Link to Post:
http://hyperallergic.com/62006/falling-in-love-with-one-half-of-a-painting/
Mary Ann Caws recounts the story of how she fulfilled her dream of owning a Vuillard, having to part with another cherished painting, Robert Vonnoh, to do so.
The Vuillard painting that caught her eye "was of a woman, turned slightly away — leaning over a table? A piano? (Was it Misia?) And toward the right, as if the entire painting were suggesting more than it could ever say, as if she were leaning toward something else not in view. Suggest, not spell it out, Mallarmé always said: 'Peindre non la chose, mais l’effet qu’elle produit.' Just so, I felt that lean, not knowing toward what or whom it might have been directed. I felt myself leaning toward that lean…Of course, I completely share Julius Meier-Graffe’s view about the mysteriousness of Vuillard: 'there is always something in the background with [Vuillard]. It is possible to have one of his interiors in the house for a month, and one fine day to discover a figure in the corner, and not only a figure, but a whole story.' I had not the entire story, of course, and only a half of the figuration, as I was subsequently to learn, but that half spoke to me far more than the whole would have."
Link to Post:
http://blogs.artinfo.com/lacmonfire/2012/11/09/gustave-moreau-and-the-unknown-masterpiece/
William Poundstone blogs about Gustave Moreau's large body of near abstract works on the occasion of the exhibition A Strange Magic: Gustave Moreau's Salome at the Hammer Museum, on view through December 9, 2012.
Poundstone writes: "At his 1898 death, Moreau left hundreds of near-abstractions in his studio, none of which had ever been exhibited publicly. His partisans have made the case that their man was the first abstractionist. Moreau began producing small, brushy sketches as early as 1855. Some are related to major paintings like Salome; others seem to be color experiments that may not have been preparatory to anything. By the late 1880s Moreau was about where Kandinsky would be 20 years later, producing paintings that were non-objective save for a fugitive hint of figure or a descriptive title."
Link to Post:
http://hyperallergic.com/57998/housetraining-weird-uncle-ferdinand/
Thomas Micchelli reviews the exhibition Ferdinand Hodler: View to Infinity continues at Neue Galerie, New York, on view through January 7, 2013.
Micchelli writes: "Parallelism was Hodler’s personal brand of Symbolism. It can be characterized as a mutation of the neoclassical principles of balance and symmetry into a relentless mirroring of the right and left halves of the composition, which the artist steeped in mystical overtones. In Hodler’s view, Parallelism meant “any repetition of any kind which lends a painting unity,” according to Oskar Bätschmann... The current exhibition at the Neue Galerie... neither avoids what is discomfiting about Hodler, nor does it offer a full-throated revisionist endorsement of his Symbolist work. Rather, it presents a highly selective view of Hodler as a precursor of Expressionism, and particularly of Klimt and Schiele – a sampling of whose work is also on display – for whom he was an acknowledged influence."
Link to Post:
http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/articles/sue-prideaux-on-edvard-munch
An essay by Sue Prideaux on the influence of photography and x-rays on the paintings of Edvard Munch.
Prideaux writes that Munch "is best known for his pictures of moody lovers and tortured souls. However, these were not merely a product of his feverish imagination. His paintings, prints and ghostly photographs reflected a contemporary fascination with spiritualism... the supernatural, the occult and the newly discovered X-ray... [Munch] was fascinated by how spiritualist photographs, with their apparent synthesis of the material and the immaterial, assuaged the public’s hunger for a return to the spiritual and the sacred that mere Naturalist depiction ignored."
Link to Post:
http://www.imamuseum.org/blog/2012/07/25/examining-photographic-activity-through-a-wide-angle-lens/
Leslie Anderson blogs about the paintings of George Hendrick Breitner (1857-1923), whose works are included in the exhibition Snapshot: Painters and Photography, Bonnard to Vuillard, on view at the Indianapolis Museum of Art through September 2, 2012.
Anderson writes that Breitner's "immediate grasp of [photography's] potential in his own artistic process is evident in the present exhibition. Breitner’s painting Demolition of Oudezijds Achterburgwal (1903-04) bears more than a passing resemblance in both form and subject matter to his snapshots of street reconstruction in Amsterdam (taken from 1894-1898)... Flattened picture planes and unusual cropping characterize Breitner's images. Breitner translated this photographic aesthetic to painting, creating works distinguished by their innovatory compositional daring."
Link to Post:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/gallery/2012/jul/13/symbolism-van-gogh-kandinsky-in-pictures
Photo blog of paintings from the exhibition Van Gogh to Kandinsky, Symbolist Landscape in Europe 1880-1910 at the National Galleries of Scotland on view through October 14, 2012.
The exhibition, which includes paintings by lesser known painters such as Jens Ferdinand Willumsen and Akseli Gallen-Kallela is "dedicated to Symbolist landscape painting... a more imaginative, emotional response to the world around them – a route which took [artists] from Naturalism to the edges of Abstraction. The exhibition will present a wide range of poetic and suggestive paintings of nature from about 1880-1910."
Link to Post:
http://www.twocoatsofpaint.com/2012/06/edvard-munchs-damaged-retina.html
Sharon Butler blogs about Edvard Munch's - on view in the exhibition Edvard Munch: The Modern Eye at Tate Modern through October 14, 2012.
Butler writes that the show "focus[es] on the neglected aspects of [Munch's] often radical work, particularly his use of film and photography..." She also calls attention to a fascinating group of paintings and drawings Munch made after "he suffered a serious intraocular hemorrhage in his right eye, and, later, another one in his left. The condition left a blind spot, splotches and blood clots that impacted both his vision and his painting. He documented the effects in watercolors and drawings, but the visual impairment affected his other work as well."
Link to Post:
http://blogs.getty.edu/iris/explorations-in-darkness-and-light-odilon-redon/
Courtney Wilder looks at Odilon Redon's lithographs. The print Lumière and ten prints from The Temptation of Saint Anthony are currently on view at The Getty Research Institute through September 2, 2012.
Wilder notes that in Lumière "the viewer becomes a double voyeur, left to contemplate the two small men in the foreground as well as the large meditative head outside the window that they seem to be discussing. Linked to dreams and imagination, Redon's subject illustrates his shared interest in the Symbolist's exploration of forces mystical, occult, and spiritual... Maybe the 'pensive head' (as Redon initially called the print) represents the illumination or light that the individual thinker can cast upon society. At the same time, this individual (and especially the artist, Redon may be saying by extension) must always exist outside the collective."
Link to Post:
http://www.imamuseum.org/blog/2012/01/24/a-modern-freundschaftsbild/
Leslie Anderson blogs about Paul Gauguin's Still Life with Profile of Laval, known as a Freundschaftsbild, a picture exchanged between artists to "demonstrate friendship and, often, artistic allegiance."
Anderson cites "evidence that van Gogh proposed a portrait exchange to foster the Gemeinschaft (sense of community) between himself and fellow artists Gauguin, Laval, and Émile Bernard... These portraits, which are rendered in new artistic idioms, announce the painters’ collective denial of naturalism and simultaneous entrée into the international Symbolist movement."
Link to Post:
http://www.studiointernational.com/index.php/edvard-munch--l-oeil-moderne
Heathcote Ruthven reviews the exhibition Edvard Munch, L'oeil moderne at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, on view through January 23, 2011.
Ruthven writes: "Rather than a study of modernity in Munch per se, the exhibition presents the relationship between Munch's art and technology. Technology in the wider sense of the term, his own body- the hand shot by his lover, his deteriorating eyesight – and also the technology of external tools – the cinemas Munch frequented and the photographs he took..."
