Category Archives: about artists

T IS FOR THEFT (AS IN ART), THE A TO Z’S OF ART

Vermeer, The Concert

I find the world of stolen art and forgeries fascinating.  The above Vermeer was stolen from the Gardner Museum – considered by many to be the greatest unsolved art heist in history.  Theft of art is thought to be the third largest crime on the planet, after drugs and arms.

Here is a list of books I thoroughly enjoyed which all about forgery or theft.

The Forgery of Venus – this fictional book was the book that started my fascination with forgery and theft.  It is a wild ride, dealing with drugs, forgery, time travel and the Nazi’s plunder.

The Vanished Smile, The Mysterious Theft of the Mona Lisa – yes, this iconic painting was stolen from the Louvre, with Picasso actually being questioned.

Priceless, How I Went Undercover To Rescue the World’s Stolen Treasures – written by former FBI agency Robert Wittman, who began the agencies Art Crime Team.

Provenance, How a Con Man and a Forger Rewrote the History of Modern Art – so interesting about how a con man created provenance for forged pieces of art!  A good read about art history too.

The Gardner Heist, the True Story of the World’s Largest Unsolved Art Theft – another good art history read, but also an nail biting look at a long investigation that travels the globe, even suspecting the IRA at one time.

Stealing Rembrants, the Untold Stories of Notorious Art Heists  – a great ride across the planet investigating the underworld of art theft.

The Rescue Artist: A True Story of Art, Thieves, and the Hunt for a Missing Masterpiece – starts with the theft of The Scream by Munch. 

Here is an article about the most recent heist in Rotterdam last week.

 

 

 

S IS FOR SURREALISM, THE A TO Z’S OF ART

Max Ernst

 

What is surrealism? Well, there isn’t a simple definition.  Briefly, the surrealist works will have elements of surprise with  unexpected and very illogical things together.  Andre’ Breton, the founder of surrealism called is “pure psychic automatism in it’s pure state”.  He went on to write the Manifesto of Surrealism.

The Surrealists were interested in children’s art, folk art, and outsider art. They were also very interested in the insane. They were tired of trivial every day living, they loved exploring dreams, magic and the subconscious.  In fact, the movement really began with literary men exploring automatic writing.

They loved to play games, one of which was called “exquisite corpses”. This was a verbal game where three or more people were assigned part of a sentence, usually the subject, verb, a predicate and so forth, which was unknown to the rest of the group. The game got it’s name from the first sentence produced in this method “The exquistie/corpse/shall drink/the bubbling wine”.  The visual artists did much the same game by drawing and folding the paper so the next artist could not see what was drawn already. The Surrealists loved chance, and as Breton said “they stood for something that couldn’t possibly be the work of a single brain.”

This is a very simplified version of what surrealism is – there have been tomes and tomes written about it. Not wanting to bore you, I thought I’d just share some examples of surrealist art.  From left to right, the artists are: Valdimir Kush, George De Chirico, Joan Miro, Yves Tanguy, Rene’ Magritte, and Salvador Dali.

 

R IS FOR REMBRANDT PART 1, THE A TO Z’s OF ART

Frankly, I am extremely tired.  I spent the day car shopping and actually purchased a car. You must understand, this was a big step, I haven’t had a car payment in 21 years!  I wasn’t going to post anything, even though I am committed to the Blogtoberfest and posting every day in October.  I already knew I was going to write about Rembrandt, but I don’t have the energy to tell the interesting facts about his life. So, I thought I’d post some of his self portraits.  After all, there are at least 40 paintings and 31 etchings as well as some drawings.

G IS FOR GEORGIA O’KEEFE, THE A TO Z’S OF ART

Georgia O’Keefe and wrangler Orville Cox,
photographed by Ansel Adams

Georgia O’Keefe was a real pioneer, an artist ahead of her time.  Here as some fun facts about her:

  • Married to photographer Alfred Steiglitz, he took over 300 pictures of her, often nude.
  • Was the first woman to receive a retrospective show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. (1946)
  • Sold her first giant flower painting in 1928, at age 41, for $25,000. In fact, she sold six of them, which apparently was the largest single sale to a living American artist at that time.
  • In 1985, the year before she died, one sold for $1,000,000.
  • She received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Gerald Ford, and the National Medal of Arts from Ronald Reagan.
  • A dinosasur fossil is named after her.

Effigia Okeeffeae

  • She lived to be 98, 1887 – 1986
  • She often painted in the nude.
  • She was considered pretty cantakerous her entire life, not having patience for children and often ignoring people she didn’t like – which consisted of fans, agressive men, competitive women and anybody that told her what to do!

The Mona Lisa, O’Keefe

 

Here are some Georgia O’Keefe quotes.

“I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn’t say any other way – things I had no words for.”

“I’ve been absolutely terrified every moment of my life – I’ve never let it keep me from doing a single thing I wanted to do.”

“Singing has always seemed to me the most perfect means of expression. It is so spontaneous. And after singing, I think the violin. Since I cannot sing, I paint. ”

“I hate flowers – I paint them because they’re cheaper than models and they don’t move.”

“I have things in my head that are not like what anyone has taught me – shapes and ideas so near to me – so natural to my way of being and thinking that it hasn’t occurred to me to put them down. ”

“It was in the 1920s, when nobody had time to reflect, that I saw a still-life painting with a flower that was perfectly exquisite, but so small you really could not appreciate it.”

“Sun-bleached bones were most wonderful against the blue – that blue that will always be there as it is now after all man’s destruction is finished. ”

“You get whatever accomplishment you are willing to declare.”

“I believe I would rather have Stieglitz like something – anything I had done – than anyone else I know.”

“I had to create an equivalent for what I felt about what I was looking at – not copy it.”

“I know now that most people are so closely concerned with themselves that they are not aware of their own individuality, I can see myself, and it has helped me to say what I want to say in paint.”

“I often painted fragments of things because it seemed to make my statement as well as or better than the whole could.”

Do you have a favorite Georgia O’Keefe painting?  Finding out these few facts about her made me curious, I’m going to read her biography next

 

 

L IS FOR LOUVRE, THE A TO Z’S OF ART

THE LOUVRE

Today’s post is going to be pretty short and sweet – listing some interesting facts about the Louvre, located in Paris.

  • built as a fortress in the 14th Century
  • was a palace for a while in the 16th Century
  • became a museum open to the public in 1793
  • you can visit the apartment of Napoleon III
  • the most famous piece of art at the Louvre is probably the Mona Lisa, which was stolen in 1911.

newspaper article about the theft of the Mona Lisa

  • Picasso was questioned about the theft and his friend, the poet Apollinaire was actually briefly accused
  •  no one noticed the theft for 24 hours
  • you can read about the theft in the book The Vanished Smile
  • there are has approximately one million pieces of art, and around 35,000 are on display at any given time
  • to see the 35,000 pieces on display, spending one minute at each one, it would take approximately 100 days looking 24/7 without a break.
  • The Pyramid consists of 603 rhombus shaped and 70 triangular glass segments.
  • one can enter the Carosel de Louvre through the Pyramid, which has a McDonalds, Virgin Megatores, Apple, Esprit and even a Hertz.
  • it is closed on Tuesday
  • official website


K IS FOR ANSELM KEIFER, THE A TO Z’S OF ART!

Anselm Keifer, Women of Antiquity

Anselm Keifer is one of my favorite living artists.  Born in Germany in 1945, he studied with Joseph Beuys during the 1970s.  Frequently using things such as straw, ash, clay, lead, cement and shellac in his works, he creates textures that I love!   He frequently uses themes that revolve around German history and the horrors of the holocaust.

Anselm Keifer, Women of Antiquity

 

The above photograph is from his series Women of Antiquity.  This addresses the unfair treatment of women in many mythologies, particularly strong women who were often persecuted and usually murdered. The figure in the forefrunt is the poet Myrtis, represented by replacing her head with a lead book, possibly symbolizing the weight of knowledge.  Next is Hypatia, a philosopher and mathematician, represented by a glass geometric shape, an homage to Albrecht Durer’s famous engraving of a Melancholia as a damaged cube.  The last figure is Candidia, a Roman witch known for weaving vipers into her hair.  Keifer has replaced the vipers with rusted razor wire.  Don’t you just love the symbolizm?

The sculptures are made of bronze giving them a sense of strength.  But by making them look so fragile, they also manage to seem vulnerable. 

I included the painting below because – well because I just love his work!

Anselm Keifer, The Milky Way, 1985-87

HAPPY BIRTHDAY MARC CHAGALL!

“When Matisse dies, Chagall will be the only painter left that understands what color really is”  – Pablo Picasso

I And The Village 1911

 

Art critic Robert Hughes said Chagall was “the quintessential Jewish artist of the twentieth century”. He is considered one of the most successful artists of the 20th century.  An early modernist, he created works in many mediums, including painting,  illustrations, stained glass, stage sets, and fine art prints to name a few.

Born Moishe Shagal in Belarus, he was the oldest of nine children of a very close knit Jewish family.  Images from his happy childhood appear in his work throughout his lifetime.

In 1910 he moved to Paris and stayed there for four years.  In 1914 he returned home, married, and initially supported the Russian revolution.  He was appointed Commisar of Fine Arts for Vitebsk and established a progressive art school.  But the infighting at the academy and political pressures forced him out.

The Chagall’s then moved to Moscow and he became the artist for the Moscow Yiddish State Theater and taught art in a Jewish orphanage.  But, he eventually returned to Paris and became a French citizen in 1937.  Because of the Nazi occupation of France, he fled to the US and stayed there until 1948.

The painting shown above is the inspiration for the 1964 musical Fiddler on the Roof.  The original Broadway set designer was Boris Aronson, who worked with Chagall at the Moscow Yiddish Theater.

The painting is considered Cubist – with vibrant colors of red, green and blue.  To me it is dreamlike, with goats, farmers, a violinist (Chagall played the violin) and houses, some of which are upside down.  The foreground has a green-faced man wearing a cross staring directly at a goat – which has another goat superimposed being milked.  In the background are houses, an Orthodox Church and a man dressed in black.

The small and large circles are said to represent three revolutions; the earth’s revolution around the sun, the moon’s revolution around the earth, and the sun’s revolution.  Some believe the small circle in the lower left-hand corner represents an eclipse.

This powerful painting can be seen at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

Here are some quotes from Chagall:

“Great art picks up where nature ends”

“If I create from the heart, nearly everything works; if from the head, almost nothing.”

“The dignity of the artist lies in his duty of keeping awake the sense of wonder in the world. In this long vigil he often has to vary his methods of stimulation; but in this long vigil he is also himself striving against a continual tendency to sleep.”

“Work isn’t to make money; you work to justify life.”