Jean-Honoré Fragonard delighted in painting fascinating portraits. In this episode of Sotheby’s Stories, learn how he captured the true essence of character, through his mastery of observation and light.
Jean-Honoré Fragonard was a French painter and printmaker whose late Rococo manner was distinguished by remarkable facility, exuberance, and hedonism. One of the most prolific artists active in the last decades of the Ancien Régime, Fragonard produced more than 550 paintings, of which only five are dated.
“I want to paint like a bird sings,” Claude Monet once stated. In this episode of Expert Voices, Simon Shaw describes Monet’s direct and unmediated response to his subject matter. In The Islands in Port-Villez, one can feel just that – Monet sitting on his boat on the seine, absorbing his surroundings.
In this episode of Expert Voices, Lisa Dennison discusses a masterful painting created by Frank Stella in the early part of his career. In the 1950s, Stella left Princeton and moved to New York at the height of Abstract Expressionism. Despite being a progenitor of Minimalism, Stella’s gestural hand is visible in the concentric squares – most likely influenced by the Abstract Expressionists.
Frank Philip Stella is an American painter, sculptor and printmaker, noted for his work in the areas of minimalism and post-painterly abstraction. Stella lives and works in New York City.
In this video, join essayist and New Yorker staff writer Adam Gopnik in an exploration of two masterpieces from the early twentieth century: Georgio De Chirico’s “Il Pomeriggio di Arianna (Ariadne’s Afternoon)”and Man Ray’s “Black Widow (Nativity).” Both painted near the outset of the first world war, these works not only capture the effusive zeitgeist of their age but prefigure the aesthetic movements that would come to characterize modern art.
Making their auction debut, “Il Pomeriggio di Arianna (Ariadne’s Afternoon)”and “Black Widow (Nativity)”will be offered as highlights of Sotheby’s Impressionist & Modern Art Evening Sale in New York. (28 October | New York) Learn more: https://www.sothebys.com/en/series/to…
Tim Wilmot is an artist from Bristol in the South-west of the UK, specialising in vibrant watercolours, using tone and light to bring out the best in the medium. Tim, self-taught, paints in a loose, impressionistic style and, while having dabbled with portraits and still lifes, he is inexorably drawn to landscapes.
Watercolorist Tim Wilmot
He says: “I’m an outdoor person rather than an indoor person. For many years I’ve taken a sketch book on my travels and I quickly scribble scenes in a shorthand sort of way. Then, returning home, I recreate those memories with paint and brush. Watercolour is also an ideal medium for those quick impressions when you’re limited in time.”
Eugène Delacroix, Greece on the Ruins of Missolonghi, 1826, oil on canvas, 208 cm × 147 cm (Musée des Beaux-Arts de Bordeaux). Speakers: Dr. Steven Zucker and Dr. Beth Harris.
Ferdinand Victor Eugène Delacroix was a French Romantic artist regarded from the outset of his career as the leader of the French Romantic school.
In 1991, the Scottish artist Peter Doig (b. 1959) visited Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation in northeast France, a utopian housing project that had opened in 1961 in Briey-en-Fôret, then been abandoned.
To Doig, the project was a temple of hope laid to ruin, and the nine large-scale canvases it inspired — Doig’s seminal ‘Concrete Cabins’ series, the largest and most distinctive cycle in Doig’s oeuvre — became a meditation on the decay of Le Corbusier’s modernist vision of social cohesion.
Boiler House was first exhibited in Salzburg after Doig had won the Eliette von Karajan prize in 1994, and was included in Doig’s 2008 retrospective at Tate Britain. It stands alone within the cycle, an isolated building in the forest.
Depicting the building designed to house the estate’s coal boiler, it is rendered in fluid trails of impasto, and carries a stark anthropomorphic charge, the angular geometries looming large through a screen of trees, shifting in and out of focus like a memory or fragments from a movie reel.
Vik Muniz’s series Postcards from Nowhere grapples with how, through photographs, we have come to “see” and understand distant yet iconic sites we may never actually view with our own eyes. “The images we hold in our heads are an assemblage,” notes Muniz. “They are an amalgam of every image of those locations that we have ever seen.”
Not so long ago, it was relatively easy to wake up overlooking Victoria Harbour in Hong Kong and go to sleep in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge; to travel from Venice to Istanbul in time for dinner. The international network of the art world, in particular, made it easy to slip through time and borders—with the right invitation and the right passport. You may never have been to Basel, Switzerland for the art fairs, but you might certainly feel as though you have, experiencing it exclusively through the spate of other people’s images.
Curator An Van Camp explains Rembrandt’s use of a printmaking technique known as etching, and what his early experiments tell us about the young artist’s working process.
An invitation into any artist’s imagined world involves an intimacy rarely encountered outside of portraiture, but Matthew Wong does this without fear by relying on our one nugget of shared understanding – Shangri-la. What is paradise after all but knowing and being known? “You sit in front of this painting, and it overwhelms you.” – reveals our specialist Isabella Lauria, –
“We get lots in our dreams, and this painting makes me feel lost in the best way.” Post-War and Contemporary Art Day sale, October 7 2020
Matthew Wong was a Canadian artist. Self-taught as a painter, Wong received critical acclaim for his work before his death in 2019 at the age of 35. Roberta Smith, co-chief art critic at The New York Times, has praised Wong as “one of the most talented painters of his generation.”
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