what i want for christmas…..

"Rouchefoucauld Grail" (detail), 1315-1323, Sotheby's, London

Wow. So how often does something like this go to auction? No, it’s not THE Grail, but in the world of medieval codicology (the study of books as physical objects) this is THEIR grail. The Rouchefoucauld Grail (c. 1315-1323) is considered to be the oldest surviving account of the Arthur’s quest for the Grail. From ArtDaily:

It is the greatest romance of chivalry produced in the Middle Ages, and its themes of friendship, treachery, ambition, achievement and star-crossed tragic lovers form the foundations of much of our modern literature. The stories of the quest for the Holy Grail, of the Lady of the Lake, of King Arthur and his court at Camelot, and of Sir Lancelot and Queen Guinevere, captured the imaginations of generations to come, and have inspired some of the best-selling novels of our time. The Rochefoucauld Grail is from the 14th century, and on a scale which is as impressive as the text: some 200 cows would have been needed to produce the vellum sheets that make up the three monumental volumes, the whole embellished with some 107 jewel like illuminated illustrations – each one a work of art in its own right.

Dr Timothy Bolton, specialist in charge of the sale at Sotheby’s, said: “This is one of the principal manuscripts of the first significant medieval work of secular literature. It is a grand book, in a monumental format, with 107 miniatures, each a dazzling jewel of early gothic illumination. The subjects are almost entirely secular – a breathtakingly unusual thing at the time – with scenes of jousts, tournaments and battles, noble adventures and daring tests of strength and courage. The scenes often have a riotous energy, and often stretch beyond the boundaries of the picture frames, with lofty towers poking through the borders at the top, and figures tumbling out of the miniatures onto the blank page as they fall or scramble to escape their enemies.”

To check out the parchment’s specs (or to register for the auction) click here. Just keep in mind it may go for around $3.2 million. If that’s a little out of your price range though, I’ll settle for any of these.

a brief history of red

Jan van Eyck, "Portrait of a Man" (1433), National Gallery, London

Social anthropologists tell us that the color red is the first color which was able to be synthesized by the human eye — the first color we could see. When it comes to its application in the world of art, the discovery of North America made its use more and more accessible. You see, for the medieval and early Renaissance periods, the color red was rarely used in paintings. This was because the dye used for red oil paint was extracted from a cactus beetle (yes, a beetle) called a cochineal.  ”People made their living trading this dye,” says Rebecca Stevens, former curator of Red, an exhibition at the Textile Museum in Washington, D.C. “It was as good as gold.” Spain, with its domination Mexico and the southwestern U.S. found easy access to the bug that was so rare in other parts of the world.  Traders would scrape the bugs off of the cacti, let them dry and smash the bugs into a smell pellet. When they reached Europe merchants weren’t able to figure out what these pellets were made of (a berry? a pigment?) and therefore the Spanish secret and monopoly was safe.

Later, as synthetic dyes became easily producable, the bottom dropped out on the cochineal market. But with red’s innate brilliance and tone, it was still used selectively: “A textile is not dyed red by chance,” Stevens says. “No, you use red for a specific reason whether it’s for love, for fertility, for happiness — you made it red on purpose.”

For an interesting read on red, check out Amy Butler Greenfield’s A Perfect Red: Empire Espionage and the Quest of the Color of Desire.

On another note, I thought I would close with this great quote I read by 19th-Century French poet Charles Baudelaire: “A frenzied passion for art is a canker that devours everything else.”

a photorealist….

Gerard Richter, "Betty" (1991), St. Louis Art Museum

I was first exposed to contemporary German painter Gerard Richter on a trip last year to the St. Louis Art Museum. While wondering around the incredibly white, incredibly vast rooms of modern and contemporary art, I was still in a state of shock – I had just seen Matisse’s famous painting Bathers With A Turtle. Nothing could shake me from the haze I was in. Nothing except the painting to the left, Betty. Painted in 1991, Richter painted this unconventional portrait of his daughter. I stood amazed. The canvas is an impressive 40 1/4 x 28 1/2 inches. Although not the largest painting in the gallery, it dominates the wall.

As I moved forward to read the placard on the wall, I was stunned by the words “oil on canvas”. With the painting’s realism I presumed it was a photograph. I moved closer and I couldn’t even see the brush strokes. This is a very odd trait in contemporary painting. If anything (as seen in the works of Anselm Kiefer), artists have made their brush strokes more evident and thicker on the canvas. But here was a painting which blended the strokes so perfectly it reminded me of neoclassicist painters of the 18th C. like Ingres or David.

Richter’s method is a perfect blend of old and new. He projects a photograph (his own usually) onto a canvas and traces the exact form. With paint he replicated the photo exactly and then adds the “photographic blur”. Depending on the painting, he uses a light brush or a heavy squeegee to pull the colors giving the painting the realistic interaction of light with bordering colors.

One advantage our modern masters have over their artistic predecessors is the internet. That said, I recommend going to Gerard Richter’s official website or check out this piece by Moira Weigel in The Guardian.

Oh, and before I forget, if you head over to Hulu check out the PBS show Art:21, a great introduction to some great artists in our time.

mirror, mirror……

Jan van Eyck, "Arnolfini Portrait" (1434), National Gallery, London

It’s a shame that Jan van Eyck isn’t a household name. He should be as well known to us Leonardo, Michelangelo or Rembrandt. Van Eyck really invented the notion of the artist as a personality. Before him (for the most part) the artist’s identity was not important . . . . not as important as who the patron(The Church) was, that is. But this began to change in a large part due to this painting, The Arnolfini Portrait or as it is also known, The Arnolfini Wedding. This is an extremely busy painting, and it would take a smarter person than me to explain it all. But I would like to point out a few features, starting with what we see in the detail below.

Here we see something that would become commonplace from canvas to alley walls — the artist’s signature. Above the mirror in the background (more on that later), the artist has written “Johannes de Eyck fuit hic” or in other words “Jan van Eyck was here”. Van Eyck is making his statement: “I DID THIS!” As I said, he was trying to create the personality of  “artist”. In fact, he was one of the first artists to create a self-portrait as a work of art unto itself.

“Arnolfini Portrait”, detail

 

His signature, however, is only the beginning of the many charming nuances of this painting. Many see this wedding as one of the shotgun style. They point to the bride’s largebelly as proof, but that was merely an effect of the dress she was wearing. Dresses of this style were worn long and draped comfortably as the wearer would move. But when standing still, it was fashionable for the woman to bundle it up and hold it so. There is also the dog (a symbol of loyalty), the discarded shoes (symbols of the sanctity of marriage) and the single burning candle in the elaborately detailed ceiling lamp, the symbolic presence of “God’s all-seeing eye”.

“Arnolfini Portrait”, detail

But the best detail of this painting has to be the convex mirror in the back of the room, dead center. In it, we see two men, witnesses to the wedding. The man on the right is another of van Eyck’s self portraits. Who is the other figure? A priest? An official witness? Or, more tempting, is it us? Spatially it makes sense. If we are seeing this before our eyes, a mirror would have to reflect our image, and so van Eyck makes a gutsy, genius move and paints a generic figure which could be any one of us. The confusing perspective, with a rear mounted mirror, but with the artist shown in a different way reminds me a lot of Las Meninas by Velazquez. The sophistication, the bravery and complete mastery of this painting prove to me that it would behove us, myself included, to pay Jan van Eyck his due and place him in the upper class of the artistic pantheon.

The Importance of being Judith

Giorgio Vasari, "Judith" (1554), St. Louis Art Museum

As I first began to explore museums a few years back, I noticed that almost every collection had a representation of the Jewish heroine Judith and her decapitation of the Assyrian general Holofernes. It came to be a sort of game for me to find these artworks. At one point I concluded that only collection lacking one was the Taft Museum of Art in Cincinnati. Yet, sure enough, on one visit a small tea set was pointed out to me in the corner of their Renaissance collection. Sure enough, there she was, with a little smile holding the head of Holofernes.

Here’s a thumbnail sketch of of Judith’s story. With the town of Bethulia under seige by the Assyrians, Judith and her maidservant go to the camp of Holofernes falsely claiming to have foreseen an Assyrian victory. The general is smitten by this woman and holds a feast for her, hoping to rape her afterwards. However, when Holofernes passes out in his tent in a drunken stupor, Judith takes up his own sword and decapitates him. She and her maidservant make their way out of the camp and back to Bethulia, which is now saved.

Johann Liss, "Judith" (1628), Kunsthistoriches Museum (Vienna)

 Existing in neither the Jewish not the Catholic canon, the apocryphal Book of Judith is one with many common themes of Jewish scriptures. Namely sexual seduction (ala Delilah) and the violent killing of a sexual aggressor (ala Jael). Starting in Renaissance, the stories of Delilah, Jael & Judith all held a special place in the hearts of painters and artists. The Italian peninsula, at the time, was a collection of city-states with constant war and shifting alliances. To many of these city-states (Florence, in particular), Judith was a symbol of unlikely victory. For some artist there was also, to quote historian Margarita Stocker: “an increasing fascination with images of strong women, femme fortes.” But of course to other artists, such as Artemisia Gentileshi, the tale of Judith was intensely personal.

Down the centuries, even with the political meaning of the story no longer apropos, the story still inspired artists. Even into the 20th century artists as avante-garde as Gustave Klimt and Frank von Stuck painted her. Even in the paintings of de Kooning we see a piece of Judith as in the Woman painting we see femme fortes who are, as a recent reader commented: “powerful, often angry”.

the other abstract-expressionists, part i

Norman Lewis, "Prehistory" (1952), Dayton Art Institute

Often, when we are told of the Abstract-Expressionists in the mid-20th C., we learn about Rothko, Pollock, de Kooning, Kline, etc. It would easy therefore to presume that this movement was made up completely of white men. However, some of the most important artists did not fall into this mold. Case in point is the artist of the above painting, Norman Lewis (1909-1979), an African-American who started new paths from inside, but diverging from, Abstanct Expressionism. 

His painting styles ranged from Cubism (Harlequin, 1943) to pure abstraction, like in 1950′s Congregation:

Norman Lewis, "Congregation" (1950), Bill Hodges Gallery

Early in his career, Lewis joined the 306 Group, with luminaries such as Ralph Ellison, which was dedicated to establishing the Harlem Renaissance as a powerful movement in the New York art and literary world. As art critic Susan Inniss wrote: “Lewis had the ability to communicate both with African-Americans and with the white mainstream world. With new found artistic freedom he became a part of the famous group of American avante-garde artists who rejuvenated American Art and the New York art scene.” In the 1940′s he began exhibiting at the Museum of Modern Art with such artists as David Smith and Robert Motherwell. From the beginning of his career to the end, Lewis believed that one could use art to promote social change and understanding between the black and white communities. Paintings such as Prehistory speak to the common chaos out of which humity has risen, but also to the chaos which we still need too overcome.

Check out the Bill Hodges Gallery website for more paintings by Norman Lewis (just scroll down to his name in the middle of the page).

  nlike, other African-American artists, had the ability to communicate both with African-Americans and with the White mainstream world. With new found artistic freedom he became a part of the famous group of American avant-garde artist who rejuvenated American Art and the New York art scene.ewis, unlike, other African-American artists, had the ability to communicate both with African-Americans and with the White mainstream world. With new found artistic freedom he became a part of the famous group of American avant-garde artist who rejuvenated American Art and the New York art scene.

Quoting “Las Meninas”, Part II

A few week back I wrote a bit about Velazquez’s Las Meninas and its popularity with other artists. The above painting, The Family of Carlos IV by Goya, is probably the most famous quotation of the painting. It portrays the family of the Spanish king Carlos IV before his overthrow by Napoleon and the French “enlightenment” forces. Goya did not flatter anyone in his portraits as this painting makes clear. This is certainly an odd looking family. Indeed French writer Theophile Gautier would say that it looked like “a portrait of the owner of the corner grocery store and his wife.”

Goya himself is shown to the right of the painting, standing in the dark behind the easel.  This painting almost makes no sense.  In this way, the confusion of POV recalls Las Meninas. The only way it would make sense is if the family and the artist were standing in front of a mirror. However,  there is a difference between the paintings of Velazquez and Goya. As Robert Hughes points out in his book Goya, “from where he stands in the painting, Goya could have seen only the royal family’s backs. Moreover, the sense of discovery in Las Meninas — the infanta, the painter, and the dwarves disclosed to the royal couple as the come in — is absent from The Family of Carlos IV: these royal personages are obviously and intentionally posing for their likenesses to be made. It is not a slice of life, and its figures were not assembled in this way in the same room at the same time.”

For those of you in Cincinnati, check out the Taft Museum of Art’s collection and you will find Goya’s study for the head of Queen Maria Luisa.

For another great quoting of Las Meninas check out Goya’s The Family of Infante Don Luis. Don Luis was a brother of Carlos IV who was ostracized from the royal family because of his marriage to non-royal.

the Violence of Turner

After a cursory view of his oeuvre, the paintings of JMW Turner may forever be seen as the quintessentially ordered view of the English Lanscape. His views of regency, countryside manor houses and of the Thames are, without us even knowing, what give our imagination the structure of early 19th century Britannia. We witness calm, rolling hills giving way to verdant meadows and clouded skies with only the slightest threat of rain. But if these paintings lull us into calm contemplation, it is the other works of Turner which show us chaos, apocalypse and the violence of nature.

The Turner who created the above painting, The Fifth Plague of Egypt, is the Turner who Simon Schama calls “the cockney poet just short of madness.” Like the most powerful of Turner’s paintins, The Fifth Plague shows nature gone wrong, from the storm brewing in the sky to the dead horse in the foreground.

But it is with the above painting, Snowstorm: Hannibal Crossing the Alps, that Turner really joins nature and violence with an overwhelming sense of  the epic. It portrays the Carthaginian general crossing the Alps during the 2nd Punic War with Rome. His army, however, has come under attack by barbarian mountain tribes (possibly the Helvetii) who are hindering his progress. If you look to the background in the middle of the painting you can just spot Hannibal himself astride an elephant, which Carthage used as their own version of “shock and awe”. The true ”star” of the painting, however, is that black vortex hanging over the scene. In spite of the strength of man and his armies, nature ultimately is strongest force in our world. The cloud swoops downward and ultimately presents itself as a bad omen for the Carthaginian armies, and as a reminder of the folly of man’s ambition.

the sublime Lady Agnew

This portrait of Lady Agnew by John Singer-Sargent, painted in 1892, is to me one of the most beautiful portraits of a beautiful woman ever put to canvas. It shows, as Umberto Eco says, “something that would make us happy if it were ours, but remains beautiful if it belongs to someone else.” (History of Beauty, 2004). When seeing this painting and thinking of beauty, the words of Baldassare Castiglione seem right:

Just as a man cannot hear with his palate or smell with his ears, beauty can in no way be enjoyed nor can the desire it arouses in our souls be satisfied through the sense of touch, but solely through what has beauty for its true object, the faculty of sight. He should enjoy with his eyes the radiance, the grace, the loving ardour, the smiles, the mannerisms, and all the other agreeable adornments of women. (Book of the Courtier, IV, 62, 1513-1518)

Art as revenge

        

Last week I watched Agnes Merlet’s Artemesia, the 1997 winner of a Golden Globe for foreign language film. It was good as a film if judged merely on its own merits, but as a history lesson……not so good. But it got me thinking a lot about the artist behind the story, an artist I’ve been studying for a while.  Artemisia Gentileschi (1593-1653) is one of the most important women in the history of western art.  A contemporary of Caravaggio, she embraced verism (a true depiction of human traits, a.k.a. “warts-and-all”) and the master’s use of light/dark contrasts.

In 1612, Artemisia was raped by her teacher, Agostino Tassi. In the misogynistic 17th C., instead of immediate charges being brought against Tassi, it was expected that he would marry Artemisia. Yes, the victim of rape was expected to become married to her attacker, the only way for her to “escape” shame.  However, when Tassi refused to take her as his wife, Artmesia’s father, Orazio (a noted painter in his own right) took him to court for the rape. The 7-month trial which followed is one of most well documented trials of this period.

Around this period, Artemisia painted the above painting — Judith Beheading Holofernes. It is based on the Jewish apocryphal tale  in which the Jewish matriarch beheads Israel’s enemy, Holofernes. Upon viewing, it is very easy for one to connect the horrors of her rape with the aggressive violence of the painting. While I’ll leave these deeper connections to be made by psychoanalysts and feminists, I can speak to the great impact this painting has had on art history. Although her version was influenced by Caravaggio’s, her vision of this story set the standard for later painters such as Rubens, Cranach, von Stuck and Klimt.

For more on some of the modern paintings of Judith and some good backstory on the Judith myth, check out this article.