TEFAF’s Meet the Experts presents Howard Shaw from Hammer Gallery shares what Van Gogh would have most likely seen when he visited Paris in 1886. This period of Van Gogh’s life is pivotal to his works as an artist.
Tag Archives: Art History
New Art Books: “Gaughin And The Impressionists” – “Stunning” (June 2020)
Joining an already impressive collection of Scandinavian art, one of the first French paintings Hansen acquired was Woman with a Fan, Portrait of Madame Marie Hubbard (1874) by Berthe Morisot. This gently ironic work set the tone for his perceptive and adventurous collecting style.
Drawn from the remarkable Ordrupgaard Collection of the Danish insurance broker and 
art lover Wilhelm Hansen, the masterpieces of 19th-century French painting in this volume represent the very best of French impressionism.
A burst of acquisitions from 1916 to 1918, during which he took advice from the influential critic Théodore Duret, saw his collection grow to include works by Cézanne, Courbet, Gauguin, Manet, Matisse, Monet, Renoir and Sisley.
With stunning reproductions of 60 works, the authors explore the history of the collection and provide detailed analysis of the works themselves.
Art: “The Most Beautiful Gardens In Art” (Christie’s)
From a Sotheby’s Online Magazine (March 26, 2020):
From Sargent to Sorolla, Jonas Wood to Winston Churchill, Berkshire to Bali — how artists have found solace and inspiration in gardens the world over.
Art Videos: “El Greco: Ambition And Defiance” (Art Institute Chicago)
Explore the exhibition “El Greco: Ambition and Defiance” with curator Rebecca Long and research associate Jena Carvana. Follow along as they lead you through the galleries and share some of the reasons El Greco and his work continue to fascinate us.
Art History Videos: “Michelangelo – Mind Of The Master” (The Getty)
Take a visual journey into the mind of Michelangelo, a painter, sculptor, architect, draftsman, and one of the most creative and influential artists in the history of Western art. See how he used drawings to create, explore, and prepare for some of his most famous works of art. Produced for the J. Paul Getty Museum’s exhibition, “Michelangelo: Mind of the Master.” https://www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions…
Art: “Eve” Sculpture By Auguste Rodin (1899)
John Swarbrooke from Dickinson Gallery explains the beauty and play of light behind the cast of Auguste Rodin’s Eve.
François Auguste René Rodin (12 November 1840 – 17 November 1917) was a French sculptor. Although Rodin is generally considered the progenitor of modern sculpture, he did not set out to rebel against the past. He was schooled traditionally, took a craftsman-like approach to his work, and desired academic recognition, although he was never accepted into Paris’s foremost school of art.
Eve is a nude sculpture by the French artist Auguste Rodin. It shows Eve despairing after the Fall.
n 1880 Rodin was commissioned to produce The Gates of Hell, for which he exhibited Adam at the 1881 Paris Salon. In a sketch for Gates Rodin showed a central silhouette possibly intended as Eve (both the sketch and Gates are now in the Musée Rodin), but in October 1881 he decided to produce Eve as a pair for Adam, with the two sculptures flanking a huge high-relief bas-relief. This would be the first free-standing female sculpture he had produced since the destruction of his Bacchante in an accident between 1864 and 1870. He began Eve in 1881, later abandoning his intended colossal version of it when he realised his model, probably Adèle Abruzzesi, was pregnant. It was first exhibited to the public at the 1899 Paris Salon. It shows a strong influence from Michelangelo, picked up by Rodin in Italy in 1876.
He also produced an autograph white marble version in 1884 (now in the Museo Soumaya in Mexico City), a version in patinated plaster and a much-reproduced 71 cm high bronze version in 1883 (known as the Petite Ève or Little Eve, whose original is also in the Musée Rodin in Paris). He also reused the same figure of Eve in his marble Eve and the Serpent (1901) and his plaster Adam and Eve (1884).
From Wikipedia
Art: “Before Pennsylvania Station” By American Realist Painter George Bellows (1882-1925)
George Bellows, Pennsylvania Station Excavation, c. 1907–08, oil on canvas, 79.2 x 97.1 cm (Brooklyn Museum), a Seeing America video.
Speakers: Dr. Margarita Karasoulas, Assistant Curator, American Art, Brooklyn Museum and Dr. Steven Zucker
George Wesley Bellows (August 12 or August 19, 1882 – January 8, 1925) was an American realist painter, known for his bold depictions of urban life in New York City. He became, according to the Columbus Museum of Art, “the most acclaimed American artist of his generation”.
Bellows first achieved widespread notice in 1908, when he and other pupils of Henri organized an exhibition of mostly urban studies. While many critics considered these to be crudely painted, others found them welcomely audacious, a step beyond the work of his teacher. Bellows taught at the Art Students League of New York in 1909, although he was more interested in pursuing a career as a painter. His fame grew as he contributed to other nationally recognized juried shows.
Bellows’ urban New York scenes depicted the crudity and chaos of working-class people and neighborhoods, and satirized the upper classes. From 1907 through 1915, he executed a series of paintings depicting New York City under snowfall. In these paintings Bellows developed his strong sense of light and visual texture,[14] exhibiting a stark contrast between the blue and white expanses of snow and the rough and grimy surfaces of city structures, and creating an aesthetically ironic image of the equally rough and grimy men struggling to clear away the nuisance of the pure snow. However, Bellows’ series of paintings portraying amateur boxing matches were arguably his signature contribution to art history.[11] They are characterized by dark atmospheres, through which the bright, roughly lain brushstrokes of the human figures vividly strike with a strong sense of motion and direction.
Pennsylvania Station, also known as New York Penn Station or Penn Station, is the main intercity railroad station in New York City and the busiest in the Western Hemisphere, serving more than 600,000 passengers per weekday as of 2019.mPenn Station is in Midtown Manhattan, close to Herald Square, the Empire State Building, Koreatown, and Macy’s Herald Square. Entirely underground, the station is located in Midtown South beneath Madison Square Garden, between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, and between 31st and 33rd Streets, with additional exits to nearby streets.
Penn Station has 21 tracks fed by seven tunnels (the two North River Tunnels, the four East River Tunnels, and the single Empire Connection tunnel). It is at the center of the Northeast Corridor, a passenger rail line that connects New York City with Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., and intermediate points. Intercity trains are operated by Amtrak, which owns the station, while commuter rail services are operated by the Long Island Rail Road (LIRR) and NJ Transit (NJT). Connections are available within the complex to the New York City Subway, and buses. An underground passageway formerly provided an indoor connection with the 34th Street–Herald Square subway station and 33rd Street PATH station.[7]
Penn Station is named for the Pennsylvania Railroad (PRR), its builder and original tenant, and shares its name with several stations in other cities. The current facility is the remodeled underground remnant of the original Pennsylvania Station, a more ornate station building designed by McKim, Mead, and White and considered a masterpiece of the Beaux-Arts style. Completed in 1910, it enabled direct rail access to New York City from the south for the first time. Its head house was torn down in 1963, galvanizing the modern historic preservation movement.[8] The rest of the station was rebuilt in the following six years, while retaining most of the rail infrastructure from the original station.
Art History Podcasts: “Understanding the Medieval World through Books” (Getty Museum)
What was the world like from 500 to 1500 CE? This period, often called medieval or the Middle Ages in European history, saw the rise and fall of empires and the expansion of cross-cultural exchange.
Getty curator Bryan C. Keene argues that illuminated manuscripts and decorated texts from Africa, Asia, Australasia, the Americas, and Europe are windows through which we can view the interconnected history of humanity. In this episode, he discusses his recent book Toward a Global Middle Ages: Encountering the World through Illuminated Manuscripts, highlighting the challenges and opportunities of the emerging discipline known as the Global Middle Ages.
Top New Art Books: “Ten In One – The Impressionists” (Taschen, March 2020)
The lives and oeuvres of Impressionist pillars Cézanne, Degas, Gauguin, Manet, Monet, Renoir, Rousseau, Seurat, Toulouse-Lautrec, and van Gogh are each explored in-depth in TASCHEN’s Basic Art series. Now, this volume combines all 10 monographs into one for the price of three.
“These seductive books have slick production values, excellent illustrations, and smart texts. Each one is a fast-food, high-energy fix on the topic at hand.” – The New York Times Book Review
This book gathers ten Basic Art monographs into one volume featuring:
- Cézanne, Degas, Gauguin, Manet, Monet, Renoir, Rousseau, Seurat, Toulouse-Lautrec, and van Gogh
- a detailed chronological summary of the life and oeuvre of each artist, covering their cultural and historical importance
- approximately 1,000 illustrations with explanatory captions
With blockbuster exhibitions, record-breaking auction prices, and packed museums, Impressionism remains close contender for the world’s favorite period of painting. Its favorite subjects— from dappled harbor scenes and summer days to vibrant Parisian salons and gardens—brim with optimism and joie de vivre. The works once dismissed as unfinished or imprecise are now beloved for their atmospheric evocation of time and place, as well as the stylistic flair of rapid brushstrokes upon canvas.
What we take for granted today—the relativity of perception depending on the viewer, lighting mood, or location to the object—was then the inspiration for some of the finest paintings in art history. Consider Monet’s 30+ variations of the Rouen Cathedral, Cézanne’s dazzling experimentation with color, Gauguin’s primitivist innovations, or Manet’s scandalous nudes: rarely has a single genre produced so many brilliant artists in such a short time.
Since 1985, TASCHEN’s Basic Art series has published some 200 individual volumes, making it the world’s most successful art-book series. Each title contains an extensive text on the artist’s life and work, a detailed biography, and some 100 high-quality color illustrations with explanatory captions. With Ten in One, TASCHEN now presents ten Basic Art monographs in one volume. A must for every art lover!
Art: “Contemporaries of Rembrandt and Vermeer”
Jonathan Ribner, associate professor; director of Graduate Admissions, Department of History of Art and Architecture, Boston University.
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