Aquaforte

Le Chemin par temps de pluie, ou Sous l'averse (between 1900 and 1910)

Henri Jourdain (1864-1931)

Cadmium sunset

 

Rue de village sous la neige au couchant, ou La neige en Norvège, circa 1904

Johannes Grimelund (1842-1917)

Albrecht Dürer, Petit Palais, Paris

 

Light paper

Paper drop (passage) VII

Wolfgang Tillmans

Black into the light

I have an app on my phone which features a different painting every day. This morning this painting by Nikolai Alexandrovich Yaroshenko (1846-1898) was featured. It's titled “The Prisoner” (in Russian: « Заключённый »), dated 1878.

It is available here. I was deeply moved by the subtle chiaroscuro, the position of the man with his back towards us, looking out this narrow window. The barely perceptible bed, the crumbling plaster, the scratches on the wall. All of this made a strong impression on me. The painting has a muted brutality. I imagined the longing, listening to muffled sounds from outside seeping through the basement window, the sole source of light in the squalid cell. I imagined the days, the hours, the loneliness. The efforts to prop himself up on an invisible sill for a few seconds to catch a glimpse of the life he's missing out on.

The problem with this app is that sometimes it doesn't give any information on the painting, and it was the case today. I didn't know who had painted it, when, where, why. I was working so I was frustrated not to be able to research it, but when I got home and after a bit of fumbling around I found a different version:

This one is available here. There is a stark difference, to say the least. The second one is much more colourful, yet it somehow doesn't make it any less brutal. The dreariness of the cell is more glaring, and less subtle. The table isn't paired with a chair, the book sitting on it might be a bible which could use some reading, and the tin pot has seen better days. The light from the basement window is warmer, more orange in tone, as of late afternoon. The posture of his legs reminded me of someone who has been standing up for too long and alternates his supporting leg. Somehow, this detail makes his situation seemingly worse: this is where he spends most of this days, looking out. Perhaps he has done this for longer than he cares to remember. He doesn't seem to be contemplating escape, he is a passive onlooker. This fraction of a window is all he has to remind him of the life outside, that life goes on for those on the other side.

I'm not certain how to explain the difference between the two versions. I believe only one painting was made, so the photograph of the painting must have become darker than the original because of poor lighting, or poor exposition, thereby altering the warmer colours of the original work. If anyone knows or has a better educated guess, feel free to enlighten me. It also provides a shining example of one-sided information: if I hadn't done my research I would have believed the first version to be the original one. We should always do a bit of research because really all it took me was less than a few minutes...and though I didn't become a Yaroshenko scholar (though the app previously featured some of his work, and that of other Russian painters), I feel less stupid (and it's I believe the goal of this type of apps ^_^).

 

Sonnet caudé sur le plafond de la Sixtine

« I’ ho già fatto un gozzo in questo stento,
Come fa l’acqua a’ gatti in Lombardia
O ver d’altro paese che si sia,
C’a forza ’l ventro appiccasotto ’l mento.


La barba al cielo, e la memoria sento
In sullo scrigno, e ’l petto fo d’arpia,
E ’l pennel sopra ’l viso tuttavia
Mel fa, gocciando, un ricco pavimento.


E’ lombi entrati mi son nella peccia,
E fo del cul per contrapeso groppa,
E’ passi senza gli occhi muovo invano.


Dinanzi mi s’allunga la corteccia,
E per piegarsi adietro si ragroppa,
E tendomi com’arco sorïano.


Però fallace e strano
Surge il iudizio che la mente porta,
Ché mal si tra’ per cerbottana torta.


La mia pittura morta
Difendi orma’, Giovanni, e ’l mio onore,
Non sendo in loco bon, né io pittore. »





    "À travailler tordu j'ai attrapé un goitre
comme l'eau en procure aux chats de Lombardie
(à moins que ce ne soit de quelque autre pays)
et j'ai le ventre, à force, collé au menton.

    Ma barbe pointe vers le ciel, je sens ma nuque
sur mon dos, j'ai une poitrine de harpie,
et la peinture qui dégouline sans cesse
sur mon visage en fait un riche pavement.

    Mes lombes sont allées se fourrer dans ma panse.
faisant par contrepoids de mon cul une croupe
chevaline et je déambule à l'aveuglette.

    J'ai par-devant l'écorce qui va s'allongeant
alors que par-derrière elle se ratatine
et je suis recourbé comme un arc de Syrie.

    Enfin les jugements que porte mon esprit
me viennent fallacieux et gauchis : quand on use
d'une sarbacane tordue, on tire mal.

    Cette charogne de peinture,
défends-là, Giovanni*, et défends mon honneur :
suis-je en bonne posture ici et suis-je peintre ?"

Michel-Ange, ibid, circa 1509-10

* destiné à Giovanni da Pistoïa

Found on the web

Bookbookbookbookbookbook

Bookshoweroverbookbookplosion

Expensive...but not quite so.

Vente de "The Lock" de John Constable. Article intéressant en soi, mais l'est plus encore le classement des 10 oeuvres les plus chères de l'histoire qui suit directement l'article.

Beauty must lie somewhere

Here are two links on the same topic: Mr Toledano's new exhibition on beauty in LA, and the Huffington Post's cover of the event. Starting tomorrow.

I regret the absence of comment from the people who were photographed in any of the articles I have read. If anyone visits the exhibition over the next month, could he or she kindly tell me if comments/reaction are available with the pictures. I'd be curious to have these men and women's take on the representation and staging of themselves. And what 'self' means.

Joke in the midst of the fray

"Don't worry, for $99m, I've got all the time in the world."


Auctioneer and Sotheby's head of modern art Tobias Meyer, at the auction of Edvard Munch's painting "The Scream", which was bought for a swooping $119,922,500 (£74m) and which lasted 12 minutes. Most expensive work of art ever sold, dethroning Pablo Picasso's "Nude, Green Leaves and Bust" (which went for $106.5 m or £65.6 m) two years ago at Christie's.


Link to Sotheby's.

Haus der Kunst

Very nice place to spend an afternoon in.

Highlight was the Wilhelm Sasnal exhibition. Very powerful images and sensations. Three paintings have made a deep impression on me (specially the last one), but there were others which were quite interesting too. They're all oil on canvas.

Kacper und Anka (2009) 

Bathers at Asnières (2010)

 Kacper (2009)

Link

This is a very interesting site on the art of Sesshū Tōyō, famous Japanese painter (1420-1506). The site is in Italian, though. Enjoy!

Munich II

"Either follow Jesus Christ and go to Paradise, or be like a puppet of the Devil and go to Hell!"

Seen on the wall of a church.

(My translation...)

Detail on a tombstone set in the Western outer wall of Alter Peter

All of the above are pictures of Asamkirche, Asam's Church (aka St Johann Nepomuk). Easy-to-miss, tiny church (from the outside). The interior is well, nothing short of grandiose.

My apologies for those pictures, taken in the Alte Pinakothek, but the lighting there is quite poor and very badly designed. Cherry on top: they have kept the old glass panes over the paintings (nowadays they only use antireflective glass)

The awkw-art-ness in the Tate

For me, some parts of the Tate Britain are like this sort of exhibitions in which people stare wondering at a humidifier, looking in vain for the label bearing the name of the artist, in which you almost consider not sitting on a bench lest it is part of the exhibition, in which a bare wall could bear a label and in which you end up being the work of art.

Tate Britain

Don McCullin (born 1935): Homeless Irishman, Spitalfields, London 1969

(Photograph, gelatin silver print, on paper)

Don McCullin: Bradford, Yorkshire 1978 (Photograph, gelatin silver print, on paper)

Don McCullin: Hadrian's Wall, Northumberland 2009 (Photograph, gelatin silver print, on paper) 

Peter Peri (1899-1967): Stalin I 1942 (Concrete)

Peter de Francia (born 1921): The Bombing of Sakiet 1959 (Oil on canvas)

John Singer Sargent (1856-1925): Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose 1885-6 (Oil on canvas)

 

Frederic Leighton (1830-1896): An Athlete Wrestling with a Python 1877 (Bronze)

George Romney (1734-1802): Mrs Johnstone and her Son (?) about 1775-80 (Oil on canvas)

 

John Everett Millais (1829-1896): Ophelia 1851-2 (Oil on canvas)

John William Waterhouse (1849-1917): The Lady of Shalott 1888 (Oil on canvas)

Paul Noble (born 1963): Lidonob 2000 (Graphite on paper)

Cerith Wyn Evans (born 1958): Inverse Reverse Perverse 1996 (Acrylic)

Here is a short video showing the artwork at work:

At a single glance

For those who don't know the immense talent of Stephen Wiltshire yet. This man, because of his spectacular visual memory (I refrained myself from using the expression 'eidetic' because I include the five senses' experience into this word) is called an 'autistic savant'. Why not simply calling him a genius, without any reference to what people will immediately think of as a handicap? This man reminds me of Da Vinci at times. Go get a look if you're on London, it is stunning. Tomorrow, I'll go again to the gallery he opened in the Royal Opera Arcades, I haven't been there in a while.

Snapshots

 Victoria and Albert Museum, plaster casts court (casts of the Trajan column in Rome).

V&A, lidded vase (enamel), unsigned, Nagoya, Japan (1880-90) - the technique of producing mirror-black enamel ground was developed through collaborative research between Namikawa Yasuyuki and the German chemist Gottfried Wagener

V&A, vase, mark of Hayashi Kodenji (1880-85) - the use of fine silver wires combined with large expanses of dark blue-black enamel ground is typical of Hayashi Kodenji's work

V&A, vase (covered with a transparent red enamel (akasuke), believed to have been invented around 1880 by Ota Jinnoei and Honda Yosaburo, signed 'Nagoya Hayashi Ko[denji]' (1880-90)

The three vases above are on display for the 'Japanese Enamels: the Seven Treasures' in the Toshiba Gallery of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

V&A, 'China - China bust 19' (1999), Ah Xian (born 1960) - Porcelain, painted in underglaze cobalt blue with landscape design

V&A, somewhere.

Detail of embroidered shawl (picture 1) and cape (picture 2) made from the silk of more than one million female golden orb-weaver spiders collected in the highlands of Madagascar (Golden Spider Silk display, room 17a, V&A Museum)

The Lady Chapel, Westminster Cathedral

Westminster Cathedral, somewhere