Neue Galerie, NYC

Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I, 1907, 138 cm x 138 cm (54 in x 54 in)

A few yards from the Metropolitan Museum of Art is the Neue Galerie, a house museum that showcases Austrian and German art and design from the early 20th century.  I made the pilgrimage to see this Gustav Klimt painting which sold in 2006 to the Neue Galerie for 135 million dollars....basking in its gold glow, I was not disappointed.  Can there be a more gloriously beautiful portrait of a woman?  Of course there are many, but this one is right up there.

I found this somewhat sad passage on the museum website....one of the few written statements (undated) ever left by Klimt:

Linger over a cappuccino in the museum's Cafe Sabarsky, surrounded by Josef Hoffman period lighting fixtures, Adolf Loos furniture, and Otto Wagner fabrics, and ponder how excellent it would be if we could travel back and time and tell people like Klimt and Morris what an amazing influence they are having on people a century later.

Camille Paglia on Pre-Raphaelite Art

The Golden Stairs, Edward Burne-Jones, 1876-1880, Tate Gallery

 

The Wheel of Fortune, Edward Burne-Jones, 1863, Musée d'Orsay

"Burne-Jones' transsexual world is populated by one incestuously self-propagating being. We are in another Late Romantic bower, shadowless under a grey sky. The ritual limitation on his sexual personae is a Decadent closure, denying our eye right of access to other human types.  The Golden Stairs (1880) expands Rossetti's triplets and quadruplets. We drown in a shower of identical women, eighteen in all, cloning themselves and assaulting the eye. Beauty in excess makes Decadent dyspepsia. The sadomasochistic tableau of The Wheel of Fortune multiplies the male. Giant Fortuna turns her torture wheel, chaining a row of beautiful young men, male odalisques in Michelangelo's troubled late style. Each seems languid twin of the next, limbs stretched in sensual suffering.

   "Burne-Jones' embowered nature begat Art Nouveau, which flourished from the 1880s to World War I. Then modern machine culture geometrized Art Nouveau's organic patterns into Art Deco. So Spenser's dynasty, extending through High and Late Romanticism, unexpectedly ends in the Chrysler Building and Radio City Music Hall. Burne-Jones' serpentine line comes from Blake, whose rapacious flamelike flowers reveal the covert sexual meaning of Art Nouveau's arabesques. The copious histories of Art Nouveau lack psychological insight. Twenty years ago, I was struck by Art Nouveau's popularity among male homosexual aesthetes, for whom neither it nor Beardsley had to be revived, since they had never been forgotten. In every star, style, or art work celebrated by these Alexandrine homosexuals, there is always a secret hermaphroditism. So with Art Nouveau, the most epicene style since Mannerism."

.....read the rest by Camille Paglia.

 

Chant d'Amour, Edward Burne-Jones, 1866-1873, Metropolitan Museum of Art

 

The Depths of the Sea, Edward Burne-Jones, 1887, Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University

The Perseus Series, The Doom Fulfilled, Edward Burne-Jones, 1884-1885

 The Tree of Forgiveness, Edward Burne-Jones, 1881-1882, Liverpool Museum

Down and dirty, artist Robert Burden

Yup, why clean your car when rogue artist Robert Burden can turn your dirty wheels into a work of art!? You can see more of his work here. Robert, we could use you in New York City!

The harder I work, the luckier I get.

A great quote from Samuel Goldwyn.  Well this lucky girl is within days of empty-nesting it to the upper west side of Manhattan.  I am excited.  The movers come on Monday.  You might appreciate, perhaps knowing me a bit by now, that the thought of endless museums and galleries in NYC (combined with my dream science job) has led to a near permanent smile on my face lately.  I'll be a voyeur, looking in on the super-cool hip artistes, like young Charlotte Young, soaking it all in.  Click to view her artist's statement.  Brilliant!  :-)

John Singer Sargent, 1856-1925

Nonchaloir (Repose), 1911
oil on canvas, 25 1/8 x 30 inches (64 x 76 cm.)

National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

photograph Michael Weinberg Photography 

During a few hours before a meeting today I ducked into the National Gallery of Art in Washington D. C..  Standing in front of this painting I was reminded of how much I liked the work of John Singer Sargent.  The satin of her clothing, painted in whites and yellows, practically shimmered on the wall in front of me.  Click to really get the picture.  The model was his niece.

Tax the Rich, David Mabb

 

 Go see new work by our favorite William Morris inspired artist.  

Wednesday, 29th June, 10-7pm

Refreshments 12-2pm

Flowers Galleries, 21 Cork St, London 

Wish I could be there!

Why we travel....

 Butterflies and poppies, 1889

 Roses, 1890

 Emperor moth, 1889

 Blossoming almond tree, 1890

 

The Bridge in the Rain (after Hiroshige), 1887

Are you reminded of anyone?  A famous painter perhaps?  One we have paid homage to before on this blog?  Amsterdam is the home of the Van Gogh Museum, caretaker to many of this famous artist's paintings and sketches.  I'm sure there are readers of this blog who know far more about Van Gogh than myself but, when confronted with the entire oeuvre of this mad genius, I was moved by a side of him I had never seen before, namely paintings influenced by his fascination with Japanese art and culture.

Van Gogh never traveled in the East (unlike his pal Gauguin who eventually made it all the way to the western Pacific) but he was inspired by the beauty and simplicity of the Japanese aesthetic and incorporated those influences in obvious ways in his paintings over a short period in the late 1880s.  Looking at these paintings I reflected on how this blog, a continuing mish-mash of travel and art, is propelled by that same spirit of finding inspiration in the unbelievably diverse cultures of our world. 

Ethiopian Magic Scrolls

"Eyes, meant to spot evil and stare it down, abound in this art.....What is clear in every detail of these objects is a believed-in vivacity. They were created to generate live spiritual power in the material world, which is why the devotees carried them everywhere during the day and hung them unfurled on the walls of their homes at night. Like computers in sleep mode, scrolls were always on, ready to power-up into action"  --- Holland Cotter, writing in the NYTimes

This level of protection will set you back around $3000-$5000.  Or maybe you could just spend $4000 on a trip to Ethiopia and pick them up in a bazaar for a few hundred.  Hard to know.....

What photons say. Happy Easter.

click to enlarge

jacksonpollock.org

(me)

Jackson Pollock's splatters really do look nicer than mine.  Make your own Pollock painting at www.jacksonpollock.org.  It's fun....a puzzle to figure out how it works, then more fun creating your masterpiece!

Number 1, 1950 (Lavender Mist)

"It is impossible to make a forgery of Jackson Pollock's work," Time magazine critic Robert Hughes claimed in 1982. It is a telling comment that gets to the heart of Pollock's authenticity as an artist." Lavender Mist about sums up his most ravishing, atmospheric painting....Pollock used the patterns caused by the separation and marbling of one enamel wet in another, the tiny black striations in the dusty pink, to produce an infinity of tones." 

---from the National Gallery of Art website

For the love of color...

I think you will like this blog, For the love of COLOR, which has the motto "Engaging the world with a colorful perspective and finding inspiration in everything from architecture to nature".  Here are a few excerpts.  There must be some kind of software that extracts colors from photographs but it is not explained.  Does anyone remember Martha Stewart's first set of paint chips?

 

Van Gogh's Starry Nights revisited

Dear WM fans, As always, thanks for the comments---they are like little dollops of excitement falling into my day.  Recently, an anonymous reader left the following comment on the post about Arthur Buxton's pie charts of Van Gogh paintings---"Where is Starry Night? Must have lots of blue and a good bit of yellow.  None of the pies match it!" 

Well, I initially thought the same thing.  And the comment reminded me of another very cool and very new resource on the web --- the Goggle Art Project.  You can "visit" famous museums all over the world and look at some of the most famous art in the world.  In fact, in many cases, you can get much closer to it than you could in the actual museum.  So I went the the MOMA in NYC to take a closer look at Starry Nights......

 

I zoomed here...

 then there... 

 I zoomed everywhere... 

(all click to enlarge)

My conclusion: The top left pie chart of the Buxton poster (a small fraction of that poster below) is Starry Nights.   Or is it the bottom right one below?   Argh, I can't decide.   Keep in mind the pie charts only plot the five most common colors (which of course begs the question of how the colors are defined.  Are they Pantone colors?).  At any rate, go have some fun at the museum!

Van Gogh Pie Charts by Arthur Buxton

(click to enlarge slightly)

It says: "28 van Gogh paintings visualized as pie charts showing the five most common colours in each as a percentage.  Can you tell which one's which?"

Art meets science and makes beautiful children.  Would love to see more!  Artist Arthur Buxton is having a show at The Arts House in Bristol with a reception on Friday the 18th of February. 

Happy New Year!

Art from my magical Aunt Anne....click to enlarge.  Can you buy DNA rattles for your children?  What a great idea...Anne you should patent that!

Monsterdrawings on Post-it notes

Who do you get when you cross Edward Gorey with Maurice Sendak? A Denmarkian named Don Kenn!  Here's the link to his website....take your kids....how come this guy doesn't have a book? 

 

And if you like your bedtime stories twisted, make sure you didn't miss the Struwwelpeter post.

a baby Jesus pic for xmas....love to all...

Rest on the Flight into Egypt (c. 1597), Caravaggio 

What to buy a Morris enthusiast for Xmas?

Artist and fellow Morris enthusiast David Mabb channels The Great One and Russian textile designer Luibov Popova in his bold new work.  He has recently released a collection of limited edition signed prints which you can see above and read about here.  The Victorian and Albert Museum bought one (~US$120), so can you!

Last summer I had the pleasure of visiting Mabb in his studio, link here.