“Art in the Streets” (MOCA) L.A.- I think Art in the Streets Is the most comprehensive show on graffiti art to date with giant installations of city blocks, cars, & murals it goes beyond the stereotypes and into regional cultures it represents. From Venice Dogtown to Brooklyn Heights it’s an education into itself on how graffiti art has redefining art in a way not done since Marcel Duchamp’s Dada masterpiece “The Urinal” of 1917 in begging the question, What is Art? Th exhibiiton runs through Aug in downtown Los Angeles.
“Art in the Streets” (MOCA) L.A.- Is the most comprehensive show on graffiti art to date with giant installations of city blocks, cars, & murals it goes beyond the stereotypes and into regional cultures it represents. From Venice Dogtown to Brooklyn Heights it’s an education into itself on how graffiti art has redefining art in a way not done since Marcel Duchamp’s Dada masterpiece “The Urinal” of 1917 in begging the question, What is Art?
Sharon Fitzgerald
Los Angeles
Pictured: Banky
Best part about my lecture at the Huntington Library today: a visit to the Medieval stained glass by William Morris, image designed by Edward Burne-Jones. Love Burne-Jones!Sharon Fitzgerald, MA
(monthly lecture series in Los Angeles)
Art in the Streets
Best Exhibition on Gaffiti Art
Los Angeles- MOCA
Art in the Streets is the first major U.S. museum survey of graffiti and street art. Curated by MOCA Director Jeffrey Deitch and Associate Curators Roger Gastman and Aaron Rose, the exhibition will trace the development of graffiti and street art from the 1970s to the global movement it has become today, concentrating on key cities such as New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, London, and Sao Paulo, where a unique visual language or attitude has evolved.
The exhibition will feature paintings, mixed media sculptures, and interactive installations by 50 of the most dynamic artists and will emphasize Los Angeles’s role in the evolution of graffiti and street art, with special sections dedicated to seminal local movements such as cholo graffiti and Dogtown skateboard culture. A comprehensive timeline illustrated with artwork, photos, video, and ephemera will provide a historical context for the work.
For more details on this show, check out:http://www.moca.org/museum/exhibitiondetail.php?id=443
Great show, look out for - Raymond Pettibon (Black Flag artist) Craig Stecyk (Dogtown) Shepard Fairey, Esteban O.
Sharon
Come spend the day at LACMA with the Los Angeles Art History Meetup Group. Next meetup and lecture is at LACMA April 2nd at 2:30pm. Free and open to the public, click pic for deets. Sharon Fitzgerald, MA
or visit:
http://www.meetup.com/Art-History-LA/events/16241883/#initialized
Artemisia Gentileschi
1593- 1692 - Female Baroque Painter
(Both Artemisia & her father, Orazio, are at the Getty Center)
In photo: the Judith & Holofernes series & the Penitent Magdalene
Artemisia Gentileschi was born in Rome on 8 July 1593, the eldest child of the Tuscan painter Orazio Gentileschi. Artemisia was introduced to painting in her father’s workshop, showing much more talent than her brothers, who worked alongside her. She learned drawing, how to mix color and how to paint. Since her father’s style took inspiration from Caravaggio during that period, her style was just as heavily influenced in turn
She was one of the greatest of Caravaggesque painters and a formidable personality. She was precociously gifted, built up a European reputation, and lived a life of independence rare for a woman of the time. Born in Rome, she worked mainly there and in Florence until she settled in Naples in 1630 (she also visited her father in England in 1638-40).
The Rape:
In 1612, despite her early talent, Artemisia was denied access to the all-male professional academies for art. At the time, her father was working with Agostino Tassi to decorate the vaults of Casino della Rose inside the Pallavicini Rospigliosi Palace in Rome, so Orazio hired the painter to tutor his daughter privately. During this tutelage, Tassi raped Artemisia. Another man, Cosimo Quorlis had helped Tassi with the rape. After the initial rape, Artemisia continued to have sexual relations with Tassi, with the expectation that they were going to be married. However, Tassi reneged on his promise to marry Artemisia after he heard the rumour that she was having an affair with another man. Quorlis had threatened that if he could not have her, he would publicly humiliate her. Orazio pressed charges against Tassi only after he learned that Artemisia and Tassi were not going to be married. Orazio also claimed that Tassi stole a painting of Judith from the Gentileschi household. The major issue of this trial was the fact that Tassi had deflowered Artemisia. If Artemisia had not been a virgin before Tassi raped her, the Gentileschis would not have been able to press charges.
In the ensuing 7-month trial, it was discovered that Tassi had planned to murder his wife, had enjoined in adultery with his sister-in-law and planned to steal some of Orazio’s paintings. During the trial, Artemisia was given a gynecological examination and was tortured using thumbscrews. Both procedures were used to corroborate the truth of her allegation, the torture device used due to the belief that if a person can tell the same story under torture as without it, the story must be true[Citation Needed]. At the end of the trial Tassi was sentenced to imprisonment for one year, although he never served the time. The trial has subsequently influenced the feminist view of Artemisia Gentileschi during the late 20th century.
In Florence, Artemisia enjoyed huge success. She was the first woman accepted into the Accademia delle Arti del Disegno (Academy of the Arts of Drawing). She maintained good relations with the most respected artists of her time, such as Cristofano Allori, and was able to conquer the favours and the protection of influential people, starting with Granduke Cosimo II de’ Medici and especially of the Granduchess Cristina. She had a good relationship with Galileo Galilei with whom she remained in epistolary contact for a long time.
In 1638 Artemisia joined her father in London at the court of Charles I of England, where Orazio became court painter and received the important job of decorating a ceiling (allegory of Trionfo della pace e delle Arti (Triumph of the peace and the Arts) in the Casa delle Delizie of Queen Henrietta Maria of France in Greenwich). Father and daughter were once again working together, although helping her father was probably not her only reason for travelling to London: Charles I had convoked her in his court, and it was not possible to refuse. Charles I was a fanatical collector, willing to ruin public finances to follow his artistic wishes.
While in Florence, Artemisia and Pierantonio (her husband) had four sons and one daughter. But only the daughter, Prudenzia, survived to adulthood — following her mother’s return to Rome in 1621 and later move to Naples. After her mother’s death, Prudenzia slipped into obscurity and little is known of her subsequent life.
……You can see paintings by her and her father at the Getty Center. My favorite thing about Artemisia, is her use of color. Note the saturated colors of red, blue and yellow -lush, deep and bold.
Hitler’s Degenerate Art Exhibition that toured 11 cities in Europe
Entartete Kunst - which literally means Degenerate Art - was the name the nazi regime in Germany generically gave to modern art, every kind of art that wasn’t figurative, imitative, realist or traditional. In this category they included, mostly, vanguardist paintings and sculptures, of an abstract, surrealist or expressionist nature. The authors of these “freaks” were, according to the nazis, Bolshevik jews - a threat, therefore - and were, consequently, subject to sanctions of various sorts, like being forbidden from displaying or selling their work, from teaching, etc. These artists included Wassily Kandinsky, Marc Chagall, Max Ernst, Paul Klee, to name only a few of the best-known ones. But Degenerate Art was so much more than this.
The expression Degenerate Art was skilfully spread by Hitler’s propaganda minister, Josef Goebbels, in a huge campaign aimed at the discredit of modern art. In 1937, a comission appointed by him was in charge of confiscating every work of art that was considered “subversive” from museums and personal collections - a total of 5 000 works. Most of them were German, but they also included paintings by Matisse, Picasso and even van Gogh. With this massive lot of paintings, they set up an exhibition to ridicule modern art and to try to get its visitors to feel repulsed by these artistic expressions, which, according to the organization, stained the genuine German culture. As you can guess, the name of the exhibit was Entartete Kunst.
On July 19th, 1937, about 650 paintings, sculptures, drawings, etc. were shown to the public in a run-down building in Munich. The purposedly disorganized and biased way the works of art were pilled up in was complemented by “pedagogical” slogans that aimed at “explaining” their meaning to the viewers: Revelation of the racial Jewish soul, Insult to German women, , Mocking of the Divine, etc. The exhibit travelled through other cities in Germany and Austria.
While this event took place, Goebbels ordered the arrest of even more works of degenerate art, that reached an estimated number of 16 000 works! After the exhibit, several works of art became part of the private collections of some of the members of the Nazi party, who were well aware of their value (Hermann Goering being one of them), while others were sent to Switzerland to be auctioned off. That was the only way they were able to survive to this day.
Curiously enough, this discredit campaign had an ironic outcome. At the same time, the Nazis promoted another big exhibit, destined to show off the official art, approved by the regime. They pompously called it Grosse deutsche Kunstausstellung (Great German Art Exhibit) an lodged it at the amazing Haus der Kunst, in Munich. After it was over, they saw that the latter had been viewed by a little over a quarter of the number of people who attended the Entartete Kunst…
Artistic movements condemned as degenerate by the Nazi
Bauhaus
Cubism
Dada
Expressionism
Fauvism
Impressionism
New Objectivity
Surrealism
Thanks for visiting TheArtHistoryBlog
Sharon
Still Life with Lemons, Oranges and a Rose, 1633
Francisco de Zurbarán Spanish, 1598-1664
On view at the Norton Simon Museum
This is one of the 5 most important pieces of art to see in Los Angeles!
This is where a Still Life can transcend to a spiritual object of meditation….
Although painted with meticulous naturalism, there is something unique and mysterious about this group of common place objects silhouetted against the darkness by a brilliant almost unearthly light, the motif seems suspended before us like objects of meditation with Zen-like clarity.
Zurbarán is best known for his numerous paintings of saints in which he portrayed their devotions, visions and ecstasies. This painting is his only signed and dated still life. Its underlying and symbolic theme may be an homage to the Virgin. The citrons are a paschal fruit and, with the orange blossoms, suggest chastity. Love and purity are symbolized in the rose and water-filled cup. An air of gravity and spiritual austerity proceeds from the strict horizontal rhythm and the limitation of detail. Indeed, the objects appear to have a mystical allusion, just like the votive offerings on an altar.
Sharon
The Art History Blog
sources: The Norton Simon Museum
Wawel Castle in Kraków, Poland
History: On the high hill on the bank of the Vistula River, originally a mediaeval castle called Wawel had been built. As in 1138, Kraków became the capital of Poland and the Wawel’s Cathedral became the coronation place of the Polish kings, the castle became their most important residence.
The fire of 1499 destroyed Wawel, but as the reconstruction had been necessary Sigismundus I The Old invited Italian architects, Polish, Italian, German and Dutch artists to build Wawel as we see it today – a splendid Renaissance royal residence, with its impressive volume placed high on the hill, beautiful courtyard. As the works continued (1502-1536), the Royal apartements were refurbished in the early Baroque style, received marble fireplaces and painted celings.
Today:
Wawel is today an interesting museum with several exhibitions open permanently to the public: The Royal Chambers – presents the castle’s interiors, Flemish tapestry collection, royal portraits, Italian Renaissance furniture, old paintings collection a.o. works by Cranach and Rubens. The Royal Private Apartments – presents private rooms where Polish Royalty lived.
Crown Treasury and Armory – exhibits regalia of Poland and royal jewelry, precious armors and weapons with the famous Szczerbiec – coronation sword of Polish Kings.
Oriental Art – shows Turkish Ottoman Empire tents and banners offered to Wawel by Jan III Sobieski after the battle of Vienna (1683), Turkish and Persian weapons and carpets and a collection of Chinese and Japanese porcelain.
The Lost Wawel - an exhibition showing the archaeological remains the early 11th c. church of St. St. Felix and Adauctus; exhibition of objects found during the excavations on the Wawel Hill, multimedia presentation of the Wawel Hill’s history. This exhibition is currently closed because of the renovation.
Wawel’s Cathedral
Wawel’s cathedral is a shrine of national importance. Originally built in a gothic style (1320-1364) has been throughout centuries rebuilt, made richer with adjoining chapels, and transformed into the real sanctuary of Polish dramatic history. The cathedral is a most important burial place of Polish kings and national heroes. Two important Polish poets and four saints are also buried there.
Dragon’s Cave (Smocza Jama)
Wawel’s hill has several caves. In the biggest of them, according to the legend, a huge dragon spiting with fire used to live and to terrorize the Krakow’s population. A simple shoemaker’s pupil poisoned the dragon giving him to eat the sheep staffed with sulfur. The dragon, ick and confused crawled out of the cave, drank tons of water from the Vistula River and burst into pieces. According to the legend, the shoemaker married the prince’s daughter and became the prince on the Wawel hill himself. Today the Cave is still free from the dragon and can be safely visited by the tourists.
![beyondneptune:
Ten-Minute Art School Course
Post-Impressionism
Beginnings
Post-Impressionism emerged out of the stylistic disagreements and personal animosities that eventually brought down Impressionism. Yet it was itself never a cohesive movement, and the label embraces a number of very different groups who all attempted to replace Impressionism as the leading avant-garde of the late nineteenth century. Indeed, many of its foremost figures were rivals in method and approach: Gauguin and Seurat both detested one another and shared a low opinion of each other’s styles; and while van Gogh revered the work of Degas and Rousseau, he was skeptical of Cézanne. The artist who, perhaps more than any other, signaled the beginning of the new trend, was Georges Seurat. His Pointillism (or Divisionism, or Neo-Impressionism, as it is variously called) sought a new, scientific approach to color. But other artists, such as Gauguin, van Gogh, and Cézanne, would soon prove equally important, and they all differed greatly. Paris was unquestionably the fount of the movement, and artists from Britain, America, the Netherlands, and elsewhere, flocked there in the hopes of absorbing the city’s rich culture and joining its artistic elite. However, the emphasis on symbolic and expressive content in Post-Impressionism meant that the life of the city, considered as a subject for art, was no longer the draw it had been to the previous generation, and many painters matured elsewhere. Cézanne spent most of his career in Provence; van Gogh led a peripatetic existence, touching down in France, Belgium and Holland; and, in what is by far the most famous renunciation of Paris, Gauguin settled in Tahiti.
Concepts and Styles
Despite the myriad approaches and ideologies associated with Post-Impressionists, they were united by their desire to overturn the superficiality of Impressionism. They felt that the Impressionists had allowed their preoccupations with technique, and the effects of natural light, to overshadow the importance of subject matter. But their impulses led them to solve this problem in different ways. Some, like Cézanne, sought greater pictorial structure, and they placed great emphasis on the specific context of a particular landscape or still life. Others, like Gauguin, sought a deeper engagement with expressive and symbolic content: they created paintings “de tete” (from memory or imagination), and they expressed a strong connection with the subject matter that inspired the work, whether it derived from religion, literature or mythology. These artists - Symbolists, or Synthetists - also placed greater emphasis on harmonious surface design: Gauguin was one of the first artists to refer to his work as “abstract.” In the fall of 1888, van Gogh and Gauguin shared a small apartment and studio space (famously known as The Yellow House), in Arles, in the south of France, and in the process forged a rocky, but mutually beneficial, relationship. They experimented with new approaches to painting, rejecting academic approaches to realistic depiction and fine finish, as well as the Impressionist’s fixation with light and color. Instead they worked with thickly applied paint in saturated hues, to create rich surface patterns. Although most of the Post-Impressionists were drawn to symbolic and expressive content, some, such as Paul Signac and Georges Seurat, extended the Impressionists’ interests in color theory. Known as Pointillists and Neo-Impressionists, they applied color in dense fields of tiny dots in order to mimic the vivid and vibrating appearance of natural light. Many of the Post-Impressionists were drawn to primitivism in their search for more vivid styles and symbolic content. Among them, Henri Rousseau was championed as a pioneer: completely self-taught, his highly imaginative landscapes and jungle scenes, such as The Sleeping Gypsy (1897), and The Dream (1910), proved highly influential, inspiring the Fauves, Cubists, and Surrealists. Rousseau’s paintings were modern not so much due to their subject matter, but because of the artist’s approach to abstract form and surface pattern, and the fact that he painted almost entirely from imagination.
Later Developments
One of the most important Post-Impressionists - and arguably the one who bridged the gap between Impressionism and various early twentieth century styles - was Paul Cézanne. Matisse and Picasso both reportedly referred to him as “the father of us all.” His late work is characterized by abstract exercises in the articulation of space and volume through color. Rather than describe the overall impression of a scene, Cézanne sought to articulate its underlying structure, often in ways which suggest that the landscape is built up from the simplest geometric components. As he once famously wrote in a letter to the Symbolist painter Emile Bernard, “Treat nature in terms of the cylinder, the sphere, the cone, all in perspective.” It was not until 1910 that the term “Post-Impressionism” was coined, when English artist and critic Roger Fry organized an exhibition for London’s Grafton Galleries, entitled “Manet and the Post-Impressionists.” The exhibition was dominated by van Gogh, Cézanne, and particularly Gauguin, and also included works by the Fauves. Manet was a lesser presence: although today he is generally associated with the Impressionists, Fry felt that he was early in his rejection of that group’s naturalism. Fry acknowledged in the catalogue that the label, Post-Impressionism, embraced many styles - at one stage he had even considered referring to the group as ‘expressionists’ - and its lack of precision points to disparity in the styles and interests of the artists it encompassed.
[via The Art Story]](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lddfiwmkwU1qa32ieo1_500.jpg)
Ten-Minute Art School Course
Post-Impressionism
BeginningsPost-Impressionism emerged out of the stylistic disagreements and personal animosities that eventually brought down Impressionism. Yet it was itself never a cohesive movement, and the label embraces a number of very different groups who all attempted to replace Impressionism as the leading avant-garde of the late nineteenth century. Indeed, many of its foremost figures were rivals in method and approach: Gauguin and Seurat both detested one another and shared a low opinion of each other’s styles; and while van Gogh revered the work of Degas and Rousseau, he was skeptical of Cézanne.
Concepts and Styles
The artist who, perhaps more than any other, signaled the beginning of the new trend, was Georges Seurat. His Pointillism (or Divisionism, or Neo-Impressionism, as it is variously called) sought a new, scientific approach to color. But other artists, such as Gauguin, van Gogh, and Cézanne, would soon prove equally important, and they all differed greatly.
Paris was unquestionably the fount of the movement, and artists from Britain, America, the Netherlands, and elsewhere, flocked there in the hopes of absorbing the city’s rich culture and joining its artistic elite. However, the emphasis on symbolic and expressive content in Post-Impressionism meant that the life of the city, considered as a subject for art, was no longer the draw it had been to the previous generation, and many painters matured elsewhere. Cézanne spent most of his career in Provence; van Gogh led a peripatetic existence, touching down in France, Belgium and Holland; and, in what is by far the most famous renunciation of Paris, Gauguin settled in Tahiti.Despite the myriad approaches and ideologies associated with Post-Impressionists, they were united by their desire to overturn the superficiality of Impressionism. They felt that the Impressionists had allowed their preoccupations with technique, and the effects of natural light, to overshadow the importance of subject matter. But their impulses led them to solve this problem in different ways. Some, like Cézanne, sought greater pictorial structure, and they placed great emphasis on the specific context of a particular landscape or still life. Others, like Gauguin, sought a deeper engagement with expressive and symbolic content: they created paintings “de tete” (from memory or imagination), and they expressed a strong connection with the subject matter that inspired the work, whether it derived from religion, literature or mythology. These artists - Symbolists, or Synthetists - also placed greater emphasis on harmonious surface design: Gauguin was one of the first artists to refer to his work as “abstract.”
Later Developments
In the fall of 1888, van Gogh and Gauguin shared a small apartment and studio space (famously known as The Yellow House), in Arles, in the south of France, and in the process forged a rocky, but mutually beneficial, relationship. They experimented with new approaches to painting, rejecting academic approaches to realistic depiction and fine finish, as well as the Impressionist’s fixation with light and color. Instead they worked with thickly applied paint in saturated hues, to create rich surface patterns.
Although most of the Post-Impressionists were drawn to symbolic and expressive content, some, such as Paul Signac and Georges Seurat, extended the Impressionists’ interests in color theory. Known as Pointillists and Neo-Impressionists, they applied color in dense fields of tiny dots in order to mimic the vivid and vibrating appearance of natural light.
Many of the Post-Impressionists were drawn to primitivism in their search for more vivid styles and symbolic content. Among them, Henri Rousseau was championed as a pioneer: completely self-taught, his highly imaginative landscapes and jungle scenes, such as The Sleeping Gypsy (1897), and The Dream (1910), proved highly influential, inspiring the Fauves, Cubists, and Surrealists. Rousseau’s paintings were modern not so much due to their subject matter, but because of the artist’s approach to abstract form and surface pattern, and the fact that he painted almost entirely from imagination.One of the most important Post-Impressionists - and arguably the one who bridged the gap between Impressionism and various early twentieth century styles - was Paul Cézanne. Matisse and Picasso both reportedly referred to him as “the father of us all.” His late work is characterized by abstract exercises in the articulation of space and volume through color. Rather than describe the overall impression of a scene, Cézanne sought to articulate its underlying structure, often in ways which suggest that the landscape is built up from the simplest geometric components. As he once famously wrote in a letter to the Symbolist painter Emile Bernard, “Treat nature in terms of the cylinder, the sphere, the cone, all in perspective.”
It was not until 1910 that the term “Post-Impressionism” was coined, when English artist and critic Roger Fry organized an exhibition for London’s Grafton Galleries, entitled “Manet and the Post-Impressionists.” The exhibition was dominated by van Gogh, Cézanne, and particularly Gauguin, and also included works by the Fauves. Manet was a lesser presence: although today he is generally associated with the Impressionists, Fry felt that he was early in his rejection of that group’s naturalism. Fry acknowledged in the catalogue that the label, Post-Impressionism, embraced many styles - at one stage he had even considered referring to the group as ‘expressionists’ - and its lack of precision points to disparity in the styles and interests of the artists it encompassed.[via The Art Story]
Anonymous portrait, believed to be Christopher Marlowe (1585)
Was this man also William Shakespeare? - Wikipedia:Unusual articles
The Marlovian theory of Shakespeare authorship holds first that the famous Elizabethan poet, playwright and secret agent Christopher Marlowe did not die in Deptford on 30th May 1593 as the historical records show, his death having been faked, and second that his survival allowed him to be the main author of the poems and plays attributed to William Shakespeare.
see also: Shakespeare authorship question
(I know people who get goodly riled if you bring up the Shakespeare authorship question. I find it to be one of the most engaging and entertaining set of fringe theories in circulation, even though the evidence seems to bear
heavilyconclusively toward Shakespeare as the author of Shakespeare’s works.)
