide—with two being translated into Spanish and Hebrew. In 2008, he returned to the stacked letters and produced the design with the word “hope” (including the signature tilted “O”) to support the campaign of Barack Obama. It was reproduced on all manner of campaign trail merch from T-shirts to buttons, with proceeds going to the campaign efforts. The following year, he created a Cor-Ten steel sculpture based on HOPE.

 

Indiana didn’t exactly love LOVE

Indiana’s relationship with his most famous work was complicated. On the one hand, it catapulted him to global fame, earning him a spot in the art historical canon as a significant Pop artist. On the other, it largely overshadowed all his other work, with Indiana himself rejecting the Pop art label: “I was the least Pop of all the Pop artists.” The widespread popularity of LOVE also led many of his contemporaries to label him a sell-out, though Indiana did not enjoy a great deal of financial success from the work as the lettering was not trademarked, leading to massive numbers of unauthorized reproductions in the form of posters, souvenirs, and other merchandise. Overwhelmed by the work’s popularity and the fame it brought him, as well as the apparent inability to escape its shadow, Indiana left New York permanently and relocated to an island in Maine in 1978, where he lived reclusively for the rest of his life.

 

Happy Birthday to Romare Bearden

 

Happy Birthday to a pioneer of African-American art, Romare Bearden: bit.ly/2bIASO2

I wrote about him back in May, 2011: http://cheznamastenancy.blogspot.com/2011/05/romare-bearden-at-museum-of-african.html 

From the NY Times, 1997: COLLAGE is the most important innovation in art of the 20th century, and this can be said with confidence because there is nothing parochial about the medium. It has attracted international artists and has been adapted to all styles of two-dimensional work. Some artists, of course, have used it only occasionally, but one master of collage who relied on it was Romare Bearden (1912-1988).

Back in 1997, the Whitney Museum's branch in Stamford exhibited some of Bearden's small collages, as precursors of a fascinating and little-known development, a series of 28 black and white ''photomontage projections'' that Bearden made in 1964.

The collages that are the seeds of the projections are compositions of paper, photographs and paint put on boards measuring 8 1/2x11 inches. The imagery was then fixed with an emulsion applied with a handroller. After drying, the collages were simply enlarged photographically in black and white, and mounted on Masonite.

Because they are photographs they don't have edges or seams that distinguish collage, but they retain its disparate quality. Some are big enough to put a viewer in mind of murals; the dimensions of one are 4x6 feet. It's a simple process but has wide ramifications.

As many advertisers recognize nowadays, simple black and white can have real punch and urgency. Viewers are not beguiled by tints and hues so are likely to pay attention. Perhaps that's why Picasso painted ''Guernica'' without color. 
Bearden's achievement was likewise born of a sense of immediacy, and of electricity in the air. When he conceived his series, the civil rights movement had just gained strong impetus from the civil rights march on Washington led by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in the summer of 1963. In her essay for the show's catalogue, Gail Gelburd notes that the event was seen flickering on countless black and white television sets.

The march inspired black intellectuals, writers and artists to form a group called Spiral; Bearden was elected secretary. Spiral aimed to recreate the spirit of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920's, but the members didn't want to be viewed merely as black artists. As Ms. Gelburd writes, ''They sought acceptance within the mainstream while paying respect to their heritage.''

This mandate was well-suited to Bearden. His biography recites a dizzying list of accomplishments. For instance, while in college at Boston University he played baseball in the Negro League and then earned a degree in mathematics from New York University.

He began his art career as a political cartoonist while also being employed as a social worker. After serving in the Army during World War II, he studied philosophy in Paris on the G.I. Bill. He returned to the United States in the early 1950's and after a brief career as a writer of popular songs he turned to painting in the Abstract Expressionist mode.

Many things displayed in the photomontage projections might be accounted for in this list: Bearden had an intense interest in people, including the teeming masses, and the works at the Whitney are chock full of humanity.

His Abstract Expressionist period, from 1954 through 1962, no doubt fixed in him the predilection to mix things up, to make bumptious compositions and to alter scale to his own expressive purposes. At the same time, Bearden's understanding of mathematics might have played some part in the preciseness, the just-right quality, that underlies the visual welter of a given work.

Influenced and inspired by these experiences and occupations, not to mention friendships with many cultural giants including Duke Ellington, Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin, Bearden could enter sentimental territory and not get caught in it. 
Two projections in which he recalls his origins --''Mysteries,'' set in North Carolina, and ''Pittsburgh Memories,'' the city where he spent his boyhood -- are distinguished by extreme close-ups of faces that carry the drama. The faceting, the geometric break-up of the faces of the two boys who confront the viewer in ''Pittsburgh Memories,'' is inspired by African masks and what is described as primitive art in general.

Bearden incorporates such references with great sophistication and a range of meaning. The visual jumble of each of the protagonists' faces is much like extreme scarring, and reflects a rough and dangerous growing up.

Perhaps the key to what Bearden accomplished in the projections is that, while they can allude to folk art, and familiar allusions can draw a viewer into a work, they are not folk art. Bearden's friend, the writer Albert Murray, says tantalizingly in an interview in the catalogue: ''Bearden's very special awareness of the ritualistic dimension of stylization saved him from genre, from just being provincial.'' ''When you turn the raw experience into a style, the style becomes the statement.'' 
If viewers accept that style is the key, they can appreciate its varieties: the rhythmic angles, for example, that dominate ''Spring Street'' and bring Analytical Cubism and Stuart Davis to mind, versus the seeming chaos of ''The Dove,'' in which the bird, once found, is the composition's calm center.

The photomontage projections may have been a brief chapter in Bearden's career, but they led to the large-scale collages that he made for the rest of his life and for which he is becoming widely recognized.

William Zimmer, 1996, NY Times