The Modern Degas You Haven’t Seen

 

Beautiful never before seen Degas - his monotypes look like old photographs.. He created these while photography was a fledgling medium so it all ties together.. but look so modern for a 1870s work. Also a great room with landscapes.

a landscape from Degas:

The Modern Degas You Haven’t Seen article in the NYT goes into depth about the show. Show is until July 24 at the MOMA. Here is the show website.

Thanks to Scotto Mycklebust for the tip, it was worth the trip. If you are an artist and wonder what to take on next, if the old ways are no longer working - experiment, just like Degas.

Ancient Rome in HD

Ancient Rome is such a powerful symbol, visually and aesthetically, as well as in terms of ideas, its battles and wars, the powerful personalities that blasted their thoughts across the centuries. Remember I spent hours with ancient Roman marble busts from the Vatican, just like with old friends. Here is Caesar's marble bust ( all photographs in this post I took during a Christmas in Rome ), video by Khan Academy :

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The walls of this gallery at the Vatican are lined with marble busts:

Visited the Colosseum in the evening on Christmas day and it was absolutely a solitary and beautiful experience, with a bit of drizzle and without a single living soul in sight.

Interactive high-resolution annotated zoom into Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights

https://tuinderlusten-jheronimusbosch.ntr.nl/en# Accompanied by medievalish music and sheep bleating.

Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights was (one) of the reasons I went to Madrid. The Garden is in the Prado and is just as stunning as the online projects show her to be. Plan to visit the painting in off hours as there is usually a crowd waiting to inspect it, and it is a delight. I spent several hours with and around the painting just breathing the molecules of paint flakes in the air, hoping to breathe in enough so it stays with me.

Also worth a visit in Madrid are the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía and the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum. The Gasparini room in the Royal palace is also a pleasure visually.

As I was writing the post I went to the Prado website and ... behold there is an Ingres exhibition.  Ingres is better than Leonardo in complete drawings, I tell you. Now that with google you can travel pretty much anywhere in the world from your Saturday morning bed - take a trip through the beautiful and the intellectual and into this painting. Visit it in person if you can.

A 19th-Century Vision of the Year 2000

http://publicdomainreview.org/collections/france-in-the-year-2000-1899-1910/  A series of futuristic pictures by Jean-Marc Côté and other artists issued in France in 1899, 1900, 1901 and 1910. Originally in the form of paper cards enclosed in cigarette/cigar boxes and, later, as postcards, the images depicted the world as it was imagined to be like in the then distant year of 2000…

 

For anyone with a roomba

Henri Matisse sculpting nude female figure while sitting in bed in his apartment, France, by Dmitri Kessel, 1951

A look Inside The World Of Chinese ‘Copy-Culture’ – Chinese artists make Van Gogh copies for a Dutch Bank. Every new client gets a Van Gogh painting, says the dealer.

And here is my stance on the matter – if they can copy Van Gogh – more power to them.  Copyright doesn’t have a place in art as all art is derivative. Picasso ripped aboriginal art, Van Gogh was inspired by Japanese woodcuts. The only takeaway here is that art carries power and presence. It only takes a corner of a sunflower to know it is Van Gogh, it takes an eye and a bit of nose to tell a Picasso, and it takes the corner of a Millennium Falcon to know it’s Star Wars. It is the strength of the artist’s ideas that overcomes us. And if there’s a place in China somewhere that makes good Van Goghs – the world is only better for it to be honest. A link directly to the Van Gogh’s copies in the timeline – I think they are pretty good:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZbZDO5y43ZU&t=4m34s

Enjoy in its entirety:

Claude Monet's House and Garden

The High Art of the Low Countries

A review of the first in the series in the Telegraph with an outline of the ideas covered in this documentary.  Artists  and their masterpieces covered: van Eyck, van der Weyden, Bosch, Bruegel, Rubens.

I remember seeing the Rubens and Brueghel exhibit at The Mauritshuis in The Hague in the Netherlands and it was one of the most magical experiences in paint I had ever seen.

Some of the art covered in the documentary: Ghent Altarpiece Garden of Earthly Delights

Salvador Dalí's Illustrations for Alice in Wonderland, 1969

Galileo's Moon Drawings

4/4 Gold : A History of Art in Three Colours (Ep1)

A History of Art in Three Colours series of documentaries.

The Artful Codgers BBC Documentary 2015

link to the original BBC documentary on BBC iPlayer, if you happen to be in the UK.

Watching the documentary I really thought the forgeries looked great and whoever made them was a genius. All art is an imitation after all.

One of Goya's Black Paintings

And a Few More from Michelangelo

And although the First Sculpture on the left is not Michelangelo but a sculpture by unknown artist called Laocoön and His Sons, it is one of the finest examples of Hellenistic Baroque to which Michelangelo is a rightful heir.

The Greatest Artist that ever Lived - Virtual Tour of The Sistine Chapel

There are hundreds of to do lists of the "hundred things to do before you die" sort. I have only one item and it is the Sistine Chapel, painted by Michelangelo. A One Man Show of gigantic proportions that has been around for 500 years and still makes ordinary beings like myself weak in the head. Photography at the Chapel is not allowed and I was happy to discover The Vatican has kept up with the 21st Century and put this online. If there is one thing that is worth the price of admission and a round trip ticket so you could see it in person, this is it. Below is a link to the Vatican website that hosts the tour online.

45 Everyday Phrases Coined By Shakespeare

Isn't language astonishing? The ability to convey complex concepts to another by means of few oddly shaped symbols. And then gurgling these out to make a point across the air,  or scribbling them down in a way so they carry meaning 500 years later. BBC America has a list of 45 everyday phrases coined by William Shakespeare. In this context the words sound more beautiful and poetic than when used casually. Here is the list - you would be surprised:

“All our yesterdays”— (Macbeth)

“As good luck would have it” — (The Merry Wives of Windsor)

“As merry as the day is long” — (Much Ado About Nothing / King John)

“Bated breath” — (The Merchant of Venice)

“Be-all and the end-all” — (Macbeth)

“Neither a borrower nor a lender be” — (Hamlet)

“Brave new world” — (The Tempest)

“Break the ice” — (The Taming of the Shrew)

“Brevity is the soul of wit” — (Hamlet)

“Refuse to budge an inch” — (Measure for Measure / The Taming of the Shrew)

“Cold comfort” — (The Taming of the Shrew / King John)

“Conscience does make cowards of us all” — (Hamlet)

“Crack of doom” — (Macbeth)

“Dead as a doornail” — (Henry VI Part II)

“A dish fit for the gods” — (Julius Caesar)

“Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war” — (Julius Caesar)

“Devil incarnate” — (Titus Andronicus / Henry V)

“Eaten me out of house and home” — (Henry IV Part II)

“Faint hearted” — (Henry VI Part I)

“Fancy-free” — (A Midsummer Night’s Dream)

“Forever and a day” — (As You Like It)

“For goodness’ sake” — (Henry VIII)

“Foregone conclusion” — (Othello)

“Full circle” — (King Lear)

“The game is afoot” — (Henry IV Part I)

“Give the devil his due” — (Henry IV Part I)

“Good riddance” — (Troilus and Cressida)

“Jealousy is the green-eyed monster” — (Othello)

“Heart of gold” — (Henry V)

“Hoist with his own petard” — (Hamlet)

“Ill wind which blows no man to good” — (Henry IV Part II)

“In my heart of hearts” — (Hamlet)

“In my mind’s eye” — (Hamlet)

“Kill with kindness” — (The Taming of the Shrew)

“Knock knock! Who’s there?” — (Macbeth)

“Laughing stock” — (The Merry Wives of Windsor)

“Live long day” — (Julius Caesar)

“Love is blind” — (The Merchant of Venice)

“Milk of human kindness” — (Macbeth)

“More sinned against than sinning” — (King Lear)

“One fell swoop” — (Macbeth)

“Play fast and loose” — (King John)

“Set my teeth on edge” — (Henry IV Part I)

“Wear my heart upon my sleeve” — (Othello)

“Wild-goose chase” — (Romeo and Juliet)

Bust of president John Kennedy by Dalí

Pieced the image together from Sotheby’s website – I felt I should compose as large an image as I can because this piece is very unusual. Why is it unusual? Because a paperclip is the badge of a quintessential bureaucrat, a man or a woman pushing papers from one tray to another under the pressure of a relentless authority figure. The piece was recently sold at an auction on Sotheby’s and my hope is it hasn’t been magnetized and used as a paper clip holder by an actual bureaucrat. Authority has always been a good incentive for work. The quality of the authority directly correlates with the quality of the work. Rejection and glorification of authority  have prodded countless artists from around the world in all of history - from anonymous Tibetan sand paintings, to painful tomb sculptures commissioned by Michelangelo's patrons, to the soft paintings in the Papal chambers, to the pro-totalitarian message of the Russian Constructivists, to various rejections of reality like Abstract Expressionism.

"Executed in 1963; this wax model was cast by the Rudier foundry then covered in paperclips by Dalí."