Art

Palmer’s poetic image contemplates evening quietude in Wales. Painted to mark the artist’s election to full membership in London’s Society of Painters in Water-Colours, the image uses sunlight to emphasize the form of Sabrina, a nymph of the river Severn who oversees drinking cattle. Palmer took the subject from John Milton’s Comus (1637), a masque, or dramatic performance, set near Mount Plynlimon in central Wales—a region the artist had toured. Replicating the dazzling effects of sunlight, the image moves from detailed hills in the center distance to broadly rendered passages in the left and right foreground. Shell gold (pure metal mixed with gum) was applied to brighten leaves near the sun, while touches of gouache (a matte, opaque form of watercolor) highlight nearer forms.

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Trained as a sculptor in the early 1970s when Minimal art held sway, Ray became skilled in fine-tuning the abstract qualities of sculpture. He wielded scale and proportion with precise aplomb but found he could not stomach the cool, inhuman aspect of Minimalism. Ray instinctively knew that the artist's first concern when working in three dimensions is the human body—as reference, implicit subject, or field of experience.

Ray made this photograph of himself while in art school. A neat critique of abstraction, it represents an early victory in his campaign to recapture the body for art. The work also confronts the modern tendency to bind and gag our visceral responses. Hovering overhead in disquieting equipoise, Ray suggests both artistic control and personal submission; according to this duality, the picture's formal perfection is in service to a "happening," a gesture of aesthetic activism. The artist's deadpan, mock-aggressive tone is deliriously literal; with an irony worthy of Ray's idol, Buster Keaton, the photograph is a characteristically witty cross between a dangerously close call and a good joke.

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Lawrence is renowned for his visual interpretations of Black life and history, which he often explored in series. This painting evokes a scene along Lenox Avenue, a central street in Harlem known at the time for its many pool parlors. The composition reveals a dimly lit room filled with dark-green pool tables punctuated with brightly colored billiard balls. Men focus intently on their competitive and communal recreation, while a few spectators look on. Zigzags of cigarette smoke and pool cues further animate the image.

Pool Parlor is the first work by Lawrence that entered The Met collection. The Museum purchased the painting as a prizewinner in its "Artists for Victory" competition in 1942, a celebratory exhibition of contemporary American art during World War II. This acquisition was a rare recognition of the talent of an artist of color by the Museum at the time. Lawrence’s artistic star had risen the previous year, when the painter, then only twenty-three years old, debuted his ambitious sixty-panel Migration Series (1940–41; Museum of Modern Art, New York and Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.), which dramatized the mass internal migrations of African Americans moving out of the segregated and rural South to Northern and Midwestern cities to find jobs, better housing, and freedom from oppression.

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While people like to call modernist art styles easy to make and say they could do it themselves here is a piece which I don't think many would claim is easy. The composition is not obvious yet beautiful which I find very rare.

In this bust of his mother, Cecilia Forlani Boccioni, the artist employs Cubist distortions and fragmentation to undermine conventional concepts of beauty. The title refers to Boccioni’s rejection of traditional artistic values, a view he expanded on in his 1914 book Pittura, scultura futuriste, "We must smash, demolish, and destroy our traditional harmony, which makes us fall into a gracefulness created by timid and sentimental cubs." Art historians have speculated that Pablo Picasso’s 1909 bronze Head of a Woman influenced Boccioni since the two works have striking stylistic similarities.

Paul Cézanne is rightly remembered for his important contribution to the rise of Modernism in the twentieth century. His paintings introduced a novel visual language of form, perspective, and structure, challenging age-old conventions in the formal arrangement of a picture. "Trees and Houses near the Jas de Bouffan" was painted "sur le motif," directly from nature, its view taken south of the Jas de Bouffan, the Cézanne family residence near Aix-en-Provence. Cézanne treats his subject with great economy: his brush marks are lean and articulated, his palette of yellows and greens is relatively simple, and areas of the canvas are unbrushed, exposing ground in patches that read as color. All his life, Cézanne played with spatial relationships in nature, whether working from life or from memory. Here the bare, attenuated trees appear as a frieze against the zones of recessive color, applied as though watercolor, not oil, were the medium.

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Like his contemporary Johannes Vermeer, Pieter de Hooch played a pioneering role in the advancement of genre painting in seventeenth century Holland. He was especially gifted as a painter of interiors--complex spatial arrangements stunningly beautiful in the manipulation of light. The Lehman picture is richly decorated with a marble floor and gilt-leather wall coverings, articulated by diffuse light from the window at left. The merry dialogue in the near ground is foiled by the mysterious encounter of a young man and elderly bearded figure in the antechamber and vestibule. De Hooch achieves extraordinary clarity and geometry in this grandly furnished chamber, qualities evocative of paintings he made in Amsterdam in the 1660s. Leisure Time in an Elegant Setting, Pieter de Hooch (Dutch, Rotterdam 1629–1684 Amsterdam), Oil on canvas)

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Vaishravana is a complex Buddhist deity who embodies many strands of thought and belief. Tibetans understand him foremost as the premier of the four guardians of the cardinal directions (lokapalas), associated with the North. In this role he serves as a protector (dharmapala) of Buddhist law. Here we see Vaishravana seated on his snow-lion mount in a stormy atmosphere, accompanied by his generals, the eight Lords of the Horses (asvapati), each riding a storm cloud. Central is Vaishravana himself, dominant is scale and represented emerging from a tumultuous skyscape. He is dressed as a warrior-king in full battle armor with a patterned tunic suggestive of chain-mail armor, mounted with a large lozenge chest-plate with pearl-and-lotus medallion and Chinese-style lion-face protective lappets on the shoulders. Decorated high boots point to his Central Asian ancestral connections. This celebrated Tibetan deity is rarely represented outside of monastery mural programs, such as those seen at Shalu and Gyantse monasteries, in 14th and 15th century respectively. In both pictorial and aesthetic terms, this painting is unrivalled in its sophisticated integration of iconographic complexities into a single coherent visualization of this deity.

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Ugolino da Siena was the most original and accomplished follower of Duccio di Buoninsegna, the greatest Sienese painter of the fourteenth century. Among Ugolino's most important commissions was the multi-panel altarpiece for the high altar of Santa Croce, the Franciscan church in Florence. This painting of the Last Supper formed part of the predella (the lowermost horizontal component) of the now dismembered altarpiece. A reconstruction of the altarpiece's original appearance is possible through an 18th-century drawing, which indicates that the "Last Supper" panel was the left-most of seven predella panels. The altarpiece's central panel, which depicted the Madonna and Child, is now lost. Ugolino's large workshop included his father and two of his brothers, who were also painters. Ugolino's point of departure was Duccio's rendition of the same scene in the "Maestà" altarpiece for Siena cathedral, but he has reorganized the composition along lines similar to the work of Giotto, who also worked in Santa Croce. That a pupil of Duccio was hired to provide an altarpiece for a major Florentine church attests to the fame of the Sienese master's work. In this scene, Christ, at the far left, informs his disciples that one of them will betray him, a prophecy fulfilled by Judas, who appears without a halo at Christ’s right. Ugolino’s exploration of spatial perspective is evident in details such as the coffered ceiling and the table settings.

This panel and six others—Arrest of Christ (National Gallery, London), Flagellation (Gemäldegalerie, SMPK, Berlin), Way to Calvary and Deposition (both National Gallery, London), Entombment (Gemäldegalerie, SMPK, Berlin), and Resurrection (National Gallery, London)—comprised the predella of the altarpiece on the high altar of the church of Santa Croce, Florence. Saints John the Baptist, Paul, and Peter (all Gemäldegalerie, SMPK, Berlin) are from the main register; Saints James the Greater and Philip, Saints Matthew and James the Lesser, and Saints Matthias and Clare (all Gemäldegalerie, SMPK, Berlin), Saints Simon and Thaddeus and Saints Bartholomew and Andrew (both National Gallery, London) are from the intermediate upper register.

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I find the lack of a halo so funny.

late 3rd to early second millennium BC, depicting an anthropomorphic figure with a double-headed eagle fighting a lion-like creature on its right and a boar on its left.

Ancient Bactria and Margiana were areas along the Oxus and Murghab rivers in modern Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Afghanistan. While these areas were sparsely inhabited during much of the third millennium B.C., by about 2200 B.C. permanent settlements with distinctive forms of architecture, burial practices, and material culture had been established, supported in part by active trade with parts of Iran, Mesopotamia, and the Indus Valley.

This silver-gilt shaft-hole axe is a masterpiece of three-dimensional and relief sculpture. Expertly cast and gilded with foil, it represents a bird-headed hero grappling with a wild boar and a winged dragon. The idea of the heroic bird-headed creature probably came from western Iran, where it is first documented on a cylinder seal impression. The hero's muscular body is human except for the bird talons that replace the hands and feet. He is represented twice, once on each side of the axe, and consequently appears to have two heads. On one side, he grasps the boar by the belly and on the other, by the tusks. The posture of the boar is contorted so that its bristly back forms the shape of the blade. With his other talon, the bird-headed hero grasps the winged dragon by the neck. This creature is distinguished by folded and staggered wings, a feline body, and the talons of a bird of prey in the place of his front paws. Its single horn has been broken off and lost.

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Van der Neer’s special interest in effects of light and atmosphere found an ideal subject in this winter scene. Here, the brilliant illumination of the sunset is diffused throughout the landscape by its reflection in the ice. Diminutive figures amuse themselves by skating, sledding, and playing kolf, a game combining features of modern ice hockey and golf.

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In this painting and Cider (on view nearby), Puvis developed his conception for a mural honoring the French territory of Picardy. Here, men construct a bridge over the Somme River while women bathe and mend fishing nets. Their draperies provide vivid accents of color amid the soft hues of the landscape. The final versions of Cider and The River are part of a cycle decorating the Musée de Picardie in Amiens.

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The distinctive silhouette of Mont Saint-Victoire rises above the Arc River valley near the town of Aix. To paint this scene, Cézanne stood close to Montbriand, his sister’s property, at the top of the hill just behind her house; the wall of the neighboring farmhouse is barely visible. Cézanne sought to reveal the inner geometry of nature, "to make of Impressionism something solid and durable, like the art of museums." Indeed the railroad viaduct that cuts through this pastoral scene is evocative of a Roman aqueduct, recalling paintings by Nicolas Poussin.

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Unfortunately don't have much more detail

The identification of the subject of this relief as the Gift of Anathapindada is by no means certain. The presence at the far left of the figure holding a waterpot suggests that a gift is about to be made, as a donor traditionally poured water over the hands of a recipient to seal a gift. However, determining the overall meaning depends on identification of the objects in the bowl being proffered to the Buddha. Sudatta, called Anathapindada (the Incomparable Almsgiver), was the richest merchant of the town of Sravasti (in Kosala). He met the Buddha at Rajagriha and proposed to donate money in order to buy land for a monastery in Sravasti. The amount of the payment exacted from Anathapindada was calculated by covering the grounds of the park to be purchased with gold coins. The identification of the objects in the bowl as coins is speculative, and the precise scene in the life of the Buddha that is represented is therefore unclear.

This dish from the ancient region of Gandhara dates from the second century B.C. to the first century A.D. International trade with the Hellenistic world and India as well as invasions into Gandhara by the Scythians, Parthians, and Kushans brought many new stylistic idioms that shaped the stylistic vocabulary of these objects. Similar dishes were found in the Gandharan city of Sirkap (Taxila) in contexts that suggest they were used for domestic rituals, perhaps to ensure a positive afterlife.

This kneeling figure is identified by the two columns of hieroglyphs in front of him as "the Osiris, the servant of the Place of Truth, Khonsu, justified." The image and its text are a graphic expression of Khonsu's hope that his spirit will pass successfully through the trial of judgment in the afterlife and become one with Osiris.

Period: New Kingdom, Ramesside
Dynasty: Dynasty 19
Reign: reign of Ramesses II
Date: ca. 1279–1213 B.C.
Geography: From Egypt, Upper Egypt, Thebes, Deir el-Medina, Tomb of Sennedjem (TT 1), Egyptian Antiquities Service/Maspero excavations, 1885–86
Medium: Gessoed and painted wood
Dimensions: H. of Khonsu: 15.3 cm (6 in.)

The critical spirit of feminism and the serial procedures of conceptualism collide to hilarious effect in Wilson’s Breast Forms Permutated. Permutation, from a branch of mathematics called set theory, was a favorite device of not only conceptual artists of the 1960s and 1970s, but also of novelist and playwright Samuel Beckett, who used it to create formal and linguistic patterns. Instead of applying it to intervals or words, however, Wilson applies it to one of the most fetishized aspects of female anatomy: breasts. Here the artist permutes the breast form, deriving nine iterations from a single variable. Mocking the tendency to police the female body and to establish universal standards of female beauty, Wilson places the "perfect set" in the center of her grid.