Link to Post:
http://blogs.artinfo.com/lacmonfire/2012/11/19/giotto-and-pacino-at-the-getty/
William Poundstone blogs about the exhibition Florence at the Dawn of the Renaissance: Painting and Illumination, 1300–1350 at The Getty Museum, Los Angeles, on view through February 10, 2013.
Poundstone writes that while "the show makes clear, nobody did it better than Giotto in capturing natural emotion and faking fascinatingly abstract architecture... An alternative pitch is 'the first retrospective of Pacino di Bonaguida.' ...Half of its 98 objects are by that rather obscure artist... Pacino was the awkward case, a two steps forward, one step backward talent. Pacino adopted Giotto’s Renaissance modeling and grafted it onto throwback medievalism. The most avant garde thing about Pacino was his taste for novelty. He crafted new takes on conventional subjects and completely novel ones (such as Dante’s bestseller, The Divine Comedy)."
Link to Post:
http://bibliodyssey.blogspot.com/2012/08/asian-miniatures.html
Pecay photo blogs a beautiful selection if images from a "small, unnamed ~18th century album of pencil and watercolour sketches [from] the digitised collection at Bibliothèque nationale de France."
Link to Post:
http://newamericanpaintings.wordpress.com/2012/06/21/in-the-studio-qa-with-susanna-bluhm/
Amanda Manitach interviews painter Susanna Bluhm about her work currently on view in the exhibition look at the crown with which his mother crowned him at Prole Drift, Seattle, Washington, through July 14, 2012.
Manitach writes that Bluhm's "new work at Prole Drift cites the darker passages of the Song of Solomon and comprises fifteen prints pulled from a single plate that's been etched with images of an infant's incubator, breathing tubes, little foxes, twigs, creeping ivy and bottles of milk. The prints themselves are wildly different, having been inked or wiped with varying degrees of thickness, then collaged or painted over."
Link to Post:
http://altoonsultan.blogspot.com/2011/12/at-met-wondrous-color-of-indian.html
Altoon Sultan blogs about color in the exhibition Wonder of the Age Master Painters of India, 1100–1900 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, on view through January 8, 2012.
Sultan writes that "many of the works [in the exhibition] we had assumed were painted by anonymous artists were in fact by well known masters, who were 'wonders of the age'. This is a very large show, some 220 paintings, and there is so much to think about – narrative strategies, compositional and spacial structures, revelatory details, refined form, sheer beauty – that I decided to focus on color."
Link to Post:
http://www.haberarts.com/2011/12/a-passage-to-india/
John Haber reviews the exhibition Wonder of the Age: Master Painters of India, 1100–1900 on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through January 8, 2012.
Haber notes that "One who thinks of Indian art as static will be surprised... Gold and distinct fields of colors slowly lose their primacy, before reasserting themselves around 1800, but they animate scenes from the first. Profiles hardly preclude a fascination with individual psychology, and a horizon line opens onto skies deepened by stars."
Link to Post:
http://aeqai.com/main/2011/10/epic-miniatures-contemporary-pakistani-miniaturist-techniques/
Maria Seda-Reeder reviews Realms of Intimacy: Miniaturist Practice from Pakistan at the Lois & Richard Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art, Cincinnati, on view through January 22, 2012.
Seda-Reeder writes that "the traditional practice of miniature creation is applied to contemporary non-miniature works. And as demonstrated by artists like Ambreen Butt in Realms of Intimacy, the effect can be equal parts begging for close inspection and stepping back for the gestalt."
Link to Post:
http://altoonsultan.blogspot.com/2011/06/more-medieval-manuscripts-at-rauner.html
Altoon Sultan blogs about 15th century manuscripts and rare books on view at the Rauner at Dartmouth College. Sultan writes "When I see the refinement and marvelous detail of the borders surrounding the illuminations, I have a feeling that the makers of these pages loved color, loved ornament, loved nature."
Link to Post:
http://venetianred.net/2011/04/17/life-or-theater-at-the-cjmsf/
Liz Hager writes about the work of Charlotte Salomon whose work is on view in the exhibition Life? or Theatre? at the the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco through July 31, 2011. Completed while evading the Nazis in southern France, Charlotte Salomon's "fictionalized autobiography, Life? or Theater?... 769 of gouache paintings with text and musical references (edited from the over 1,300 pages she completed) -is a triumph of mixed-media storytelling, a richly thematic and profusely imaginative narrative."
Link to Post:
http://altoonsultan.blogspot.com/2011/04/delicate-beauty-of-persian-manuscript.html
Altoon Sultan reviews A Prince's Manuscript Unbound: Muhammad Juki's 'Shahnamah' on view at the Asia Society in New York through May 1, 2011. She writes: "Many of the images were of battles and bloodshed, but even so, were full of wonder in their details and color." Sultan also share some of her own favorite Persian paintings enjoying their "carefully observed and refined details... the forms are essentially flat, but there is such sensitivity in the use of line that the merest suggestion of volume creates a sense of solidity."
Link to Post:
http://art-unwashed.blogspot.com/2011/03/rarely-seen-medieval-manuscripts-at-met.html
Laura Gilbert discovers one of the Metropolitan Museum's newest acquisitions "six illustrated manuscript leaves... [from] Nicholas of Lyra's 'Postilla Litteralis.' She comments: "Unannounced, the Met has put two of them on display: the elevation and the curtains of the Tabernacle ... They're big -- 16.5 x 9.75 inches -- and so beautiful in their simplicity that it's a shame the Met isn't exhibiting the other leaves as well."
