| ART “4”
“2”-DAY 29 November |
| DEATH:
1516 BELLINI |
BIRTH:
1933 ROSENQUIST |
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Born on 29 November 1933: James
Rosenquist, US Pop painter, printmaker and sculptor. — He was born in Grand Forks, North Dakota. His family moved to Minneapolis in 1944. While still at school in 1948 he won a scholarship to study at the Minneapolis School of Art, and from 1952 to 1955 he studied painting at the University of Minnesota. In 1955 he moved to New York to study at the Art Students League on a scholarship. He earned his living as a billboard painter from 1957, and in 1960 he began to apply similar techniques of grossly enlarged and fragmented images to huge paintings such as President Elect (1961, 213x366cm), in which the glamorous face of John F. Kennedy is combined with the side of a 1950s car and a hand holding a piece of cake painted in grey as if it were a black-and-white photograph. Rosenquist’s debt to Surrealism in his reliance on seemingly irrational juxtapositions was evident in the majority of his paintings, for example in I Love you with my Ford (1961, 210x238cm), which in its three horizontal registers includes the image of the front of a car, a close-up of lovers kissing and a garishly coloured tangle of tinned spaghetti. His references, however, to mass-produced goods and to magazines, films and other aspects of the mass media, together with his dispassionate and seemingly anonymous technique, caused him to be regarded as one of the key figures in the development of Pop art in the US. — In 1948 he began his studies of art at the Minneapolis Art Institute. In 1953 he continued his studies of painting at the University of Minnesota. In 1955 he had a scholarship to go to the Art Students' League, New York, where he met Robert Indiana. During this period he painted small format abstract paintings and worked part-time as a driver. In 1957 he met Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. In 1959 he was at the same drawing class as Claes Oldenburg and was made "head painter" by the Artcraft Strauss Corporation. He married the textile designer Mary Lou Adams. During the election he produced the picture President Elect in which John F. Kennedy's face is combined in a kind of collage with sex and automobile imagery. His first one-man exhibition in the Green Gallery, in 1962, was sold out. In 1963 he worked on several sculptures, had a number of exhibitions at the Galerie Ileana Sonnabend, showed his work at the Dwan Gallery, Los Angeles, and taught at Yale University. In 1965 he began to work with lithographs. In the same year he made the 26 meter-wide picture F-111, which was shown at the Jewish Museum, New York, at Moderna Museet, Stockholm, and in other Europen cities. It is one of his most important works. The spatial organization of the composition into layers suggests the interrelationship of contemporary historical symbols and signs of affluence and military hardware, a vision of American culture expressing the proximity of euphoria and catastrophe. In 1967 he moved to East Hampton. In 1968 he was given his first retrospective by the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. In 1969 he turned his attention to experimenting with film techniques. In 1970 he went to Cologne for the opening of his exhibition at the Galerie Rolf Ricke. During the public protest against the Vietnam War he was briefly detained in Washington. During the same year he had comprehensive retrospectives at the Wallraf-Richards Museum, Cologne, and the Whitney Museum, New York. In 1974 and 1975 he lobbied the senate on the legal rights of artists. He became separated from his wife and designed his own house with an open-air studio at Indian Bay, Aripeka, Florida. In 1978 F-111 was exhibited in the International Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. In his work of the late seventies and eighties, e.g. 4 New Clear Women, images of women are confronted with machine aesthetics, usually in large oblong compositions. The themes of these dynamic compositions also include fire, progress and war machinery which he shows in rotating pictorial narratives. Between 1985 and 1987 Rosenquist's entire development as an artist was shown in a comprehensive retrospective at six American museums. — LINKS — World's Fair Mural (1964 610x610cm) _ In 1964, a World's Fair was held in New York. The architect, Philip Johnson, designed the New York State exhibition building for the fair. The building was shaped like a large circle and Johnson commissioned works by 10 well-known young American artists to attach to it. James Rosenquist was the youngest of the artists invited. The 20-foot-square mural Rosenquist painted especially for this building is like many of his paintings during this time. It resembles a montage of billboard sections. Each individual image has it own meaning or associations, but Rosenquist was more interested in how they would work together to stimulate a response from the viewer. He said, "I'm interested in contemporary vision--the flick of chrome, reflections, rapid associations, quick flashes of light. Bing-bang! Bing-bang! I don't do anecdotes; I accumulate experiences." This mural combines images that were seen frequently in 1964 advertisements or the news. Included are images of the World's Fair (carnival peanuts and soda pop), the space race, technology, and patriotism (Uncle Sam's hat) in a sort of icon of American popular culture. Rosenquist said, "I decided to make pictures of fragments, images that would spill off the canvas instead of recede into it.... I thought each fragment would be identified at a different rate of speed and that I would paint them as realistically as possible. Then I thought about the kind of imagery I'd use... I wanted to find images that were in a 'nether-nether-land.' Things that were a little out of style, but hadn't reached the state of nostalgia." In the middle of these images you can see the words "Atwater, MN" which is the name of the city where James Rosenquist lived for a while when he was young. Rosenquist often includes words or images that have to do with his own memories or events that happened to him. His work is about his own identity and the identity of his country and era. In fact, in 1969, this work was selected for the cover of a French textbook on American civilization. — Untitled (1966 color screenprint, round 51cm diameter; 2/5 size) — Dusting off Roses (1965 color lithograph 65x55cm; quarter-size) — untitled plate on pp. 20-21 in the book 1¢ Life (1964 color lithograph, 41x30cm, 1/3 size) _ looks like a sketch for an ad for a laundry detergent named “new OXY”, with the words: HAPPILY AND LONG INTO THE NIGHT WE DRINK TILL ALL ARE DRUNK THERE IS NO RETIRING HOW CAN A MAN BITE HIS NAVEL ? — Whipped Butter for Eugen Ruchin, pl. 3 from Eleven Pop Artists, Vol. II (1965, 61x76cm; 3/8 size) — Circles of Confusion pl. 8 from Eleven Pop Artists, Vol. I (1965 screen print, 61x51cm; half-size) _ on the fuzzy multicolored circles there are 25 white GE circle logos of General Electric, in two small sizes. — For Love plate 5 from the portfolio Eleven Pop Artists Vol. III (1965 color screenprint 90x67cm; half-size) |
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Died on 29 November 1516: Giovanni
Bellini, Italian painter and draftsman born in 1430. — Giovanni Bellini, 87 ans, peintre, meurt à Venise. Il appartient à une famille vénitienne qui compte plusieurs peintres illustres. Son père Jacopo [1400-1470] fut un grand peintre, de même que son frère aîné Gentile (1429-1507); mais on s'accorde à reconnaître que Giovanni est le plus grand de tous. La plus belle de ses toiles La Madone et les Saints, date de 1490. On peut admirer les brillantes couleurs qui caractérisent l'École Vénitienne. Deux de ses élèves, Giorgione (1477-1510) et surtout Le Titien (1485?-1576) deviendront aussi célèbres que leur maître. — Although the professional needs of his family background may have encouraged him to specialize at an early date in devotional painting, by the 1480s he had become a leading master in all types of painting practised in 15th-century Venice. Later, towards the end of his long life, he added the new genres of mythological painting and secular allegory to his repertory of subject-matter. His increasing dominance of Venetian art led to an enormous expansion of his workshop after about 1490; and this provided the training-ground not only for his numerous shop-hands and imitators (generically known as Belliniani) but probably also for a number of major Venetian painters of the next generation. Throughout his career, Giovanni showed an extraordinary capacity for absorbing a wide range of artistic influences, both from within Venetian tradition and from outside. He also oversaw a technical revolution in the art of painting, involving the gradual abandonment of the traditional Italian use of egg tempera in favour of the technique of oil painting pioneered in the Netherlands. It was thanks to Giovanni Bellini that the Venetian school of painting was transformed during the later 15th century from one mainly of local significance to one with an international reputation. He thus set the stage for the triumphs of Venetian painting in the 16th century and for the central contribution that Venice was to make to the history of European art. — Giovanni Bellini was initially taught by his father Jacopo Bellini whose icon-like method and manner influenced his early work. When Giovanni's sister Nicosia married Andrea Mantegna in 1453, close relations between Venice and Padua were established, and Giovanni began to explore the physical and special representation of the Early Renaissance. Under Mantegna's influence his style assumed temporarily a certain calligraphic precision: Transfiguration (1460). The visit of Antonello da Messina to Venice in 1475/76 seems to have liberated Giovanni's innermost talents. Without abandoning the rational structure and interaction of form and space, his colors gain in luminosity and depth; modulation of tone increasingly replaces the dividing outline, light floods the canvas. The landscape, as can be seen in many of his representations of the Virgin and Christ and the Pietà, achieved a quality that marks Bellini as the most important Italian landscape painter of the Early Renaisance. His ability to endow his figures with an expression of quiet contemplation while fully conveying movement and human anatomy, remains a secret that raises him above all his contemporaries. The great works of his late art, in particular his portrayals of the Sacra Conversazione, already cross the border from Early to High Renaissance in the way artistic freedom and convention merge. As teacher of Giorgione and Titian, Giovanni, whom Dürer on his second visit to Venice from 1505 till 1507 still called the greatest painter of his time, was of immeasurable significance for Venetian art in the 16th century. More than 200 of his works survived till our days, among them 50 images of Madonna with Infant. — The assistants of Giovanni Bellini included Lattanzio da Rimini, Giovanni Mansueti, Rocco Marconi, Marco Marziale, Girolamo da Santacroce, Andrea Vendramin. — Besides Giorgione and Titian, the students of Giovanni Bellini included Giovanni Battista Cima da Conegliano, Vittore Gambello, Jacopo di Paride Parisati da Montagnana, Bernardino Licinio, Bartolomeo Montagna, Pier Maria Pennacchi, Andrea Previtali, Niccolò Rondinelli, Sebastiano del Piombo, Francesco Vecellio. — LINKS — Sacred Conversation (1490, 58x107cm) _ Bellini's Sacred Conversation (Madonna with Child and Saints Catherine and Magdalene) is one of the loftiest expression of this frequently painted theme. This painting shows a magisterial development that has prompted critics to recall the fundamental teaching of Leonardo's "sfumato". The light, in fact, softly progressing over the faces and garments, strikes from the side of the assorted figures of the Virgin and Saints Catherine and Magdalene, silent companions of the former in sacred contemplation. Also in the characteristic symmetrical composition of all Bellini's sacred conversations, the spreading of a crepuscular and intimate light that tinges the figures is a demonstration of how far ahead Bellini was proceeding in these years in developing the concepts of space and color which had belonged to Antonello da Messina. The indistinct background, completely lacking any kind of connotation, is just "opened" in depth by the two diagonal wings of the saints which close at the sides the perfect pyramid formed by the group of the Madonna and Child. What is suggested is a warm and yet transparent depth in which the figures move without being engulfed. There is also and other, probably autograph version at the Prado in Madrid. The success of paintings like this can be measured by the large quantity of existing variants, mostly the work of the workshop or only partially autograph, and often reproduced in various copies. _ (detail 1) _ An excellent example of the special skill of Giovanni Bellini in using light effects to detach images from their backgrounds can be seen in his Madonna and Child between St. Catherine and St. Mary Magdalene where the sacred figures stand out not against a landscape but rather against a dense blackish backcloth. The forms take shape and substance in the light in a concert of musical gestures and deep, warm colors judged to exactly the right degree of refinement. While the Virgin in the centre of the group seems to be turning slowly, and St. Catherine on the left, her hair fashionably dressed with strings of pearls, lingers ecstatically in mute adoration, Mary Magdalene emerges from the black of the background in a Leonardesque apparition, her fair, silken tresses hanging loose over her shoulders. This detail shows Saint Magdalene. _ detail 2 _ This detail shows the head of Saint Catherine. — Sacred Conversation (1490, 77x104cm) _ The painting (Virgin and Child with Saints Magdalene and Ursula) is signed: "IOANNES BELLINVS P.". Probably autograph, although some critics consider it to be a workshop product or a copy with modifications of the above-mentioned Sacred Conversation. — Portrait of Doge Leonardo Loredan (1501, 62x45cm) _ The portrait, the largest of Bellini's portraits, was probably painted around 1501, the year in which this aristocrat rose to the dogate. The age of the person portrayed, who held office from the age of sixty-five to eighty-five, does not indeed allow to it to be any later. The teaching of Antonello da Messina had clearly been absorbed in the subtle realism of the facial wrinkles and the garments and, even before this, in the sitter's three-quarter turn, rather than the profile pose which was prescribed by dogal iconographical tradition and also adopted by Gentile Bellini. The artist's progress from the early portraits is apparent, and particularly from the still pre-Antonellian Portrait of Jörg Fugger, fixed and linked as it is to the analytical realism of late-Gothic art. In this figure, that fixity now assumes the quality of an emblem of his own highest dignity of office: a "denaturalization" almost that crystallizes, but does not dim, the psychological make-up of this highly cultivated man, even in spite of the fact that he is rendered with solemn detachment. Any psychological excess or a too penetrating individualization were prohibited in the name of official and hierarchical decorum. For this reason the portrait finishes by being placed in a line that is consistent more with the Venetian portraiture tradition than with the revolutionary and hyper-real portraits of Antonello da Messina. Bellini's first works were certain portraits, which met with great praise, in particular this one which depicts Doge Leonardo Loredan. This picture was painted in 1501, when the Doge (who was proud of his Roman descent) took office, or shortly thereafter. It can indeed be considered one of the greatest achievements of Venetian painting, and not just in the field of portraiture. Tutto spirito (all intellect) was the verdict passed on it even by contemporaries. Thin, tall of stature, of no great fortune, choleric, but as a ruler clever and wise was Leonardo Loredan (1438-1521). He was Doge until 1521, and in the 12 or so years following the painting of this portrait, he was to guide the Republic through the War of Encirclement waged by the League of Cambrai. — Dead Christ in the Sepulchre (Pietà) (1460) — Dead Christ Supported by Angels (Pietà) (1474 ) — Dead Christ Supported by the Madonna and St John (Pietà) (1455 ) — Dead Christ Supported by the Madonna and St John (Pietà) (1460 ) — Dead Christ Supported by Two Angels (Pietà) (1460 ) — Pesaro Altarpiece: Pietà ) — Pietà — Pietà (1473 ) — Pietà (detail) (1505 ) — Pietà (1465 ) — Pietà (1458 ) — Pietà (1505 ) — Pietà, 1505 ) — Pietà (1475) — Pietà (detail) (1460 ) — Pietà (detail) (1474 ) — Pietà (detail) (1460 ) — Pietà (detail) (1472 ) — Frari Triptych: Madonna and Child (detail) (1488) — Greek Madonna (1460) — Greek Madonna (1454) — Madonna and Child (1489) — Madonna and Child — Madonna and Child (1488) — Madonna and Child (1510) — Madonna and Child (1463) — Madonna and Child (1475) — Madonna and Child — Madonna and Child (1468) — Madonna and Child — Madonna and Child — Madonna and Child — Madonna and Child between SS. Catherine and Ursula (1500) — Madonna and Child Blessing (1510) — Madonna and Child Blessing (detail) (1510) — Madonna and Child Blessing (details) (1510) — Madonna and Child (detail) (1488) — Madonna and Child Enthroned (Frari Triptych) (1488) — Madonna and Child in a Landscape (1497) — Madonna and Child in a Landscape (1480) — Madonna and Child with Four Saints and Donor (1507) — Madonna and Child with Saints (1490) — Madonna and Child with St. John the Baptist and a Saint (1503) _ (detail 1) _ (detail 2) _ (detail 3) — Madonna che tiene il Bambino in piedi (1490) — Madonna degli Alberetti (1487 ) — Madonna Enthroned Adoring the Sleeping Child (1475 ) — Madonna in Adoration of the Sleeping Child (1475) — Madonna of Red Angels (1488) — The Madonna of the Meadow — The Madonna of the Meadow (1505) — Madonna of the Meadow _ (detail 1) _ (detail 2) — Madonna of the Meadow (Madonna del prato) (1505) — Madonna with Blessing Child (1479) — Madonna with Child (1454) — Madonna with Child (1475) — Madonna with Child (1475) — Madonna with Child and Sts. Peter and Sebastian (1487) — Madonna with Child Blessing (1463) — Madonna with saints Madonna with the Child (1463) — Madonna with the Child (1487) — Madonna with the Child (1463) — Madonna with the Child (Greek Madonna) (1463) — Madonna with Trees |
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