Marcelle Lender
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec
A French singer, dancer and entertainer made famous in paintings by Toulouse-Lautrec Anne-Marie Marcelle Bastien, began dancing at the age of sixteen and within a few years made a name for herself performing at the Théâtre des Variétés in Montmartre.
Lautrec's portrait of her in full costume, her flame-red hair accentuated by two red poppies worn like plumes, boosted Lender's popularity considerably after it appeared in a Paris magazine. The painting was eventually sold to a collector from the United States and on her passing in 1998 the painting's then owner, American Betsey Cushing Whitney, donated it to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.
Doru Covrig
Princess Lulu
Doru Covrig is a widely acclaimed contemporary artist living in Paris. His sculptures, some of them of huge dimensions, are covering a large thematic area from imposing statues of dictators made of glued pieces of timber, cardboard of paper to homage to Guttenberg cast in bronze prints.
Princess Lulu is part of the artist’s larger project consisting of papier maché sculptures, all replicas to Brancusi`s series of Mademoiselle Pogany.
Calum Colvin
Venus Anadyomene (after Titian)
The Scottish artist Calum Colvin reinterprets Titian’s motive by making use of the photographic technique to which he juxtaposes a symbolic graphic surface with two points of reflection, a dressing table and a camera set upon a tripod in the pupil of the eye.
In his own words: “This work has a reflection at its centre, in fact it has two. There is the dressing-table mirror’s reflection of Venus painted on the left-hand wall, then there is a camera set upon a tripod in the pupil of her eye … What I wanted to do was look at the narrative behind it, at the idea of Venus, and make my own version of this image which would refer to photography and the notion of creativity … To look at these paintings afresh, in a sense to represent the image and let the people just think.”
Pablo Picasso: Bather Wringing her Hair
The work has been painted at Picasso’s home in Vallauris on the French Côte d’Azur and is dated 7 October 1952. It that time Picasso’s relationship with his companion Françoise Gilot was deteriorating; a year later she ended the relationship taking her children, Claude and Paloma, with her back to Paris.
Picasso statuesque figure has the quality of a sculputure which can be viewed “in the round”; the figure is seen from both front and the back. It is likely that Picasso was directly inspired by Titian’s painting of Venus (see Art Gallery). Direct comparison can be drawn by the use of color and the scale and composition of the figure.
Titian: Venus Rising from the
Sea
('Venus Anadyomene')
Titian lived in Venice for most of his life, but was also known throughout Europe. He may have made this work to rival a famous ancient Greek painter called Apelles*. Apelles was greatly admired in the 1500s. He had painted a 'Venus Rising from the Sea' (1520) , which had since been lost and was known only through a written description. Titian's Venus is a big, beautiful woman who dominates the picture. She looks unaware of being seen, like a celebrity snapped by a paparazzo while wading ashore after a swim. The only reference to her mythical status is the small scallop shell in the bottom left-hand corner.
Titian's Venus fills the canvas. The small shell floating on the water identifies the beautiful nude female as the goddess of love. The ancient Greek poet Hesiod described how Venus was born fully grown from the sea and blown to the shore on a scallop shell. Titian shows the goddess wringing her hair, a pose inspired by classical sculpture and by an account of a painting by Apelles, the most celebrated painter of ancient Greece. Titian's Venus proved that he could rival the art of antiquity and that he could make the ideal appear real. The painting is in exceptionally fine condition and was acquired from the Sutherland collection in 2003.
The Birth of Venus
Sandro Botticelli (1444–1510)
The classical goddess Venus emerges from the water on a shell, blown towards shore by the Zephyrs, symbols of spiritual passions. She is joined by one of the Horae, goddesses of the seasons, who hands her a flowered cloak.
The effect is distinctly pagan, considering it was made at a time and place when most artworks depicted Roman Catholic themes. It is somewhat surprising that this canvas escaped the flames of Savonarola's bonfires, where a number of Botticelli's other alleged pagan influenced works perished. Botticelli was very close to Lorenzo de Medici. Because of their friendship and Lorenzo's power, this work was spared from Savonarola's fires and the disapproval of the church.
The anatomy of Venus and various
subsidiary details do not display the strict classical realism of Leonardo da
Vinci or Raphael. Most obviously, Venus has an improbably long neck, and her
left shoulder slopes at an anatomically unlikely angle. Some have suggested it
prefigures mannerism.
Apelles of Kos: Venus Rising
Apelles of Kos was a renowned painter of ancient Greece. Pliny the Elder, to whom we owe much of our knowledge of this artist, claims that this very painting had been part of the collection of Julius Caesar, but was destroyed when Caesar's mansion on the Palatine Hill burned down.
While sketching one of Alexander the Great's concubines, Campaspe, Apelles fell in love with her. As a mark of appreciation for the great painter's work, Alexander presented her to him.
The image represents the birth of Aphrodite, Goddess of Love, as she emerges from the waters. According to Greek mythology Aphrodite was born fully adult from the sea, which perpetually renewed her virginity. A motif of the goddess wringing out her hair is often repeated.
Constantin Brancusi: Mademoiselle Pogany
A friend, Margit Pogany, was the inspiration for Mlle Pogany II, one of the sculptures that came to epitomise Brancusi's work.
The most radical of these works is the mysterious Princess X, from 1915. A photograph survives of the first version of this sculpture, in which a woman arches her neck to catch a glimpse of herself in a mirror. The neck is exaggerated in order to convey the self awareness of this gesture. Dissatisfied with this version, Brancusi carved back the superficial details. The head became an ovoid on an arching neck and the supporting hand is reduced to a pattern.
He showed this sculpture in New York, but when the bronze version was exhibited in Paris in 1920 it was banned - to Brancusi's apparent bewilderment - as being deliberately phallic. It was only reinstated as a result of a campaign to support his freedom of expression.
The sculpture can be admired at MoMA, NY.
Ceiling of l’Opera Garnier in Paris
The Marc Chagall mural on the ceiling of the auditorium of l’Opera Garnier. Installed in 1964, it provoked much heated controversy because it was not in keeping with the "Napoleon III" style of the original. Furthermore the new mural was attached in such a way that the old mural (underneath the new) was permanently damaged. Nevertheless time has softened the controversy and to the first time visitor, the Chagall has a lightness and beauty that complements the 19th century decor in a charming (and lasting) way.
Echoing the colorful style dear to Charles Garnier's, Chagall has designed his painting as a living image of the festive spirit surrounding each performance: luminous, fluid figures surge forth, contrasting with the gold and red tones of the theatre.
Las Meninas
One of Velázquez's most representative works Las Meninas (1656, The Maids of Honour), appears to have as a subject the eldest daughter of the new Queen, Margarita, However, in looking at the various viewpoints of the painting it is unclear as to who or what is the true subject. Is it the royal daughter, or perhaps the painter himself? The answer may lie in the image on the back wall, depicting the King and Queen. Is this image a mirror, in which case the King and Queen are standing where we stand? Are they the subject of Velazquez's work? Or is the work simply a court painting? Much is still in speculation about the true subject of this masterpiece, and many of the questions that we ask may never be truly answered.
Created four years before his death, it is a staple of the European baroque period of art. An apotheosis of the work has been effected since its creation; Luca Giordano, a contemporary Italian painter, referred to it as the "theology of painting," and the eighteenth century the Englishman Thomas Lawrence cited it as the "philosophy of art," so decidedly capable of producing its desired effect. That effect has been variously interpreted; Dale Brown points out an interpretation that, in inserting within the work a faded portrait of the king and queen hanging on the back wall, Velázquez has ingeniously prognosticated the fall of the Spanish empire that was to gain momentum following his death. Another interpretation is that the portrait is in fact a mirror, and that the painting itself is in the perspective of the King and Queen, hence their reflection can be seen in the mirror on the back wall.
The Creation of Adam
The fresco on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel was painted by Michelangelo about 500 years ago. It illustrates the Biblical story from the Book of Genesis in which God breathes life into Adam, the first man. Chronologically the fourth in the series of panels depicting episodes from Genesis on the Sistine ceiling, it was among the last to be completed. The fresco technique requires that the artist paint a freshly plastered wall which is still sufficiently humid to allow the paint to bond chemically so that when the plaster dries, the paint is completely a part of the wall. In order to paint the plaster which dries very quickly, the artist must have a very rapid and precise techniques of painting. He must clearly know how much he can paint during the course of the day ('giornata'). It is possible to identify the extent of the various daily paintings from the plaster on the borders of the frescoes. From these it is clear that Michelangelo painted at a remarkably high speed. The creation of Adam was painted in two weeks.
Le Déjeuner sur l'Herbe
Edouard Manet painted The Luncheon on the Grass originally titled The Bath (Le Bain), between 1862 and 1863. It is oil on canvas and measures 208 by
264.5 centimeters. The juxtaposition of a female nude with fully dressed men
sparked controversy when the work was first exhibited at the Salon des Refusés
in 1863. The piece is now in the Musée d'Orsay, Paris.
“Painters, and especially Édouard Manet, who is an analytic painter, do not share the masses' obsession with the subject: to them, the subject is only a pretext to paint, whereas for the masses only the subject exists.”
Emile Zola, 1867
Perhaps the most important of Wassily Kandinsky's paintings from the decade of the 1900s, it shows a small cloaked figure on a speeding horse rushing through a rocky meadow. The rider's cloak is a medium blue, and the shadow cast is a darker blue. In the foreground are more amorphous blue shadows, presumably the counterparts of the fall trees in the background. The Blue Rider in the painting is prominent, but not clearly defined, and the horse has an unnatural gait (which Kandinsky must have known). Indeed, some believe that a second figure, a child perhaps, is being held by the rider (though this could just as easily be another shadow from a solitary rider). This type of intentional disjunction allowing viewers to participate in the creation of the artwork would become an increasingly conscious technique used by the artist in subsequent years—culminating in his great "abstract expressionist" works of the 1911–1914. In The Blue Rider Kandinsky shows the rider more as a series of colors than of specific details. In and of itself, The Blue Rider is not exceptional in that regard when compared to contemporary painters, but it does show the direction that Kandinsky would take only a few years later.
The Turkish Bath
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780-1867). A summation of the theme of female voluptuousness, attractive to Ingres throughout his life, The Turkish Bath, was painted in 1862, in the circular format of earlier masters.
The most erotic of all his works, created at the end of his life, this harem scene combines the figure of the nude with an oriental theme. Taking as his inspiration the letters of Lady Montague, who recounts a visit to a women's bath in Istanbul in the early eighteenth century, Ingres has borrowed figures from some of his previous paintings for this composition full of arabesques.
It was Prince Napoleon who commissioned this harem scene around 1848. The painting was delivered in 1859, but returned soon afterwards because it had shocked the empress. The painter continued to rework his picture until 1863, even after he had dated it 1862. It was only finally revealed to the wider public in 1905, on the occasion of the Ingres retrospective at the Salon d'Automne, and here it excited the most avant-garde painters such as Picasso. The Turkish Bath was the masterpiece of Ingres' later years, as audacious in its subject as it was in its style. The painting can be admired in the Louvre, Paris.
A masterpiece by Michelangelo
Merisi da Caravaggio, a painter of the baroque era, completed
in 1599-1600 for the Contarelli Chapel in the church of the French
congregation, San Luigi dei Francesi in Rome. The church is located in
the neighborhood of Piazza Navona.
Caravaggio
represented the event as a nearly silent, dramatic narrative. The sequence of
actions before and after this moment can be easily and convincingly re-created.
The tax-gatherer Levi (Saint Matthew's name before he became the apostle) was
seated at a table with his four assistants, counting the day's proceeds, the
group lighted from a source at the upper right of the painting. Christ, His
eyes veiled, with His halo the only hint of divinity, enters with Saint Peter.
A gesture of His right hand, all the more powerful and compelling because of
its languor, summons Levi. Surprised by the intrusion and perhaps dazzled by
the sudden light from the just-opened door, Levi draws back and gestures toward
himself with his left hand as if to say, "Who, me?", his right hand
remaining on the coin he had been counting before Christ's entrance.
Johannes Vermeer van Delft (1632- 1675) the painter of meditative portraits and of poetical domestic scenes was a master of rendering the almost material quality of light falling on rich textures, on the delicate traces of a face or on a pearl. Girl with the Pearl Earring won in the past years a well deserved fame through Tracy Chevalier’s novel and through the homonymous film; a consuming story of unconventional love and renunciation in an exquisite patrician environment.
The portrait can be admired in Royal Cabinet of Paintings Mauritshuis, The Hague, The Netherlands.
Albrecht Dürer (1471 1528), painter and graphic artist, was the central figure in the German Renaissance and one of the most outstanding personalities in the history of art. In the year 1500 Dürer painted a self portrait in a hieratical pose that up his time was only reserved for kings and for Jesus, whose features he was emulating in it. This portrait represents his own interpretation of the biblical figure and his belief in the divine inspiration as the source of the artist’s creative powers. The remarkable force of the portrait is emanating from the balanced focus of the stare.