Cone Beaker
Cone Beaker, possibly England or Northern France or Germany,
400-599. 66.1.247.
This beaker was reportedly found at Acklam, Yorkshire,
England, in 1892. Large conical beakers with pointed bottoms like this one
could not stand on their own and were likely passed hand-to-hand among multiple
drinkers.
Aestheticism
Aestheticism (also the Aesthetic Movement) is an intellectual and art movement supporting the emphasis of aesthetic values more than social-political themes for literature, fine art, music and other arts. This meant that art from this particular movement focused more on being beautiful rather than having a deeper meaning — "art for art's sake".
It was particularly prominent in Europe during the 19th century, supported by notable figures such as Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde, but contemporary critics are also associated with the movement, such as Harold Bloom, who has recently argued against projecting social and political ideology onto literary works, which he believes has been a growing problem in humanities departments over the 20th century.
In the 19th century, it was related to other movements such as symbolism or decadence represented in France, or decadentismo represented in Italy, and may be considered the British version of the same style.
The British decadent writers were much influenced by the Oxford professor Walter Pater and his essays published during 1867–68, in which he stated that life had to be lived intensely, with an ideal of beauty. His text Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873) was very well regarded by art-oriented young men of the late 19th century.
Writers of the Decadent movement used the slogan "Art for Art's Sake" (L'art pour l'art), the origin of which is debated.
The artists and writers of Aesthetic style tended to profess that the Arts should provide refined sensuous pleasure, rather than convey moral or sentimental messages. As a consequence, they did not accept John Ruskin, Matthew Arnold, and George MacDonald's conception of art as something moral or useful, "Art for truth's sake". Instead, they believed that Art did not have any didactic purpose; it only needed to be beautiful. The Aesthetes developed a cult of beauty, which they considered the basic factor of art. Life should copy Art, they asserted. They considered nature as crude and lacking in design when compared to art. The main characteristics of the style were: suggestion rather than statement, sensuality, great use of symbols, and synaesthetic/Ideasthetic effects—that is, correspondence between words, colors and music. Music was used to establish mood.
Predecessors of the Aesthetics included John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley, and some of the Pre-Raphaelites who themselves were a legacy of the Romantic spirit. There are a few significant continuities between the Pre-Raphaelite philosophy and that of the Aesthetes: Dedication to the idea of ‘Art for Art’s Sake’; admiration of, and constant striving for, beauty; escapism through visual and literary arts; craftsmanship that is both careful and self-conscious; mutual interest in merging the arts of various media. This final idea is promoted in the poem L’Art by Théophile Gautier, who compared the poet to the sculptor and painter. Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Edward Burne-Jones are most strongly associated with Aestheticism. However, their approach to Aestheticism did not share the creed of ‘Art for Art’s Sake’ but rather “a spirited reassertion of those principles of colour, beauty, love, and cleanness that the drab, agitated, discouraging world of the mid-nineteenth century needed so much.”
This reassertion of beauty in a drab world also connects to Pre-Raphaelite escapism in art and poetry.
In Britain the best representatives were Oscar Wilde and Algernon Charles Swinburne, both influenced by the French Symbolists, and James McNeill Whistler and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The style and these poets were satirized by Gilbert and Sullivan's comic opera Patience and other works, such as F. C. Burnand's drama The Colonel, and in comic magazines such as Punch, particularly in works by George Du Maurier.
Compton Mackenzie's novel Sinister Street makes use of the type as a phase through which the protagonist passes as he is influenced by older, decadent individuals. The novels of Evelyn Waugh, who was a young participant of aesthete society at Oxford, describe the aesthetes mostly satirically, but also as a former participant. Some names associated with this assemblage are Robert Byron, Evelyn Waugh, Harold Acton, Nancy Mitford, A.E. Housman and Anthony Powell.
Artists associated with the Aesthetic style include Simeon Solomon, James McNeill Whistler, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Aubrey Beardsley. Although the work of Edward Burne-Jones was exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery which promoted the movement, it also contains narrative and conveys moral or sentimental messages hence it falls outside the given definition.
The primary element of Decorative Art is utility. The maxim "art for art's sake", identifying art or beauty as the primary element in other branches of the Aesthetic Movement, especially fine art, cannot apply in this context. Decorative art must first have utility but may also be beautiful. Decorative art is dissociated from fine art.
Look at these wonderful faces...
Merry, 1893, John Everett Millais
Girl with the Cornflowers, Alexey Venetsianov
Family portrait, 1635, Frans Hals
Love it!
Five watercolors attributed to Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler failed to sell at auction this weekend, possibly over fears they could be fakes.
The Nuremberger Nachrichten newspaper reported Sunday that no bids were received on the paintings, which had starting prices of between 19,000 euros ($21,500) and 45,000 euros ($50,900).
Three days before Saturday's auction, prosecutors reportedly seized 63 other paintings attributed to Hitler from the auction house to investigate allegations they were fakes.
In Berlin last month, prosecutors seized three other Hitler watercolors after receiving a complaint questioning their authenticity.
As a young man, Hitler is thought to have painted a number of pictures as he unsuccessfully struggled to succeed as an artist in Vienna prior to World War I. He twice failed the entrance exam to the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts, in 1907 and 1908.
American and British soldiers found many Hitler drawings in the ruins of German government buildings after World War II, as Fox News previously reported. Sotheby’s in London offered Hitler drawings for sale in the 1960s. Over the years, several auctions have been conducted in England and Germany.
Fox News' Don Snyder and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
The Bay of Naples, Ivan Aivazovski
Ivan Konstantinovich Aivazovsky (1817
– 1900) was a Russian Romantic painter
who is considered one of the greatest masters of marine art. Baptized as
Hovhannes Aivazian, he was born into an Armenian family in the Black Sea port
of Feodosia in Crimea and was mostly based there.
Following his education at the
Imperial Academy of Arts in Saint Petersburg, Aivazovsky traveled to Europe and
lived briefly in Italy in the early 1840s. He then returned to Russia and was
appointed the main painter of the Russian Navy. Aivazovsky had close ties with
the military and political elite of the Russian Empire and often attended
military maneuvers.
He was sponsored by the state and was
well-regarded during his lifetime. The saying "worthy of Aivazovsky's
brush", popularized by Anton Chekhov, was used in Russia for describing
something lovely. He remains highly popular in Russia.
One of the most prominent Russian
artists of his time, Aivazovsky was also popular outside Russia. He held
numerous solo exhibitions in Europe and the United States. During his almost
60-year career, he created around 6,000 paintings, making him one of the most
prolific artists of his time.
The vast majority of his works
are seascapes, but he often depicted battle scenes, Armenian themes, and
portraiture. Most of Aivazovsky's works are kept in Russian, Ukrainian and
Armenian museums as well as private collections.
At School Doors, Nikolay Bogdanov-Belsky
Bogdanov-Belsky was active in St. Petersburg. After 1921, he worked exclusively in Riga, Latvia. He became a member of several prominent societies in including the Peredvizhniki from 1895, and the Arkhip Kuindzhi Society from 1909 (of which he was a founding member and chairman from 1913 to 1918).
Bogdanov-Belsky painted mostly genre paintings, especially of the education of peasant children, portraits, and impressionistic landscapes studies. He became pedagogue and academician in 1903. He was an active Member of the Academy of Arts in 1914. Since 1921, he lived in Riga. Bogdanov-Belsky died in 1945 in Berlin.
John Tuohy's MY WRITERS SITE: What a wonderful face!
John Tuohy's MY WRITERS SITE: What a wonderful face!: Portrait of the Singer Alexandra Molas, 1883, Ilya Repin
Look at these wonderful, wonderful faces.
The Laughing Cavalier, Frans Hals
The Rommel Pot Player, 1620, Frans Hals
Mariana Waldstein, Ninth Marquesa de Santa Cruz, 1797, Francisco Goya
Hitler
an art critic who was asked to review Adolf Hitlers paintings, without being told who painted them, judged them as quite good. He also noted the different style in which human figures were drawn represents a profound disinterest in people.
40,000-year-old cave art may be world's oldest animal drawing
The Southeast Asian island of Borneo joins a growing number of sites boasting early cave art innovation.
BY MAYA WEI-HAAS
________________________________________
PUBLISHED NOVEMBER 7, 2018
COUNTLESS CAVES PERCH atop the steep-sided mountains of East Kalimantan in Indonesia, on the island of Borneo. Draped in stone sheets and spindles, these natural limestone cathedrals showcase geology at its best. But tucked within the outcrops is something even more spectacular: a vast and ancient gallery of cave art.
Hundreds of hands wave in outline from the ceilings, fingers outstretched inside bursts of red-orange paint. Now, updated analysis of the cave walls suggests that these images stand among the earliest traces of human creativity, dating back between 52,000 and 40,000 years ago. That makes the cave art tens of thousands of years older than previously thought.
But that's not the only secret in the vast labyrinthine system.
In a cave named Lubang Jeriji Saléh, a trio of rotund cow-like creatures is sketched on the wall, with the largest standing more than seven feet across. The new dating analysis suggests that these images are at least 40,000 years old, earning them the title of the earliest figurative cave paintings yet found. The work edges out the previous title-holder—a portly babirusa, or “pig deer,” in Sulawesi, Indonesia—by just a few thousand years.
“In the entrance, there's a little chamber to the right, and it's there—bam,” says archaeologist Maxime Aubert of Griffith University. It's not the earliest cave art ever found. But unlike earlier scribbles and tracings, these paintings are unequivocal depictions of ancient animals, his team reports today in the journal Nature.
The bovines and handprints join a growing array of artwork of similar age that adorns the walls of caves around the world. These paintings mark a shift in how early humans thought about and engaged with their environment—from focusing on survival and daily mundane necessities to cultivating what could be the earliest threads of human culture, explains Paleolithic archeologist April Nowell of the University of Victoria.
“I think for a lot of us, that's a true expression of human-ness in the broadest sense of that word,” she says.
Island locals have long known about these paintings, as they encountered the stunning works while hunting for edible bird nests. The artwork was eventually documented in the 1990s and later dated. But many samples were porous, Aubert explains, which notoriously gives ages older than reality. At the time, the team settled on a cautious minimum age of 10,000 years.
Aubert and his colleagues ventured back to the caves in 2016 and 2017 to collect new, nonporous samples and retest the ages using the same method, which relies on the ever-present drip of water. As liquid percolates through the rock and sediments overhead, the water slowly dissolves both limestone and naturally occurring radioactive uranium. It then deposits the substances in calcium carbonate coatings on the cave walls.
Uranium predictably degrades to thorium, and because water leaves this element behind in its wending path, scientists can measure the ratio of uranium to thorium to determine various features' ages. In total, the team analyzed 15 calcium carbonate samples from six cave sites, drawing from deposits on top of and beneath the drawings that sandwich the art in time.
The new dates seem to define three stages of Paleolithic artistry in the region, and they show a shift from depicting animals to showcasing the human world.
“We didn't expect that at all,” Aubert says.
The oldest phase is made up of reddish-orange images starting sometime between 40,000 to 52,000 years ago, including the bursts of color outlining ancient hands and the bovid-like animals. Dark purple images mark a second period timed to around 20,000 years ago. Many hands make up this phase, but they're ornamented with tattoo-like dots, dashes, and lines. Vine-like tendrils connect the hands together. Both red and purple pigments seem to be made of the same material, one may just be more weathered than the other, Aubert notes.
A slim, mulberry-colored human figure dating to roughly 13,600 years ago leads the art into the third phase. This period is dominated by black pigmented geometric shapes and stick figures engaged in activity, such as dancing, boating, and hunting. Found elsewhere across the island of Borneo, these black pigment drawings are thought to be just a few thousand years old.
Standing among the greats
The new dates are exciting but perhaps not surprising, says archaeologist Nicholas Conard of the University of Tübingen. Conard, who was not involved in the latest study, led the investigations into the Hohle Fels cave of southern Germany that discovered, among many other finds, a headless woman figurine dating to at least 35,000 years ago. In 2009, when the find was announced, it was arguably the earliest rendering of the human form.
But Conard has long anticipated the discovery of other ancient cultural centers: “Why would there only be one place on the planet Earth where all this stuff comes from?”
Sure enough, signs of the early beginnings of art around the world has grown in recent years. Smatterings of supremely old evidence include a 73,000-year-old hashtag-like doodle from South Africa, as well as 65,000-year-old geometric shapes and hand outlines from Spain that may have been made by Neanderthals. (Learn more about the origins of art.)
With their new dates, the Borneo depictions join a rich period that seems to mark the beginning of true cave painting around the world. The impressive charcoal menagerie of southern France's Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc Cave dates to roughly 36,000 years ago; hand outlines and simple red discs of Spain's Castillo cave date to more than 40,800 years old. And just a short boat ride away from Borneo are the red handprints and portly pig-deer of Sulawesi that are as old as 39,900 years. There's also a variety of Australian art that could come from this time period, but it has proven more difficult to date than the limestone works.
As these varied regions gain more attention for their cave art, Nowell says, “I think the picture is going to change quite a bit.”
Mysterious origins
What sparked this apparent global artistic movement remains unknown. In Europe, art seemed to flourish soon after early modern humans arrived, but evidence for humans in Southeast Asia predates the ancient artists by 20 to 30 thousand years. As Aubert notes, the movements seem to accelerate during the last glacial maximum, and he speculates this change in climate somehow forced people into closer groups, speeding along cultural innovation.
But Conard is not convinced. “The way the climatic variations play out is so different in the different parts of the world,” he says. “In the world of hunters and gatherers in the Pleistocene, there's a lot of real estate,” he adds, so when the climate changes, there are still many places for people to go. When interpreting these changes, he says, context is key.
It's also possible that older rock art didn't survive the passage of time, Nowell suggests, especially if the work was scrawled on surfaces that were more exposed to the elements. Or perhaps earlier humans weren't inspired by the cave's blank canvas, she adds. Ochre crayons date back over 200,000 years—and scientists have ascribed many more mundane purposes to the colorful pigments, from sunscreen to adhesive.
For now, researchers are continuing to track down these cultural threads around the world, and with each new find, they grow more attuned to the past.
“Once we start to find these behaviors and these kinds of images,” Nowell says, “there's something that really connects us to these people and how they saw the world around them.”
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