On 12 Aug, 2011 With
Artist in his Studio This is a view of Claude Monet standing in his first studio amidst his favorite canvases. The light of the afternoon is almost palpable. This room located in his main house at Giverny was turned into his sitting-room after 1890. The picture was made in springtime according to the tulips behind Monet. The photo reveals how much the painter loved flowers. There were at least six vases in his studio on this day! When Monet became successful, he built a new house in the corner of his garden, where he moved his studio. He had now a well lit large room to work in and to store his paintings. The former studio became a place where he used…
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On 6 Aug, 2011 With
A French symbolist painter, printmaker, draughtsman and pastellist. Odilon Redon was born in Bordeaux, Aquitaine, to a prosperous family. He started drawing as a child, and at the age of ten he was awarded a drawing prize at school. Aged fifteen, he began the formal study of drawing, but on the insistence of his father he changed to architecture. His failure to pass the entrance exams at Paris’ École des Beaux-Arts ended any plans for a career as an architect, although he briefly studied painting there under Jean-Léon Gérôme in 1864. (His younger brother Gaston Redon would become a noted architect.) Back home in his native Bordeaux, he took up sculpture, and Rodolphe Bresdin instructed him in etching and lithography….
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On 5 Aug, 2011 With
Henri Fantin-Latour (14 January 1836 – 25 August 1904) was a French painter and lithographer best known for his flower paintings and group portraits of Parisian artists and writers. As a youth, he received drawing lessons from his father, who was an artist. In 1850 he entered the Ecole de Dessin, where he studied with Lecoq de Boisbaudran. After studying at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris from 1854, he devoted much time to copying the works of the old masters in the Louvre. Although he befriended several of the young artists who would later be associated with Impressionism, including Whistler and Manet, Fantin’s own work remained conservative and classical in style. Whistler brought attention to Fantin in England, where his still-lifes sold so well that they were “practically unknown in France during his lifetime”. In addition to his realistic paintings, Fantin-Latour created imaginative lithographs inspired by…
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On 4 Jan, 2011 With
Dora Maar and Picasso (1936-1944) In 1936 54-year old Picasso met Yugoslavian Dora Maar (1907 -1997), the photographer who documented Picasso’s painting of Guernica, the 1937 painting of Picasso’s depiction of the German’s having bombed the Basque city of Guernica, Spain during the Spanish Civil War. She became Picasso’s constant companion and lover from 1936 through April, 1944. Maar went back to painting and exhibited in Paris soon after Picasso left her for Françoise. Picasso referred to Dora as his “private muse”. In later years she became a recluse, dying poor and alone.
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On 24 Dec, 2010 With
Ten years later the embers of Canada’s biggest art scandal are still burning. Within 72 hours of the National Gallery of Canada reporting that it had purchased Voice of Fire, a huge abstract painting by American artist Barnett Newman for $1.76 million, the media, the public and the government went ballistic. The two-month furore that raged in the media and the House of Commons in March 1990 was Canada’s biggest art controversy. A 1996 book Voices of Fire: Art, Rage, Power and the State, edited by Bruce Barber, Serge Guilbaut and John O’Brian, chronicled the fiasco and tried to make sense of it. It all began March 7, 1990. “We rarely have a chance in today’s over-heated art market to…
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On 24 Nov, 2010 With
The Importance of Being Odd: Nerdrum’s Challenge to Modernism By Paul A. Cantor The Norwegian artist Odd Nerdrum is one of the greatest painters of the century. Unfortunately, according to his detractors, the century in question is the seventeenth. Thus Nerdrum has emerged as one of the most controversial artists of our day. His admirers praise him for his superb Old Master technique, while his critics condemn him as hopelessly reactionary. His work calls into question all our customary narratives about art history, and especially the modernist dogma that the artist can be creative only by turning his back on the past. Nerdrum has openly acknowledged his debt to the Old Masters. He uses heavy layers of paint to create chiaroscuro effects reminiscent of Caravaggioand Rembrandt,…
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On 21 Nov, 2010 With
Picasso was the first rock-star artist, whose wild visions gripped the public imagination and changed 20th-century art for ever. But his flamboyant personality divided opinion. Was he a playful genius, as some suggest, or a capricious and cruel misanthrope who left battered lives in his wake? On the eve of a new show in London, we speak to his closest friends and family in a bid to unravel the enigma. “Picasso,” the surrealist poet Paul Eluard said, “paints like God or the devil.” Picasso favoured the first option. “I am God,” he was once heard telling himself. He muttered the mantra three times, boasting of his power to animate and enliven the visible world. Any line drawn by his hand…
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On 27 Oct, 2010 With
Marie-Thérèse Walter and Picasso (1927-1936) n 1927 Picasso met Marie-Thérèse Walter (1909-1977), a 17 year old who Picasso then lived with in a flat across the street from his marital home (while still married to Olga). Marie-Thérèse and Picasso had a daughter, Maya (Maria de la Concepcion) on October 5, 1935. (Picasso and Olga later separated although they remained married so Olga would not receive half of Picasso’s wealth — until she died in 1955. ) Picasso’s relation with Marie was kept from Olga until Olga was told of Marie’s pregnancy. Marie understandably became jealous when Picasso started to fall in love with Dora Maar in 1936, a year after Maya was born. It was Marie-Thérèse who was the inspiration for many of Picasso’s famous Vollard Suite etchings. …
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On 27 Oct, 2010 With
Odd Nerdrum (born April 8, 1944, Sweden), is a Norwegian figurative painter. The themes and style in Nerdrum’s work, based onanecdote and narrative, and the major influence of the painters Rembrandt and Caravaggio place him in direct conflict with the abstractionand conceptual art considered acceptable in much of his native Norway. Nerdrum creates six to eight paintings per year that have been categorized as: Still life paintings of small objects like bricks, portraits and self portraits whose subjects are dressed as if from some other time and place, and large paintings, allegorical in nature that present a sense of the apocalyptic, and again reference another time. Nerdrum claims that his art should be understood as kitsch rather than art as such. “On Kitsch“, a manifesto composed by Nerdrum describes…
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On 4 Jun, 2010 With
First of all, it doesn’t matter if you can paint. It helps a little bit, but the majority of fine artists making tons of money today are not representational painters! This means they draw geometric shapes or splashes of paint, using heavy brushstrokes and scratchy movements. Those artists who are painting recognizable things in their art, are usually using a simplified, stylistic (not realistic) cartoonish method, which is a million times easier than actually painting objects and people as they are. I’ll say it again; representation it out. What should I paint? What you want to do is develop a theme and a style. Use the same colors (and not a lot). Pick your 5 favorite colors. Muted and dull…
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