ART
4 2-DAY 09 November
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BIRTH:
1883 DEMUTH |
YOUNG
LADY FOR A MERE $20 MILLION ! |
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Died on 09 November 1677: Aart (or Aernou)
van der Neer, Dutch Baroque painter specialized in landscapes,
born in 1603. Van der Neer is famous for his nocturnal landscapes. He probably did not begin his painting career until after 1630 and then was unable to make a reasonable living from his art. In 1658 he opened a wineshop, but this venture ended in bankruptcy in 1662. He probably reverted to painting, for he is described as a painter in the inventory that was made of his few belongings at the time of his death. Apart from a number of accomplished winter scenes, such as Riverscape in Winter in the manner of Hendrik Avercamp, he specialized in canal and river landscapes seen by the light of late evening or early dawn or (most characteristic of all) by moonlight, as in River View by Moonlight . Within this limited range he had no rival among his contemporaries; his best pictures are distinguished by sensitive handling of subdued light and its reflections on water and in the windows of riverside houses. His son Eglon Hendrick van der Neer [1634-1703] and grandson Aert van der Neer the Younger were also painters. LINKS Fishing at Moonlight (66x86cm; 706x911pix, 138kb) _ Van der Neer was a Dutch landscape painter, influenced by the woks of Avercamp. He became a painter late in life; his later work was mainly of landscapes under snow, under strong atmospheric conditons or with dramatic lighting. Landscape with Windmill (1649, 70x93cm; 698x924pix, 123kb) _ Van der Neer belonged to the generation of De Vlieger and Salomon van Ruysdael. His specialities (winter scenes and nocturnal landscapes) adapted well to the tonal style,as shown in this painting. Small Town at Dusk (37x53cm; 638x930pix, 110kb) _ The artist is interested in the reflection of the light on the surface of water, like in his other works. River View by Moonlight (1645) Winter Scene with Frozen Canal (33x42cm; 3/4 size) — Sports on a Frozen River (495x800pix, 138kb) — Effet de Nuit (20x29cm lithograph; full size) |
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Died on 09 November 1911:
Howard Pyle, US painter, author, and
Golden
Age illustrator born on 05 March 1853. Originator of the "Brandywine School" of illustration, Pyle had many students, including N.C. Wyeth, Maxfield Parrish, Violet Oakley, Jessie Willcox Smith and Frank Schoonover. Pyle is best known for the children's books that he wrote and illustrated. Pyle wrote original children's stories as well as retelling old fairy tales. Many of Pyle's children's stories, illustrated by the author with vividness and historical accuracy, have become classics most notably The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood (1883); Otto of the Silver Hand (1888); Jack Ballister's Fortunes (1895); and his own folktales, Pepper & Salt (1885), The Wonder Clock (1888), and The Garden Behind the Moon (1895). He also wrote and illustrated Men of Iron (1892 historical fiction: 1400 England under King Henry IV) The Champions of the Round Table (1905) The Story of the Grail and the Passing of Arthur (1910) The Story of King Arthur and His Knights (1903) Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates (1921) A Modern Aladdin, The Ruby of Kishmoor Stolen Treasure The Rose of Paradise: Being a detailed account of certain adventures that happened to Captain John Mackra, in connection with the famous pirate, Edward England, in the year 1720, off the island of Juanna in the Mozambique Channel; writ by himself, and now for the first time published (1894) Within the Capes (1885 the story of Captain Tom Granger, a Quaker, and his adventures in 1812, a combination of Robinson Crusoe, pirates, Quaker romance, and seafaring adventure) Some Merry Adventures of Robin Hood, of Great Renown in Nottinghamshire (1902) Sir Launcelot and his Companions (1907) Twilight Land PYLE ART LINKS Joan of Arc in prison The Pirate was a Picturesque Fellow (1905) The Mermaid (1910) — In Knighthood's Day — Men of Iron illustrations: the cover _ Henry of Lancaster, who in 1399, as Henry IV, became England's King in the stead of the weak, wicked, and treacherous Richard II. _ Myles, as in a dream, kneeled and presented the letter. _ "When thou strikest that lower cut at the legs, recover thyself more quickly." _ At last they had the poor boy down. _ Myles pushed the door farther open. _ They bore him away to a bench at the far end of the room _ "But tell me, Robin Ingoldsby, dost know aught more of this matter?" _ "Belike thou sought to take this lad's life," said Sir James. _ Myles entertains the Lady Anne and the Lady Alice with his adventures. _ Myles found himself standing beside the bed. _ The Earl of Mackworth received King Henry IV. _ Lord George led him to where the King stood _ "My Lord," said he, "the favor was given to me by the Lady Alice." _ Prior Edward and Myles in the Priory Garden _ The Challenge _ He held tightly to the fallen man's horse — A Royal Prince at prayer (etching 57x34cm; half-size; ZOOM to full size) — Early printers (etching 56x33cm; half-size; ZOOM to full size) — One of those City Fellows - a Hundred Years Ago (23x35cm; full size) p.701 from Harper's Weekly 08 Sep 1877. 3 illustrations (1881) for Tennyson's The Lady of Shalott: Lancelot (a different one) _ The Lady of Shalott Weaving _ The Lady of Shalott dead Links to The Lady of Shalott pictures by other artists. Commentary on The Lady of Shalott illustrations. Links to The Lady of Shalott text: http://www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/shalcomb.htm (1833 and 1842 versions) The next 3 with the 1842 version only: http://charon.sfsu.edu/TENNYSON/TENNLADY.HTML http://www.geocities.com/EnchantedForest/1106/shalott.html http://65.107.211.206/victorian/tennyson/los1.html WRITINGS BY PYLE ONLINE: |
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Born on 09 November 1883: Charles Demuth,
US Precisionist painter, who died on 25 October 1935. Charles Demuth was born and died in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. He was born in a Lancaster house on North Lime Street. At age 7, he and his family moved to the King Street home where he spent most of his lifetime. He was the only child of successful business people; they were financially secure so that Demuth never had to work for a living, although he was never wealthy. Demuth's health was frail; from an early age he suffered from lameness and as an adult from severe diabetes. At sixteen, after a long, isolated adolescence, Demuth was sent to a prestigious private prep school, the Franklin and Marshall Academy, from which he was graduated in 1901. He remained at home for two more school years before enrolling at the Drexel Institute of Art, Science, and industry in Philadelphia, then he studied with Thomas Anshutz and William Merritt Chase at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. As a young man Demuth made several trips to Europe to study. There he became part of the avant garde scene. He was attracted by the work of Marcel Duchamp and the Cubists. As he matured he moved gradually away from illustrative art. He executed a series of watercolors of flowers, circuses, and café scenes. Impressed by his abilities Alfred Stieglitz featured his works in his New York Gallery. Later in his career, Demuth began to paint advertisements and billboards into such cityscapes as his "Buildings, Lancaster" (1930), in which bold, commercial lettering is complemented by the severely hard-edged abstraction of buildings. Demuth created most of his art in his home where he worked in a small second floor studio of the rear wing, overlooking the garden. He was homosexual and lived with his partner Robert Locher at home with his parents. In his will he bequeathed his watercolors to Robert Locher, and all his other paintings to Georgia O'Keeffe. Among Demuth's best-known works are his poster portraits such as the tribute to the poet William Carlos Williams, "I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold.". Charles Demuth died of complications from diabetes in 1935, shortly before his fifty-second birthday. He helped channel modern European movements into US art and was a leading exponent of Precisionism. Less known are his pictures of flowers, Bermuda, and the homosexual navy scene. The Figure 5 in Gold is deservedly one of the icons of US modernism, but it came almost at the end of Demuth's life and its author has always seemed a little elusive beside the heavier reputations of his contemporaries Georgia O'Keeffe, Marsden Hartley, Arthur Dove, Charles Sheeler. Of them all, he was the most unabashed esthete. And the wittiest too: it's hard to imagine any of his colleagues painting a factory chimney paired with a round silo and calling it, in reference to star-crossed lovers in a French medieval romance, Aucassin et Nicolette. Blessed with a private income from his parents in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, coddled in childhood, lame, diabetic, vain, insecure, and brilliantly talented, Demuth lacked neither admirers nor colleagues. He was well read (and had a small talent as a writer, in the Symbolist vein) and his tastes were formed by Pater, Huysmans, Maeterlinck, and The Yellow Book; he gravitated to Greenwich Village as a Cafe Royal dandy-in-embryo. Free of market worries, he did a lot of work that was private in nature, for the amusement and stimulation of himself and his gay friends, and much of it was unexhibitable at least until the 1980s. Demuth was a rather discreet homosexual, but if he could not place his deepest sexual predilections in the open, he could still make art from them. Seen from our distance, that of a pornocratic culture so drenched in genital imagery that sly hints about forbidden sex hardly compel attention, the skill with which he did this might seem almost quaint. But in the teens and twenties the public atmosphere was of course very different, and Demuth, like other artists in the avant-garde circle that formed around the collectors Loulse and Walter Arensberg especially Marcel Duchamp, whose recondite sexual allegory The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even Demuth called "the greatest picture of our time" took a special delight in sowing his work with sexual hints. To create a secret subject matter, to disport oneself with codes, was to enjoy one's distance from (and rise above) "straight" life. The handlebar of a vaudeville trick-rider's bicycle turns into a penis, aimed at his crotch; sailors dance with girls in a cabaret but ogle one another. If these scenes of Greenwich Village bohemia were all that Demuth did, he would be remembered as a minor US esthete, somewhere between Aubrey Beardsley and Jules Pascin. But Demuth was an exceptional watercolorist and his still-lifes and figure paintings, with their wiry contours and exquisite sense of color, the tones discreetly manipulated by blotting, are among the best things done in that medium by a US artist. They quickly rise above the anecdotal and the "amusing." About 1920 Demuth began with increasing confidence to explore what would become the major theme of his career: the face of the industrial US. It may seem odd that Demuth, yearning for Paris, should have become obsessed with grain elevators, water towers, and factory chimneys. But as he wrote to Stieglitz in 1927: "America doesn't really care - still, if one is really an artist and at the same time an American, just this not caring, even though it drives one mad, can be artistic material." Precisionism was by no means just a provincial US response to the European avant-garde - the splintering of planes from French Cubism, the machine ethos from Italian Futurism. Sheeler and Demuth were painting a functional US landscape refracted through a deadpan modernist lingo that, in Demuth's case, picked up bits of Robert Delaunay and Lyonel Feininger while anticipating some of the essential subjects of Pop art. The machine emblems of this US landscape had fascinated some of the best minds in Europe (Picabia, Duchamp, Le Corbusier), who saw them either as exotic whiffs of the Future or as instruments of irony. Being from the US, Demuth took the silos and bridges rather more literally. Out of this came his Precisionist masterpiece, My Egypt (1927). It is a face-on view of a grain elevator in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Demuth's hometown, painted with such careful suppression of gesture that hardly a brushstroke can be seen. Demuth's title whimsically refers to the mania for Egyptology planted in US popular culture in 1922, when Howard Carter discovered Tutankhamen's tomb. The visual weight of those twin pale silo shafts and their pedimental cap does indeed suggest Karnak. But Demuth may have had a deeper level of intent. His title connects to the story of Exodus. Egypt was the symbol of the Jews' oppression; it was also the starting point for their collective journey toward the land of Canaan, the forging of themselves as a collective and distinct people. An invalid in later life, Demuth was "exiled" in Lancaster, bedridden in his parents' house, cut off from the intellectual ferment of Paris and the sexual-esthetic comradeship of New York. All these were Canaan; home was Egypt. Yet he was poignantly aware that the industrial America which gave him a rentier's income had also given him a great subject which would define him as a painter. From that tension, his finest work was born. LINKS From the Garden of the Chateau (no garden, no chateau, 1921, 51x64cm) Modern Conveniences (tenement back, 1921) Aucassin and Nicolette (factory smokestacks, 1921) _ he was the most unabashed esthete. And the wittiest too: it's hard to imagine any of his colleagues painting a factory chimney paired with a round silo and calling it, in reference to star-crossed lovers in a French medieval romance, Aucassin and Nicolette. Lancaster Buildings (with big FEED sign) My Egypt (grain elevator) I saw the Figure 5 in Gold (1928) _ Luckily or not, Charles Demuth painted one picture so famous that many of those in the US who look at art know it. The Figure 5 in Gold, is a precursor of Pop art, based on an Imagist poem, The Great Figure, by his friend William Carlos Williams: Among
the rain
"Imagist" because each line, a snap
unit of meaning, is meant by its isolation to be perfectly clear, a pulse
in itself, without narrative - suspended for contemplation, like elements
in a painting. Obviously Demuth's rendering has something in common with
Hartley's arrays
of banners, numbers, and emblems, and in fact Williams later recalled that
he had seen and heard the firetruck in question from the window of Marsden
Hartley's studio on Fifteenth Street. Here are the streetlights, the red
back of the truck and the engine company number 5, that gloss-enamel heroic
heraldry of the New York Fire Department, interspersed with lettered apostrophes
to Williams: "BILL," "CARLO[S]," and, at the bottom left, "W.C.W." next
to his own initials, "C.D." and lights I saw the figure 5 in gold on a red firetruck moving tense unheeded to gong clangs siren howls and wheels rumbling through the dark city. Incense of a new Church (abstract, 1921) Acrobats (1919) Vaudeville Musicians Trees and Barns: Bermuda (1917) |
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Died on 09 November 1778: Giovanni-Battista
Piranesi, Italian engraver born on 04 October 1720. Italian draftsman, printmaker, architect, and art theorist. His large prints depicting the buildings of classical and postclassical Rome and its vicinity contributed considerably to Rome's fame and to the growth of classical archaeology and to the Neoclassical movement in art. At the age of 20 Piranesi went to Rome as a draftsman for the Venetian ambassador. He studied with leading printmakers of the day and settled permanently in Rome in 1745. It was during this period that he developed his highly original etching technique, producing rich textures and bold contrasts of light and shadow by means of intricate, repeated bitings of the copperplate. He created about 2000 plates in his lifetime. Carceri d'Invenzione of about 1745 are his finest early prints; they depict ancient Roman or Baroque ruins converted into fantastic, visionary dungeons filled with mysterious scaffolding and instruments of torture. Among his best mature prints are the series Le Antichità romane (1756), the Vedute di Roma (appearing as single prints between 1748 and 1778), and the views of the Greek temples at Paestum (1777-78). His unparalleled accuracy of depiction, his personal expression of the structures' dramatic and romantic grandeur, and his technical mastery made these prints some of the most original and impressive representations of architecture to be found in Western art. Giovanni Battista Piranesi was an Italian graphic artist famous for his engravings and etchings. He created more than 2000 prints of real and imaginary buildings, statues, and ornaments. He contributed to 18th-century neoclassicism by his enthusiastic renderings of ancient Roman monuments, which included both accurate portrayals of existing ruins and imaginary reconstructions of ancient buildings in which alterations of scale and juxtaposition of elements enhance the sense of grandeur. One of Piranesi's earliest and most lastingly renowned collections is his Carceri d'Invenzione (1745), in which he transformed Roman ruins into fantastic, immeasurable dungeons dominated by immense, gloomy arcades, staircases rising to incredible heights, and bizarre galleries leading nowhere. These engravings became an important influence on 19th-century romanticism and also played a role in the development of 20th-century surrealism. LINKS Self~Portrait Temple at Paestum (1777) |
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2000
At an Impressionist and modern art sale
at Sotheby's, the expected highlight of the Sotheby's sale, Manet's
Jeune fille dans un jardin which the auction house
had estimated could set a record at $20 million to $30 million, just managed
it low estimate, going to an anonymous telephone bidder for $20'905'750
including commission. The painting of a young woman in a garden who is wearing
a bright blue coat and matching hat, which is among the artist's better
known works, was the evening's top lot. [Image: Manet's Jeune Fille à l'Entrée d'un Jardin à Bellevue which I hope is the same one referred to above >] It was Manet's decidedly Impressionist ambition, towards the end of his life, to paint open-air pictures in such a way that `the features of the characters would melt into the vibrations of the atmosphere'. In 1880 his poor state of health caused him to spend the summer at Bellevue, on the outskirts of Paris, where he rented a house and while undergoing hydropathic treatment he contrived to paint several pictures according to his plein-air intention, in the garden of the house. They included one view of the garden without figures, a painting of Madame Auguste Manet seen in profile and the work reproduced here, all giving a sunlight effect. The brilliant result in the picture of the girl reading is obtained by a development of Manet's personal style of oil sketching in which he concerned himself with the general opposition of light and dark areas to the exclusion of half-tones. This was not exactly Impressionism as Monet came to understand it though Monet had passed through a phase in which he adopted Manet's technique. But if Impressionism strictly meant the translation of light into color irrespective of light and shade, Manet was still working to a more traditional recipe. What he meant by features melting `into the vibrations of the atmosphere' would seem equivalent to creating an envelope of surrounding light but the figure of the girl reading is more of a silhouette against the sunny background than a form sharing the same source of light. The picture, however, has the verve that was Manet's individual gift. . Manet was a painter and printmaker. Made the transition from the realism of Gustave Courbet to Impressionism. Born into a prosperous middle-class family, Manet spent a year in the navy before entering the studio of Thomas Couture in 1850, where he stayed until 1856. Couture encouraged strong modeling through light and dark contrasts, and copies Manet made at the Louvre, after Velázquez, Titian, and Rubens among others, nurtured a painterly style of rich color and bold brushwork. Like the realist painters, Manet chose his subjects largely from modern life. His Déjeuner sur l'herbe ( 1863) and Olympia ( 1863, exhibited 1865) created scandals both for their unconventional subject matter and their broad handling. A series of paintings on Spanish themes culminated with a trip to Spain in 1865 and firsthand study of works by Velázquez and Goya. At the 1867 Universal Exposition, Manet held a private exhibition, which helped solidify his leadership within the avant-garde. Charles Baudelaire, Theodore Duret, and Émile Zola supported him critically. During the 1870s he worked outdoors like the impressionists, and his work became lighter and more colorful, but he maintained hope for acceptance at the official Salons and never contributed to the impressionist exhibitions. Success came in later years with numerous commissions and portraits. By about 1879, however, he began to feel the effects of a debilitating disease that would eventually cause his death. LINKS Tête du Christ (1865, 47x39cm) Chez La Modiste (1881) Bateaux de Pêche sur la Plage, St. Pierre-en-porte, Normandie (1873, 48x64cm) Charles Baudelaire, Full Face (1865) |