Art

After experimenting with a variety of styles in the year following his arrival in Paris, Picasso developed a style properly his own in autumn 1901. He painted six canvases, all about the same size, with either a single figure or a couple seated at a café table, that together constitute one of the greatest achievements the twenty-year-old artist had yet accomplished. The paintings derive from the 1870s café scenes of Degas and Manet, as reworked by Van Gogh, Gauguin, and Lautrec in the 1880s and 1890s. For this one, Picasso borrowed the flowery wallpaper from the background of Van Gogh's La Berceuse (1889, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1996.435), which he would have seen at the Galerie Vollard.

Picasso revised the painting a great deal before settling on the final arrangement: he first depicted Harlequin without ruffs at the neck or cuffs; a large glass stood on the table where the match striker now appears; Harlequin's bicorne hat originally rested behind his right hand; and the floral wallpaper was more extensive and not hidden by the high banquette.

By 1901 Harlequin was a ubiquitous figure in popular culture. He usually carried a baton, or slapstick, and wore a black mask. However, Picasso gave his Harlequin a white face and ruffs: the attributes of Pierrot, the melancholy, cuckolded clown who inevitably loses his love, Columbine, to the nimble and lusty Harlequin. Many writers have suggested that the pensive mood of this picture and the series to which it belongs were the result of Picasso's brooding on the suicide of his friend Carles Casagemas, who, like Pierrot, was unrequited in love.

Van Gogh produced more than twenty self-portraits during his Parisian sojourn (1886–88). Short of funds but determined nevertheless to hone his skills as a figure painter, he became his own best sitter: "I purposely bought a good enough mirror to work from myself, for want of a model." This picture, which shows the artist's awareness of Neo-Impressionist technique and color theory, is one of several that are painted on the reverse of an earlier peasant study.

This painting from February/March 1885, with its restricted palette of dark tones, coarse facture, and blocky drawing, is typical of the works Van Gogh painted in Nuenen the year before he left Holland for France. His peasant studies of 1885 culminated in his first important painting, The Potato Eaters (Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam).

The carved wooden dome, balconies and supports of this architectural ensemble belonged to the gudha-mandapa (meeting and prayer hall) of the Vadi Parshvanatha Jain temple in Patan, Gujarat. The temple was dedicated on May 13, 1596. During the renovation and enlargement of the temple in the early twentieth century, this portion of the building was discarded; nothing of the original structure survives in Patan. Some of its elements—in particular, the eight large figures of musicians and dancers that rose toward the dome—were lost and are known only from early photographs. The figures carved around the dome are the ashtakikpalas (eight regents of the directions). Traces of pigment suggest that the interior of the structure was once painted.

The location of the Museum's structure in the original mandapa is uncertain; it probably rested on top of the flat roof and allowed sunlight into the building. In this installation, one of the four sides, which has had a great many plaster restorations, has been left off so that the ensemble can be easily viewed. The original metal grillwork that kept bats and birds from the interior of the mandapa has not survived; it has been replaced with wider wooden grating.

This particularly fine and elaborate early Gujarati wood carving is the type that was translated into stone by craftsmen of the great Mughal emperor Akbar in the sixteenth century on some buildings at Fatehpur-Sikri (City of Victory) and at the harem at the Red Fort in Agra.

Adorned with his portrait or signs of the zodiac, the coins issued by Jahangir (r. 1605–27) are a development from the epigraphic, aniconic coins issued by most Muslim rulers. His father Akbar (r. 1556–1605) had also experimented with different imagery, including hawks and ducks

During the American Civil War, the United States warship Kearsarge made headlines after sinking the Confederate raider Alabama off the coast of France. Manet did not witness firsthand the widely-covered event but devoted two paintings to the subject: a scene of the naval battle (Philadelphia Museum of Art) and this picture, prompted by his subsequent visit to the victorious ship at anchor near Boulogne. They were his first depictions of a current event.

This painting, which reflects the Parisian vogue for Spanish art and culture during the Second Empire, won Manet his first popular and critical success in his debut at the Salon of 1861. Though the picture was admired for its realistic detail, Manet did not disguise the fact that it was composed in a studio using a model and props. The left-handed singer holds a guitar strung for a right-handed player, and his fingering suggests that he was unfamiliar with the instrument. His outfit was fashioned from costumes that Manet kept on hand; several accessories reappear in paintings in this gallery.

For a long, long time, women were systematically written out of art history. 

From the 16th to the 19th centuries, after the rise of ‘Academic’ art institutions in Italy, France, and Britain, women weren’t allowed to train properly as artists.

They were rarely admitted to academies, barred from formal apprenticeships, and forbidden from studying the nude model (until the 19thC), which was considered essential for mastering painting. 

Of course, this did not stop them. 

Since the 1970s, feminist art historians have been making up for lost time. Although lots more research is yet to be done into women artists (especially in the realms of craft, folk, and naive art), there are some great books that have been published, particularly in the last few years, that shed some light on these brilliant women. 

• Linda Nochlin, Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists? (1971) — groundbreaking essay, arguing that the exclusion of women from the ‘canon’ of art is not because they don’t make good artists, but rather because of historic, institutional barriers.

• Leonora Carrington, The Hearing Trumpet (1974) — not an art history essay at all: a bizarre, hilarious novel by the surrealist painter Leonora Carrington… all about an old woman who leads a feminist revolution. 

• Gina Siciliano, I Know What I Am: The Life and Times of Artemisia Gentileschi (2019) — a rich, graphic-novel biography of the Baroque painter, Artemisia Gentileschi, addressing her struggles with patriarchy, family expectation, and sexual assault. 

• Katy Hessel, The Story of Art Without Men (2022) — a response to the art historian E.H. Gombrich’s ‘The Story of Art’ and its woeful lack of female artists. 

• Franny Moyle, Mrs Kauffman and Madame Le Brun (2023) — dual biography of the eighteenth-century Academic painters, Angelica Kauffman and Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, following their parallel and intertwined careers.

• Jill Burke, How to Be a Renaissance Woman (2023) — a thoroughly-researched, conversational account of what it was like to be a woman in Renaissance Italy. 

Enjoy!

The Seated I is one of four bronze sculptures created by Mutu for The Met's facade in September 2019, part of a commission titled The NewOnes, will free Us. The works consist of two kneeling and two seated female figures, simultaneously celestial and humanoid, strange and familiar. In the case of The Seated I, one of the figures' knees is raised, while the other meets the floor. The arms and hands rest gently on the legs. The head and fingers are attenuated, the facial features stylized. The figure is graced with a variety of embellishments, including abstract ornamentation on its head and ears; a polished disc at its mouth; and horizontal coils sheathing most of its body. The coils, which respond with great sensitivity to the curve and slope of the figure’s musculature, animated by virtue of the single bent knee, serve as garment and armor all at once. When conceiving the figures' adornments, likewise the proportions of their necks and heads, Mutu took inspiration from a variety of customs practiced by high-ranking African women, such as beaded bodices, circular necklaces, lip plates, crowns, hair styles, and skull elongation. The body of work from which The Seated I derives was also inspired by the tradition of load-bearers, sometimes referred to as caryatids, frequently but not always women carved out of stone or wood and designed to physically or symbolically support either buildings or male rulers. Female load-bearers appear in various guises across times and places, and they are omnipresent in The Met's Greek, African, American, and European collections. In the case of The Seated I, Mutu has staged a feminist intervention, liberating her load-bearer from the tasks she was historically assigned to perform. Belonging to no one time or place, the sculpture is stately, resilient, and self-possessed, announcing her authority and autonomy. When considered in the context of the original commission, moreover, The Seated I represents the "new ones" who bring word of new ideas and new perspectives, encouraging viewers to look forward to a better, more just future. Here the polished disc plays a key role, serving as a beacon that brings visitors into conversation with the sculpture, either by reflecting light or reflecting them back to themselves, occasioning moments of intersubjective conversation and critical self-awareness. A work of great importance in the context of Mutu’s career, The Seated I represents the culmination of two decades of sustained artistic experimentation and rigorous research into the relationship between power, race, gender, and representation.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/28445116

cross-posted from: https://literature.cafe/post/25018930

**What happens when love itself becomes a form of waste management? **

This is a portrait of the failure of distinction between what is wasted and what is “recyclable,” between love as pure gift and love as transaction.

Two armless mannequins kissing in a trashcan, this is not simply “trash art,” no, it is the purest materialization of the contemporary impasse of love under late capitalism.

Let’s begin with the obvious obscenity (yes ive been reading too much zizek): the kiss in the trashcan. It is not just that love here is “trash,” something thrown away — it is that love, when it is genuine, when it gives without expecting return, is structurally trash.

It cannot be recycled, cannot be reinserted into the symbolic economy of exchange. When you love, you lose an arm, because you give without measure. The armless mannequins embody this impossibility of holding, of possessing the Other. Their kiss, confined in a trashcan, is the remainder of a gesture that no longer belongs to the order of usefulness.

Like all true love, it is obscene in its uselessness.

But then — beside it — the recycling bin. With trash and mannequin legs. The legs are crucial — they are the organs of movement. They are what allows the subject to go somewhere AND to return, to complete an exchange. To “give your legs,” in this sense, is to give only a part of yourself and to expect it to 're-enter circulation'. To give you productive value.

The recycling bin is thus the perfect allegory for consumerist love, where love and consumerist products are one and the same, where even intimacy is a system of return: you give in order to receive, you recycle your emotions, hoping they will come back in a purified form just as we expect from our products.

So love has been contaminated by waste — desire itself has become polluted.

Here “authentic giving” and “productive exchange” have disintegratedd. Even our attempts to “recycle love,” to make it sustainable, are revealed as obscene. The leg, detached from the mannequin’s body, is no longer a symbol of movement but a fetishized fragment, a commodity of desire without wholeness.

Thus, the entire scene performs the commodification of the gift. The trashcan kiss — pure, useless love — sits beside its own mirror: a recycling bin that pretends to restore value but only produces dismembered remains.

So in late capitalism, even our trash is asked to be productive, to “come back” as something new. Yet love, real love, cannot be recycled. It must remain a remainder, a waste — the excess that escapes every system.

It is also crucial that they are mannequins because mannequins embody the paradox of the human under capitalism — they are perfect imitations of people, yet utterly empty, subjects reduced to pure form without interiority. Their presence exposes love and desire as already commodified gestures, rehearsed poses of intimacy with no flesh, no vulnerability. When these hollow consumer objects attempt to love — armless, plastic, discarded — the act becomes tragic: even the symbols of consumption try to transcend their function, to feel something real. But precisely because they are mannequins, their kiss is doomed to remain a simulation — a love scene without life, revealing how the machinery of consumer desire has replaced the human capacity to feel with the glossy shell of it.

To love is not to circulate but to cease circulation — to accept loss without return, to dwell in the trashcan. It is there, among the discarded mannequins, that the only authentic intimacy survives.

The passage I wrote myself. The image I randomly found as a comment on a meme. The image was never intended as art, but i found it striking.

This dramatic image is of the great Indian fruit bat (Pteropus giganteus) frontally displayed with one wing out-stretched. The body is shown in considerable detail, with the bat’s fur, eyes, curling claws, and wing veins naturalistically articulated. This work is closely related to another image of a bat painted by the well-known artist Bhawani Das, who was trained in Mughal miniature painting and commissioned by Sir Elijah Impey, Chief Justice of Bengal (1774–1782), and his wife, Lady Mary, to make extensive natural history studies at their estate in Calcutta. It was perhaps made by a follower of Bhawani Das who worked in a slightly more naturalistic mode.

The Three Crosses, one of Rembrandt's finest works in any medium, represents the culmination of his virtuosity as a printmaker. He drew on the copperplate entirely in drypoint which allowed him to fully exploit the velvety areas of burr raised by the drypoint tool as it cut into the copper. When Rembrandt created this impression, he deliberately left ink on the printing plate; it lightly veils the figures standing at the foot of the cross on the right; a thicker layer almost completely covers the bushes along the right edge. By creatively inking the copperplate, Rembrandt in a certain sense painted each impression. Each time he printed the copperplate he created a unique work. He further varied impressions by printing them on different supports; this impression is printed on vellum, which infuses the composition with a warm light. Vellum, less absorbent than paper, holds ink on the surface, softening lines and enhancing the richness of entire effect.

Painted by Marco d’Oggiono, a close associate of Leonardo da Vinci’s in Milan, this picture combines elements of portraiture and allegory. The richly dressed female wearing an inscrutable smile is crowned with ivy and holds a bowl of cherries. The meaning is enigmatic: it may allude to marriage (ivy symbolized marital fidelity) but also suggests a connection with sophisticated literary circles. D’Oggiono built a successful career, first by working in Leonardo’s style and making copies after his paintings, later breaking away and crafting his own artistic identity.

Fully revealed in 2005, the verso of this sheet is inscribed with a gray-brown ink ".T." that is quite reminiscent of the "Melzi-Leoni" markings on Leonardo’s drawings and manuscripts. The study for the head of the Virgin on the recto has sometimes been doubted by scholars 'ex silentio' as being by Leonardo, possibly because its magical beauty renders it suspicious (Walter Vitzthum in 1966 quoted a recent English critic’s opinion in his support, "the drawing makes one think of Walter Pater’s mind rather than of Leonardo’s hand"). However, even in Leonardo’s most densely pictorial drawings, a few traces of his left-handed parallel hatching often remain visible underneath all the layers of the worked up medium. As the detailed scientific analyses of 2002-2003 demonstrated, this drawing is done with a nearly seamless sfumato technique, and is extremely homogeneous in its dense use of red and black chalks, revealing extensive, unified left-handed strokes in the rubbed-in intermediate shadows; these lines are also partly evident with the plain, unassisted eye (laboratory examinations by Marjorie Shelley and Rachel Mustalish, Paper Conservators, The Metropolitan Museum of Art; microphotograph details published and discussed by Carmen C. Bambach in Metropolitan Museum of Art 2003, pp. 41-42, 46-47, figs. 35a-d).

The left-handed strokes in the intermediate shadows of modeling had almost gone unnoticed until 2002-2003, as this drawing is much too often discussed by scholars from photographs, rather than from analysis of the original; one early historian who discerned the faint evidence of the "tratto alla mancina" in the drawing was Theodore Rousseau, the curator who acquired the work for the Metropolitan Museum of Art (see press release, dated 8 June 1951, Archive of The Metropolitan Museum of Art). The structural, delicately curving lower right to upper left strokes of the silvery, soft black chalk are most evident to the unassisted eye in the area of the Virgin’s forehead, while the short, left-handed strokes in the under-drawing done in red chalk are best evident in microscopic enlargements. Since this left-handed hatching is extensive, the drawing of the Head of the Virgin must unquestionably be authentic, and must have also served a creative, exploratory purpose in Leonardo’s design process. Among the great believers in the attribution of the drawing to Leonardo himself was Jean Paul Richter (the eminent anthologist of Leonardo’s writings), who catalogued the work in 1910, while it was in the collection of Dr. Ludwig Mond in London; most authors who have published an opinion about the Metropolitan Head of the Virgin have accepted it as an original work by Leonardo. While an attribution to Leonardo was hesitantly maintained by Carlo Pedretti and Patricia Trutty Coohill in 1993, they thought the drawing problematic and "so thoroughly overworked that one cannot penetrate to its original character" (this is not correct according to the most recent condition reports of the drawing in laboratory conditions in November 2005); the same authors considered the drawing a "bozzetto" with strong hints of the style of Bernardino Luini and Bernardino Lanino. It must be emphasized that the areas of intervention by later hands on the drawing are minimal (as is clarified by ultraviolet and transmitted light), and that the issues of condition are also minor: tiny flecks of dark accretions in the corner of the left eye, a slight vertical, curved area of abrasion at the base of the nose, and some strengthening of the deepest shadows of the nostril and lips. The design of the hair (done in places with bold, incisive strokes of the hard pointy black chalk at upper left) reveals noticeable changes of design by the artist. Still faintly visible are a pattern of tight curls done with small curving strokes on the side of the face (curling tendrils of hair similarly obscure the face in some of the Leda head studies; RL 12515, 12517, Windsor), while at least two alternative ideas for the forms of the thick braids enveloped in the veil-headdress at the crown of the head are explored with free, expressive strokes in partly erased layers of drawing in black chalk and then reworked differently on top (the alternative designs are comparable to some of Leonardo’s late head studies; RL 12533, 12534, Windsor). Recent positive opinions of the drawing have been stated by Pietro C. Marani (1999-2000), Martin Clayton (1996-97, 2002-2003), and David Alan Brown (2003).

This study is closely connected to the final design of Leonardo’s oil painting on panel, the Virgin and Child with Saint Anne (Musée du Louvre, Paris), which the present author dates to ca. 1508–12 (in agreement with Pietro C. Marani, Leonardo: una carriera di pittore, Milan, 1999-2000, pp. 275-78). Although the delicately finished drawing surface of the Metropolitan Museum study has suffered somewhat from slight abrasions throughout, it is still possible to appreciate the atmospheric dissolution of the Virgin’s relief-like forms as a work of superb technical virtuosity. The artist reworked much of the drawing in soft black chalk with red chalk (this red chalk layer is especially evident in the face, but it is found in the hair as under-drawing), and used a sfumato technique to unify the layers of medium. The soft smudging of the strokes into seamlessly blended tone exactly recalls Leonardo’s famous note intended for the "Libro di Pittura," of 1490-92, in the Paris Manuscript A, fol. 107 verso (B.N. 2038, fol. 27 verso): "… che le tue o[m]bre e lumi sieno uniti sa[n]za tratti o segni, a uso di fumo." More importantly, the Metropolitan Museum study vividly illustrates the depths of Leonardo’s explorations of optical phenomena late in his career. Like a number of other drawings associated with the Louvre painting of the Virgin and Child with Saint Anne, this sheet is an important example of Leonardo’s innovative development of complex pictorial techniques of drawing, in order to materialize his scientific research on the perspective of color, the disappearance of form, and the gradations of light and shadow, as discussed in his notes of 1513-16 (see RL 19076 recto, Windsor; Paris Manuscript G, fol. 37 recto; Paris Manuscript E, fols. 15 recto-17 recto, 32 verso, 80 recto-verso). He advised artists that their drawings attempt to capture such minute types of observable phenomena, as the reflected varieties of brightness and darkness from surrounding objects onto primary forms (Paris Manuscript E, fol. 17 recto).

Of the other closely related preparatory drawings for the Louvre Virgin and Child with Saint Anne that exist, the Metropolitan Museum Head of the Virgin seems exactly comparable in date to the study in soft black chalk or charcoal for the head of St. Anne (RL 12533, Windsor), to the studies in red chalk on ochre prepared paper for the Christ Child (Gallerie dell’Accademia 257, Venice), and to some of the detail studies for the draperies (RL 12530, 12532, Windsor; Louvre 2257, Paris). See recent discussion in Carmen C. Bambach (ed.), Leonardo da Vinci: Master Draftsman. Exh. cat. New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York, 2003, pp. 557-70, nos. 105-109; Francoise Viatte and Varena Forcione (ed.) Léonard de Vinci: Dessins et manuscrits. Exh. cat. Paris, Musée du Louvre. Paris, 2003, pp. 243-65, no. 79-90 (with an early, unconvinving date of ca. 1499 for the Louvre drapery study inv. 2257). It is also clear from other drawings connected with the Louvre painting that Leonardo continued to executed studies for the picture into his French period, in 1516-19, and especially drapery studies (RL 12526, 12527, Windsor). See Martin Clayton, Leonardo da Vinci: A Singular Vision, exh. cat., Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace, London, 1996-97, pp. 132-37. A number of landscape drawings are also connected to the composition of the Louvre painting, of which the study of rock formations (RL 12397, Windsor) seems especially close in date and drawing technique to the Metropolitan Head of the Virgin. It can be said that in his drawings for the Louvre Virgin and Child with St. Anne, Leonardo transformed scientific principles into a pictorial language of magical force and nuance.

The Metropolitan Head of the Virgin is among the earliest examples in Italy of the "two chalk technique," in which red and black chalks are blended for a subtly complementary pictorial effect. Among the Lombard followers of Leonardo who quickly adopted this innovative chalk technique was Bernardino Luini, whose large-scale studies of the infant heads for the painting of 1525-30, the Sleep of Jesus (Musée du Louvre, Paris) offer especially accomplished results. See Luini’s two drawings Louvre inv. 6815 and inv. 6816; discussed by Linda Wolk-Simon in Metropolitan Museum of Art 2003, pp. 667-69, nos. 132-33. Yet none of the head studies by such artists, however directly inspired by Leonardo they may be, approaches the poetry and beauty of drawing technique seen in the Metropolitan Head of the Virgin. Two early drawn copies after the Metropolitan Museum of Art drawing exist (Graphische Sammlung Albertina inv. 17613, Vienna; see Veronika Birke and Janine Kertész, Die italienischen Zeichnungen der Albertina: Generalverzeichnis,Vienna, Cologne, and Weimar, 1992-97, vol. 4, p. 2166, no. 7613; and Biblioteca Pinacoteca Ambrosiana F. 263 Inf. 67, Milan). An unconvincing attribution of the Ambrosiana copy to Cesare da Sesto was proposed by Luisa Cogliati Arano (see Augusto Marinoni and Luisa Cogliati Arano, Leonardo all'Ambrosiana: Il Codice Atlantico, i disegni di Leonardo e della sua cerchia, exh. cat., Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan, 1982, p. 128), as was also rightly observed by Marco Carminati (see Carminati, Cesare da Sesto, 1477-1523, Milan, 1994, p. 184, under no. 12).

Carmen C. Bambach.

Begun in Cape Cod over the summer and finished in New York City, it was the only oil painting Hopper produced that year. Reprising one of his signature subjects—a solitary figure, physically and emotionally detached from his surroundings and other people—it was described by the artist’s wife as "the man in concrete wall."

Kauffer spent the majority of his career working as a graphic designer in England, creating advertising posters that reflected his interest in Cubism, Italian Futurism, and Vorticism, a British art movement with affinities to Cubist abstraction and Futurism’s radical embrace of the machine. By the late 1920s Kauffer was also designing similarly inspired textiles and theatrical sets. Woven in wool and jute by the Wilton Royal Carpet Factory, this rug, with its collagelike combination of geometric shapes and planes of color, demonstrates Kauffer’s ongoing engagement with abstract design.

Was a contender for community banner.