Art news from Spain

Fra Angelico's Virgin of the Pomegranate:  from a private collection to The Prado museum, its due home, thanks to the present day duke of Alba (yes, it is a real person). (I was so surprised to hear this piece of news, I had been lucky to see this painting and after initial speechlessness followed by some ohs, ahhs, wows, OMGs... I could not stop repeating to myself "this should be in The Prado")

 The Hug, by Juan Genovés to the Congress building

                       (I would like to conduct a world survey: Does this painting inspire any feelings to you?

 If so, what kind? )

 Ceiling frescoes of Saint Nicholas Church in Valencia restored. Judge for yourself if they deserve the nomination as "Spain's Sixtine Chapel")

Making Africa, A Continent of Contemporary Design

23 March - 28 August 2016 at CCCB, Barcelona

The exhibition showcases the work of over 120 African artists and creators and illustrates how design fuels economic and political changes. Making Africa speaks, from Africa, of a new continent “under construction” and places emphasis on its possibilities over its problems.

“Thinking about the future means thinking about our possibilities in the world. The future belongs to Africa, because it seems to have happened everywhere else already.” 
Okwui Enwezor, Consulting Curator of Making Africa

annnnndddd:

Bosch. The 5th Centenary Exhibition

El Prado Museum, 31.05.2016 - 11.09.2016

A couple of links to articles that I'm finding quite hard to categorize

1.

Cockatoo perched in Renaissance painting forces rethink of history

Discovery of an animal more closely associated with Sydney than Venice is leading to a revision of early trading networks

2.

'Kangaroo' sketch suggests Portuguese may have beaten Dutch to Australia

Nun's 500-year-old prayer book features a kangaroo-like creature and a man who could be an Indigenous Australian

Source: The Guardian

Music was our first love

The way we were

Bankers

Dear journal

Whenever  I watch the ballet

I see artists who love their audience

so  big thank you

An etching by Rembrandt

I love the no-pose intended, casual look. 

From the Legado Casa de Alba Exhibition, Madrid 

Bokja

The Arab seasons by Bokja

At the Arab World Institute, Paris

"Bokja is a millenial Turkish word used in several countries to describe the intricately worked fabric created to wrap a bride's dowry. Beirut-based designers Hoda Baroudi and Maria Hibri bring a similar passion for detail and history to the furniture that they create under the same name. Baroudi and Hibri source vintage shapes and develop new designs before covering them with textiles and embroideries from around the world, retracting the Silk Route from the Far East via South Asia to the Middle East and beyond. Merging old cultures with repurposed modernist design, Bokja produce unique one-of-a-kind pieces that are sold and admired around the world, using textile to tell stories through explosive colours, juxtaposed patterns and rich textures.

Parallel to their furniture creations, Bokja often blur the fine line between art, craft and design. In response to the socio-political changes evoked - and provoked- by the events of the Arab spring, the designers have created a new body of work that positions Bokja within this new international context: questioning the future, albeit sometimes with a sense of irony, not only for Baroudi and Hibri but also for the craft artisans who collaborate with  them. Weaving these experiences into their very fabric of their oeuvre, each of them has an individual story to tell, and in turn, asks us to tell ours"

Ancient Greek painting

This is my find of the year. I found it by chance flipping through a book at a bookshop.
So it turns out that there are some examples of Ancient Greece painting on wood panels. The wood is covered in plaster and painted in several colours with mineral pigments: black, white, blue, red, green, yellow, purple and brown.

These are known ase the Pitsa Panels, and they were found near the town of Sycion in Greece. They have been dated c.540 - 530 BC.



This one shows a sacrifical scene connected to the cult of the nymphs:

Smile

pinterest is a gold mine

Art students

art students and copysts at the Louvre

Winslow Homer, 1867

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The way we were

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The "bikini girls" mosaic

Villa Romana del Casale (a UNESCO world heritage site)

 Piazza Armerina,Sicily

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Art students a couple of centuries ago

Marie Bashkirtseff, The Académie Julian, 1880

via Ellen Moody's website

Guggenheim Bilbao

"The studio is a place where meaning is excavated- it is brought out of a seemingly senseless process. A process of play. Abstract art seeks to operate under the skin, to deliver its meanings surreptitiously"

Anish Kapoor

Yellow, 1999

Fibreglass and pigment

Anish Kapoor



Yellow is a monumental and arresting work. Our entire field of vision is taken up with the singular experience of colour. Here Anish Kapoor uses colour as an autonomous tool: it embraces and subverts form. A great gaping belly recedes deep into the wall. As we look at it we struggle to understand what we see. We are no longer certain about what we think we know is convex and what we make out to be concave. The sheer scale of the work and its monochrome state fills our view. Kapoor has a deep interest in the use of varying tones of a single colour. You can see him explore its sculptural and metaphysical possibilities again and again in his work. Let’s hear the artist’s thoughts about the way he works with colour:
...the idea that in monochrome there is no composition, there is only a kind of ‘witness’. We want to make colour such that it is a condition so absolute and complete that it’s rather like water is wet. Yellow should be yellow or red should be red. There, total. What that does, or what that can do (as we know from Barnett Newman, who was a great hero of mine...) is that it can change time. That something happens in that process that seems to be ‘other’. That seems to say this is a real time of dreaming; it’s not just a static. In other words, something else is happening.
As we look at this work the boundaries are blurred between what we know and what we perceive. We know this is a finite space but we are also aware of its mysterious qualities. It seems to go deeper and stretch beyond its sculptural confines. How does Anish Kapoor create this impression?
The expansiveness of time and space are qualities that fascinate Kapoor. We can experience this in Yellow as well as other works, such as My Body Your Body, from 1993. Kapoor blurs the space between the object and the subject. With Yellow, our eyes begin to operate in a similar way: - they pull in and push out. We find we are as drawn to the overwhelming strength of the colour as much as to the void at the centre of the work. Anish Kapoor describes this phenomenon clearly:
... It’s that phenomenological shift that brings uncertainty, that asks the question about what it is that we’re looking at. ... I hope that somewhere in that is a moment of poetry.
To get to the quality of finish we see in this work the sculpture is meticulously moulded and smoothed down before the yellow pigment can start to be applied. The surface appears flawless, so that we are no longer able to identify the hand of the maker, or the material from which it is made. This level of perfection, the intensity of the yellows, and the vast void at the centre of the work, all draw us in. They impel us to ask questions. It is a work that demands our total engagement






White Sand, Red Millet, Many Flowers, 1982


Mixed media and pigment


Anish Kapoor



These vivid pigment objects are drawn from one of Anish Kapoor’s earliest sculptural series. Completed between 1979 and 1984, they combine the use of primary colours with geometric forms. It is a sculptural language that the artist has returned to over the course of his career. They also introduce us to another element, which is at the core of Kapoor’s work - each piece is individually different from the next, yet they all belong to a group or series.
These works came about following a short trip Kapoor made to India in 1979, when he began to use powdered pigment in his three-dimensional works.



I wondered somewhere along the way whether one could make sculpture out of colour. And what interested me was the sense that the material seemed to contradict itself, that this stuff - pigment - is physical. It has a physical ...’stuffness’, which I like, and yet it’s... kind of unusual in that it isn’t really there...or points to the possibility that it isn’t there. ... I began to feel that what I wanted to do was deal with absolute colour. Colour as a condition rather than colour as a tool in a compositional form.



These works introduce us to a rich palette of colours that Kapoor has used repeatedly - deep blues, bold reds and brilliant yellows.
At the time he produced these objects, Anish Kapoor was already identified as being part of the internationally heralded ‘New British Sculpture’ - along with other young artists such as Richard Deacon, Tony Cragg, Alison Wilding, Bill Woodrow and Shirazeh Houshiary.
... Just to put it into a historical perspective, this is... when the art world was opening up to the possibility of a new kind of figuration... and I was ... with a group of colleagues -and we were all, if you like, exploring the three-dimensional form.
Kapoor was still at art school in London when he came to believe that the illusory was more poetically truthful than the real. It is a notion that continues in his working practice to this day. How does this apply to these pigment works?
One of the things that interests me about these objects ... is that they are partial, that they are rather like icebergs, hidden under the ground. ... The plane of the pigment reveals a part of the object. The rest of them isn’t there. That’s perhaps a kind of fiction, in a sense, but then fiction, it seems to me, is what it’s all about. The other idea that seems to me to be important that comes out of them is another fiction: that they are auto-generated, that they make themselves; that they weren’t ‘made’, that they ‘arrived’

These objects give the appearance of being both natural and abstract in their form. They seem to grow through the museum’s floor and walls. While we know the pieces are static, we can be forgiven for believing that they have burst through the architecture, scattering powdery pigment as they forced their way out.
The intricate way in which the pigment has been applied seems to remove any trace of the artist’s hand. The objects reveal nothing of the artist or the artistic process that was used to create them. This is of primary importance to Kapoor.

"Art is educational, provocative, and enlightening, even if it is not understood at first. The creative confusion itself stimulates curiosity and development and leads to the truth and to tolerance."

Robert Rauschenberg

Snow Crab Crystal Glut
1987



Yellow Moby Glut (=Moby for Moby Dick)
1986



Glut: Oversupply, or, in business, a market situation where the supply of a good o service far exceeds its demand, usually resulting in a substantial fall in its price.

Assemblage: A sculptural composition consisting of an arrangement of miscellaneous objects or found materials
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...The series is characterized by the use of materials gathered at junkyards, such as mattress frames, blinds and bicycles, street detritus such as traffic and gasoline signs.
Rauschenberg used these metal assemblages to express his criticism of the economic situation in his home state of Texas, which at the time was suffering a recession due to a surplus (or glut) of oil on the market.


...Many of the Gluts are completely or very loosely manipulated combinations of objects. Sometimes the objects are simply left as found; sometimes they're connected with something as simple as a rope


...Rauschenberg's artwork frequently features words, phrases, or numbers altered by removing from their original context or by other artistic means (cutting, painting or folding) often in witty ways. Many of the words emblazoned on the Gluts are directionals -arrows, instructions, numbers, or imperatives- that indicate the object's former functions as traffic, street or gas station signs


....In the Gluts, the metal found objects retain their original shapes enough to suggest their former lives or functions. Rauschenberg insisted: "whatever material I use remains true to itself"


...These sculptures continued his effort to work within the gap between art and life, or to break down the distinctions between the two.





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Content: Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao,

Anish Kapoor, visual gallery

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What's this?

Images from watercolourwar blog

From It's Bigger Than Hip Hop, a book by M.K. Asante, Jr.:

...The artivist (artist +activist) uses her artistic talents to fight and struggle against injustice and oppression—by any medium necessary. The artivist merges commitment to freedom and justice with the pen, the lens, the brush, the voice, the body, and the imagination. The artivist knows that to make an observation is to have an obligation.

Some links, if you click here

Artivism in facebook

&Definition in Wikipedia

A special find

Brooch by Josef Hoffman, 1910



Cigarette case by Josef Hoffman, 1910








From Britannica.com

Wiener Werkstätte

Vienna Workshops: Cooperative enterprise for crafts and design founded in Vienna in 1903. Inspired by William Morris

and the English Arts and Crafts movement, it was founded by Koloman Moser and Josef Hoffman with the goal of restoring the values of handcraftsmanship to an industrial society in which such crafts were dying. Its members had close ties to the artists of the Vienna Sezession and the Art Nouveau movement. The Wiener Werkstätte's work in jewelry, furnishings, interior design, fashion, and other areas, which often celebrated the beauty of geometry, became widely known for elegance and innovation, and this “square style” influenced the work of the Bauhaus craftsmen in the 1920s as well as the work of Frank Lloyd Wright
hh

via a very interesting post in venetianred.com

March's quiz

Who is wearing this magnificent pendant?

February's quiz results

So the wandering lady is busy with her flowers in Albrecht Altdorfer's Susanna in the Bath and the stoning of the elders (1526, Alte Pinakothek, Munich, Germany)

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Today's find: street art by Kurt Wenner

via creative tempest and mgwhipkey's blog.

Gallery and link to Kurt Wenner's website

Van Gogh's lost painting

The painter on the road to Tarascon, painted in 1988