Art for the Blog of It

Winter Scene in Brooklyn

2012-01-30T07:56:00.001-08:00

Marion Stiebel Siciliano

2012-01-27T05:45:00.000-08:00

Lucian Freud

2012-01-26T06:08:00.000-08:00

Margaret Olley

2012-01-20T07:54:00.001-08:00

Odd and ends

2012-01-19T09:48:00.001-08:00

Sam Norkin

2012-01-18T12:46:00.001-08:00

Gilbert (Magú) Luján

2012-01-17T06:50:00.001-08:00

Anthony Kalani Roberts

2012-01-16T05:52:00.001-08:00

Charles O. Perry

2012-01-16T05:49:00.000-08:00

Roman Opalka

2012-01-16T05:45:00.001-08:00

Larry Bogdanow

2012-01-14T08:34:00.001-08:00

Budd Hopkins

2012-01-13T05:21:00.000-08:00

John Hoover

2012-01-12T04:32:00.001-08:00

Vann Nath

2012-01-11T05:07:00.001-08:00

Stephen Mueller

2012-01-10T05:50:00.000-08:00

Keith Irvine, interior designs

2012-01-09T05:47:00.000-08:00

Edgar A. Tafel

2012-01-08T08:04:00.001-08:00

Richard Hamilton (one more time, we featured him once before)

2012-01-08T07:59:00.000-08:00

Elsa Rady

2012-01-07T12:50:00.000-08:00

Barbara Willis

2012-01-07T12:46:00.001-08:00

David Hockney

2012-01-06T22:18:00.000-08:00

Stephen Mueller

2012-01-06T05:16:00.000-08:00

The Taj Mahal

2012-01-05T06:38:00.000-08:00

"A brutal, wasteful, and ruthless emperor, who ordered the killing of all his male relations who might possibly claim the throne, Shah Jehan (ruled 1627-1658 CE) also had a passion for architecture, and he imported Italian artists who taught his craftsmen the art of inlaying marble with a mosaic of precious stones. He built forts with luxurious halls bearing panels of Florentine mosaic on black marble, as well as ceilings and arches carved with such skill they looked like lace. However, he is mostly remembered for the hauntingly beautiful Taj Mahal, a tribute to his eternal love for his beauteous queen, Mumtaz Mahal (Exalted of the Palace). Mumtaz gave her husband fourteen children in eighteen years and died in childbirth at the age of thirty-nine.

"In 1632, the mausoleum was built for the queen by the inconsolable Shah Jehan. There is no trace of Hindu influence. Artisans were brought from Baghdad, Constantinople, and other centers of the Muslim faith. It took twenty-two years and twenty-two thousand laborers and craftsmen from India, Asia, and Europe to build the white marble Taj. The building is set in a Persian landscaped garden on the banks of the Yamuna River. The Taj Mahal is exquisitely proportioned, with minarets and a central dome mirrored in a reflecting pool. It features perforated marble grilles, semiprecious stones (including jasper, lapis lazuli, and bloodstone) inlaid in marble, as well as arabesques and chevrons. There is hardly a break between the stones. One flower an inch square can have sixty different inlays. The Taj Mahal reflects the varying moods of night and day: brilliant and dazzling at noon, warm and glowing at dusk, and ethereal in the moonlight. The main entrance was once guarded with heavy silver gates. The stone carving is of alabaster lace, beautiful and sublime with delicate detail.

"Another legendary work of art created at this time was the Peacock Throne, which took seven years to complete. It was legendary for its components of precious metals and stones. Four legs of gold supported the seat, and twelve pillars of emeralds held up the enameled canopy, while each pillar bore two peacocks glittering with rubies and pearls. Between the peacocks was a tree, covered with diamonds, emeralds, rubies, and pearls. The fabled throne was carried off to Persia in 1739 by Nadir Shah and then was gradually dismantled to pay off the expenses of the royal personages.

"Yet another project on a grand scale, the Red Fort (Lal Kila) - of red sandstone - was built in Delhi in 1640. It includes towering ramparts, factories, storehouses, military barracks, stables, and a mint. It housed thousands of servants, courtiers, and princesses. A magnificent mosque, Jama Masjid, was built facing the main entrance. Every Friday, tens of thousands of Muslims in India still gather here to pray at noon.

"Shah Jehan, the most lavish spender of the Moghul emperors, ruled for three decades. He began his reign by killing his brothers but neglected to kill his sons, one of whom, Aurangzeb, not only overthrew him but imprisoned him. Shah Jehan languished in prison for eight years, looking sorrowfully through a grille at his creation, the Taj Mahal, where the body of his beloved rested."

Author: Prem Kishore & Anuradha Kishore Ganpati
Title: India
Publisher: Hippocrene
Date: Copyright 2003 by Prem Kishore & Anuradha Kishore Ganpati
Pages: 86-90

Ruth Stone, poet

2012-01-05T06:06:00.000-08:00

In the Next Galaxy

In the Next Galaxy
Things will be different.
No one will lose their sight,
their hearing, their gallbladder.
It will be all Catskills with brand
new wrap-around verandas.
The idea of Hitler will not have vibrated yet.
While back here,
they are still cleaning out
pockets of wrinkled
Nazis hiding in Argentina.
But in the next galaxy,
certain planets will have true
blue skies and drinking water.

Pat Passlof

2012-01-05T06:03:00.000-08:00

John Chamberlain (auto parts)

2012-01-04T07:02:00.000-08:00

Andrew Geller

2012-01-03T18:59:00.000-08:00

Helen Frankenthaler

2012-01-03T18:55:00.000-08:00

Helen Frankenthaler (December 12, 1928 – December 27, 2011) was an American abstract expressionist painter. She was a major contributor to the history of postwar American painting. Having exhibited her work for over six decades (early 1950s until 2011), she spanned several generations of abstract painters while continuing to produce vital and ever-changing new work.

Frankenthaler began exhibiting her large-scale abstract expressionist paintings in contemporary museums and galleries in the early 1950s. She was included in the 1964 Post-Painterly Abstraction exhibition curated by Clement Greenberg that introduced a newer generation of abstract painting that came to be known as Color Field.

Born in Manhattan, she was influenced by Hans Hofmann, Jackson Pollock's paintings and by Clement Greenberg. Her work has been the subject of several retrospective exhibitions, including a 1989 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, and been exhibited worldwide since the 1950s. In 2001, she was awarded the National Medal of Arts.

She was born in Manhattan on December 12, 1928. Her father was Alfred Frankenthaler, a respected New York State Supreme Court judge. Her mother, Martha (Lowenstein), had emigrated with her family from Germany to the United States shortly after she was born. Her two sisters, Marjorie and Gloria, were six and five years older, respectively. Growing up on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, Frankenthaler absorbed the privileged background of a cultured and progressive intellectual family that encouraged all three daughters to prepare themselves for professional careers. Her nephew is the artist/photographer Clifford Ross.

Frankenthaler studied at the Dalton School under Rufino Tamayo and also at Bennington College in Vermont. She met Clement Greenberg in 1950 and had a five-year relationship with him.

She was later married to fellow artist Robert Motherwell (1915–1991), from 1958 until they divorced in 1971. She has two stepdaughters, Jeannie Motherwell and Lise Motherwell. Both born of wealthy parents, the pair was known as "the golden couple" and noted for their lavish entertaining. She married Stephen M. DuBrul, Jr., an investment banker who served the Ford administration, in 1994.

Initially associated with abstract expressionism her career was launched in 1952 with the exhibition of Mountains and Sea. This painting is large - measuring seven feet by ten feet - and has the effect of a watercolor, though it is painted in oils. In it, she introduced the technique of painting directly onto an unprepared canvas so that the material absorbs the colors. She heavily diluted the oil paint with turpentine so that the color would soak into the canvas. This technique, known as "soak stain" was used by Jackson Pollock (1912–1956), and others; and was adopted by other artists notably Morris Louis (1912–1962), and Kenneth Noland (1924–2010), and launched the second generation of the Color Field school of painting. This method would sometimes leave the canvas with a halo effect around each area to which the paint was applied but has a disadvantage in that the oil in the paints will eventually cause the canvas to discolor and rot away.

One of her most important influences was Clement Greenberg (1909–1994), an influential art and literary critic with whom she had a personal friendship and who included her in the Post-Painterly Abstraction exhibition that he curated in 1964.

Through Greenberg she was introduced to the New York art scene. Under his guidance she spent the summer of 1950 studying with Hans Hofmann (1880–1966), catalyst of the Abstract Expressionist movement.

The first Jackson Pollock show Frankenthaler saw was at the Betty Parsons Gallery in 1950. She had this to say about seeing Pollock's paintings Autumn Rhythm, Number 30, 1950 (1950), Number One,1950 (Lavender Mist) (1950):

In 1960 the term Color Field painting was used to describe the work of Frankenthaler. This style was characterized by large areas of a more or less flat single color. The Color Field artists set themselves apart from the Abstract Expressionists because they eliminated the emotional, mythic or the religious content and the highly personal and gestural and painterly application.

Critics have not unanimously praised Ms. Frankenthaler’s art. Some have seen it as thin in substance, uncontrolled in method, too sweet in color and too “poetic.” But it has been far more apt to garner admirers like the critic Barbara Rose, who wrote in 1972 of Ms. Frankenthaler’s gift for “the freedom, spontaneity, openness and complexity of an image, not exclusively of the studio or the mind, but explicitly and intimately tied to nature and human emotions."

At her death 27 December 2011 it became widely known through social media that Frankenthaler singlehandedly tried to stop the support of artists whose work were different from hers and was one of those responsible for the NEA dropping individual grants to artists.

According to LA Times, "Frankenthaler did take a highly public stance during the late 1980s "culture wars" that eventually led to deep budget cuts for the National Endowment for the Arts and a ban on grants to individual artists that still persists. At the time, she was a presidential appointee to the National Council on the Arts, which advises the NEA's chairman.

In a 1989 commentary for the New York Times, she wrote that, while "censorship and government interference in the directions and standards of art are dangerous and not part of the democratic process," controversial grants to Andres Serrano, Robert Mapplethorpe and others reflected a trend in which the NEA was supporting work "of increasingly dubious quality. Is the council, once a helping hand, now beginning to spawn an art monster? Do we lose art ... in the guise of endorsing experimentation?"

James Rizzi

2012-01-02T09:56:00.001-08:00

The art of the paperback cover

2011-12-30T07:44:00.000-08:00

The art of Eastern Europe goes to war

2011-12-30T07:20:00.000-08:00

The Nazi's go to war

2011-12-30T06:47:00.001-08:00

The art of France at war

2011-12-30T06:42:00.001-08:00

England goes to war

2011-12-30T06:35:00.001-08:00

The art of Generic Asian Propaganda

2011-12-30T06:28:00.000-08:00

The art of women at war

2011-12-30T06:13:00.000-08:00

The art of war bonds

2011-12-30T06:05:00.001-08:00

The War Vietnam

2011-12-30T06:02:00.001-08:00

The marines go to war

2011-12-30T05:57:00.001-08:00

The enemy

2011-12-30T05:51:00.001-08:00

The Red Cross at war

2011-12-30T05:50:00.001-08:00

Go Navy

2011-12-29T10:54:00.001-08:00

Somebody talked

2011-12-29T10:52:00.001-08:00

Together, we win

2011-12-29T10:49:00.001-08:00

Food fight!

2011-12-29T10:47:00.001-08:00

Enlist

2011-12-29T10:43:00.001-08:00

December 7th

2011-12-29T10:41:00.001-08:00

Civil war posters

2011-12-29T10:37:00.001-08:00

US army posters

2011-12-29T10:35:00.001-08:00

US war poster

2011-12-29T10:33:00.001-08:00

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum opened October 21, 1959. Designed by Frank Lloyd Wright

2011-10-21T07:32:00.000-07:00

Giacomo Balla

2011-10-21T07:22:00.000-07:00

Giacomo Balla (July 18, 1871– March 1, 1958)

Born in Turin, in the Piedmont region of Italy, the son of an industrial chemist, as a child Giacomo Balla studied music, but, at 9, when his father died, he gave up music and began working in a lithograph print shop.

By age twenty his interest in art was such that he decided to study painting at local academies and exhibited several of his early works. Influenced by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Balla adopted the Futurism style, creating a pictorial depiction of light, movement and speed.

He was signatory to the Futurist Manifesto in 1910 and began designing and painting Futurist furniture and also created Futurist "antineutral" clothing.