Deco is beautiful
Parkview Square Building, Singapore, photo by Harry Tan
The General Electric Building, NYC
Joseph Rodefer DeCamp — Farewell. circa 1900-1902
I love the simplicity and the gentleness of the colors
Joseph Rodefer DeCamp (November
5, 1858 – February 11, 1923) was an American painter and educator. DeCamp
became known as a member of the Boston School, focusing on figure painting, and
in the 1890s adopting the style of Tonalism. He was a founder of the Ten
American Painters, a group of American Impressionists, in 1897.
Hour of Suffering by Jean-Paul Riopelle, 1953,
"When I begin a painting I
always hope to complete it in a few strokes, starting with the first colors I
daub down anywhere and anyhow. But it never works, so I add more, without realizing
it. I have never wanted to paint thickly paint tubes are much too expensive.
But one way or another, the painting has to be done. When I learn how to paint
better, I will paint less thickly."
Riopelle's style in the 1940s
changed quickly from Surrealism to Lyrical Abstraction (related to abstract
expressionism), in which he used myriad tumultuous cubes and triangles of
multicolored elements, facetted with a palette knife, spatula, or trowel, on
often large canvases to create powerful atmospheres.
The presence of long filaments of
paint in his painting from 1948 through the early 1950s has often been seen as
resulting from a dripping technique like that of Jackson Pollock. Rather, the
creation of such effects came from the act of throwing, with a palette knife or
brush, large quantities of paint onto the stretched canvas (positioned vertically).
Riopelle's voluminous impasto became just as important as color. His oil
painting technique allowed him to paint thick layers, producing peaks and
troughs as copious amounts of paint were applied to the surface of the canvas.
Riopelle, though, claimed that the heavy impasto was unintentional.
When Riopelle started painting,
he would attempt to finish the work in one session, preparing all the color he
needed beforehand: "I would even go as far to say—obviously I don't use a
palette, but the idea of a palette or a selection of colors that is not mine
makes me uncomfortable, because when I work, I can't waste my time searching
for them. It has to work right away."
A third element, range of gloss,
in addition to color and volume, plays a crucial role in Riopelle's oil
paintings. Paints are juxtaposed so that light is reflected off the surface not
just in different directions but with varying intensity, depending on the
naturally occurring gloss finish (he did not varnish his paintings). These
three elements; color, volume, and range of gloss, would form the basis of his
oil painting technique throughout his long and prolific career.
Riopelle was arguably one of the
most important Canadian artists of the 20th century, establishing his
reputation in the burgeoning postwar art scene of Paris, where his entourage
included André Breton, Sam Francis and Samuel Beckett. Riopelle produced over
six thousand works.
Devin Leonardi (American, 1981-2014) - Two Friends on the Shore of Long Island, 2009
Devin Leonardi
Missoula Art Museum
In 2014, Philipsburg-based artist
Devin Leonardi tragically died. To honor his passing and share his artistic
vision, MAM has worked closely with Altman Siegel Gallery in San Francisco and
the artist’s family to present this selection of paintings.
Leonardi deftly uses 19th century
photography as source material for his haunting landscape paintings. He
investigates the complex relationship between painting and photography, a
medium that came to prominence during modernity and challenged painting’s
supremacy. By editing and re-presenting historical photographs, Leonardi
interprets our collective record and comments on modernity as a causal force in
the nation’s burgeoning expansion.
His atmospheric paintings elicit
the precise aesthetic and illustrative realism of Thomas Eakins, Norman
Rockwell, and Maxfield Parrish, and like these influences, revel in bucolic
idealism. He positions historical subjects, however, as allegories and parables
against anonymous western tropes to present a past that isn’t lost, but
manifests as contemporary anxiety and fears of the changing future.
Barbara Hepworth b.1903
Dame Jocelyn Barbara Hepworth DBE
(January 10 1903 – May 20 1975) was an
English artist and sculptor. Her work exemplifies Modernism and in particular
modern sculpture. She was one of the few female artists of her generation to
achieve international prominence.
Deco
Centre Theatre East North Avenue,
Baltimore, Maryland ca. 1939 Photograph by the Hughes Company. Also known as
Film Centre, Centre Theatre opened in 1939 and included a studio theater and
the broadcasting center of WFBR radio. WFBR radio has since moved out and the
building was converted into a storefront church. ( I understand it has since been demolished, I hope not)
George Grosz (1893-1959)
My Drawings expressed my despair,
hate and disillusionment, I drew drunkards; puking men; men with clenched fists
cursing at the moon. ... I drew a man, face filled with fright, washing blood
from his hands ... I drew lonely little men fleeing madly through empty
streets. I drew a cross-section of tenement house: through one window could be
seen a man attacking his wife; through another, two people making love; from a
third hung a suicide with body covered by swarming flies. I drew soldiers
without noses; war cripples with crustacean-like steel arms; two medical
soldiers putting a violent infantryman into a strait-jacket made of a horse
blanket ... I drew a skeleton dressed as a recruit being examined for military
duty. I also wrote poetry. — George Grosz
George Grosz was a German artist known especially for his
caricatural drawings and paintings of Berlin life in the 1920s. He was a
prominent member of the Berlin Dada and New Objectivity group during the Weimar
Republic. He immigrated to the United States in 1933 and became a naturalized
citizen in 1938.
Abandoning the style and subject
matter of his earlier work, he exhibited regularly and taught for many years at
the Art Students League of New Although Grosz made his first oil paintings
in 1912 while still a student, his earliest oils that can be identified today
date from 1916.
By 1914, Grosz worked in a style
influenced by Expressionism and Futurism, as well as by popular illustration,
graffiti, and children's drawings.
Sharply outlined forms are often treated as if
transparent. The City (1916–17) was the first of his many paintings of the
modern urban scene.
He settled in Berlin in 1918 and
was a founder of the Berlin Dada movement, using his satirical drawings to
attack bourgeois supporters of the Weimar Republic. His drawings, usually in
pen and ink which he sometimes developed further with watercolor, frequently
included images of Berlin and the Weimar Republic in the 1920s. Corpulent
businessmen, wounded soldiers, prostitutes, sex crimes and orgies were his great
subjects.
After his emigration to the USA
in 1933, a softening of his style had been apparent since the late 1920s,
Grosz's work assumed a more sentimental tone in America, a change generally
seen as a decline. His late work never achieved the critical success of his
Berlin years. In 1959 he returned to Berlin where he died.
From 1947 to 1959, George Grosz
lived in Huntington, New York, where he taught painting at the Huntington
Township Art League. It is said by locals that he used what was to become his
most famous painting, Eclipse of the Sun, to pay for a car repair bill, in his
relative penury. The painting was later acquired by house painter Tom
Constantine to settle a debt of $104.00. The Heckscher Museum of Art in
Huntington purchased the painting in 1968 for $15,000.00, raising the money by
public subscription.
In 2006, the Heckscher proposed
selling Eclipse of the Sun at its then-current appraisal of approximately
$19,000,000.00 to pay for repairs and renovations to the building. There was
such public outcry that the museum decided not to sell and announced plans to
create a dedicated space for display of the painting in the renovated museum.
The Grosz estate filed a lawsuit
in 1995 against the Manhattan art dealer Serge Sabarsky, arguing that Sabarsky
had deprived the estate of appropriate compensation for the sale of hundreds of
Grosz works he had acquired. In the suit, filed in State Supreme Court in
Manhattan, the Grosz estate claims that Sabarsky secretly acquired 440 Grosz
works for himself, primarily drawings and watercolors produced in Germany in
the 1910s and 20s. The lawsuit was settled in summer in 2006.
In 2003 the Grosz family
initiated a legal battle against the Museum of Modern Art in New York City,
asking that three paintings be returned. According to documents, the paintings
were sold to the Nazis after Grosz fled the country in 1933. The museum never
settled the claim, arguing that a three-year statute of limitations in bringing
such a claim had expired. It is well documented that the Nazis stole thousands
of paintings during World War II and many heirs of German painters continue to
fight powerful museums to reclaim such works.
Grosz's younger son is jazz guitarist Marty Grosz
Art Nouveau
From Wikipedia-edited for size.
Art Nouveau is an international
style of art, architecture and applied art, especially the decorative arts. The
style was most popular between 1890 and 1910. It was a reaction against the
academic art, eclecticism and historicism of 19th century architecture and
decoration. It was often inspired by natural forms such as the sinuous curves
of plants and flowers. Other characteristics of Art Nouveau were a sense of
dynamism and movement, often given by asymmetry or whiplash lines, and the use
of modern materials, particularly iron, glass, ceramics and later concrete, to
create unusual forms and larger open spaces.
One major objective of Art
Nouveau was to break down the traditional distinction between fine arts
(especially painting and sculpture) and applied arts. It was most widely used
in interior design, graphic arts, furniture, glass art, textiles, ceramics,
jewelry and metal work. The style
responded to leading 19-century theoreticians.
From Belgium and France, it
spread to the rest of Europe, taking on different names and characteristics in
each country. It often appeared not only in capitals, but also in rapidly
growing cities that wanted to establish artistic identities (Turin and Palermo
in Italy; Glasgow in Scotland; Munich and Darmstadt in Germany), as well as in
center of independence movements (Helsinki in Finland, then part of the Russian
Empire; Barcelona in Catalonia, Spain).
By 1910, Art Nouveau's influence
was fading. It was replaced as the dominant European architectural and
decorative style first by Art Deco and then by Modernism.
Mystery of orb in a record-breaking Leonardo Da Vinci painting deepens
By Stephanie Pappas
The likely Leonardo da Vinci
painting "Salvator Mundi" looks straightforward at first glance: a
depiction of Jesus Christ in Renaissance-era clothing, raising one hand in
blessing and holding a clear orb in the other.
But that orb defies the laws of
optics, creating a controversy over just what da Vinci was using as his
inspiration. Now, a new study argues that the orb may be a realistic depiction
of a hollow glass ball.
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The work has not yet been
published in a peer-reviewed journal, but a preprint of the findings is posted
on the preprint site arXiv. University of California, Irvine, researchers used
a computer-rendering technique to show that the appearance of the orb would
have been physically possible in the real world, if the orb were made of thin
blown glass.
But the paper is unlikely to
settle the long-running debate over da Vinci’s intentions.
"The paper of the sphere is
just one of many examples of scientists making ill-judged interventions in
Leonardo studies based on ignorance of the sources," da Vinci scholar
Martin Kemp, an emeritus professor of the history of art at the University of
Oxford's Trinity College, wrote in an email to Live Science.
The "Salvator Mundi" is
a painting with a dramatic past. It probably dates to around 1500 and was
acquired by Charles I of England at some point in the 1600s. Charles I was
executed in 1659 after a civil war, and in 1651 a mason named John Stone
purchased the painting. In 1660, he returned the artwork to Charles II, the son
of Charles I who retook the throne that year. The trail of the painting then
goes cold until 1900, when it was resold not as an original da Vinci, but as
the work of one of the master’s students.
It wasn’t until 2011 — after
professional conservators got ahold of the painting and repaired sloppy
conservation work that had built up over the years — that art experts
reassessed the "Salvator Mundi" and realized that it was likely
painted by da Vinci himself. In 2017, a Saudi prince bought the painting at
auction for a record-breaking $450 million.
Embedded within the painting is a
persistent mystery. The orb held by Christ contains a few painted sparkles that
look like inclusions within a solid sphere or crystal. But a solid orb would
magnify and invert the image of anything behind it due to the refraction of
light, and the orb in the painting doesn't do that. Christ's robes appear
undistorted behind the glass.
Da Vinci was an avid student of
optics and likely wouldn't have made that mistake carelessly. Art historians
have been arguing for decades about what the orb was made of and whether Da
Vinci deliberately painted it inaccurately. The new paper brings a method
called physically based rendering to the question. UC Irvine computer scientist
professors Michael Goodrich, Shuang Zhao and doctoral student Marco (Zhanhang)
Liang used this method to simulate light in the scene that is depicted in the
painting.
They found that a combination of
dim environmental light, a strong light source from overhead and a hollow blown
glass sphere could re-create the scene in the "Salvator Mundi." The
glass could have had walls up to 0.05 inches (1.3 millimeters) thick without
creating any refraction disrupting the lines of Christ's robes behind it, the
researchers wrote in their paper posted on arXiv. (A hollow orb wouldn’t create
the same magnify-and-flip effect as a solid orb.)
Liang and his colleagues declined
to comment on their work, which Liang said is now under review at a scientific
journal. Kemp was not convinced by the study, however. In a section of his new
book, "Leonardo's Salvator Mundi and the Collecting of Leonardo in the
Stuart Courts" (Oxford University Press, 2020), Kemp traces the context of
the orb from entries in da Vinci’s journals, finding that the artist had a
fascination with rock crystals and their optics at the time the "Salvator
Mundi" was painted. He also lists examples of paintings in which da Vinci
tweaked the laws of physics and light to create a more pleasing composition. In
paintings of the baptism of Christ, for example, the painter and his
contemporaries skipped depicting the refraction of light in water that would
have made the figures' legs look skewed. Da Vinci also painted baby Jesus as
unnaturally large, an artistic way to highlight the Christ child's divinity.
"His paintings were not raw
demonstrations of optical science, any more than they were stark demonstrations
of anatomy," Kemp wrote. In other words, da Vinci was known to use
artistic license in his works, and likely did so with the orb in "Salvator
Mundi."
Leonardo "is not making a
'photographic image,'" Kemp told Live Science. "If he was, all his
'Christ childs' would be the progeny of giants! He is using his knowledge of
natural laws to give conviction to devotional paintings."
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