This intricately delicate cameo features a very detailed story of the prophet Elijah ascending to heaven. In this episode of Sotheby’s Stories, discover how this delightful miniature work of art is part of a very small group of rare cameos which feature Hebrew inscriptions. Learn how it was crafted by Jewish artisans in the court of a 13th century Holy Roman Emperor.
Category Archives: Art
Art: ‘Autumn Rhythm’ – Jackson Pollock (Video)
Autumn Rhythm (Number 30) is a 1950 abstract expressionist painting by American artist Jackson Pollock in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. The work is a distinguished example of Pollock’s 1947-52 poured-painting style, and is often considered one of his most notable works.
Artworks: ‘The Starry Night’ Viewed Through Van Gogh’s Letters To His Brother Theo (Video)
Vincent van Gogh’s “The Starry Night” has been a visitor favorite at MoMA since it first appeared in our Van Gogh retrospective in 1935 and then was acquired in 1939. To become acquainted with the heart and mind of its maker, there is no better source than his letters. Those to his brother Theo, in particular, reveal his deepest aims and convictions, and his pleasures and anxieties, especially during the last year-and-a-half of his life, working in near-isolation from an asylum in St.-Remy.
Learn more at Virtual Views: Vincent van Gogh’s “Starry Night” https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibit…
Art History: ‘Watercolor In The Renaissance’ (Video)
Focussing on the three types of object featured in the V&A display Renaissance Watercolours: illuminated manuscripts, portrait miniatures and coloured drawings, this film showcases the qualities that made watercolour the medium of choice for many artists during the Renaissance.
A modern-day painting of a pomegranate, using traditional watercolour techniques, by artist Lucy Smith, also demonstrates how watercolour painting remains a versatile medium, ideal for capturing life-like details that help us to record our diverse world.
Video Profiles: American Conceptual Painter Lee Lozano (1930-1999)
Jo Applin gives an insight into both Lee Lozano’s life and her work, contextualizing her practice and highlighting her response to the constraints of constitutional systems, gender dynamics, power, money, and politics.
Created in 1962–1963, the early paintings and drawings on view at Hauser & Wirth Somerset use airplanes as a central image and can be considered as examples of the artist’s passionate exploration of creative energy in its purist form. This focused body of early work exposes a complex and deeply intimate inner life grappling with one-sided gender and societal dichotomies, while other works display a form of ferocious humour and playfulness, exploiting the rhetoric of exaggeration to its most cogent effect.
Her raw expressionist brush strokes create powerful works imbued with a very personal iconography, including genitals, religious symbols, tools and body parts. Lozano’s short lived but influential career remains a source of fascination, lauded by Lucy Lippard as the foremost female conceptual artist of her era in New York. Jo Applin is author of ‘Lee Lozano: Not Working’ and ‘Eccentric Objects: Rethinking Sculpture.’ She teaches modern and contemporary art at The Courtauld Institute of Art in London.
Artist Profile: Chinese-French Abstract Painter Chu Teh-Chun (Video)
The 1960s were a turning point for Master Chinese Artist Chu Teh-Chun. In this latest Sotheby’s video, discover how he abandoned his traditional figurative style of painting in favour of abstraction. Learn how his painting ‘Composition’, created in 1961, perfectly executes the concept of Chinese painting whilst meeting the style of Western abstraction.
Chu Teh-Chun or Zhu Dequn was a Chinese-French abstract painter acclaimed for his pioneering style integrating traditional Chinese painting techniques with Western abstract art. Chu Teh-Chun enrolled in the National School of Fine Arts, where he studied under Fang Ganmin and Wu Dayu.
Profiles: ‘J.M.W. Turner’ – Romanticism’s Greatest Painter (1775 – 1851)
Joseph Mallord William Turner RA, known contemporarily as William Turner, was an English Romantic painter, printmaker and watercolourist. He is known for his expressive colourisations, imaginative landscapes and turbulent, often violent marine paintings.
Inside Artworks: ‘Marilyn Monroe’ By Andy Warhol
In 1967, Warhol established a print-publishing business, Factory Additions, through which he published a series of screenprint portfolios on his signature subjects. Marilyn Monroe was the first one. He used the same publicity still of the actress that he had previously used for dozens of paintings. Each image here was printed from five screens: one that carried the photographic image and four for different areas of color, sometimes printed off-register. About repetitions Warhol said, “The more you look at the same exact thing, the more the meaning goes away, and the better and emptier you feel.”
Cocktails With A Curator: ‘Murillo’s Self-Portrait’
In this week’s episode of “Cocktails with a Curator,” delve into the life and times of Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, one of the most celebrated painters of seventeenth-century Spain. Look closely at his self-portrait for clues about the Seville-born artist—a trompe l’oeil stone frame points to his fascination with the antiquities excavated in his hometown, and the sitter seems to be looking forward, into the future, after surviving a traumatic period when Seville was ravaged by plague. Acquired by Henry Clay Frick in 1904, the painting stayed with the family until 2014, when it was gifted to the museum by Dr. and Mrs. Henry Clay Frick II. This week’s complementary cocktail, the Rebujito, conjures the warm spring days of Seville’s Feria de Abril (April Fair) and goes well with Thanksgiving leftovers.
To view this painting in detail, please visit our website: https://www.frick.org/murilloportrait
Profile: German Painter & Engraver Albrecht Dürer
‘Saint Eustace’ by Albrecht Dürer depicts the popular medieval legend of a Roman General becoming a saint. In this episode of Anatomy of an Artwork, discover how Dürer captured the intricate detail of the story through the arduous medium of engraving.
Albrecht Dürer (1471 -1528), sometimes spelt in English as Durer or Duerer, was a German painter, printmaker, and theorist of the German Renaissance. Born in Nuremberg, Dürer established his reputation and influence across Europe when he was in his twenties due to his high-quality woodcut prints.
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