Photo with 12 notes
Circle of Jean-Antoine Watteau
Landscape in a Roman Manner, circa 1715-1716
Sanguine on cream antique laid paper
29.3 cm x 44 cm (11 9/16 in. x 17 5/16 in.)
Archer M. Huntington Museum Fund, 1982
Jean-Antoine Watteau is best known for his fêtes galantes, a term invented by the Académie de France in 1717 especially to describe the artist’s variation on the traditional theme of outdoor feasts. In these pictures elegant young couples frolic in pastoral settings. Watteau kept bound albums of his own landscape drawings-some made from nature and others copied from earlier artists-which he later incorporated into his painted compositions. Although Watteau never had the good fortune to travel to Italy, he had access to a substantial collection of Venetian drawings owned by Pierre Crozat, his patron and benefactor. He copied the works of Titian, Domenico Campagnola, and the Bassano family from this collection. No model has yet been identified for this drawing within that Venetian collection, but it is characteristic of others more securely attributed to this period. The mountainous background and the medieval hilltop town crowned with asymmetrical towers signal Italian inspiration. The tree in the left foreground, used as a framing device for the composition, is a familiar refrain in Watteau’s Venetian copies. The artist’s interpretations of his Venetian predecessors are unique, however, in their featherlike touch and a delicacy that suggests life’s fragility and transience.
Audio post reblogged from The Modern Art Notes Podcast with 4 notes - Played 74 times
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]This week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast features artist Martha Rosler. An exhibition of Rosler’s pictures of Cuba, taken in January, 1981, are on view now at Mitchell-Innes & Nash in Chelsea. Rosler and I talked last week in front of a live audience at the Baltimore Museum of Art.
Rosler will receive her first solo show at the Museum of Modern Art this November when MoMA hosts Rosler’s “Meta-Monumental Garage Sale” in the museum’s atrium. Rosler and I discussed the origins of her garage sales — the first one was in San Diego in the early 1970s — and the MoMA iteration in particular. That section of this week’s show is smart and particularly funny.
Anyone can donate objects to be sold in the MoMA presentation of Rosler’s garage sale. (A couple weeks ago the museum very quietly published the garage sale’s website — don’t miss it.) It should be a pretty fantastic event, full of Rosler’s wry commentary on privacy, consumerism and consumption.
Rosler has been the subject of dozens of major exhibitions, including the 1999 retrospectinve “Martha Rosler: Positions in the Life World,” which was organized by Ikon Gallery in Birmingham and Generali Foundation, Vienna. That show traveled throughout Europe and to the New Museum and the International Center of Photography in New York.
To download or subscribe to The Modern Art Notes Podcast via iTunes, click here. To download the program directly to your PC/mobile device, click here. To subscribe to The MAN Podcast’s RSS feed, click here. Click here to see images of art discussed on the show.
Source: traffic.libsyn.com
The Human Touch: Selections from the RBC Wealth Management Art Collection
June 10 - August 12, 2012
The Blanton will present selections from one of the leading corporate art collections in North America. RBC Wealth Management, headquartered in Minneapolis with local offices in Austin as well as many other U.S. and international cities, began collecting contemporary art in the early 1990s as a way to distinguish itself from other financial management firms. Committed to representing the diversity of the communities where they do business, they focused on the human figure in all its variety. Ranging from whimsical to provocative in content, and from large scale to small and across media, the exhibition will feature close to 40 works by leading international contemporary artists including Radcliffe Bailey, Lesley Dill, Gajin Fujita, Luis Gispert, Nan Goldin, Hung Liu, Kerry James Marshall, Elizabeth Peyton, Tom Sachs, and Kehinde Wiley.
The Human Touch: Selections from the RBC Wealth Management Collection
(image)
Roland Fischer
Untitled (L.A. Portrait), 2000
C-print and acrylic on board
Collection of RBC Wealth Management
Photo with 2 notes
Giovanni Antonio Pellegrini
Justice Fulminating the Vices, 1717
Oil on canvas
34.6 cm x 32.3 cm (13 5/8 in. x 12 11/16 in.)
The Suida-Manning Collection
Giovanni Antonio Pellegrini represents eighteenth-century Venetian painting at its most exuberant. He was first trained in Milan with the idiosyncratic Paolo Pagani, but his style depends more on the sensuous and decorative aspects of Sebastiano Ricci. Pellegrini’s drawing is broad and soft, his palette warm and pastel, and his paint handling dense and fluid. Defying gravity, bordering on the caricatural, this painterly virtuosity was a tremendous success across Europe, with the artist called to execute significant fresco cycles and numerous canvases in England, France, and Germany. During a year-long sojourn in Antwerp, Pellegrini carried out three major decorative projects. This painting is an unpublished oil sketch for one of these, a much-admired canvas for the ceiling of the Salle du Petit Collège in the city’s town hall. Appropriate to that setting, it represents the figures of Justice and Prudence crushing two male figures identifiable as Avarice and Deceit. Phosphorescent in color, practically sculpted in paint, this sketch dramatizes the material properties for which Pellegrini was so highly regarded. These properties are conspicuous in the wake of a recent cleaning and relining of the canvas. The Suida-Manning Collection includes two other paintings by Pellegrini: a comparably rich, half-length figure of Bellona from around 1713-1714, and a more summary Venus and Cupid, which may have come from a decorative ensemble.
Photo with 2 notes
James Abbott McNeill Whistler
Nocturne: The River at Battersea, 1878
Lithotint with scraping, printed in grayish-black ink on grayish-blue laid paper, mounted on wove paper
28.2 cm x 37 cm (11 1/8 in. x 14 9/16 in.)
The Teaching Collection of Marvin Vexler, ‘48, 1997; 1997.21
James Abbott McNeill Whistler spent much of his career working in London, whose dense urban landscapes were a frequent theme for this master of evocative realism. From his home in the riverside neighborhood of Chelsea, he could easily see the industrial tracts of Battersea on the opposite shore.
Already an accomplished etcher by the 1870s, Whistler was encouraged by London printer Thomas Way to experiment with lithography, which allows both fluidity of expressionistic effects and the rendering of specific detail. Whistler pushed the limits of lithography’s expressive potential with a technique called lithotint. Invented and named in 1840 by Charles Hullmandel, the technique that fell into disuse after his death in 1850 was revived by Whistler with Way’s assistance. With lithotint, Whistler produced delicate effects similar to wash by brushing a liquid lithographic medium called tusche onto the stone. The dilution of the tusche dictates the concentration of ink on the final print, allowing for infinite tonal values.
During the 1870s, Whistler developed the type of image for which he became best known—the nocturne, or evening landscape—in scores of oil paintings and lithographs; Nocturne: The River at Battersea is among his first and most successful experiments in lithography. The atmospheric effects of this haunting image, in which buildings and their reflections seem to dissolve in the dusky light, were enhanced by the technique. Whistler’s use of a cool, blue paper underscores the romantic mood of the scene, reinforcing its dreamlike quality and the musical allusions of its title.
Photoset reblogged from with 8 notes
Susan Meiselas/Magnum Photos. Front and back of press print “Nicaragua: 1978” from Magnum Photos archive at the Ransom Center.
Source: ransomcenter
Photo reblogged from NPR with 5,543 notes
“This is how Maurice Sendak sometimes sent his letters. Just imagine getting one.” (via Letters Of Note)
Source: theatlantic
Photo with 3 notes
David Novros
Untitled, 1967
Lacquer on fiberglass
221 cm x 518.2 cm (87 in. x 204 in.)
Gift of Lannan Foundation, 1999
An important figure among abstract painters working in New York in the late 1960s, David Novros has questioned painting’s relationship to architecture for more than thirty years. Influenced by centuries-old mosaic and fresco traditions, he has created site-specific works, explored expansive scale and unusually durable surfaces, and investigated the “objectness” of painting-its capacity to be a thing in itself, rather than just a representation of something. Along with others of his generation, Novros experimented with the unconventional effects of industrial materials on shaped canvases that departed from the usual square or rectangular format. One of Novros’s first paintings on fiberglass, this untitled work blurs the distinctions between painting and sculpture, and emphasizes the work’s architectural presence on the wall and in the gallery. The work’s six L-shaped sections fit together to make a tight wall grouping. The right-angled shapes echo the surrounding architecture of the gallery, suggesting the dynamism of corners more than the flat planes of walls. Each section is painted a single rich hue of lacquer mixed with Murano, an iridescent pigment that causes the pearlescent colors to shift as viewers move before them. This changing palette of jewel-like colors rewards movement along the work’s imposing seventeen-foot expanse.
Page 1 of 17
