Take some shots at this...

probly no known artist, altho could be wrong...

Last edited Fri Jun 1, 2012, 07:43 PM - Edit history (1)

in a new book "The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind and Brain" by Eric R. Kandel. Klimt evidently went to Ravenna and saw the mosaics at San Vitale Church. That is when he decided to go with the flat surface interpretation of the mosaic, combined with his knowledge of using gold since his father was a expert in precious metals.

It's beautiful and uniquely fantastic!

experience! It was in a very quiet church. In fact, the whole town was quiet. I noticed how quiet it was when I got off the train from Bologna. I asked my friends what happened to all the people? Geez, the rest of my journey was FULL of people...esp. Venice which freaked me out...

I must say, tho, I loved Verona...what a lovely town...

The rest I had no clue about. My wife (with an art history diploma) has many books on Klimt!

Braque

cezanne/braque

degas/hopper

interesting to explore these two dark paintings...

I wanted to formally work out the perspective in photoshop, out of curiosity, because the room is so well exposed. It is almost formal, like a stage, but with a little angle to it. The back wall isn't quite parallel to the viewer. You can see that smidgen of the ceiling.

Before photography nobody would have constructed a room like that in a painting. I like how the classical is livlied up a little without losing the basic function of presenting the room stage-like with a missing "fourth wall."

I have a good visual memory but alas, don't know the names of many works. (And have a fairly poor memory for names of artists, also.)

That Hopper might be the most atypical thing he ever painted (excluding very, very early work like the illustrations and such), so it's one of those things you have to know. Hard to deduce.

Thanks for including something from after the Civil War so I could get one of these for once. I am weak on medieval and renaissance but know 19th-20th century okay.

The Degas title is "Interior" and the Hopper title is "Summer Interior."

I find both of these works extremely disturbing in their implications of rape. Chilling and really in your face...but that is why they are so powerful...

I don't know that she has any past or future at all.

Hoppers probably tend to have less narrative content then we naturally impose on them. I think some of the pensiveness and depressive quality we read comes from him seeking a lack of affect and motive, not from trying to express alienation or loneliness. And an affect-less person appears depressed and introspective.

Near as I can tell, all of his figurative work is a conscious reaction to magazine illustration, which he really was not good at. His quote about his aversion to (and seeking to avoid) groups of figure grimacing and gesticulating can be read as a critique of salon painting but I think he was really talking about magazine story illustration in the 1920s-1930s.

Of course he may have been fooling himself. Wouldn't be the first.

and look at again. At the time, I thought that Hopper was intentionally referencing Degas and since the Degas had a strong vibe of rape (perhaps marital rape) I may have just transferred it to Hopper.

Where does "lack of affect and motive" come from with Hopper, in your opinion? I wonder if that is a judgment that he has made on the people of his paintings or just a general feeling? It seems to amount to the same thing. I think of Hopper as being an urban equivalent of his time to the rural Andrew Wyeth, esp. the open window one with the tracks of a tractor outside and no one there. Those two seem to be yoked together, in my mind, as artists feeling the loneliness of 20th century America.

He complained that magazine art directors always wanted him to paint pictures of groups of people gesturing and grimacing, but 'I didn't want to paint people gesturing and grimacing, what I wanted to do was paint light on the side of a house."

There is so much solitude and introspection in Hopper that it has to have some expressive intent, or reflection of personality, but it also arises from:

1) Being at heart an abstract artist. Hopper's formality makes things sparse and spare. He wants to paint a thing without much distraction, so he seeks out a house that looks like the only house on Earth. Paints a subway car with only a handful of figures. etc.

2) He really did not draw or paint very well. He was a brilliant artist and my favorite 20th century American and all around wonderful, but he lacked skill to go with his genius. Each figure, each architectural detail, was an effort for him. That does not denigrate the work, it merely helps explain it.

Using Andrew Wyeth as an eample... Wyeth was an excellent draftsman. When we look at Christina's world and those Hoppers of the collie in tall grass the treatment of the grass is night and day. With Wyeth it is implied that you can see every blade of grass. With Hopper the grass is one solid mass... like the ocean. The effect is very different, and the Hopper grass is influential and memorable and more art historically important than the Wyeth grass.

But where Hopper ended up with that grass is heavily influenced by the fact that he could not do Wyeth grass. He didn't have the skill. And he couldn't do the grimacing and gesturing figures art directors wanted. I wasn't that he was above it... he couldn't do it. Illustration rejected him, not the other way around.

Always remember that artists do not have infinite free will. Much of what we see is shaped by what an artist happens to be good at.

In art school we once looked at the work of someone who, we were told, expressed anxiety in that all of his figures had hands in pockets or behind their backs. It is true that the people looked nervous, but it is also true that the artist simply could not draw hands very well. Not everyone can.

An artist's blue period may well arise from blue paint being on sale. And so on.

Hopper's wife wouldn't let him work from other models, but didn't really like posing for him. If one asked why he did relatively few nudes despite doing some very good ones we could offer an explanation about the movement of his work toward the formal and lifeless (true) or cite his marriage. Both are real factors. The heavy abstraction/lack of detail in the Interior piece is surely an artistic vision, but also because he ws probably working from an earlier pencil drawing.

I don't know any stories about that painting. Just noting that there is always a web of inspiration and personal ability and practicality.

Hopper loved the abstraction of angled shadows. In an urban setting that tends toward a sinister and lonely look because you want single-source lighting. The sunlit side of a house in Maine doesn't have the same emotional feel as an interior lit by one lamp, but both are a fascination with single-point light sources.

So I split the difference. Hopper was a painter of loneliness and alienation. He surely had that in him. But I'll bet that he was constantly surprised how bleak his work struck people because I doubt it seemed as bleak to him. I am not sure that he would put a figure in a room at night and ask himself why this woman didn't have a date. What strikes us as bleak was probably, to him, peaceful.

I don't think he liked noise and activity and wouldn't have seen some things as being as desolate as we read them

But yes, there is desolation. That cannot be disregarded.

There is a painting of a couple in a lighted apartment interior seen from outside that, because Hopper's work is rather stark, reads as a study of marital alienation.

But Hopper may well have considered it a pleasant scene. Perhaps is is husband and wife having a fine time reading magazines and listening to the radio. Perhaps their relationship is healthier than most, having no trouble with awkward silences.

I don't know.

But I do know he was a Wendell Wilkie Republican. Very mainstream guy.
I am just typing here, of course. Free associating.

But I think you can't reject what art historians can rightly claim is the alienation aspect of wyeth and hopper, whether they think it was their motive or not.

OR, maybe you CAN!

The fact that in the Hopper painting the woman is alone suggests that it is after something has happened. The Degas suggests it is about to happen. I wonder about that...and I would have to find that Hopper book text on that particular painting and look it up...

Shadows: See how Cezanne just loved shadows! This work really speaks to that. It is as if he really wanted to do shadows more than anything...his fabled "spheres. cones and cubes" notwithstanding. Just speculating here, because I see them...

Who knows about all of this, tho. Cezanne might have just become a crabby old guy, not an artist haunted by the cubism he could almost see but didn't and then along came Braque and Cezanne just a few years after he dies and ZAP...

Hopper is chock full of alienation, no matter what he thought about it, and critics are correct to say so. The line is that they shouldn't assume that was his intent. And artistic intent is really not so relevant, IMO.

The work is alienated. Period.

you see it in the work I just displayed? I'm just wondering if Cezanne was experimenting and critics later said "Oh, see how he is the father of cubism..." when maybe he was just playing with what he could do really, really well. Of course, after he abandoned his apples ("I will astonish Paris!) no doubt he had a passion. But what can we assume? The reason I like Braque's "L'estaque" is that he just went and DID it. He just said, "OK, here it is. This is it!"

I love Georges Bracque. And BTW his ceiling at the Louvre is right next to Cy Twombly's. Whatta a thrill that was (saw it April, 2011).

And though cubism is the child of Cezanne I don't know whether Cezanne is the father of anything. It is impossible for us to see him without knowing everything that followed so we are bound to read history backward sometimes.

His work feels so personal and quirky and unique to me, not scientific and proselytizing. I've never known that much about him biographically... that's just my take on his work.

Post-impressionism was really exciting. The best of both worlds.

Renoir, Derain, Braque, Dufy, Marquet and others of less or no fame. With the exception of Renoir, the others headed into Fauvism so it is surprising to see the difference. Or at least it is to me.

The south of France is on my bucket list: http://www.marseille-tourisme.com/index.php?id=1416

the first raphael and the second Picasso.

got it from a Rembrandt etching that was itself after this etching done by somebody (Rodolino... something like that) who actually saw Raphael's Judgment of Paris (which I assume does not exist? Is that right? You surely know.)

And Picasso was working after Manet... so it goes Raphael > Rembrandt > Manet > Picasso, which is quite a lineage.

It's a very nice Picasso. Not always a fan, but I like that painting.

are correct. I am guessing that since we have this, it is a copy of something lost...but I don't know for sure...

Picasso, however, was sure busy doing "reinventions" of other masterpieces. He redid Las Meninas, 3rd of May (some Korean War thing), and of course Delacroix "Women of Algiers', which is one of my favorite Delacroix's. Jeez...

It is holy writ that Picasso was a child prodigy of academic artistic virtuosity, wowing the establishment like boy Jesus speaking to the pharisees, and then turned his back on representation because he had mastered it.

What's the famous quote? At age 10 I could paint like a master and I spent the rest of my life learning to draw like a child. Something like that.

Anyway, Picasso was never a particularly gifted draftsman or traditional painter. In any 19th century atelier he would have been a middle-of-the-pack student. Maybe even above avergae... but not a star. He could draw, of course, but so could thousands of other people at the time.

I remember flipping through a book of early Picasso, including a lot of student work. It was okay... nothing special. Then I hit a very well done drawing that leaped of the page, but it was a drawing of Picasso done by one of his classmates. (Who nobody has ever heard of.)

The point is not to denigrate Picasso in any way. I have no doubt that he could do traditional drawing better than most people who are best known as modernist/abstract artists. He was a talented guy.

But he was limited. All artists are limited. And the stock story about how he could have done anything is just not true.

All artists follow a vision while simultaneously being corralled by their ability and natural tendencies, and the best of them maximize the intersection of vision and ability. I think Picasso and Hopper both did that.

But even the shabbiest atelier had students who were more talented draftsman than either of them. (And who were not great artists by any strtch.)

I will give you a hint: 1.a. is from the 16th century, and 1.b. is from the 19th century.

Titian did a lot of things. This is one of his most charming IMHO. Really lovely. I don't know why I didn't know it...

Pre-Raphaelite, but that's all I can figure.

P.S. The change in boards a ways back threw me off, but I decided tonight I missed the place!

It is in Trinity Church in Boston. The Church was built in the 1880s. That would put this in about that era.

LaFarge was a fine artist who worked in stained glass. He had the misfortune of working in this medium at the same time as Louis Comfort Tiffany, who had a much sharper business sense than LaFarge. This window was done in memory of a beloved member of the congregation of the church. It is a nice memorial to her, albeit a direct steal from Titian.