Art

The extreme familiarity of this image today makes it hard to realize how shocking it and other works by Munch were when they were created slightly over a hundred years ago. Munch's art represented his own emotions, mostly the darker ones of fear, dread, loneliness, and sexual longing, with extraordinary expressiveness. The screaming figure personifies existential horror. A precursor of this image is a drawing of a man (Munch himself) on a similar bridge, with a blood-red sky above. A text accompanying this drawing states: "I walked with two friends. Then the sun sank. Suddenly the sky turned as red as blood ... My friends walked on, and I was left alone, trembling with fear. I felt as if all nature were filled with one mighty unending shriek."

It seems doubtful that this Angel Applicant, resembling the offspring of a bulldog and a Halloween mask, will ever reach heaven. In 1939, Klee composed twenty-nine works that feature angels, having in earlier years only sporadically depicted them. His angels were not the celestial kind but hybrid creatures beset with human foibles and whims. Klee's angels are "forgetful, "still female, "ugly," incomplete," or "poor"—as the titles he gave these pictures indicate.

Suffering from an incurable illness and sensing himself hovering between life and death, Klee possibly felt a kinship with these outsiders. In this work, he covered a sheet of newspaper with black gouache on which he then drew the outlines of the figure and of the crescent moon with a thick, soft graphite pencil. Then he filled in these forms with a thin white wash. It is the black ground peeking through the white pigment that gives this creature its ghostly shimmer.

The met.

Big fan of Paul Klee here as you can probably tell by my posting history. Lovely read there, do give it a go. Also, Happy Halloween folks!

By: Adrien Tournachon , Guillaume-Benjamin-Amand Duchenne de Boulogne. 1854–56, printed 1862

In compiling a scientific treatise to aid artists, the physiologist Duchenne de Boulogne used electrical stimulation of the facial muscles to elicit expressions of the principal emotions. Wanting his transcriptions to be exact, he collaborated with Adrien Tournachon (brother of the famous Nadar), a photographer who specialized in portraiture. From the negatives they made together in 1854, Adrien produced a single set of carefully crafted prints that the doctor mounted in a large album (now École des Beaux-Arts, Paris). Later, on his own, Duchenne copied and cropped the images to create illustrations for his book Mécanisme de la physionomie humaine; ou, Analyse électro-physiologique de l’expression des passions applicable à la pratique des arts plastiques (1862). In the volume, Duchenne wrote that the subject of this image seems terrified of the idea of imminent death or torture: “This expression must be that of the damned.”

The met.

Anastasia Samoylova came of age as part of Russia’s first post-Soviet generation and has lived in the United States for most of her adult life. Straddling the line between insider and outsider, she wields a dual perspective that enriches her artistic vision and drives her passionate interest in exploring the particularities of place: how a region’s values, ideologies, and ecologies change and challenge each other over time.

Samoylova began photographing Florida in 2016. From her home base in Miami, traveled by car from the southernmost Keys to the state borders with Alabama and Georgia and up and down the Gulf Coast. The first result of these road trips was FloodZone, a book and series of exhibitions responding to the problem of rising sea levels and the fragility of the built environment in the southern United States. Her next project, Floridas, to which this work belongs, delves deeper into the state’s complexity and contradictions.

With their lush colors, layered surface, and collage-like compositions, Samoylova’s photographs and mixed-media paintings temper the shimmering seductions of the Sunshine State with an awareness of the troubling consequences of climate change, gentrification, and political extremism. The work is layered with subtle references to Florida’s complex history and to the ways it has been represented by others, most notably by the American photographer Walker Evans (1903-1975), who traveled there for commissions, book projects, and family visits from the 1930s through the 1970s.

The met.

Among the most celebrated works of art at The Met, this painting conveys Rembrandt’s meditation on the meaning of fame. The richly clad Greek philosopher Aristotle (384–322 BCE) rests his hand pensively on a bust of Homer, the epic poet who had attained literary immortality with his Iliad and Odyssey centuries before. Aristotle wears a gold medallion with a portrait of his powerful pupil, Alexander the Great—perhaps the philosopher is weighing his own worldly success against Homer’s timeless achievement. Although the work has come to be considered quintessentially Dutch, it was painted for a Sicilian patron at a moment when Rembrandt’s signature style, with its dark palette and almost sculptural buildup of paint, was beginning to fall out of fashion in Amsterdam.

The met.

After almost five years of brutal conflict, World War II came to an end with Germany surrendering on May 8, 1945, followed by Japan on September 2 after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This poster celebrates the victory of the Allies and the Soviet Red Army and the "total destruction of fascism." Triumph is expressed through striking imagery: a bayonet stuck in Hitler’s eye socket, chaotic surrounding debris, and rays of light in the background that suggest a new dawn. The text describes the jubilation of the artists at the TGP, the workers, and all those who fought for progress in Mexico.

Against the towering background furnace that radiates sparks and flames, the lean but muscular bodies of two laborers glow under more dramatic lighting as they go about smelting metals in a crucible. The print thus juxtaposed and celebrated two kinds of raw energy—one human, the other industrial—as China began to modernize.

The print’s dense texture, vivid details, and layered visual effects recall Soviet wood engravings, which Huangyan greatly admired.

The met

Edgar Degas, Répétition d’un ballet sur la scène, 1874

There are three similar versions of this scene, and their precise relationship has bedeviled scholars for decades. The largest, painted in grisaille (Musée d’Orsay, Paris), appeared in the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874. The two others, tentatively dated the same year, are in the Metropolitan’s collection. This painting probably preceded the version in pastel (29.100.39), which is more freely handled. The importance that Degas attached to the composition is evident in the preparatory drawings that he made for almost every figure, from the dancer scratching her back in the foreground to the woman yawning next to the stage flat.

the met.

Maybe the first artist I would've called a favourite of mine. Still love his style.

Belovezhskaya Forest belongs to Qiu Xiaofei’s recent series investigating the intersections of personal and political history through magical realism. With influences from nineteenth-century European painting and Chinese figurative painting traditions, and forms taken after socialist architecture, Qiu lays out a fantastical, psychological drama drawing upon his family history and childhood in Harbin, in Northeastern China. The story of his maternal grandfather, a former Trotskyist whose career in China suffered due to that association, drives the narrative. Belovezhskaya Forest lies on the border of Poland and Belarus, where watershed moments during the Nazi occupation and history of the Soviet Union took place. Obscured portraits of Marx, Göring, Lenin, and Trotsky—who had direct or indirect history with the forest—are blended with Qiu’s grandfather’s visage and posted on the anthropomorphic trees. They watch over a pastel-colored figure representing a kind of arhat, one who is on the threshold toward enlightenment. Yet this character is entangled with amorphous monsters and surrounded by skulls, pointing to the forest’s sinister past. On the right and in the background appear abstracted Russian Orthodox churches and socialist-style workers’ dormitories, the latter memories from Qiu’s childhood that are slowly vanishing from the Harbin cityscape. A wormhole-like vortex, with its concentric circles, symbolizes the spiraling of time and imagination. The dizzying juxtaposition of these fragmented scenes weaves politics, allegory, and memory into a melancholy landscape.

The met

Beginning in 1905, Matisse spent the summers—and sometimes even the winters—in Collioure and continued to do so intermittently until about 1914. It was in Collioure that the sitter for The Young Sailor, a local sardine fisherman, caught his eye. In this second version of the painting (the first, dated 1906, is in a private collection), the contours have been sharpened, the forms are more defined, and the colors have been reduced to large, mostly flat areas of bright green, blue, and pink—a decorative style and palette adopted by Matisse from this point on. Matisse also drastically altered the sailor's mood and expression. His stylizing brush wiped off the earlier round-cheeked youthfulness of the fisherman's face, replacing it with a masklike expression of savvy cunning from which a touch of licentiousness seems not absent. The sitter's rather theatrical looks and his colorful costume, set against the pink candy-colored ground, combine to make this work one of Matisse's most decorative portraits in the Fauve manner.

The met.

This rejection led Monet to organize impressionist exhibitions. It’s now considered a masterpiece of early Impressionism.

There is something about snow in the impressionist style that I just find unexplainably beautiful.

I love great painters of light. Especially light on water. Similarly backlit subjects, the way light interacts with the image and impacts what we see while only backlighting.

I havent read much about him but i feel like he really likes triangles, often we see very sharp triangles in water and the general shape of his subjects too. Hence I added an image of the pyramid. You can also notice it in the water and the building and the people. Just a little theory.

Witches' Sabbath is one of Francisco de Goya's "Black Paintings," created between 1820 and 1823 on the walls of his home, the Quinta del Sordo. This series of works reflects the artist's dark and pessimistic vision in his final years. ​In the painting, a large he-goat represents the devil, presiding over a gathering of witches. The work not only depicts a scene of witchcraft but is also a social critique of the ignorance and fanaticism of the era. ​The painting inspires deep reflection on the darker side of humanity, the fear of the unknown, and madness. It is a testament to Goya's personal anguish and his view of Spanish society as a place dominated by superstition and evil.

Has been used as reference and as an inspiration for a lot of art. The witch by Eggers for example used this image as inspiration for it's ending too. A movie I love and a scene that left me pointing at my screen.

Tatsushima’s I Cannot Be a Bride Anymore is a critique of societal pressure on women to marry, and the conflict between personal identity and traditional expectations.