What’s New with Edvard Munch?
November 17, 2008
There are two exciting news items with respect to Norwegian expressionist Edvard Munch this November.
First, Edvard Munch’s rare painting “Love and Pain” just sold for $34 million at the Sotheby’s auction in New York on November 3, 2008.
The artwork depicts a pale red-headed woman leaning over and passionately clutching a man on her lap. The woman in the painting is consoling her lover (?) The relationship between the two parties is not exactly clear.
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The title does however clearly indicate a relationship between falling in love and getting hurt. The painting depicts an intimate tenderness. While the woman dominates the vulnerable man, it is not threatening. The painting has been dubbed ‘the Vampire’ by Przybyszewski, however, this clearly misreads the intend of the artist and is more sensationalist than accurate.
Overall, this painting is a rare find. Till this day, the painting has remained in private hands for 70 years. As you can gauge from my other article on Munch, as most of his works are housed in museums in Scandinavia. It was expected to sell for $35 million (or anywhere between $30 to $40 million), and so that target has been nearly reached.
While this painting probably won’t be for sale again for some time to come, you can amuse yourself with the purchase of a rather nice canvas print of said painting for a fraction of the cost. Ha ~ click on the image shown here to consider your options.
Complete Munch Catalog with Celebratory Munch Seminar
The second Munch news item will probably have a more long-lasting and wider benefit to the community than the sale of that rare painting. This month marks the launch of the most comprehensive guide of Edvard Munch’s work. It is called ‘GERD WOLL: EDVARD MUNCH. THE COMPLETE PAINTINGS’.
Edvuard Munch bequeathed an enormous collection to the City of Oslo towards the end of WWII. The city established the Musée Eduard Munch. Many of Edvuard Munch paintings and portraits can be seen in this museum in Oslo (www.munch.museum.no).
The book project involved a systematic gathering of photographs and information on external works by Munch. Of course, a keystone was already provided by the Munch Museum’s catalog of its collection and of privately owned paintings that had been examined by the museum staff.
The catalog is enormous. It comprises a total of 1789 works, and is published in four volumes.
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The publisher Cappelen Damm, in conjunction with the museum, launched the Norwegian edition on 3 November 2008. It can be ordered through the museum shop in Oslo. The English edition will be published by Thames & Hudson in Spring 2009.
In anticipation of the English version of the Catalogue Raisonné of Edvard Munch’s painted ouvre, the Scandinavian House of New York, in collaboration with the Munch Museum in Oslo, arranged a Munch seminar in New York, NY, last 13-14 November 2008.
This seminar will examine the artist’s career and contributions to European modernism and visual culture. It included lectures by Senior Curator Gerd Woll, Curator Petra Pettersen and Senior Curator Mai Britt Guleng of the Munch Museum in Oslo, Professor Øivind Storm Bjerke of the University of Oslo, Senior Curator Iris Müller-Westermann of the Moderna Museet in Stockholm and Munch scholars from American museums and universities.
(Note: Edvuard Munch is sometimes written as ‘Eduard Munch’ or even ‘Edward Munch’.)
Edvard Munch : the Man behind the Scream ~ Biography
November 17, 2008
“I want to show men breath, fell, love, and suffer. I want to bring home to the spectator the sacred element in these things, so that he takes his hat off just as he would in church.” ~ Edvard Munch
Early Childhood of Edvard Munch
Edvard Munch was a Norwegian painter and graphic artist, born at Løten in Hedmark on 12 December 1863. At that time, his father, Christian Munch, was lowly paid medical military officer. When visiting his colleague Dr. Munthe at Elverum he became acquainted with the young Laura Cathrine Bjølstad, employed by the family as a maid. The 44-year-old doctor and the tubercular 23-year-old married in 1861.
Munch’s parents came from very different backgrounds. Laura’s father had been a successful sea captain and a timber merchant. The Munch family was was made up of middle class, priests, scholars & artists. Both parents were devout Christians, which characterized Munch’s family home.
Edvard Munch was only a year old when the family moved to Kristiania, what is now called Oslo. Both his mother and his favorite sister died young of tuberculosis. His aunt came to help raise the children. Christian Munch was an attentive father who instructed his son in history and literature, and entertained him and his sisters and brothers with vivid ghost stories and tales of Edgar Allan Poe. He was also a qualified doctor. However, his altruism sabotaged his attempts to establish a private practice. This situation led to frequent moves and poverty in Edvard’s childhood. All these factors added to Munch’s dark perspective on life.
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Edvard Munch Art Education
Munch was most interested in art as a teenager, but he followed his father’s wishes and in 1879 he enrolled in a technical college. There he studied engineering, excelling in physics, chemistry, and math. Frequent illnesses interrupted his studies, and he decided to become a painter. His goal, as he wrote in his diary: “in my art I attempt to explain life and its meaning to myself.” In 1881, Munch enrolled at the Royal School of Art and Design of Kristiania, which incidentally had been founded by his forefather Jacob Munch.
Artistic Influences
Much to the chagrin of his father who paid Edvard’s stipend, Edvard Munch’s art and thoughts were greatly influenced by the writer Hans Jaeger, who was the leader of the controversial group, called ‘Christiania’s Bohemia.’ Jaeger was a bohemian nihilist, an anti-establishment rebel and a believer of free love.
Edvard Munch’s Travels
1880 saw a marked revolution in Norwegian art. The Norwegian artists, who had previously been studying overseas, first in Germany and then in France, now returned to Norway and choose Naturalism as the only direction for young Norwegian art.
Munch first experimented with many styles, including Naturalism and Impressionism. Then Jaeger encouraged him to reflect and examine his own emotional and psychological state. This helped Munch to move beyond impressionism and started what he called in his diary ’soul paintings’. His first such painting was ‘The Sick Child’ (1886), based on his sister’s death.
Over the next decade or so, Munch played around with brushstroke techniques and color palettes to find his own personal painting style and began to explore symbolism and eventually expressionism. In 1889, Munch had his first one-man show of almost all his works to date. The recognition for this show resulted in scholarship to study in Paris under French painter Léon Bonnat for two years.
While not to crazed about Bonnat’s drawing classes in Paris, Munch was very excited about modern European artists like Paul Gauguin, Vincent Van Gogh, and Henri Toulouse-Lautrec who used color to convey emotion. Learning from them and crafting his own, by 1892, Munch had formulated his characteristic, and original, Synthetist aesthetic, in which color is the symbol-laden element. A great example is his work Melancholy. Munch had since moved from Paris to Berlin, where he’d stayed for four years. In Berlin, Munch involved himself in an international circle of writers, artists and critics, including the Swedish dramatist and leading intellectual August Strindberg, whom he painted in 1892. At this stage he still sold little of his work.
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In 1896, Munch moved back to Paris, focusing on graphic representations of his “Frieze of Life” themes. Here he worked on his woodcut and lithographic technique. Munch also produced multi-colored versions of “The Sick Child” which sold well, as well as several nudes and multiple versions of Kiss (1892). Parisian critics considered work “violent and brutal” however his work started to get serious attention and his financial situation improved considerably. In 1897, Munch bought himself a summer house, in the small town of Åsgårdstrand in Norway. He dubbed this home the “Happy House” and returned here almost every summer for the next 20 years. In that year, Munch returned to Christiana (Oslo), and he finally started to be accepted there.
Love Life
In 1899, at the age of thirty-four, Munch began an intimate relationship with the wealthy, upper-class Tulla Larsen. After their travels to Italy together, Munch began another fertile period in his art. It was a period of landscapes and his final painting in the “The Frieze of Life” series, The Dance of Life (1899).
Tulla was keen to get married, which scared Munch and he flet to Berlin in 1900.
International Recognition of Munch’s Art
In 1902, Berlin critics were beginning to appreciate Munch’s work even though the public still found his work strange. Good press coverage brought him the influential patrons Albert Kollman and Max Linde. He described the turn of events in his diary, “After twenty years of struggle and misery forces of good finally come to my aid in Germany—and a bright door opens up for me.”
On the Verge of Madness
Tulla eventually marries another artist, which brings much grief to Edvard ~ a grief that permeates his art. End 1908, Munch’s anxiety had become acute, verging on madness. He entered the clinic of Dr. Daniel Jacobson, whose therapy lightens his mood and Munch started to create some of his cheeriest works. While some say that the “electrification” therapy killed his creative edge, others call the Portrait of Dr. Jacobson made at that time one of Munch’s best works.
Regardless, the Norwegian public acceptance of Munch’s art work is a further catalyst for his cheeriness as was the fact that museums began purchasing his paintings. Munch was even made a Knight of the Royal Order of St. Olav “for services in art”.
Munch’s Later Years
Munch spent most of his last two decades in solitude at his nearly self-sufficient estate in Ekely, at Skøyen, Oslo. Munch died at 80 in his country home in 1944.
© www.eArtfair.com/blog 2008 - all rights reserved
In an exploration of modern existential experience unparalleled in the history of art, Edvard Munch, the internationally renowned Norwegian painter, printmaker and draftsman, sought to translate personal trauma into universal terms and in the process to comprehend the fundamental components of human existence: birth, love and death. Inspired by personal experience, as well as by the literary and philosophical culture of his time, Munch radically reconceived the given world as the product of his imagination.
This book explores Munch’s unique artistic achievement in all its richness and diversity, surveying his career in its entire developmental range from 1880 to 1944. The comprehensive volume features a lavish selection of color plates, an introduction by Kynaston McShine, Chief Curator at Large at The Museum of Modern Art, and essays by Patricia Berman, Reinhold Heller, Elizabeth Prelinger, and Tina Yarborough, as well as in-depth documentation of Munch’s art and career. It will accompany the most extensive exhibition of Munch’s art in America in three decades.
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Edvard Munch : Analysis of the ScreamThe painting ‘The Scream’ is well recognized as the embodiment of Munch’s work as an artist. This artwork, which is loaded with movement, strikes as being painted with an explosive force, and as a result, is a genuine expression of a disturbed mind. Munch’s Scream has become our collective mental picture for the existential anguish of the urbane man. |
Other article on Munch:
http://eartfair.com/blog/whats-new-with-edvard-munch/, or ‘What’s New with Edvard Munch?
Timeline of Art History: United States & Canada, 1900 ad – present
September 5, 2008
List of significant American art, artistic events and influences that mark the last century of American art.
ARCHITECTURE
1900 In the design of the Ward W. Willitts House in Highland Park, Illinois, Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959) creates the “Prairie Style,” a modernist aesthetic for architecture and design that complements the Midwestern landscape.
DANCE
1903 San Francisco–born expatriate Isadora Duncan (1878–1927) delivers a lecture in Berlin entitled “The Dance of the Future” and is soon hailed in the U.S. and Europe as the founder of modern dance.
ART PHOTOGRAPHY
1908 Lewis Hine (1874–1940) becomes staff photographer for the National Child Labor Committee (NCLC), traveling through the United States documenting child labor in various industries. Designed to evoke the sympathy of viewers and mobilize activism, Hine’s images are circulated by the NCLC via exhibitions and pamphlets. His last large-scale documentary project will be a record of the construction of the Empire State Building in New York (1930–31), in which workers and labor itself share the spotlight with the awe-inspiring structure.
FINE ART PAINTING
1908 A group of eight realist painters of urban life, later known as the Ashcan School or “The Eight,” including William Glackens (1870–1938), Robert Henri (1865–1929), George Luks (1867–1933), and John Sloan (1871–1951), organize an exhibition at Macbeth Gallery in New York.
WRITING
1909 Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) publishes Three Lives, a character study of three women. A native of Pennsylvania, Stein is for many years a prominent member of avant-garde artistic and expatriate circles in Paris.
ART ENVIRONMENT
1910s Greenwich Village in lower Manhattan emerges as an enclave of bohemian and radical culture, home to irreverent small presses, avant-garde art galleries and studios, and experimental theater groups.
ART ENVIRONMENT
1912 New Mexico and Arizona become the forty-seventh and forty-eighth states of the U.S. The unique landscape and culture of the American Southwest will attract many artists, including Georgia O’Keeffe (1887–1986), who will travel to New Mexico for the first time in 1929 and reside there permanently from 1949.
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ART MOVEMENT
1913 The International Exposition of Modern Art (the “Armory Show”) is held at the 69th Regiment Armory in New York and introduces Americans to the modernist work of Matisse, Kandinsky, Brancusi, Picasso, Braque, and others on a large scale. Nude Descending a Staircase, a Cubist canvas by Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968), creates a public sensation. Theodore Roosevelt labels the Futurist and Cubist artists in the exhibition “the lunatic fringe.” Smaller versions of the show subsequently travel to Chicago and Boston.
CONTROVERSIONAL ART
1917 Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) exhibits his first readymade, Fountain, an upturned and signed urinal, at the Society of Independent Artists in New York. This work questions what it means to be an artist and what constitutes a work of art.
ART MOVEMENT
1920s–early 1930s Literary, visual, and performing arts flourish in Harlem, the African-American enclave of New York City, spurred by the mass migration of blacks from rural areas to northern cities. Poets, novelists, painters, and musicians of the “New Negro Movement“—later called the Harlem Renaissance—search for new forms of expression to convey their racial experiences and celebrate African-American cultural identity. Major figures of the Harlem Renaissance include poets Langston Hughes (1902–1967) and Countee Cullen (1903–1946), novelist and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960), jazz composer Duke Ellington (1899–1974), political activists W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963) and Marcus Garvey (1887–1940), photographer James Van Der Zee (1886–1983), and artists Aaron Douglas (1899–1979) and Archibald Motley (1891–1981).
ART SCHOOL
1928–41 The Cranbrook Academy of Art is designed and constructed in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, by Finnish-American modernist Eliel Saarinen (1873–1950), who also serves as president of the Academy.
ART MUSEUM
1929 The Museum of Modern Art, New York, opens.
ART MOVEMENT
1930s The Regionalist movement is embodied in the paintings of Grant Wood (1892–1942), John Steuart Curry (1897–1946), and Thomas Hart Benton (1889–1975). Rejecting the tenets of modernist art and theory, the Regionalists depict indigenous American subjects in a realist mode, often in murals commissioned for post offices, schools, libraries, and other public buildings under the auspices of the Federal Art Project, a Depression-era government program.
ART MOVEMENT
1932 The International Style exhibition opens at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Curated by architect Philip Johnson (born 1906) and art historian Henry-Russell Hitchcock (1903–1987), it introduces an American audience to recent developments in European modernist architecture.
ART PHOTOGRAPHY / ART MOVEMENT
1932 Eleven West Coast photographers, including Ansel Adams (1902–1984), Imogen Cunningham (1883–1976), and Edward Weston (1886–1958), hold an exhibition in San Francisco at which they announce the formation of Group f/64, dedicated to a “pure” photography that captures the world “as it is,” and opposed to the aesthetic manipulations of Pictorialism.
ART SCHOOL
1933 A liberal arts college is founded in Black Mountain, North Carolina, and becomes a locus for the dissemination of Bauhaus ideas through its European émigré teaching staff, including the German Josef Albers (1888–1976). Black Mountain College remains a site for the production of experimental multimedia work until it closes in 1957.
CONTROVERSIAL ART
1933 Mexican muralist Diego Rivera (1886–1957) is commissioned by Nelson Rockefeller (1908–1979) to create a mural for the RCA Building in New York’s Rockefeller Center. Because the painting, entitled Man at the Crossroads, contains a portrait of Lenin, Rivera is prevented from completing it, and Rockefeller later has it destroyed. The leftist politics and social content of Rivera’s work, along with that of his compatriots José Clemente Orozco (1883–1949) and David Alfaro Siqueiros (1896–1975), who also spend time in the U.S. during the 1930s executing various public commissions, influence many American artists employed in government-sponsored New Deal projects during the Depression.
ART SUPPORT
1935 The federal government launches the Works Progress Administration (WPA), which, like other New Deal programs, provides employment for artists. Ben Shahn (1898–1969), Stuart Davis (1892–1964), and Jackson Pollock (1912–1956), among thousands of other artists, produce murals, sculptures, posters, and other graphic materials for public buildings and for exhibitions held in dozens of community art centers established across the country by the Federal Art Project. Photographers document the living and working conditions of Americans during the Depression with the support of the Resettlement Administration (later called the Farm Security Administration). Among the photographers is Dorothea Lange (1895–1965), whose images of the Dust Bowl exodus become symbols of the migrant experience.
CONTROVERSIAL ART - ART PHOTOGRAPHY
1936 The Photo League, committed to a documentary photography allied to progressive political and social movements, establishes a school in New York under the directorship of Sid Grossman (1913–1955) and begins publication of its provocative journal Photo Notes. Among the League’s projects is Harlem Document, supervised by Aaron Siskind (1903–1991), which records life in New York’s African-American community. In the late 1940s, the League is declared a “subversive” organization by the U.S. Attorney General and many of its members are blacklisted.
LANDMARK ART
1942 Edward Hopper (1882–1967) paints Nighthawks (Art Institute, Chicago), an iconic depiction of loneliness and isolation in contemporary American life. Hopper maintains allegiance to a harsh realist mode throughout his life, creating stark urban and rural scenes scored by bright artificial light and deep shadows.
ART MUSEUM
1942 Peggy Guggenheim (1898–1979) opens the gallery Art of This Century in New York. Romanian-Austrian architect Frederick Kiesler (1890–1965) designed the interiors that were intended to complement the Surrealist and abstract art on display.
ART & DESIGN
1944 The American Society of Industrial Designers is founded to advocate high-quality design of industrial products, a larger concern at mid-century. Among the most advanced designers of the period is Norman Bel Geddes (1893–1958), whose work encompasses the practical design of everyday commodities such as typewriters and radios, and large-scale visionary projects such as the Futurama exhibit at the 1939 New York World’s Fair.
ART MOVEMENT/ ART GENRES
1945 The conclusion of World War II begins a prolonged period of economic expansion in the U.S. Among the postwar American art movements that receive popular and critical attention worldwide is Abstract Expressionism, which includes two subgenres: action or gesture painting, associated with the work of Jackson Pollock (1912–1956), Lee Krasner (1908–1984), Willem de Kooning (1904–1997), Franz Kline (1910–1962), and others, and color field painting, represented by the work of Mark Rothko (1903–1970), Barnett Newman (1905–1970), and Ad Reinhardt (1913–1967). Although Abstract Expressionism is mostly thought of as a movement in painting, it has some correlation to the sculpture of David Smith (1906–1965).
PRINT MAKING
1957 Tatyana Grosman (1904–1982) establishes Universal Limited Art Editions (ULAE), a printmaking workshop, in West Islip, New York. ULAE sets the standards for a postwar printmaking renaissance in the United States.
ART MUSEUM
1958 The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959), opens in New York. Wright had begun working on the commission for a building to house the Guggenheim’s collection of modernist art in 1943. The museum represents a sculpturally and spatially rich use of concrete.
ART HAPPENING
1959 The first public “happening” is produced by Allan Kaprow (born 1927) at the Reuben Gallery in New York. Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg are among the performers. Influenced by Jackson Pollock’s process of action painting, the teachings of John Cage on chance and indeterminacy in art, and ultimately Dadaism, Kaprow defines a happening as a choreographed event that facilitates spontaneous interactions between objects—which include performers—and visitors.
ART MOVEMENT
1960 The Minimalist movement begins and maintains an important place in the art world for about a decade. Practitioners include Carl Andre (born 1935), Robert Morris (born 1931), Dan Flavin (1933–1996), Brice Marden (born 1938), Robert Ryman (born 1930), and others.
ART MOVEMENT
1961 The phrase “concept art” is first used by Henry Flynt (born 1940). It comes to have a more general application to the work of artists Sol LeWitt (born 1928), Joseph Kosuth (born 1945), and others. During the following decade, Conceptual and performance art demonstrate the possibilities of making art without producing saleable objects.
ART MOVEMENT
1962 Andy Warhol (1928–1987) paints Campbell’s Soup Cans, a key work of the Pop Art movement. Warhol and other artists associated with the movement, including Claes Oldenburg (born 1929) and Roy Lichtenstein (1923–1997), satirize Americans’ voracious consumption of manufactured products in the postwar period.
ART STYLE / MOVEMENT
1962 Yale University’s Art and Architecture Building, designed by Paul Rudolph (1918–1997), opens. It is an important monument of New Brutalism, a style that—in contrast to the trim and sleek aesthetic of 1920s modernism—emphasizes the tactility and roughness of its materials, often poured-in-place concrete.
ART MOVEMENT
1964 The term “optical art” is coined in Time magazine to describe painting and sculpture that makes use of optical effects to evoke physiological responses in the viewer. Proponents of Op Art include Bridget Riley (born 1931), Larry Poons (born 1937), and long-time practitioner Victor Vasarely (1908–1997).
ART MOVEMENT
1969 A group exhibition devoted to Conceptual art, entitled January 1–31: 0 Objects, 0 Paintings, 0 Sculptures, is mounted by New York dealer Seth Siegelaub and features the work of four artists: Joseph Kosuth (born 1945), Lawrence Weiner (born 1940), Robert Barry (born 1936), and Douglas Huebler (1924–1997). As a movement, Conceptualism critiques the political and economic structures that sustain Western art forms, and Conceptual artists produce works intended to convey ideas—often through the use of text alone—rather than to be appreciated as precious commodities.
ART MOVEMENT
1970 Environmental awareness spawns earthworks, sculptural projects on the scale of the landscape itself. Perhaps the best-known example is Robert Smithson’s (1938–1973) large-scale Spiral Jetty, built out of rock and earth in the Great Salt Lake in Utah.
ART MOVEMENT
1971 The term “Post-Minimalism” is used by critic Robert Pincus-Witten (born 1935) to describe the contemporary work of Richard Serra (born 1939) and Eva Hesse (1936–1970).
LANDMARK ART
1976 The avant-garde opera Einstein on the Beach, by Robert Wilson (born 1941) and composer Philip Glass (born 1937), premieres.
ART INSTALLATION
1977 Walter De Maria (born 1935) installs The Lightning Field near Quemada, New Mexico. In the same year, he re-creates his 1968 Earth Room, a gallery filled with dirt, at the Heiner Friedrich Gallery in New York. With the latter work, De Maria becomes prominently associated with the earthworks movement.
CONTROVERSIAL ART
1979 Artist Sherrie Levine (born 1947) rephotographs images by Walker Evans as a means of making art that questions the notion of originality. Over the next decade, Levine, Dana Birnbaum (born 1946), Barbara Kruger (born 1945), and others will become prominent in the Appropriation Art movement.
ART MUSEUM
1985 The Los Angeles County Museum of Art organizes an exhibition of works by Barbara Kruger (born 1945), which combine found photography and succinct, humorous slogans deconstructing the representations of power inherent in mass-media imagery. Kruger is one of many artists of the 1980s, sometimes dubbed the “pictures generation,” who explore the coercive and seductive dynamics of the media.
ART MOVEMENT
1991 The “grunge” style, originating in Seattle, Washington, becomes nationally fashionable and has an impact on popular music and clothing.
source:
http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/ht/11/na/ht11na.htm
Pop Art Forerunner Robert Rauschenberg died at 82
May 18, 2008
The American artist Robert Rauschenberg passed away May 13 at age 82.
Rauschenberg gained fame in the 1950s transition from Abstract Expressionism to Pop Art. Several of his works — including “Canyon,” which featured a stuffed bald eagle affixed to a canvas; “Monogram,” a stuffed Angora goat on top of a painted panel; and “Bed,” a quilt, sheet and pillow slathered with paint and framed on a wall — became icons of postwar modernism.
Born Milton Ernest Rauschenberg, he briefly attended the University of Texas at Austin in 1943 and served in the U.S. Navy during World War II prior to studying art. Upon being honorably discharged in the summer of 1945, Rauschenberg enrolled at the Kansas City Art Institute (1947) and later at the Academia Julien in Paris (1948) before studying with Josef Albers at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, where he formed life-long friendships with John Cage, Merce Cunningham and David Tudor. After moving to New York City in 1949, Rauschenberg enrolled in the Arts Students League.
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In the spring of 1951, Rauschenberg was invited to exhibit at the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York City.
Two years later he created the first of his acclaimed Combine sculptures, works that incorporated painting and a variety of found objects.
The juxtaposition of different media (lithography, painting, photography, silk-screening and sculpture) and their interplay comprise Rauschenberg’s chief interests, and throughout his career, his work has been marked by a sense of experimentation and chance.
Robert Rauschenberg
Canyon
1959
mixed mediums with taxidermy bald eagle and pillow, ca. 87 x 70 x 24 in.
Sonnabend Collection
During the 1950s, Rauschenberg also began his lifelong involvement and affiliation with theatre and dance, designing sets and costumes for a variety of productions worldwide. At the time of his death Texas native was a painter, photographer, printmaker, choreographer, onstage performer, set designer and a composer.
Robert Rauschenberg experimented boundlessly. “I’m curious” he said in 1997 in one of the few interviews he granted in later years. It’s very rewarding. I’m still discovering things every day.”
Rauschenberg’s more than 50 years in art produced a varied and prolific collection that showed America that all of life could be open to art. … Rauschenberg didn’t give a fig for consistency, or curating his reputation; his taste was always omnivorous, and hit-or-miss, yet he had a bigness of soul and a richness of temperament that recalled Walt Whitman.
Rauschenberg split his time between New York and Captiva Island in Florida, where he kept a house stocked with his own art and those of his friends.
Prices for Robert Rauschenberg’s works start at $3000+ for a signed limited edition. Two days ago Sotheby’s sale records show his 1963 painting “Overdrive” sold for some $14.6 million.
source: rareposters at pressbox.co.uk
Analysis of The Sunflowers - Vincent van Gogh
March 14, 2008
Vincent’s Sunflowers
“The sunflower is mine in a way.” –Vincent van Gogh
Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers” are among his most famous paintings, but few people realize he did many sunflower pictures, not just the most famous “Vase with Twelve Sunflowers” and “Vase with Fifteen Sunflowers.” These were canvases he made to decorate the Yellow House in Arles in anticipation of his friend Paul Gauguin’s visit, and in the hope that other artists would follow and form a Utopian art community. Some of Vincent’s sunflower paintings are all but indistinguishable, with only tiny differences to prove one reproduction is different from the next. During his stay in Paris, he painted cut sunflowers in different stages of being, from fresh to wilted to dry.
He appears to have brought his passion for sunflowers with him from his homeland in Holland wherever he roamed, and indeed, they make the kind of dramatic subject he loved. Around the world today, the sunflower is synonymous with Vincent’s work, immediately recognizable and every bit as much his own as the water lilies belonging to Monet.
Vincent’s “Sunflowers No. 2,” the most famous sunflower still life, yellow on yellow, possesses the same universal appeal and impact of all his most beloved pictures. So widespread is the appeal of his sunflowers, in fact, that in 1987, a Japanese company paid a record of the equivalent of almost 40 million dollars for “Vase with Fifteen Sunflowers” at an auction. Van Gogh’s many sunflower canvases are flung all over the world in testimony to his mastery, now residing in art galleries in Europe, London and Tokyo, to name a few.
During his stay in Paris, Vincent hobnobbed with some of the greatest Impressionist painters of the period. The artists all had a great effect on one another, including van Gogh, who was recognized as a formidable genius by “Les Vingt,” Monet and Toulouse Lautrec, among others. One can readily discern the Paris sunflowers from the ones Vincent painted later, in the Yellow House at Arles, since they are cut flowers without vases. These cut sunflowers are depicted in various stages of wilting, but Vincent’s final bright and bold color palette is evident at this point in his artistic development, permeating the pictures with life and joy.
The master’s influence on western art and artists cannot be overstated. His work bridged impressionism, expressionism, cubism and more with a unique language understood by all lovers of beauty and truth. The enormous popularity of a simple vase of sunflowers attests to his power and sincerity.
Though Vincent was plagued by a serious mental imbalance and eventually took his own life, he left a body of over 2,000 canvases, painted in about a decade, as a living legacy. Whether they represent his portrayals of living fields of wheat or swirling stars, tender and thoughtful portraits of the peasants he loved or starkly vivid flowers in a simple vase, his works all bear his own stylistic imprint. Seen as a superb form of communication of the spirit, his work succeeded beyond his wildest dreams to comfort and console humanity through art. It is through his paintings, not his over-romanticized, beleaguered life, that he should be judged as the poet, prophet and master artist he was.
By Elizabeth Harding
Visit the Life of Van Gogh website for more information on Van Gogh paintings, or to get out own Biography of Vincent Van Gogh.
Roy Lichtenstein
February 4, 2008
Introduction
Roy Lichtenstein (1923-1997) was an American artist born in New York City. He epitomized pop art, and brought popular culture into fine art. Personally, he described his pop art as industrial painting. Pop Art started in the ’50s and referred to the interest of a number of artists in the images of mass media, advertising, comics and consumer products.
Pop Art Contemporaries
Other key players in the pop art movement included Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg, Jim Dine, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, David Hockney, Wayne Thiebaud, Keith Haring, and Sigmar Polke.
Lichtenstein’s Famous Pop Art
Roy Lichtenstein became famous for his comic-strip style paintings such as “Whaam”, “Torpedo . . . los!”, “Grrrrrrrrrrr!!”, his series of crying women, features of Tintin, and his New York graffiti, or murals.
(part of original painting to show Lichtenstein’s style)
Roy acknowledged that his ideas on perception by Fine Arts professor Hoyt Sherman, Ohio State University, were his earliest important art influence, and that his ideas continued to affect his ideas of visual unity over time. This professor used a “flash room”. This was a dark room where images would be briefly flashed onto the screen. Students were supposed to draw what they had seen - a method of grasping an image by copying it. Roy received his MFA from Ohio State in 1949, and subsequently taught at the same university. In 1957 he started teaching in upstate New York.
Lichtenstein’s earlier artwork switches between Cubism and Expressionism. 1957 was a turning point for Roy when he adopted Abstract Expressionism. In 1961, Lichtenstein commenced his now-famous Pop Art style, using comic strip images: displaying hard edge figurative close-ups, and applying his famous painting technique of using Benday dots, sourced from commercial printing.
Lichtenstein’s most famous works were created in the early ’60s. In this phase of his career, he was a cartoon copyist. However, he changed scale, color, treatment and implication. (A convincing project by David Barsalou reviewed 30,000+ comic strips, uncovering the strip images that Lichtenstein used in his artwork. http://davidbarsalou.homestead.com/LICHTENSTEINPROJECT.html shows many source strip book artwork and Lichtenstein paintings side-by-side.) Anyhow, Lichtenstein stopped copying cartoons in 1965.
His art made in the ’70s and ’80s with a much looser style of art, displaying surrealism. He also created hundreds of screen prints in this period.
In 1996, Lichtenstein donated 154 prints and 2 books to the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC. With this huge donation, the museum now holds the largest collection of this artist’s work. Other museums holding his work include the Tate in London; SF Moma, in San Francisco; MoMa, Guggenheim and The Met in NYC. And then there is of course the gallery that represented him, Leo Castelli Gallery, also in NYC. There are an estimated 4,500 of Lichtenstein’s works in circulation, shared between private collectors and museums around the world.
The Increasing Value of Lichtenstein’s Art
Lichtenstein’s artwork has been in demand for decades, capturing increasing value. In 1989, Torpedo…Los! sold for a record $5.5m at Christie’s. This sale make Roy Lichtenstein 1 of 3 living artists to have attracted such huge sums. In 1990, a second record price for a Lichtenstein work was set when ‘Kiss II’ was sold for $6m.
In 2002, that record for Lichtenstein was broken when another work ‘Happy Tears’ sold for $7.1m at Christie’s in New York. ‘Happy Tears’ (1964) is a pop art painting of a smiling women with tears. In 2006, Lichtenstein’s ‘Sinking Sun’ (1964) was sold for $15.7m at the modern art auction at Sotheby’s in New York. New York gallery L&M Arts purchased the work. This artwork is considered as ‘one of the greatest icons of the 20th Century’.
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Abstract Art and Its Future
January 5, 2008
By Devi Sri
Precision is not reality, said Henri Mattisse the great artist. Thus the search for exactness begins and authenticity struggles.
In art, everything is precise. That explains the genuineness of art in a broad scale. But art need not carry accuracy. The reason- there is no clear-cut rules. The rules in art depends on an artist’s imagination, how he carries his dreams forward, what shape he gives to them, and how he reproduces the idea on to canvas with a brush dipped in paint.
Abstract art is a form of art. As the name explains, the paintings come under it are abstract in nature. It is not related to anything, non representational, even though it is a clear representation of an imaginative mind. Abstract art can be divided basically in to two types.
- Figurative abstraction
- Emotional abstraction
As the name suggests, figurative representation is the symbolic representation of situations or ideas in a way the artist conceptualizes. They are simplifying reality by avoiding unnecessary details. The essence is left for use. Emotional abstraction is the representation of emotion, spirituality or voice.
The movement
The movement of abstract painting emerged in the mid forties in New York. It gradually gained importance in American art. When artists like James McNiell began believing in the harmonious arrangement of colors in representing visual sensation rather than the depiction of objects, abstraction started gaining prominence.
Later artists took up the movement in such a way that abstract painting gained much importance. The artists believed that the job of the artists was to deepen the mystery rather than revealing it. In abstraction only conception made a difference. The basic idea behind the idea remains the same. Stephen Wright once commented on abstract painting that he had been doing a lot of abstract painting without paint, brush and canvas, but just by thinking about it.
Abstract expressionism
This is the movement in which the artists rapidly applied paint on canvas without great care for detail, and thus showing emotions and feelings spread on the canvas. The works of abstract painters showed a sense of hastiness and an intervention of life situations like a risk or a chance in applying paint on canvas.
Some abstract artists even took a mystical approach to subject matter, but by defining their objectives and intentions clearly on canvas. It was generally believed that the painters of abstract expressionism relied on the spontaneity of creativity and the representation of that flow on canvas in a scale broad and large. The expressive method of painting was considered important.
Abstract expressionism did not focus on one topic; rather it focused on many themes or styles. It concentrated on many ideas. The artists of abstract expressionism valued individuality and spontaneous inventiveness.
The painters who came to be called as abstract expressionists shared an outlook
Characterized by the spirit of revolt. The movement of abstract expressionism
can be divided in to two-
- Action painting
- Color Field painting
Action painting
Action painting is related to surrealism, which is the movement in visual art and literature that became popular in Europe between World Wars I and II. It emphasized on positive expression. Artists like Pollock Jackson with essence form surrealism, implied a technique different from the usual styles of painting that employed the method of dripping paint on to the canvas. Instead of brush, sticks and knives were used to manipulate the picture. This type of painting began to be called as action painting.
Color field painting
This abstract art movement started only in the 1960’s. A type of abstract expressionism, color field paintings employed the use of solid color covering the whole canvas in such a way that the lyrical or atmospheric effects of color were seen in a vast canvas. The aesthetics of the color field artists were truly intellectual aesthetic. They dealt with two-dimensional spaces and their color tone was different and not modulated.
Abstract expressionism presented within its large framework, a stylistic diversity that was not easily identifiable. Many artists explored various forms of painting in abstract expressionistic painting. Here more attention was paid to brushstrokes, texture and surface qualities.
Thus abstract art gained much importance. Wassily Kandinsky came to be known as the father of abstract painting. Other artists who followed the path of Kandinsky were kasimir Malevich, Raoul Dufy, Paul Klee, Juan Gris, and Piet Mondrian. Thus abstract painting spread far and wide with an intellectual tone to the form of art in a style varied, specific and incomprehensible.
The future of abstract painting
With a fabulous history of abstract paintings done on landscape, floral art, people, and just emotions in various ways possible, abstract art grew on a canvas broad, but ambiguous. Artists like Wassily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrain came with newer conceptions and ideas representing the new form of art in an aesthetically well built canvas.
There would definitely be a shift in style from the usually employed techniques like action painting and color field painting. Newer forms will take shape with styles which may take time to establish in the field of painting.
With the invention of more tools in painting, and with newer methods employed, abstract painting will undergo a lot of changes in the coming future. Probably, forms take a different shape, ideas may be modernized, and fresh thoughts would be employed. But the basic idea behind the notion, which is abstraction, will never change.
To the great painter there is only one manner of painting - that which he employs in his art. He appreciates his own art and also criticizes. Because nobody, but he can understand the enormity of his work, so do his pitfalls.
Abstract art has definitely a future, bright, colorful even though vague. As Edgar says, “A painting requires a little mystery, some vagueness, and some fantasy. When you always make your meaning perfectly plain you end up boring people.”
About the Author
Devi sri is a seo copywriter for 1st Art Club. She has involved herself in this field for more than 3 years.
For further details related to the article you can visit the site http://www.1artclub.com.. You can contact her through mail at devisrri@gmail.com
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Find books on Abstract Art in our fine art book overview.
Abstract Art Defined
December 31, 2007
The article below is really about defining abstract art. It is not an easy definition, however the article does provide an introductory guide to this art genre.
The Beauty of an Abstract Painting
“Have you ever been to an art museum and looked at an abstract painting? Did you find yourself asking what was this artist thinking when he created this abstract painting? What on earth is an abstract painting? Maybe you are just wondering where the art of abstract painting came from. If you find yourself asking these questions then perhaps it is time you learn about the beauty of an abstract paining.
The art of abstract painting began a very long time ago. Artists began this art several hundred years ago. In fact, you have probably seen some of the more famous abstract paintings before. You may recall a famous abstract painting created by Van Gogh. Picasso also had an abstract painting or two as well. Modigliani is also known for his abstract painting work. Because of these artists, and many others, the art of abstract painting has gained popularity in the modern world.
Now what exactly is an abstract painting? An abstract painting is defined in many ways. First off, an abstract painting does not depict reality like traditional paintings. In the beginning, most art was depicting a photographic or realistic expression of someone or something. But an abstract painting does not do this. The definition of an abstract painting is that an abstract painting does not depict objects in the natural world. Rather, an abstract painting uses colors and shapes in a non-representing and nonobjective manner. It can be of anyone, anything, or just nothing at all.
You can easily see this when you look at an abstract painting. An abstract painting has bold, bright, and vivid colors. An abstract painting also has many biometric shapes that are used with the bold colors to make the artwork stand out. It is both strange and beautiful to look at an abstract painting.
In the 1940’s a movement called “Abstract Expressionism” was started. This movement was started to show the freedom of an artist’s expression and to push the art of abstract painting. It was started in New York in a school that also called it “Action Painting.” This school was one of the first American schools that declared its independence from the European style of artwork. They liked to think of their art as a form of spiritual and intellectual art. This then further pushed the art of abstract painting.
Now that you know the history of the art of abstract painting you may come to understand it better. It is important to appreciate all forms of art, including the odd art of an abstract painting. You may find yourself wanting to get a piece of this artwork for yourself. It is truly an interesting thing to look at.”
About the Author
Jay Moncliff is the founder of http://www.forex-web.info a blog focusing on the latest Forex signal, resources and articles. This site provides detailed information on forex market.
Impressionism: The Lasting Impression!
December 12, 2007
By Nadeem Alam
A style that turned into a movement and then brought about the change at a great level in technique along with the ideology of the painting during the last third of 19th century that emphasized the perception of an artist up to an extant where it was adjacent to the importance of the subject itself.
Although Impressionism is taken chiefly as a movement of Fine Arts, but it also influenced other forms of artistic expression, as literature and music also got a slight change and new emergence under this movement. In literature; it emphasized more on immediate aspects of objects or actions without paying attentions to details, whereas in late 19th and early 20th century music, lush harmonies, subtle rhythms and unusual tonal colors were used to stir up moods and impressions. In both these forms of expression, under influence of Impressionism, recreation of objective reality was discouraged and replaced by the practice of developing one’s subjective response to a piece of work to actual experience.
Fine Arts generally, found this theory more suitable for its somewhat blur and sometime vague objects; where many things could be said through reflecting light and incomplete forms, crafted through quick range of short strokes of pure and bright colors. On the other hand, sculpture, hit upon this style with partially modeled volumes, surfaces roughened to uneven reflection of light.
So, the immediate visual impression created by the use of unmixed primary colors, small strokes, partially modeled shapes and the element of reflected light turned out to be the main characteristics of Impressionism. Free movement of the painter’s arm with brush in his hand and eyes on the object, made this style more popular and satisfying for all, as there was more margin for the artist’s point of view and angel of perception to be rendered through a more human and more energetic approach. It was really a treat to imprison the changing light and varying ambiance in no time. This brought in an altogether new move toward observing normal things under certain spell of making an “Impression” for that; artist’s eye befell as the platform to study and process available panorama.
Paul Cézanne; a classic post- impressionist painter himself, provided the concept in these words when he hyped Claude Monet as:
“Monet is only an eye, but what an eye!”
Claude Monet (1840-1926) and his early work “Impression: Sunrise” has been regarded as the beginning of that epoch studded with vivid hues and fluent brush strokes, while Edouard Manet (1832-1883), Camille Pissaro (1830-1903), Edgar Degas (1834-1917) and Auguste Renoir (1841-1919) were not behind him in the crafting of this comparatively simple and incredibly depict able way of expression through everlasting Impressions.
When Manet painted everyday objects in this style, it was like the attempt to make viewer grope that view out of ordinary looking things that an artist, by his or her extraordinary vision, was able to see, in other words, Impressionism enabled an artist to convey the emotional element of feeling ordinary things that was never revealed before through meticulous and calculated Classicism or overwhelming Romanticism.
On the other hand French landscape was getting vent through the revelation of Pissaro, as rivers were then flowing and lush green fields were feeling the wind blowing across, the element of life was at swing with the joyous motion of the brush synchronized with the inner stance of the artist.
Degas’ dry pastels and oily paints caught up the momentum of the ballet dancers in a way that facial expressions were as important as the kinesics were. The light and darks put adjacent to the flare of dancing body, detailing the stress on musically motivated feet and purposeful eyes became the identity of that great artist and a unique feature of that style.
Apart from these big names, there were many other artists of diverse origins who were greatly moved by this close to instinct movement.
Armand Guillaumin (1841-1927) and Berthe Morisot (1841-1927) in France, Emil Jakob Schindler (1842-1892) in Austria, Mary Cassatt (1844-1926) in America and Luis Jimenez Aranda (1845-1928) in Spain, were following the impressionist style to reveal new horizons.
The ways of transportation were now fast enough to take someone to countryside in the morning and allow one to be back by evening.
Thanks to the surprise invention as train, many Impressionist painters could go in the morning to a riverside or a panoramically alluring countryside, where they stirred the view with their feelings and blended the rapidly changing light in the darks of simple bits and pieces to fashion their coarse canvas.
Impressionism influenced a variety of artists in large number, many stuck to it for rest of their work and then came a new umbrella term “ Post-Impressionism”, that encompassed a number of artists who were influenced by Impressionism but took their art in other directions, we could not elaborate Post-Impressionism in any well defined style but in general it was less idyllic and more emotionally charged than Impressionist work.
The classic Post-Impressionists were Paul Gauguin (1848-1903), Paul Cezanne (1839-1906), Vincent van Gough (1853-1890), Henri Rousseau (1844-1910) and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901).
The work of Gauguin with flat and simple anatomy and garlanded tan-skin figures of Tahiti Island became his identity while the Dutch read head (Van Gough) with his unique style and dragging brush made an ever-lasting impression as his “Sun Flower” or “The Wheat Field” in terms of technique and “The Potato Eaters” in concept inspired many to come.
Toulouse-Lautrec introduced a new less oily style with oil paints that gave an effect more like the pastels could create and laid the foundation of poster-making through his trouble-free emphatically painted areas without diminutively drawn objects.
While the groups of Pointillists and Les Nabis, were also generally included among the Post-Impressionists.
That movement was later overwhelmed by the angular curve and edges of Cubism (1908-1914) and the force of Expressionism (1905-1925). Later the absurdity of Dadaism (1916-1920), dynamic attitude of 20th century through Futurism (1909-1944) and the soft, delicate ambiance of imagination and dreams of Surrealism (1920-1930) took art to new lands where the power and freedom of expression distorted the classical forms and introduced it to Abstract Expression (1940-1960).
20th century with all its industrial revolution took art by surprise and the forceful modern art came out of making and developed itself as powerful medium, if we grope deeply, we could find the Impressionism as the bridge from classical style to the threshold of modern one.
Undoubtedly, Impressionism could be considered as the foundation of gigantic, multifarious skyscraper of Modern Art.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Nadeem_Alam
The Future of Art - Investment Ideas
November 14, 2007
Featured at http://www.eArtfair.com/blog
By Tim Seaward
In order to look into the future we need only to look into the recent past.
It is not only helpful to look at different trends as well, but I believe we will find that certain fashions have had varying degrees of mutual influence upon artistic endeavors.
Current art trends are mirroring the apparent confusion found in the fashion industry. 60’s hippie gear (itself a mixture of classical medieval and pop) can be seen with 80’s punk; experiments with pop and new wave continue; and cartoon wear taken directly off the pages of anime imagery is finding an affinity with hip-hop and black gangster rap. Alongside this I see a fantastic mixture of some or all of cartoon, naive, pop art, abstract expressionism, and surrealism, which I believe has been coldly labeled neo-expressionism.
This observation amazes me … it is so similar to the abundant fashion and art at the end of the nineteenth century. What is more incredible is that out of that chaotic time came the first momentous in-roads into the drama of avant garde art, and the yet to be dominant power of the modern art movement.
And I think history is about to repeat itself.
Just look at the commercial world where “instant” recreation is fast becoming the most successful entity in that it pervades almost everything … everywhere. Television has introduced a specific modern basic attitude towards art and living, but now it is fast being replaced (or I should say - consumed) by the very latest technological breakthrough … the computer - hooked into the world wide web. Here is the new world … and a fundamentally unexplored world too. Here art can be produced one end of the world … and be seen at the other end in a matter of seconds. Everyone is invited to add their own personal art … no matter where they have come from, or what lack of teaching they might have had. There is a kind of “free-for-all” attitude beginning to grow, and with it a beautiful artistic innocence is very slowly flowering from every culture, every community, every body.
We are blessed in being right in the middle of another chaotic period which is a kind of vast cauldron - every kind of entertainment or activity is being poured into it. And very soon the mixture will be just perfect for the next avante garde generation of artists to join together - not in a Paris cafe but in a cyber cafe, and it will be from there that true, strong, innovative art will begin to seep into the worlds consciousness. But what sort of art will it be?
For that answer I believe we have to look at what is happening now - on the internet. We need to look very carefully at those extremely fragile shoots … such as the gaming environment, the online caricatures and their naive graffiti styles, plus those intimate personal blogs absolutely brimming with virgin creativity, and not forgetting the ever handy mobile phone with instant photographic and movie ability. It will be in these places that the next art movement will gently evolve.
So, if you are looking for investing in art for the future, I believe you should start your investigation now into the many visual interpretations found on the net, and you will find … eventually, that the internet will heavily influence the new covenants of tomorrows fine art. Its power and strength will establish a completely innovative art that will portray a tantalizing contradiction - a movement, anonymous and yet extremely personal.
About the Author
Tim is the author of “The Future of Art - Investment Ideas”. He is also a practicing fine artist living and working in the UK. Visit his site to find out exactly what he paints. http://www.ablot.com or mailto:tim@ablot.com
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