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Born on 24 July 1848: Francisco
Pradilla y Ortiz, Spanish Realist
painter who died on 01 November 1921. — Doña Juana “La Loca” ante el féretro de Felipe el Hermoso (340x500cm) _ Pradilla did several paintings of Juana la Loca, and there are several examples in the Prado Museum: many other 19th Century painters did the same. Within the historical trend of this century's painting, the insane Castillian princess was a common model. It won a Medal of Honour, its first, at the 1878 National Exposition. It captures a moment when the princess' entourage take a break during the long march she undertook to transfer the body of her deceased husband, The Archiduke Philip "The Handsome". Her insanity, accentuated over a long period by jealousy, moved her to undertake this journey (from Burgos to Granada, where she wished to bury her husband) only travelling by night because "an honest woman should flee from the light of day when she has lost her husband, who was the sun". During the day, the casket was kept at monasteries along the way, although in this painting we see a convent of nuns rather than a monastery of monks as should have been the case: Juana made them take the casket out of the church though since she was jealous of any female eye being set upon her departed husband. — An Elegant Lady In Court Costume, With A Ruff, Full-length (29x21cm; 1000x696pix, 236kb) [Does it make you think of a barking dog, because it looks like a rough ruff?] |
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Died on 16 May 1842: John
Sell Cotman, English Romantic
painter and etcher born on 16 May 1782, specialized in Landscapes.
— [He who fakes Cotman will get caught, man!] — Cotman was born in the parish of St Mary Coslany, Norwich, the son of Edmund Cotman, a hairdresser, later a haberdasher [but never a maker or seller of cots], and Ann Sell. In 1793 he entered Norwich Grammar School as a ‘freeplacer’. In 1798 he moved to London, where he worked as an assistant to the publisher Rudolph Ackermann. Following in the footsteps of Turner and Thomas Girtin he joined Dr Monro’s ‘Academy’ in 1799 and became a member of the sketching society that had developed around the personality and talent of Girtin. He exhibited at the Royal Academy for the first time in 1800, when he was awarded the large silver palette by the Society of Arts. — Cotman has been considered the best watercolorist of his generation. Although his career was not cut short like so many of the famous Romantics -- Keats, Girtin, Schubert -- it was curiously aborted; his best work was done in the first decade of the century when, under the influence of Girtin, he produced a remarkable series of watercolors characterized by firm drawing, delicate washes, and an uncanny sense of design. Atmosphere doesn't play a strong role in Cotman's work; light does. Cotman had a unique ability to give masses and shadows a kind of equivalence in the design which in some respects prefigures Cubism, a full century in the future. In his latter years, Cotman was troubled by fits of depression and this, combined with relative isolation in Norfolk (he was one of the founders of the "Norwich School") led him away from his genius to pursue the influence of Turner and what Ruskin came to call "The Turnerian sublime." Cotman died in London. — Among Cotman's students were George Devey, Dawson Turner, and William Burges, who also did his early work in Cotman's studio. — LINKS — Tilney All Saints Church near King's Lynn (28x21cm) — Windmill (29x23cm) — On the Greta (1805; 689x1000pix, 108kb) — On the Greta or the Tees (1805) — Duncombe Park -- Yorkshire (1807) — Seashore with Boats (1808) — Houses at Epsom (1800, 23x17cm) — A Ruined House (600x472pix, 69kb) _ “After the Earthquake”? — 106 prints at FAMSF |
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Born
on 24 July 1871: Giacomo Balla, Italian
Futurist
painter who died on 05 March 1958. — Balla was one of the founders of Futurism, signing the Futurist Manifesto which was published in 1910. In this document Balla, along with artists including Umberto Boccioni and Carlo Carrà, outlined their primary objective to depict movement, which they saw as symbolic of their commitment to the dynamic forward thrust of the twentieth century. Futurism celebrated the machine - the racing car was heralded as the triumph of the age - and early futurist paintings were concerned with capturing figures and objects in motion. In his Girl Running on the Balcony, Balla attempted to realize movement by showing the girl's running legs in repeated sequence. Other paintings, such as Dog on a Leash, got to grips with the problem of recreating speed and flight by superimposing several images on top of each other. Inevitably, the advances that were made by this short-lived movement were eventually to be overtaken by the art of cinematography. Futurism was finished by the First World War, after which Futurist ideals became increasingly associated with Fascism. Balla began to plough an independent path, at first toward abstraction and, after 1931, toward figuration. — Nato a Torino, Balla si trasferisce in gioventù a Roma dove morirà nel 1958. Aderisce al Futurismo nel 1910, quando sottoscrive il Manifesto dei pittori futuristi (11 Feb 1910) e il Manifesto tecnico della pittura futurista. (11 Apr 1910). Gli esordi di Balla sono caratterizzati da una pittura influenzata dal divisionismo di Pellizza da Volpedo e Giovanni Segantini e dal postimpressionismo francese, interesse approfondito dall'artista durante un soggiorno a Parigi nel 1900. È nel 1912 con opere come il celebre Dinamismo di un cane al guinzaglio, che l'arte di Balla si delinea con caratteristiche decisamente futuriste, già affermando la sua peculiare attenzione all'analisi oggettiva del particolare, sicuramente legata al forte interesse dell'artista per la fotografia. L'idea del moto e il senso moderno della velocità, centrali nella poetica del Futurismo, sono resi da Balla mediante un linguaggio di dettagli ripetuti e dissociazioni cromatiche. Successivamente, la sua pittura si fa più astratta, per costruirsi su una rete di "linee andamentali", traiettorie che tracciano il movimento di corpi nello spazio a partire da un punto di vista mobile. Con le Compenetrazioni iridescenti, dipinte tra la fine del 1912 e il 1914, l'artista realizza una serie di composizioni liricamente astratte, scandite da forme triangolari pure e armonie di colori che aspirano ad un'idea di totalità. Nel 1916 firma insieme a Depero il manifesto Ricostruzione futurista dell'universo che delinea un programma di ricreazione del reale attraverso gli equivalenti astratti di tutte le forme pensati come complessi plastici mobili. In questo ambito si collocano l'ideazione e la creazione di congegni meccanici, musicali e rumoristici e poi di giocattoli, vestiti, concerti, edifici, secondo una logica che ispira anche la creazione di mobili ed interi arredamenti. A partire dagli anni Venti Balla si indirizza nuovamente verso una pittura figurativa, che conserva sfondi con motivi astratti di impianto dinamico, per affrancarsi definitivamente dal Futurismo intorno alla metà degli anni Trenta, con una serie di opere caratterizzate da una intensa ricerca luminosa ai limiti del misticismo. — LINKS — Il Sole e Mercurio — Velocità — Dinamismo di un cane al guinzaglio (1912, 91x110cm) — Form~Spirit Transformation (1918, 3 divergent rays reflected convergent) — The Flight of the Swallows (1913) — Young Girl Running on a Balcony _ (1912, somewhat like a photo multiple-exposure [but with partial superimposition] in Animal Locomotion- An Electro-photographic Investigation of Consecutive Phases of Animal Movements. by Muybridge [Eadweard Muggeridge 09 Apr 1830 – 1904]) — Feu d'Artifice (telai, acrilico su tela, plexiglas, lampade colorate, sonoro, 500x550x550cm) _ Gli elementi che compongono la scena di Feu d'artifice sono stati ricostruiti al Castello di Rivoli in occasione della mostra Sipario del 1997, dedicata allo stretto rapporto tra teatro e arti visive. Feu d'artifice, unico spettacolo realizzato, tra quelli progettati da Balla, andò in scena al Teatro Costanzi a Roma il 30 aprile 1917. Sulle note di Stravinsky per tre minuti Balla presentò il suo teatro del futuro, in linea con quanto proclamato nel 1915 da Filippo Tommaso Marinetti che promuoveva un teatro "Atecnico, Dinamico, Simultaneo", cioè brevissimo e capace in pochi minuti di condensare molteplici situazioni e idee (manifesto Il Teatro Futurista Sintetico, 11 gennaio 1915). Balla concepì Feu d'artifice come una serie di forme dall'architettura non-logica e dinamica destinate ad interagire con un gioco di luci in rapporto con gli accordi musicali. Al Museo della Scala di Milano sono conservati oltre venti fogli che recano i progetti per ciascun elemento dello scenario. Balla realizzò anche un autoritratto (perduto) nel cui sfondo erano riportate alcune delle forme di Feu d'artifice. — Ritratto del sindaco Onorato Caetani (75x62cm) _ Firmato in alto a destra: Balla. Il dipinto, quasi sconosciuto agli studiosi di Balla, è stato segnalato soltanto in due occasioni: nella scheda comparsa negli Archivi del Divisionismo e nella monografia di Maurizio Fagiolo dell'Arco, che menziona il ritratto del duca Caetani, sindaco di Roma tra il 1890 e il 1892, senza riprodurlo e ne segnala anche l'abbozzo, dipinto su tela, nella collezione Balla. Il modo di segnare il fondo del dipinto, con tratti non omogenei, e l'impostazione della figura, che sembra esorbitare dai margini del quadro, avvicina l'opera ai ritratti della signora Ida Maini e di Bice Morselli, datati entrambi 1910, nella fase che precede di qualche anno il periodo futurista dell'artista. — Street Light (1909) — Alberi spogli (1902) |
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Died on 24 July 1680: Ferdinand Janszoon
van Bol, Dutch Baroque
era painter born on 24 June 1616. — Studied under Rembrandt van Rijn. Bol's students included Sir Godfrey Kneller and Cornelis Bisschop. — Ferdinand Bol was born in Dordrecht in 1616. He studied in Rembrandt’s studio around 1635; the master strongly influenced the development of the young artist. Bol stayed and worked in Amsterdam till the end of his life in 1680; he painted portraits, historical compositions and sometimes still-lifes. In his early works the powerful authority of Rembrandt is seen, but already in 1650s he changed his palette to a lighter one. — Dutch painter and etcher. He was a pupil of Rembrandt in the mid-1630s and in his early work imitated his master's style so well as to create occasional difficulty in distinguishing between them. The portrait of Elizabeth Bas in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, is the best-known instance; it was acknowledged as a Rembrandt until 1911, when it was attributed to Bol, and although this opinion is still generally accepted, there has been renewed support for Rembrandt as the author. As Bol's career prospered, both as a portraitist and a painter of historical subjects, his style moved away from that of Rembrandt, becoming blander and more elegant in the style of van der Helst. In 1669 he married a wealthy widow and seems to have stopped painting. Sir Godfrey Kneller was Bol's most distinguished pupil. — Ferdinand Bol Leaning on Window Sill (etching 19x15cm) by Adam von Bartsch — Young Man in Velvet Cap (Ferdinand Bol) (1637 etching, 10x8cm) by Rembrandt van Rijn — LINKS — Self Portrait (1667) — Aeneas at the Court of Latinus (1663) — Consul Titus Manlius Torquatus Beheading His Son (1663) — Elisabeth Jacobsdochter Bas (1640) — Maria Rey, Wife of Roelof Meulenaer (1650) — Roelof Meulenaer (1650) — The Peace Negotiations between Claudius Civilis and Cerealis (1670) — Venus and Adonis (1657, 168x230cm) _ The story of Venus and Adonis is taken from the tenth book of Ovid's Metamorphoses. Venus, the goddess of love, becomes enamoured of the beautiful young huntsman, Adonis. In Bol's painting Venus and the young Cupid try in vain to prevent Adonis from going hunting, as the goddess has had a premonition that the hunting party will have fatal consequences, and indeed the hunter is killed by a wild boar. The story of Venus and Adonis was a favorite in the Netherlands. Rubens painted the subject several times and Bol later painted another picture of the same theme. It was probably the moral component that made the story popular: Adonis was seen as the epitome of reckless youth, whose rejection of Venus' advice led him to his death. — Jacob's Dream (1642, 128x97cm) _ In his later career Bol turned to a more courtly style and a lighter tonality, the faces of his models look rather pasty, and the highlights on the red velvet he loved to paint appear to have been dusted lightly with talcum powder. In a subject picture like the Jacob's Dream Bol captures something of the mood and tender character of Rembrandt's art of this period; but the elegant and noble attitude of the angel, with its long limbs and aristocratic gesture, is foreign to Rembrandt. — Portrait of a Man (87x72cm) _ Ferdinand Bol entered Rembrandt's studio about 1636-1637 and left Rembrandt about 1642 when he began working independently in Amsterdam where he settled for the rest of his life. His early painted portraits are very similar to the commissioned ones Rembrandt made in the late thirties and early forties and in them he successfully incorporates aspects of the transparent chiaroscuro the older master develops during these years. — David's Dying Charge to Solomon (1643). |
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Born on 24 July 1927: Alex Katz,
US Pop
Artist. — {“cats” is not the same as “many cats”,
and Katz is not the same as Mané-Katz [05 Jun 1894 – 09 Sep
1962]. O hel!} — [Do NOT drop the x and call him “Alé
Katz”] — Katz belongs to the same generation as Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Frank Stella, Claes Oldenburg and Roy Lichtenstein, but his work always seemed marginal compared with theirs. He is known for his billboard-size figure paintings and portrait heads. Typically he paints his motif from close to, so that the face or body fills our field of vision. Though the pictures have little depth and the space in them is limited, the colors are bright and the compositions punchy. With their big, bold forms and broad areas of monochrome color bathed in even light, you can recognise a picture by Katz from streets away. Up close you are enveloped by the Ozymandias-scaled heads and by bodies the size of small buildings. If we are looking for Katz's predecessors, we should start with the US muralists of the 1930s, or the Art Deco proponents whose canvases adorned the public saloons of great ocean liners between the wars. The pictures don't invite or reward close inspection. The paint surface is no more interesting close to than it is from 3 meters away, and there is something formulaic about Katz's approach to the human face. In a characteristic Katz portrait, the almond-shaped eyes and perfectly formed lips are so schematically drawn that they look like those in a how-to-draw manual. Except that there are no Ben Day shading dots or speech bubbles, his figures are first cousins to Roy Lichtenstein's cartoon characters. All the people in these pictures come from the same educated and affluent upper middle classes, their gleaming white teeth and even features testaments to the skills of the orthodontist and, possibly, the plastic surgeon. In their expensive clothes and designer sunglasses they stroll through spring meadows, picnic by the sea, or loll on the beach, smiling. All have the depthless uniformity of expression you find in the faces of the people you see in television commercials. In Katz's paintings there is no pain, little tension, no emotion and zero sexuality. As snapshots from suburbia, his art is relentlessly vacuous. What is missing in Katz's art is a sense of moral or emotional complexity, a sense that life isn't quite this simple. Presumably the studied neutrality of these scenes is deliberate. Katz was painting a nation on Prozac decades before that wonder drug had been invented. The question is, was he also painting for an audience on Prozac? Is there more to these pictures than first meets the eye? Is their emotional numbness, for example, a comment on the banality of US middle-class life? The answer is no. Katz is one of the few US artists of his generation not to have been touched by the influence of Marcel Duchamp. There is nothing tongue-in-cheek about his art. Bearing in mind that some of his earlier pictures were painted when the Vietnam War was tearing US society apart, it is all the more remarkable that they have no subtext. From the perspective of the late 1990s, the most avant-garde thing about Katz is his own admission that his pictures are "not concerned with psychology, just surfaces". In dumbing his art down, Katz was the precursor of the decorative, meaningless art which is emerged later. Katz was a "post-human" artist long before the rest of the art world decided that brain-dead was cool. Certain gestures or poses in Katz's paintings derive from Michelangelo, Rodin and Munch. But Katz divests those gestures of psychological significance, rendering them all but meaningless. And so, when a fashionably dressed woman in one canvas lightly rests her hand on her chin, Katz may well have had Rodin's Thinker in mind, but he drains the pose of frustration and intensity, cleaning it up for country-club consumption. Though Katz's figurative work is rather blah, the landscapes are a different story. In these we don't worry about the absence of meaning or character. Once again Katz has an unerring eye for the cliché — the moose by the lake, the moonlight on the water, the flowers in spring. But rippling water or trembling leaves are seen as semi-abstract forms, allowing us to concentrate on the pictures' purely painterly qualities. Paradoxically, it is when painting inanimate things that Katz finds a gestural freedom and pleasure in the handling of paint which is largely absent from the supercool figure paintings. Emotion at last enters the work. In the winter nocturne City Landscape circular areas of softly brushed-in white pigment conjure up headlamps or street lights, while great arcs of black, blue and silver become bare, snow-touched branches. The whole picture is steeped in the mystery and elegance of Central Park at night. And in one of his best painting, May of 1996, a medley of lime and forest-green brush strokes loosely painted against a white ground create a fugue of color as joyful as Jackson Pollock's Autumn Rhythm. What is astonishing is that all of Katz's landscapes date from the 1990s. What we are seeing is an artist who did not find his true subject, the landscape, until late in his career. For many people the early work of Johns, Oldenburg and Rauschenberg is more interesting than what came later. Katz, when he reached the age of 70, was a rarity among US artists of his generation in reversing that pattern and saving the best for last. — LINKS — Joan (1986) — Black Brook (1989) — Beach Sandals (1987) — Black Shoes (1987, color aquatint and softground etching, 30x43cm) — Swimmer (1990) — Ursula (1990, 20x66cm) — Red Cap (1989, 53x90cm) — The Green Cap (1985, color woodcut, 31x45cm) — Swamp Maple (color lithograph) — Reclining Figure (1987 color aquatint, 90x106cm) |
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Died on 24 July 1802: Joseph
Ducreux, French pastelist, miniaturist, First Painter to
Queen Marie-Antoinette, engraver. Ducreux was born on 26 June 1735. — Born in Nancy, he lived in Paris from 1760 and from 1762 kept a list of his works. Among the portraits he completed in his early years were those in pastel of the well-known connoisseurs Pierre-Jean Mariette, the Comte de Caylus and Ange-Laurent de la Live de July [how about other months?], which apparently were copies after Maurice-Quentin de La Tour. Ducreux has traditionally been seen as de La Tour’s favorite pupil, while Jean-Baptiste Greuze is supposed to have initiated him into oil painting. From his age, it can be assumed that by the time Ducreux reached Paris he had already acquired a grounding in his art. — Joseph Ducreux probably was trained by his father, a painter in Nancy, before going to Paris in 1760, where he was the only student of pastelist Maurice-Quentin de La Tour. Like his successful mentor, Ducreux specialized in portraiture and made many self-portraits. He was also influenced by Jean-Baptiste Greuze's oil technique. In 1769 Ducreux was sent to Vienna to paint a miniature of Louis XVI's future wife, Marie-Antoinette. An instant success, he was made a baron and Premier Peintre de la Reine. In the late 1780s, the irascible Ducreux painted "character" self-portraits, using his own face to study various expressions, then a popular field for artistic exploration. While in London avoiding the French Revolution, he engraved and published three of these expressive self-portraits and drew the last portrait ever made of Louis XVI [1754-1793]. In 1793 Ducreux returned to Paris, where he became associated with Jacques-Louis David, who helped him continue an official career. Ducreux's rooms became a popular meeting place for artists and musicians, who often commissioned portraits from him; his friend composer Etienne Nicolas Méhul based the main character of an opera on him. Ducreux rarely signed his paintings, and many remain wrongly attributed to other artists. — LINKS — Portrait de l'Artiste Sous les Traits d'un Moqueur (1793, 91x72cm; 1115x885pix, 51kb) _ Dans ses nombreux autoportraits, l'artiste a exploré la vieille tradition de "l'expression des passions", se peignant surpris, silencieux, baillant, ou comme ici, ricanant. L'index tendu vers nous, Ducreux se moque à son tour d'un public trop facilement apte à critiquer la peinture. — Portrait de l'Artiste Sous les Traits d'un Moqueur (1782, 55x46cm; 490x422pix, 32kb) [presqu'identique aux deux tiers du haut du précédent] — Self-Portrait, Yawning (<1783, 114x89cm; 718x561pix, 26kb) _ Joseph Ducreux experimented with the traditional limitations of the genre of self-portraiture by creating an expressive, humorous, and rather unorthodox image of himself stretching and yawning. Dressed informally in a turban and bright red jacket, Ducreux, in the midst of a huge yawn, opens his mouth wide, contorting his face with the effort and stretching his right arm toward the viewer. Holding this exaggerated pose, his back sways and his stomach pushes forward; his entire body presses up close to the surface of the picture. Ducreux was interested in the study of physiognomy and frequently used his own features as a convenient means to observe various expressions. In fact, he executed dozens of similarly exaggerated self-portraits throughout his career. A contemporary critic admired this self-portrait for its warmth, color, and expression, but later critics complained about the repetition of the subject. — Le Discret (1790, oval; 751x627pix, 36kb) _ another self-portrait? — Louis XVI's last portrait (1793; 920x600pix, 42kb) — Louis XVII (monochrome photo of pastel, oval 43x35cm; 773x902pix, 44kb) — Louis-Antoine, comte de Bougainville (1790, 88x71cm; 512x411pix, 46kb) _ Louis Antoine de Bougainville [1729-1811], mathématicien, avocat et navigateur, se rendit d'abord avec Montcalm au Canada. Après la signature de la paix de 1763, il partit fonder une colonie aux îles Malouines, ou Falkland, revendues trois ans plus tard par la France à L'Espagne. Entre 1766 et 1769, il dirigea une expédition scientifique autour du monde, relatée dans son ouvrage publié en 1771, Voyage autour du monde. Il participa également à la guerre d'indépendance américaine. “Autant que j'en puis juger sur une lecture assez superficielle, j'en rapporterais l'avantage à trois points principaux: une meilleure connaissance de notre vieux domicile et de ses habitants; plus de sûreté sur des mers qu'il a parcourues la sonde à la main, et plus de correction dans nos cartes géographiques. Bougainville est parti avec les lumières nécessaires et les qualités propres à ces vues: de la philosophie, du courage, de la véracité; un coup d'oeil prompt qui saisit les choses et abrège le temps des observations; de la circonspection, de la patience ; le désir de voir, de s'éclairer et de s'instruire; la science du calcul, des mécaniques, de la géométrie, de l'astronomie; et une teinture suffisante d'histoire naturelle. (Diderot, Supplément au voyage de Bougainville, 1772). |
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