The great end of art

The great end of art is to strike the imagination with the power of a soul that refuses to admit defeat even in the midst of a collapsing world. -- Friedrich Nietzsche

In every person

In every person who comes near you look for what is good and strong; honor that; try to imitate it, and your faults will drop off like dead leaves when their time comes.-- John Ruskin (1819-1900) English Art Critic

Loving what I'm doing

We all get report cards in many different ways, but the real excitement of what you're doing is in the doing of it. It's not what you're gonna get in the end - it's not the final curtain - it's really in the doing it, and loving what I'm doing. -- Designer Ralph Lauren

The Empire State Building in Black and White

The Shalimar in Wildwood New Jersey 1962

Kitchen of the future, 1959 version

Gas Station, design by Frank Lloyd Wright...really, no joke

Pop

Lichtenstein

Jazz music

"Jazz music was the classic American art form that had accompanied virtually every "glorious" era of mobsterism in the United States since the end of the nineteenth century. In Storyville, the legendary turn-of-the-century red-light district of New Orleans, ragtime gave way to a freer, more blues influenced form of jazz as practiced by the likes of Buddy Bolden, Jelly Roll Morton, and Louis Armstrong. The music had its roots in the African-American experience; it was also the music of the bordello, the speakeasy, and Mob-owned nightclubs from Boston to Los Angeles. Jazz was race-mixing music, through which rich and poor alike came together out of a desire to skirt the placid white-bread veneer of American life (that is, until jazz itself was co-opted by white-bread America).

"It is probable that jazz would have been born without the influence of the Mob, but it is unlikely the music would have grown and flourished as it did without the economic framework provided by organized crime. Particularly in the era of the Roaring Twenties (i.e., Prohibition), when jazz became an international obsession, money from bootlegging rackets made it possible for nightclubs to hire large orchestras. Jay McShann, Count Basie, and Duke Ellington all created world renowned orchestras that were financed by Mob-controlled nightclubs. These orchestras spawned many legends of jazz who developed their talents and headlined in smaller clubs, some of which were also Mob owned.

"In Chicago, Al Capone adored the music and fostered an entire generation of musicians. In Harlem, the Mob-owned Cotton Club had as its house band the sophisticated Duke Ellington Orchestra. Kansas City had an entire district of jazz clubs and after-hours joints that spawned their own version of the music known as 'dirty jazz,' a Delta blues-influenced sound that gave birth to McShann, Basie, and Charlie 'Bird' Parker, among others. This flourishing jazz district in Kansas City - which existed from the early 1920s into the 1930s - was made possible by a corrupt political machine that served as a model for the Havana Mob as constructed by Meyer Lansky, Fulgencio Batista, et al., and which itself spawned Afro-Cuban jazz. "
T.J. English, Havana Nocturne, Morrow, Copyright 2007, 2008 by T.J. English, p. 244.

Links to larger Art Museums in the US

Ana Gorta Mor Collection


http://www.thegreathunger.org/html/collection/Angortamorart.html



Addison Gallery of American Art

http://www.addisongallery.org/



Amon Carter Museum

http://www.cartermuseum.org/



Art Gallery of the University of Rochester

http://mag.rochester.edu/



Art Institute of Chicago

http://www.artic.edu/aic/



Block Museum of Art

http://www.blockmuseum.northwestern.edu/



Brooklyn Museum

http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/



Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh

http://www.carnegiemuseums.org/



Cleveland Museum of Art

http://www.clemusart.com/educef/distance/index.aspx



Currier Museum of Art

http://www.currier.org/



Dallas Museum of Art

http://www.dm-art.org/index.htm



Dayton Art Institute

http://www.daytonartinstitute.org/



Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

http://www.famsf.org/



Fleming Museum

http://www.uvm.edu/~fleming/



Fred Jones Jr Museum of Art

http://www.ou.edu/fjjma/home.html



Harvard University Art Museums

http://www.artmuseums.harvard.edu/



Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden

http://hirshhorn.si.edu/



Honolulu Academy of Arts

http://www.honoluluacademy.org/cmshaa/academy/index.aspx



Hyde Collection

http://www.hydecollection.org/



Johnson Museum of Art

http://www.museum.cornell.edu/



Maier Museum of Art

http://www.maiermuseum.org/





Montclair Art Museum

http://www.montclair-art.com/



Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

http://www.mfah.org/home.asp?par1=1&par2=1&par3=1&par4=1&par5=1&par6=1&par7=&lgc=0&eid=¤tPage=



National Gallery of Australia

http://nga.gov.au/Home/Default.cfm



National Portrait Gallery

http://www.npg.si.edu/



Nevada Museum of Art

http://www.nevadaart.org/



Norton Museum of Art

http://www.norton.org/



Oklahoma City Museum of Art

http://www.okcmoa.com/



Orange County Museum of Art

http://www.ocma.net/index.html?page=index



Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts

http://www.pafa.org/

http://www.pafa.org/ (Link)





The Phillips Collection

http://shop.phillipscollection.org/phillips/



Pierpont Morgan Library

http://www.themorgan.org/home.asp



Pomona College Museum of Art

http://www.pomona.edu/museum/



San Diego Museum of Art

http://www.sdmart.org/



Sheldon Art Gallery

http://www.sheldonartgallery.org/



Smithsonian American Art Museum

http://americanart.si.edu/



Springfield Museum of Art

http://www.springfieldart.museum/



Tacoma Art Museum

http://www.tacomaartmuseum.org/



Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum

http://www.museothyssen.org/



University of Kentucky Art Museum

http://www.uky.edu/ArtMuseum/





Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

http://www.virginiamuseum.blogspot.com/



Walker Art Center

http://www.walkerart.org/index.wac



Westmoreland Museum of American Art

http://www.wmuseumaa.org/



Whitney Museum of American Art

http://whitney.org/



Yale University Art Gallery

http://artgallery.yale.edu/

The Art Work of Colleen Cannon

Art from the Getty in LA

Henry Fukuhara

Watercolorist Henry Fukuhara

Keith Crown

Abstract landscape painter Keith Crown, an art professor at UCLA, did mostly coastal scenes in oil and casein until the late ‘50s, when he switched to watercolor.

Bruno Gironcoli

Austrian sculptor Bruno Gironcoli created eclectic futuristic works whose techniques defied categorization. In his career, the artist refused to be placed in any one style of art.

Kat Black OM Bar, Isla Mujeres Mexico (watercolor pencils 10x 18)

The patron

"By the time of Louis XIV, private individuals as well as rulers felt and obligation-they “owed it to themselves”- to care for art and support its makers...His aim was to make supreme in the arts and in the crafts of luxury. Choosing the artists who were supposed to glorify the reign can hardly be a straightforward process, because choice is a cause of strife between cabals.

"One notable instance illustrates how uneasy the patron-artist relation is, and why. In the late 1630’s the French painter Poussin was living and working quietly in Rome . His renown reached Paris, and Louis XIII, possibly at Richelieu ’s suggestion, invited him to bestow his genius on his native land. The cardinal ordered Sublet de Noyers to conduct the negotiations. Poussin, valuing his comfort, had the good sense to decline, but he took a year and a half to do it, not wanting to seem ungrateful. Angered, M. de Noyers pointed out that the king ”had a long arm,” meaning that his influence in Rome could be used to create (unspecified)trouble for the artist. Poussin gave in.

"In Paris , very definite trouble awaited him. To begin with, he was ordered to paint allegorical murals: his specialty was small works. True, he did paint subjects from history or mythology, but they were really pretexts for a classical dreamland with a few figures and architectural fragments. Murals would have required large expanses of canvas showing many-sided action. Next, he was to decorate a long gallery in the Louvre, although he had never worked at architectural decorations. He went to work making sketches athletically but not peacefully. It seems the court wanted him to outdo Vouet, the painter favored by the town. Vouet’s clique thereupon devised every sort of hindrance and embarrassment to get rid of the interloper from abroad.

"...Poussin gave up the struggle, giving the excuse that his wife in Rome was ill and he must return."

Jacques Barzun, From Dawn to Decadence, 1st Perennial, 2001, pp. 554-5

Leonardo Da Vinci

"As a young man, Leonardo was exceptionally beautiful. ... He was a homosexual vegetarian born out of wedlock who received very little formal education and was excluded by birthright from almost all professions. He was a mass of contradictions and conflicts, a man who rarely completed a commission ... [but wanted to] do as much as he possibly could and record everything he witnessed.

He wrote disapprovingly of war, but designed military hardware for several different European warlords; he was a masterful painter, perhaps the greatest who ever lived, but tired of art. He was scornful of received wisdom but steeped himself in classical learning, and while he believed the human form was the ultimate expression of the divine, he despised humanity. ... "

Leonardo was never able to come fully to terms with the fact that he had been deprived of a formal university education. ...

He once wrote with barely disguised bitterness: '[Establishment scholars] strut about puffed up and pompous, decked out and adorned not with their own labours but with those of others and they will not even allow me my own.' ..."

At other times he displayed what some may consider to be an unhealthy contempt for humans in general, once declaring: 'How many people there are who could be described as mere channels for food, producers of excrement, fillers of latrines, for they have no other purpose in this world; they practise no virtue whatsoever; all that remains after them is a full latrine.' "Michael White, Leonardo, The First Scientist, St. Martin's Press, 2000, pp. 7-19.

Rodin

"In Rodin, France produced a sculptor of outstanding quality and importance. But he stood alone... "

He was more vehemently for the past than other sculptors but did not limit his enthusiasm to the classical tradition, taking a passionate interest in Gothic art and seeing Michelangelo as 'the culmination of all Gothic thought.'

All his work was concerned with the human figure. He had the original idea (inspired by classical remains) of making truncated figures, limbless and/or headless torsos, which were thought in his day to reveal a streak of sadism (as perhaps they do), but have the important effect of lifting sculpture out of the range of normal subject-matter into a sphere where its abstract qualities of line, mass and tension dominate the responses it evokes."

Rodin, who admired and encouraged Degas as a sculptor, went far beyond him in search of the unposed pose...

Rodin planned for deviations. His models moved around him and he captured in swift line-and-wash sketches those momentary dispositions that seemed to him expressive. Thus, like Michelangelo, he found in artistically unprecedented movements a whole world of expressive form that seemed to him at one with nature at large: 'A woman, a mountain or a horse are formed according to the same principles.' "Myers and Copplestone, General Editors, The History of Art, Dorset, 1990, pp. 819-820

Chopin

"At around two in the morning on 17 October 1849, Chopin died of consumption in an apartment in the Place Vendome, that most elegant 18th-century square in Paris. It is almost exactly opposite the hotel where, about 150 years later, Diana, Princess of Wales set out to her death; today, Chopin's plaque can be seen above a very smart jeweller's shop."....(He) had been born less than 40 years earlier, in a village near Warsaw...

The Poland into which Chopin was born, and for which he became a symbol, had long been an unhappy place. For centuries, its borders with Muscovy and the fiefdoms of the Ottoman Empire seem to have been permanently elastic. In seeking their disparate aims, thugs with Romantic names like Boleslaw and Casimir, and their supporters, hacked each other to bits.

Some of the worst were that ferocious combination of grail and sword known as the Teutonic Knights. Then, two centuries after the Knights ceased to be an active force, the Swedes and Russians inflicted damage on Poland as serious as that experienced by Germany in the Thirty Years War..."

The Poles have certainly claimed Chopin as embodying the nationalism of the Polish people, although very few of his works actually contain an identifiable folk tune. Some claim that 'the Polish blood throbs with particular vigour in his warlike polonaises, whose boldly arching melodies are of bent steel', and yet others have found evidence of him making political statements through his music, whatever this may mean...

Poland and its woes certainly stimulated his imagination; but it seems fair to say that 'Polish music owes to him something more and something greater than he does to Polish music'. The Poles, when their national identity had been obliterated, rallied around his music; he became a focus for their nationalism."Michael Steen, The Great Composers, Oxford, 2003, pp. 363-8

Beethoven

"Some people, Beethoven's special friends, maintain that it is precisely this symphony that is his masterpiece, that this is the genuine style for first- rate music, and that if it fails to please now, it is because the public is not sufficiently cultured, from an artistic point of view, to appreciate all these ethereal beauties; when a few thousand years have elapsed it will not fail to make its effect."

Another group denies that the composition has any artistic value and claims to see in it an unfettered quest for strangeness and effect. Through curious modulations and abrupt transitions, by joining together the most disparate elements, as for example when a pastoral in the grandest style is torn apart by the basses, by three horns, etc., a certain unwanted originality may result without much difficulty; but genius reveals itself not in the strange and the bizarre, but in the beautiful and the lofty. "The third group, a very small one, stands halfway between the others--it concedes that the symphony has many beauties, but also grants that the continuity is often completely disrupted, and that the enormous length of this longest, and possibly most difficult of all symphonies, exhausts even the connoisseur, and for the mere music lover it is unbearable; it would like Beethoven to employ his undoubtedly enormous talents in offering us works like his early compositions which have put him eternally in the company of the greatest instrumental composers.

It is afraid, however, that if Beethoven pursues his present bent both he and the public will suffer. His music could soon reach the point where one would take no pleasure in it, unless well-versed in the rules and problems of the art, but on the contrary would leave the concert hall with an unpleasant feeling of exhaustion from having been overwhelmed by a mass of disconnected and cumbersome ideas and a persistent noise from all the instruments."The public and Herr van Beethoven, who conducted, were not happy with each other on this evening; the public thought this symphony was too weighty, too long, and himself too ill-mannered, because he did not incline his head to acknowledge the applause which came from a section of the audience. On the contrary, Beethoven felt the applause was not sufficient."Alan Kendall, The Chronicle of Classical Music, Thames and Hudson, 1994, pp. 130-3.

Van Gogh

"Every Sunday the family, clad in black and bearing flowers, set off to the little cemetery at Groot-Zundert, where they went directly from the gate to a grave marked 'Vincent Wilhelm Van Gogh 1852.'

A single date to mark a birth and a death, for this was the grave of a child six weeks old. As the father, mother, two sons and three daughters prayed, the eldest of the boys--also called Vincent Wilhem--stared intensely at the gravestone and the name, his brother's, that was also his own."

The young Vincent Wilhelm was born March 30, 1853, a year to the day after the death of his brother. Was his destiny to be that of an earthly replacement for the child now lying at his feet beneath the slab of gray stone? To take the place of another? Or was he himself the other his identity had usurped?

Each Sunday little Vincent Van Gogh--the new Vincent--asked himself the same question, not daring to look at his mother with her hands joined and her eyes brimming with tears. Whom was she praying for? The dead child? Or for Vincent himself, the substitute? As they silently made their way home, Vincent, troubled and riven with doubt, stayed huddled against his younger brother Theo, born May 1, 1857, with whom he was very close.

The dismal ritual was repeated every Sunday for years. Every March 30, they celebrated Vincent's birthday, but who were the celebrations really for? The dead child or the boy who was now ten years old? ..."All his life Vincent would struggle against a brother more insistently present than if he had actually been alive, as his parents inevitably measured him against the virtues they attributed to the lost child."Pierre Cabanne, Van Gogh, Terrail, 2006, pp. 7- 8.