… Yesterday, Monday afternoon at three o’clock, I was at Rodin’s for the first time. Atelier 182 rue de l’Universite. I went down the Seine. He had a model, a girl. Had a little plaster object in his hand on which he was scraping about. He simply quit work, offered me a chair, and we talked. He was kind and gentle. And it seemed to me that I had always known him. That I was only seeing him again; I found him smaller, and yet more powerful, more kindly, and more noble. That forehead, the relationship it bears to his nose which rides out of it like a ship out of harbor … that is very remarkable. Character of stone is in that forehead and that nose. And his mouth has a speech whose ring is good, intimate, and full of youth. So also is his laugh, that embarrassed and at the same time joyful laugh of a child that has been given lovely presents. He is very dear to me. That I knew at once. We spoke of many things (as far as my queer language and his time permitted). Then he went on working and begged me to inspect everything that is in the studio. That is not a little. The “hand” is there. C’est une main comme-ça (he said and made with his own so powerful a gesture of holding and shaping that one seemed to see things growing out of it). ― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letter to his wife Clara, on September 2, 1902
Rodin and statue of The Hand of God - Edward Steichen, 1907
Walt Kuhn - Chico in Top Hat, 1948
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza
To which I am adding another painting of Chico - Chico in Silk Hat, from the same year and a photo of Kuhn himself. Text by Carmen Bernárdez Sanchís.
Chico in Top Hat is one of the many representations of circus performers constituting a fundamental part of Kuhn’s artistic creation. One of the best examples of this subject is White Clown, painted in 1929, now at the National Gallery of Washington, and his most famous work. In that painting, Kuhn composed a monumental, robust figure in a sitting position, which takes up the entire canvas, and which patently shows the influence of Cézanne’s concept of composition. Chico in Top Hat, on the other hand, clearly reveals a difference in its artistic design and execution. The stylised figure of the young clown wearing a jacket and a black top hat stands out against a grey background with wide vertical folds. His long bony face is covered in thick white makeup with strong black lines outlining the eyebrows, eyes and lips. The painting is executed with a restricted range of colours, which Kuhn uses to give intense effects of light. Chico presents a frontal gaze and is strongly hieratic, with a restrained expression conveying intense melancholy. Clearly, the emphasis is on the huge eyes, a characteristic of the majority of Kuhn’s figures from the 1920s until the end of his life, although this was not the case of White Clown, in which the painter was more interested in the volume and plasticity of the body. Here, the character stares at a point outside the painting, where the spectator stands, but the intensity of his gaze is not really on the viewer or on an object outside the picture; it hides a deep sense of solitude and of interior crisis, which Kuhn’s friends had perceived in the painter himself during the last months of his life, when he held his last exhibition at the Durand-Ruel Gallery in New York. In November 1948 he had a nervous breakdown followed by a gastric perforation, as a consequence of which he died in a hospital in New York.
Kuhn’s relationship with the performing arts was not just an artistic option in line with so many representations of harlequins, clowns, actors and circus performers, starting with Watteau’s Gilles, Degas’ circus scenes, Picasso’s harlequins and Rouault’s characters. Among the American painters, Everett Shinn had depicted theatre and variety shows, while Bellows and Luks had chosen boxing matches. The direct and realistic representation of the figure recalls the circle of realist painters in which Walt Kuhn had moved in his initial years. Although he was not a direct follower of Robert Henri or of the so called Ash Can School, he was in touch with him and his circle during the organisation of the Exhibition of Independent Artists held in 1910, three years before the Armory Show. Kuhn shared with the realist artists a taste for the direct observation of things, and particularly a strong rejection of academic conservatism. He had always been a skilful entrepreneur and organiser. His link with the world of the performing arts went back to his youth when he was responsible for delivering to the theatres the costumes made in the shop where he worked, and he often delayed behind the scenes. Later, he executed some advertising commissions for the circus and in 1928 he collaborated with Libby Holman in the vaudeville show Merry-Go-Round, for which he designed the set and costumes. The characters which fill his paintings of the 1920s, 30s and 40s were generally professional performers and not models, and Kuhn and his wife designed the circus or theatre costumes with which they were portrayed
God is really only another artist. He invented the giraffe, the elephant and the cat. He has no real style, He just goes on trying other things.
― Pablo Picasso
Pablo had birthday a few days ago :)
Though the artist must remain master of his craft, the surface, at times raised to the highest pitch of loveliness, should transmit to the beholder the sensation which possessed the artist. — Alfred Sisley
Birthday to Alfred Sisley, who was British but spent most of his life in France. One of the most famous Impressionists, he never really abandoned it or deviated from it, so he is sometimes referred to as one of most steadfast of the group. Art historian Robert Rosenblum said his work was in fact a textbook idea of a perfect Impressionist painting. Mainly he painted landscapes, always in plein air.
A time will come when the picture will no longer be enough. Its immobility will become an archaism with the vertiginous movement of human life. The eye of man will perceive colours as feelings within itself. Multiplied colours will not need form to be understood and paintings will be swirling musical compositions of great coloured gases, which, on the scene of a free horizon, will move and electrify the complex soul of a crowd that we cannot yet conceive of. — Umberto Boccioni from lecture La Pittura Futurista, 1911
Birthday to Umberto Boccioni, Italian futuristic painter and sculptor, born in Reggio Calabria on this day, in 1882 and of tragically short life of just 33 years. Boccioni studied in Rome and then went to France; his early paintings were done under the strong influence of the Impressionism and Post-Impressionism he saw there, but also Divisionism and Cubism. After meeting Marinetti and other young artists turned to future in Milan, in 1907, he became one of the most prominent and important futurist artists and its theorist. Futurists believed that museums should be more or less destroyed and that the ultimate beauty lies in machine, in technology and dynamism. Unfortunately, as the First World War started, Boccioni was drafted; during an training he was thrown off his horse and the next day he died.
Today he is more widely famous as a sculptor than as a painter, his iconic work being Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, made in 1913.
Man Ray
Le Violon d’Ingres (1924)
Man Ray was an admirer of the paintings of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres and made a series of photographs, inspired by Ingres’s languorous nudes, of the model Kiki de Montparnasse in a turban. Painting the f-holes of a stringed instrument onto the photographic print and then rephotographing the print, Man Ray altered what was originally a classical nude. He also added the title Le Violon d’Ingres, a French idiom that means “hobby.” The transformation of Kiki’s body into a musical instrument with the crude addition of a few brushstrokes makes this a humorous image, but her armless form is also disturbing to contemplate. The title seems to suggest that, while playing the violin was Ingres’s hobby, toying with Kiki was a pastime of Man Ray. The picture maintains a tension between objectification and appreciation of the female form. (via Getty)
(Source: onlyartists)
Dorothea Tanning in her studio, Sedona, Arizona, 1946
Photograph by Lee Miller
Maternity. 1946
If you get married you’re branded. We could have gone on, Max and I, all our lives without the tag. I never heard him use the word “wife” in regard to me. He was very sorry about that wife thing. I’m very much against the arrangement of procreation, at least for humans. If I could have designed it, it would be a tossup who gets pregnant, the man or woman. Boy, that would end rape for one thing. And “woman artist”? Disgusting.
― Dorothea Tanning in an interview for Salon, in 2002
Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning, Sedona, Arizona, 1948
Photograph by Bob Towers
Read the whole interview http://www.salon.com/2002/02/11/tanning/
Art has always been the raft onto which we climb to save our sanity. I don’t see a different purpose for it now. ― Dorothea Tanning
She would have celebrated her 102nd birthday today, if she hadn’t passed away this year in January - Dorothea Tanning was until very recently the oldest living surrealist.
She discovered Dada and Surrealism in 1936, after visiting Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism exhibition in Museum of Modern Art in New York, soon starting with her own surreal paintings. In 1942 Max Ernst visited her studio and the twoplayed chess and fell in love as she said - four years later they were married in a double ceremony with their friend Man Ray and his wife. They moved to France in 1949 where they lived until Max Ernst died in 1976, when she moved back to USA. Towards the end of her life she focused more on her writing, producing two books of memoirs Birthday (named after one of her most famous paintings) and the expanded version Between Lives: An Artist and Her World. About contemporary art she said wisely - I get the impression that the idea is to shock. So many people laboring to outdo Duchamp’s urinal. It isn’t even shocking anymore, just kind of sad.
See much more about Dorothea here http://www.dorotheatanning.org/index.php
And read aricles
here http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2012/feb/06/dorothea-tanning
and here http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/culture-obituaries/art-obituaries/9060213/Dorothea-Tanning.html
Birthday to Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot born on this day in 1796 :) Corot was primarily a landscape painter although he dealt with prints as well.
Parisian born, Jean Baptiste was one of rare painters that never had money troubles : he came from a well to do family. He was not a brilliant student and so his father made him become apprentice to a draper; having finished this apprenticeship Corot famously said : I told my father that business and I were simply incompatible, and that I was getting a divorce. Soon he turned to oil painting, landscapes being from the start his main preoccupation.
From 1825 to 1828 Corot lived in Italy; his parents financed the trip with one request : that he should paint a self portrait for them :) In Italy Corot made friends with other young French painters and spent much time with them either in cafes or in Italian countryside. Nevertheless it was a very productive period for him : he painted around 150 paintings. In these and then later ones too, many critics see the beginning of what would eventually become Impressionism : especially so his practice of painting plain-air at the time that most painters did their work inside a studio. Later Baudelaire would say that Corot was the leader in the modern school of landscape painting. Camille Pissarro, whose birthday we had a few days ago, was later one of his pupils for a while; his pupils called him Father Corot :)
Corot’s fame significantly increased as he grew older, his paintings fetching quite enormous prices. He used his wealth and influence to help other artists, whether they were still young and needed a push, or were old and poor : it is well known how Corot bought a house for old and blind Honoré Daumier who was without any money and homeless, or how he helped with significant sum Millet’s widow after his death.
He himself died when he was 78; Claude Monet said of him There is only one master here—Corot. We are nothing compared to him, nothing.
Happy Birthday Jean-Baptiste-Camille !
Gustav Klimt never painted a self portrait, quite extraordinarily for an artist. There is one portrait of him by his friend and protégé Egon Schiele, and another painting by Schiele that we have reason to believe portrays them two together. However, although he did not like to paint himself or to be painted, we do have some photographs of him :) These that I am posting today are of him and his life partner Emilie Flöge, whom he never married but who nevertheless and inspite many other women in his life, stayed with him for almost 30 years :)
Gustav and Emilie met around 1891 : his brother Ernst Klimt married Emilie’s younger sister Helene. The two Klimt brothers and two Flöge sisters were extremely close, as siblings but also in business - as Gustav and Ernst (who was an engraver like their father) worked together in Company of Artists, Emilie and Helene owned fashion salon together called Schwestern Flöge (Flöge Sisters) on what is today as well it was in their time one of the most posh streets in Vienna - Mariahilfer Strasse. However, this idyll was soon over with the death of Ernst in 1892; Gustav was however by his will appointed Helene’s guardian and so started spending much time with Flöge family. The liaison between Emilie and Gustav became passionate and strong, although not exclusive. However, when he died in 1918 he left to her half of his belongings.
These are some photos of their life together, her wearing mostly her own designs :) and portrait of Emilie by Klimt.
There are many very famous paintings by Gustav that will be posted today, on his 150th birthday; I, however, chose the less famous and quite an early one, that I love very much for the story that goes with it :The Old Burgtheater :)
The old theatre was founded by Empress Maria Theresa and was a place of such historical and important premiers as Mozart’s operas The Abduction from the Seraglio, The Marriage of Figaro, Così fan tutte or Beethoven’s 1st Symphony. The Viennese loved their old theatre and although aware of the fact that the city needed a new building for it - fell quite into despair when time to say good bye to it arrived. In one of my favourite books - Stefan Zweig’s The World of Yesterday - the writer describes just how important the old Burgtheater really was to the Viennese, their love and self-identification with it that are not just almost incomprehensible to us today, with this time distance, but that were even in their own time considered somewhat bizarre to all that were not from this city. Thus he describes how on a day that it was torn down, half of Vienna came sombre looking and sad, as if that was someone’s funeral; after the last performance, he says, after the last note died out, everybody rushed onto the stage to grab at least a piece of wood from it, as a memory. For decades, Zweig writes, you could see parts of the old Burgtheater in peoples homes, exhibited almost as a piece of relic.
This painting was started in 1888. the year that the Austrian national theatre moved from this old building to the new one on Ringstraße. For his work on this new theater Klimt received the Golden order of Merit from Emperor Franz Josef I.
Zuschauerraum im alten Burgtheater in Wien 1888, by Gustav Klimt, the photograph of the outside of the old building and the new one on Ringstraße, right after its construction.
Klimt’s Atelier in der Villa Klimt in Wien-Hietzing
from http://www.klimt.com
