Art-e-Facts Archives – Daily Art Fixx

5 Random Art Facts: XXIV

August 9, 2016 By Wendy Campbell

1. The De Stijl Art Movement was a Dutch movement founded in 1917 in Amsterdam. Originally a publication, De Stijl (meaning “style” in Dutch), was created by two pioneers of abstract art, Piet Mondrian and Theo van Doesburg. The magazine De Stijl became a vehicle for Mondrian’s ideas on art, and in a series of articles in the first year’s issues he defined his aims and used, perhaps for the first time, the term neo-plasticism. This became the name for the type of abstract art that he and the De Stijl circle practiced. Proponents of De Stijl advocated pure abstraction and universality by a reduction to the essentials of form and colour. They simplified visual compositions to vertical and horizontal, using only black, white and primary colours. The movement had a profound influence on the development both of abstract art and modern architecture and design.

Other members of the group included Bart van der Leck, Vantongerloo and Vordemberge-Gildewart, as well as the architects Gerrit Rietveld and JJP Oud. Mondrian withdrew from De Stijl in 1923 following Van Doesburg’s adoption of diagonal elements in his work. Van Doesburg continued the publication until 1931. (Tate)

2. Wabi-Sabi is a term used to describe a type of Japanese aesthetics and has been associated with Zen Buddhism as it exemplifies many of Zen’s core spiritual and philosophical tenets. The aesthetic is sometimes described as one of beauty that is imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete. Emerging in the 15th century in Japan as a reaction to the prevailing aesthetic of lavishness, ornamentation, and rich materials, wabi-sabi is the art of finding beauty in imperfection and profundity in earthiness, of revering authenticity above all. An example of this can be seen in certain styles of Japanese pottery. In the Japanese tea ceremony, the pottery items used are often rustic and simple-looking. Hagi ware pottery for example have shapes that are not quite symmetrical, and colours or textures that appear to emphasize an unrefined or simple style. Other examples of wabi-sabi include Honkyoku (traditional shakuhachi music of wandering Zen monks), Ikebana (the art of flower arrangement), Japanese gardens, Zen and bonsai (tray) gardens and Japanese poetry. (Wikipedia, Utne Reader)

3. Women and the Arts: In 1976, at the peak of her career, Georgia O’Keeffe refused to lend her work to a pivotal exhibition in Los Angeles, Women Artists: 1550 to 1950. It was one of a wave of all-female shows that decade — some 150 — to spotlight artists largely ignored by major museums and galleries. But O’Keeffe, the most famous female artist of her day, saw herself in a different category — “one of the best painters,” period.

The feminist art historian Linda Nochlin borrowed an O’Keeffe painting elsewhere and put her in the show anyway. Yet despite these exhibitions, neither O’Keeffe nor any other woman would break into Janson’s History of Art, the leading textbook, until 1987, and equality remained elusive. (New York Times)

4. The Starry Night by Vincent van Gogh was painted in June 1889, one year before his death. It depicts the view from the east-facing window of his asylum room at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence where he voluntarily admitted himself after the self-mutilation of his ear. The painting is a combination of van Gogh’s direct observations as well as his imagination, memories, and emotions. The steeple of the church, for example, resembles those common in his native Holland, rather than those in France. The whirling forms in the sky, on the other hand, match published astronomical observations of clouds of dust and gas known as nebulae. (Moma, Wikipedia)

5. Fluxus – Founded in 1960 by Lithuanian/American artist George Maciunas, Fluxus was a small international network of artists and composers who challenged accepted ideas about what art is. Rooted in experimental music, it was named after a magazine which featured the work of musicians and artists centred around avant-garde composer John Cage.

Almost every avant-garde artist of the time took part in Fluxus, including Joseph Beuys, Dick Higgins, Alice Hutchins, Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, Ben Vautier, Robert Watts, Benjamin Patterson and Emmett Williams.

Fluxus had no single unifying style. Its artists used a range of media and processes adopting a ‘do-it-yourself’ attitude to creative activity, often staging random performances and using whatever materials were at hand to make art. Seeing themselves as an alternative to academic art and music, Fluxus was a democratic form of creativity open to anyone. Collaborations were encouraged between artists and across art forms, and also with the audience or spectator. It valued simplicity and anti-commercialism, with chance and humour playing a big part in the creation of works. The fluxus network still continues today. (Tate)

Art-e-Facts: 5 Random Art Facts – XXIII

March 29, 2016 By Wendy Campbell

1. Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) art movement lasting from 1911 to 1914, fundamental to Expressionism, along with Die Brücke. The group was founded by a number of Russian emigrants, including Wassily Kandinsky, Alexej von Jawlensky, Marianne von Werefkin, and native German artists, such as Franz Marc, August Macke and Gabriele Münter. The name Blaue Reiter (“blue rider”) refers to a key motif in Kandinsky’s work: the horse and rider, which was for him a symbol for moving beyond realistic representation. The horse was also a prominent subject in Marc’s work, which centered on animals as symbols of rebirth. An extensive collection of paintings by Der Blaue Reiter is exhibited in the Städtische Galerie in the Lenbachhaus in Munich. Der Blaue Reiter dissolved with the outbreak of World War I in August 1914. Kandinsky, a Russian citizen, was forced to return to his homeland, and Marc and another Blaue Reiter artist, August Macke, were killed in action. (Moma)

2. The Hockney–Falco thesis is a theory of art history, advanced by artist David Hockney and physicist Charles M. Falco. Both claimed that advances in realism and accuracy in the history of Western art since the Renaissance were primarily the result of optical instruments such as the camera obscura, camera lucida, and curved mirrors, rather than solely due to the development of artistic technique and skill. Nineteenth-century artists’ use of photography had been well documented. In a 2001 book, Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters, Hockney analyzed the work of the Old Masters and argued that the level of accuracy represented in their work is impossible to create by “eyeballing it”. Since then, Hockney and Falco have produced a number of publications on positive evidence of the use of optical aids, and the historical plausibility of such methods. The hypothesis led to a variety of conferences and heated discussions.

The hypothesis that technology was used in the production of Renaissance Art was not much in dispute in early studies and literature. The 1929 Encyclopedia Britannica contained an extensive article on the camera obscura and cited Leon Battista Alberti as the first documented user of the device as early as 1437. Art historians and others have criticized the argument on the grounds that the use of optical aids, though well-established in individual cases, has little value for explaining the overall development of Western art, and that historical records and paintings and photographs of art studios (without optical devices), as well as present-day realist artists, demonstrate that high levels of realism are possible without optical aids. (Wikipedia)

3. The Ugly Duchess (also known as A Grotesque Old Woman) is a satirical portrait painted by the Flemish artist Quentin Matsys around 1513. The painting is in oil on an oak panel, and measures 62.4 by 45.5 cm. It shows a grotesque old woman with wrinkled skin and withered breasts wearing the aristocratic horned headdress of her youth, out of fashion by the time of the painting. She holds in her right hand a red flower, then a symbol of engagement, indicating that she is trying to attract a suitor. The work is Matsys’ best-known painting.

The painting was long thought to have been derived from a putative lost work by Leonardo da Vinci, on the basis of its striking resemblance to two caricature drawings of heads commonly attributed to the Italian artist. However the caricatures are now thought to be based on the work of Matsys, who is known to have exchanged drawings with Leonardo. (Wikipedia, National Gallery)

4. Tyrian Purple:In ancient Rome, purple was the color of royalty, a designator of status. And while purple is flashy and pretty, it was more important at the time that purple was expensive. Purple was expensive, because purple dye came from snails. The pigment got its name from the best of the marine shellfish used to make the pigment being found off the shore of Phoenicia’s Tyre. The snail-made purple remained in use until chemists learned to make synthetic dyes. Perkin’s purple, otherwise known as aniline purple, or mauveine, was the first synthetic dye and was created by accident by an eighteen year old chemist named William Perkin in 1856. (Smithsonian)

5. Andy Warhol Time Capsules: During his lifetime, Andy Warhol consigned 300,000 of his everyday possessions to 610 sealed cardboard boxes or “Time Capsules”. The boxes contain everything from gallery flyers, junk-mail, fan-letters, gallery-invitation cards, unopened letters, solicitations for work, freebie LPs, a lump of concrete, eccentric pornographic assemblages, used postage stamps, packets of sweets and unopened Campbell’s soup tins. In some capsules, toenail clippings, dead ants, a mummified foot and used condoms were found.

Warhol began the project when he was moving the Factory, as his studio was called. But “the artist didn’t hire a moving company”, says Warhol Museum’s chief archivist, Matt Wrbican. Warhol asked his staff to clean up the mess, and one of his assistants suggested that they start putting everything in these boxes, and they could call them ‘time capsules’. Warhol intended for the Time Capsules to eventually be sold as art, but they never went on the market. (NPR, BBC)

Art-e-Facts: 5 Random Art Facts – XXII

February 29, 2016 By Wendy Campbell

1. Postminimalism is an art term coined by Robert Pincus-Witten in 1971 and is used to describe artistic fields which are influenced by, or attempts to develop and go beyond, the aesthetic of minimalism (a style that uses pared-down design elements). In visual art, postminimalism art uses minimalism either as an aesthetic or conceptual reference point. More an artistic tendency than a particular movement, postminimalist artworks are typically created with everyday objects, using simple materials, and sometimes take on a formalist aesthetic (emphasizing compositional elements such as color, line, shape, texture, and other perceptual aspects rather than iconography or historical and social context). Noted post-minimal artists include Eva Hesse and Richard Serra. Contemporary metal artist Richard Sturgeon uses the everyday materials of steel and rock to play with the concepts of balance and tension. Wikipedia

2. Louise Bourgeois Sunday Salons: Louise Bourgeois moved from Paris to New York in 1938 after marrying art historian Robert Goldwater. In 1962, the couple moved to a brownstone Chelsea apartment at 347 West 20th Street, where Louise lived for the rest of her life. Beginning in the 1970s, Bourgeois hosted Sunday salons at home where, for the next thirty years, students and young artists would come and talk about their work. Entry was open to all, with Bourgeois’ number publicly listed. Bourgeois held these salons, which she dryly referred to as “Sunday, bloody Sunday”, on a weekly basis until her death in 2010, at the age of 98. AnOther Mag

3. The Brighton Cats: LOLCAT photography is nothing new. During the 1870s, Brighton photographer Harry Pointer (1822-1889) became well known for a series of carte-de-visite photographs which featured his pet cats. Pointer began by taking conventional photographs of cats resting, drinking milk or sleeping in a basket, but from around 1870 he specialised in photographing cats in a variety of poses, placing them in settings that would create a humorous image. Pointer often arranged his cats in unusual poses that mimicked human activities – a cat riding a tricycle, cats roller-skating and even a cat taking a photograph with a camera. He soon realised that even a relatively straight-forward cat photograph could be turned into an amusing or appealing image by adding a written caption and he began selling the photos. Purchasers sent the small cartes-de-visite as tiny greetings cards and the popularity of Pointer’s distinctive cat photographs increased. By 1872, Pointer had created over one hundred captioned images of cats that were collectively known as “The Brighton Cats”. Photo History Sussex

4. Papier Collé: Georges Braque’s Fruit Dish and Glass is the most famous and possibly the first Cubist papier collé, a collage made of pasted papers. In the summer of 1912, Braque and Picasso were working in Sorgues in the south of France. Braque later recalled that one day, while wandering around the nearby city of Avignon, he noticed a roll of faux bois wallpaper displayed in a shop window. Braque waited until Picasso departed for Paris before incorporating pieces of the mechanically printed, fake wood grain paper into a series of charcoal drawings. These fragments from the real world add significant meaning to the fictive world of the picture: they can be interpreted as the front drawer of the table (onto which Braque drew a circular knob), the floor, or the wall of the bar. This collage marked a turning point in Cubism. Braque later said “After having made the papier collé, I felt a great shock and it was an even greater shock to Picasso when I showed it to him.” Met Museum

5. Aerial Perspective or atmospheric perspective refers to the effect the atmosphere has on the appearance of an object as it is viewed from a distance. As the distance between an object and a viewer increases, the contrast between the object and its background decreases, and the contrast of any markings or details within the object also decreases. The colours of the object also become less saturated and shift towards the background color, which is usually blue, but under some conditions may be some other color (for example, at sunrise or sunset distant colors may shift towards red). Aerial perspective was used in paintings from the Netherlands in the 15th Century, and explanations of its effects were written about by polymaths such as Leonardo da Vinci who used aerial perspective in many of his paintings including the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper. Atmospheric perspective was used in Pompeian Second Style paintings, one of the Pompeian Styles, dating as early as 30 BCE. Wikipedia

Art-e-Facts: 5 Random Art Facts – XXI

August 18, 2011 By Wendy Campbell

1. Considered a pioneer in modernism, Romanian artist Constantin Brâncuşi‘s sculpture “Bird in Space” was the cause of a court battle in 1926-27 when US customs officials refused to believe that bronze piece was art. They imposed the tariff for manufactured metal objects, 40% of the sale price or about $230 dollars. Marcel Duchamp (who brought the sculptures from Europe), American photographer Edward Steichen (who was to take possession of Bird in Space), and Brâncuşi were furious. Under pressure from the press and artists, U.S. customs agreed to rethink their classification of the items, but until then released the sculptures on bond under “Kitchen Utensils and Hospital Supplies.” (Wikipedia)

2. In the movie Inception, The “Penrose Stairs” (with a woman perpetually picking up papers) is a reference to a lithograph print by the Dutch graphic artist M.C. Escher. First printed in 1960, the drawing is usually called “Ascending and Descending” or “The Infinite Staircase”. Escher is well-known for his drawings exploring optical illusions and real architectural, mathematical, and philosophical principles rendered in fantastical ways. (IMDB)

3. The Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci may contain hidden code. Art historians are investigating a real life “Da Vinci Code” style mystery after discovering tiny numbers and letters painted into the eyes of the Mona Lisa. Members of Italy’s National Committee for Cultural Heritage have revealed that by magnifying high resolution images of the Mona Lisa’s eyes letters and numbers can be seen. Silvano Vinceti, president of the Committee said, “You have to remember the picture is almost 500 years old so it is not as sharp and clear as when first painted….From the preliminary investigations we have carried out we are confident they are not a mistake and were put there by the artist.” (Daily Mail UK)

4. The well known saying “15 Minutes of Fame” was coined by Andy Warhol. The expression is a paraphrase of a line in Warhol’s exhibition catalog for an exhibit at the Moderna Museet, in Stockholm from 1968. The catalog read, “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.” In 1979 Warhol stated his claim, “…my prediction from the sixties finally came true: In the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes.” Becoming bored with constantly being asked about this particular statement, Warhol attempted to confuse interviewers by changing the statement variously to “In the future 15 people will be famous” and “In 15 minutes everybody will be famous.” As it turns out, with the rise of celebrity culture, reality TV, YouTube, and the internet, Warhol’s statement has been quite prophetic. (Wikipedia)

5. Paul Cézanne rarely considered his paintings finished. His friend and dealer Ambroise Vollard observed that “when Cézanne laid a canvas aside, it was almost always with the intention of taking it up again, in the hope of bringing it to perfection.”One consequence of this was that Cézanne rarely signed his or dated his works making it difficult to determine the chronology of his works. (Princeton)

Art-e-Facts: 5 Random Art Facts – XX

June 30, 2011 By Wendy Campbell

1. When the Mona Lisa was stolen in August 1911, French poet Guillaume Apollinaire, who had once called for the Louvre to be “burnt down,” came under suspicion; he was arrested and put in jail. Apollinaire tried to implicate his friend Pablo Picasso, who was also brought in for questioning, but both were later exonerated. The real thief – Louvre employee Vincenzo Peruggia was discovered 2 years later and only served six months in jail for the crime. (Wikipedia)

2. Salvador Dali had a peculiar way of napping. Daily after his lunch, he would sit down with his arms extending beyond the chair’s arms. In one hand he would grasp a key between thumb and forefinger. After he fell asleep, his fingers would relax, the key would fall to the floor, the clatter would wake him up, and he would harvest the wild associations common to the first few minutes of sleep. (Washington Post)

3. The art market experiences similar bubbles to the stock market. For example, the art market soared in 1985 to 1990, when the compound annual return of the art market was 30%. It subsequently tanked in 1991-1995, losing 65% of its value. Art experienced another bubble in 2003 through 2007, during which the art index had at CAR of 20%. This bubble too burst with the collapse of the stock market 23.5%. For the past 10 and five year periods however, the Moses Mei All Art Index outperformed the stock market, returning a CAR of 5.5% and 3.3% respectively, compared with stock returns of -1.3% and -0.1%. (Pamela J. Black – On Wall Street)

4. Natural Ultramarine which is found in nature as a component of the semi precious stone lapis lazuli, is the most difficult pigment to grind by hand, and for all except the highest quality of mineral sheer grinding and washing produces only a pale grayish blue powder. The oldest use of lapis lazuli as a pigment can be seen in the 6th- and 7th-century AD cave paintings in Afghanistani, Zoroastrian and Buddhist temples, near the source of the mineral. The pigment was most extensively used during the 14th through 15th centuries, as its brilliance complemented the vermilion and gold of illuminated manuscripts and Italian panel paintings. Synthetic versions of ultramarine have been around since 1928 though it is not as vivid or permanent. (Wikipedia)

5. Tachisme, derived from the French word tache–stain, is a French style of abstract painting popular in the 1940s and 1950s. It is often considered to be the European equivalent to abstract expressionism. It was part of a larger postwar movement known as Art Informel which abandoned geometric abstraction in favour of a more intuitive form of expression, similar to action painting. (Wikipedia)

Art-e-Facts: 5 Random Art Facts XIX

May 20, 2011 By Wendy Campbell

1. Macro Photography is photography that is 1x magnification(1:1) or greater. For example, an insect that is 1/2 an inch when photographed on film at “life size” , it will take up 1/2 an inch on a piece of 35mm film. Macro photography allows us to experience what we would normally fail to notice with the naked eye. Up close, the eye of a lizard becomes a beautiful textured landscape, a tiny dust mite becomes what could be a creature out of a sci-fi movie, the fly on the wall seems to have an expression on its face.

2. En Plein Air is a French expression which means “in the open air”, and is particularly used to describe the act of painting outdoors. French Impressionist painters such as Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, Vincent van Gogh, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir advocated en plein air painting, and much of their work was done outdoors, in the diffuse light provided by a large white umbrella. The popularity of painting en plein air increased in the 1870s with the introduction of paints in tubes which were easy to transport.

3. Frottage is a technique developed by German artist Max Ernst in 1925. Drawings were made by placing sheets of paper over different objects such as floorboards and leaves, and rubbing with a stick of graphite. Through precise selection, combination, control of texture and some discreet additions, he was able to build up delicate, surprising images of fantasy landscapes, plants and creatures. He adapted this fundamentally simple technique to painting in the form of grattage, by which textures and patterns were made through simultaneously rubbing and scraping off layers of paint. Representational forms were then extracted from the whole by means of over-painting.

4. Dadaism is a cultural movement that began in Zurich, Switzerland, during World War I and peaked from 1916 to 1922. The movement involved visual arts, literature—poetry, art manifestoes, art theory—theatre, and graphic design. It concentrated its anti-war politics through a rejection of the prevailing standards in art through anti-art cultural works. Its purpose was to ridicule what its participants considered to be the meaninglessness of the modern world. In addition to being anti-war, Dada was also anti-bourgeois and anarchist in nature. Notable artists involved in the movement include: Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, Jean Arp, Andre Breton, and Man Ray.

5. Art Competitions formed part of the modern Olympic Games during its early years, from 1912 to 1952. The competitions were part of the original intention of the Olympic Movement’s founder, Pierre de Frédy, Baron de Coubertin. Medals were awarded for works of art inspired by sport, divided into five categories: architecture, literature, music, painting, and sculpture.

The juried art competitions were abandoned in 1954 because artists were considered to be professionals, while Olympic athletes were required to be amateurs. Since 1956, the Olympic cultural programme has taken their place.

Sources: Wikipedia (Art Competitions), Wikipedia (Dadaism), DAF (Frottage), DAF (Macro Photography), Wikipedia (en plein air)

Art-e-Facts: 5 Random Art Facts XVIII

February 22, 2011 By Wendy Campbell

1. Mannerism is a period of European art that emerged from the later years of the Italian High Renaissance around 1520. It lasted until about 1580 in Italy, when a more Baroque style began to replace it. Northern Mannerism continued into the early 17th century throughout much of Europe. Mannerism encompasses a variety of approaches influenced by, and reacting to, the harmonious ideals and restrained naturalism associated with artists such as Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, and early Michelangelo. The term is also used to refer to some Late Gothic painters working in northern Europe from about 1500 to 1530, especially the Antwerp Mannerists—a group unrelated to the Italian movement. Mannerism also has been applied by analogy to the Silver Age of Latin. (Wikipedia, Artcyclopedia)

2. Sequential Art is the use of a train of images deployed in sequence to graphic storytelling or convey information. The best-known example of sequential art is comics. The term was coined in 1985 by comics artist Will Eisner in his book Comics and Sequential Art. Scott McCloud, another comics artist, elaborated the explanation further, in his book Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. Sequential art predates comics by millennia. Some of the earliest examples are the cave paintings, Egyptian hieroglyphics and paintings and pre-Columbian American picture manuscripts, which were recurrent mediums of artistic expression. (ComicArt.com, Wikipedia)

3. Decalcomania, from the French décalcomanie, is a decorative technique by which engravings and prints may be transferred to pottery or other materials. It was invented in England about 1750 and imported into the United States at least as early as 1865. Its invention has been attributed to Simon François Ravenet, an engraver from France who later moved to England and perfected the process he called “decalquer” (which means to copy by tracing). The first known use of the French term décalcomanie, in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Eleanor’s Victory (1863), was followed by the English decalcomania in an 1865 trade show catalog (The Tenth Exhibition of the Massachusetts Charitable Mechanic Association). It was popularized during the ceramic transfer craze of the mid-1870s. Today the shortened version is “Decal”. Max Ernst also practiced decalcomania, as did Remedios Varo. (Wikipedia)

4. The New Objectivity (in German: ”Neue Sachlichkeit”) was an art movement that arose in Germany in the early 1920s as an outgrowth of, and in opposition to, expressionism. Gustav Friedrich Hartlaub coined the term in 1923 in a letter he sent to colleagues describing an exhibition he was planning saying “what we are displaying here is distinguished by the — in itself purely external — characteristics of the objectivity with which the artists express themselves. He identified two groups: the Verists, who “tear the objective form of the world of contemporary facts and represent current experience in its tempo and fevered temperature;” and the Magical Realists, who “search more for the object of timeless ability to embody the external laws of existence in the artistic sphere.” The movement essentially ended in 1933 with the fall of the Weimar Republic and the rise of the Nazis to power. (Wikipedia, Artcyclopedia)

5. The Bradshaw Rock Paintings are a distinctive style of rock art found in the Kimberley region of Western Australia. They are named after the pastoralist Joseph Bradshaw who was the first European to discover them in 1891. The Bradshaws are also known as Gwion Gwion by the local Aboriginal people. Scientists estimate that there may be more than 100,000 sites spread over 50,000 km of the Kimberley. In 1996 one of the paintings was dated by analysing an ancient wasp nest covering it (using thermoluminescence). The nest was found to be over 17,000 years old, indicating that some paintings are at least this old. (Bradshaw Foundation, Wikipedia)

Art-e-Facts: 5 Random Art Facts – XVII

January 13, 2011 By Wendy Campbell

1. “Art for art’s sake” is the English version of a French slogan, from the early 19th century, ”l’art pour l’art” , and expresses a philosophy that the intrinsic value of art, and the only “true” art, is divorced from any didactic, moral or utilitarian function. “The term is credited to Théophile Gautier (1811–1872). Such works are sometimes described as “autotelic”, from the Greek autoteles, “complete in itself”, a concept that has been expanded to embrace “inner-directed” or “self-motivated” human beings. A Latin version of this phrase, “Ars gratia artis”, is used as a slogan by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and appears in the circle around the roaring head of Leo the Lion in their motion picture logo. (Wikipedia)

2. Verism is the artistic preference of contemporary everyday subject matter instead of the heroic or legendary in art and literature; a form of realism. The word comes from Latin verus (true). Verism was often used by the Romans in marble sculptures of heads. Often described as “warts and all”, verism shows the imperfections of the subject, such as warts, wrinkles and furrows. (Wikipedia)

3. For decades, the Saturday Evening Post distinguished itself through its cover artwork. The most famous are by Norman Rockwell who created a total of 322 original covers for The Saturday Evening Post over 47 years. J.C. Leyendecker created over 320 covers, the most well known are his “New Year’s Baby” series which ran every year from 1908 to 1943.

4. In 2010, Picasso’s, Nude, Green Leaves and Bust sold for $106.5 million US to an anonymous buyer, setting a record for the sale of any work at auction. One of a series of highly prized, intimate portraits Picasso painted in 1932 of his lover, Marie-Thérèse Walter. (DAF)

5. Italy has by far the most art crime, with approximately 20,000 art thefts reported each year. Russia has the second most, with approximately 2000 art thefts reported per year. Italy’s government takes art crime very seriously and its Carabinieri are by far the most successful art squad worldwide, employing over 300 agents full time. (ARCA)

Art-e-Facts: 5 Random Art Facts XVI

November 2, 2010 By Wendy Campbell

1. Cloisonnism is a style of post-Impressionist painting with bold and flat forms separated by dark contours. The term was coined by critic Edouard Dujardin on occasion of the Salon des Indépendants, in March 1888. The name describes the technique of cloisonné, where wires (cloisons or “compartments”) are soldered to the body of the piece, filled with powdered glass, and then fired. Many of the same painters also described their works as Synthetism a closely related movement. The Yellow Christ by Paul Gauguin is often cited as a quintessential cloisonnist work. Gauguin reduced the image to areas of single colors separated by heavy black outlines. In such works he paid little attention to classical perspective and boldly eliminated subtle gradations of color — two of the most characteristic principles of post-Renaissance painting. (Wikipedia)

2. Les Automatistes were a group of Québécois artistic dissidents from Montreal, Canada. The movement was founded in the early 1940s by painter Paul-Émile Borduas. “Les Automatistes” were so called because they were influenced by Surrealism and its theory of automatism. Members included Marcel Barbeau, Roger Fauteux, Claude Gauvreau, Jean-Paul Riopelle, Pierre Gauvreau, Fernand Leduc, Jean-Paul Mousseau, and others. The group gained recognition and were exhibited in Paris and New York. Though it began as a visual arts group, it also spread to other forms of expression, such as drama, poetry and dance. (Wikipedia)

3. On December 8, 1980, famed American photographer Annie Leibovitz was sent to photograph John Lennon and Yoko Ono and created the now famous Lennon nude curled around a fully clothed Ono. Several hours after the photo shoot, Lennon was shot and killed. The photograph ran on the cover of Rolling Stone Lennon commemorative issue in January, 1981 and in 2005 was named best magazine cover from the past 40 years by the American Society of Magazine Editors.

4. Papier Collé (pasted paper) is a specific form of collage that is closer to drawing than painting. The Cubist painter Georges Braque first used it when he drew on imitation wood-grain paper that had been pasted onto white paper. Both Braque and Pablo Picasso made a number of papiers collés in the last three months of 1912 and in early 1913, with Picasso substituting the wood-grain paper favoured by Braque with pages from the newspaper Le Journal in an attempt to introduce the reality of everyday life into the pictures. (Tate)

5. Revolutionary Baroque painter Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio was infamous for his unruly life. He was known for brawling and was arrested and imprisoned numerous times. In May of 1606, Caravaggio killed (possibly by accident) a man named Ranuccio Tomassoni. Wanted for murder, he fled Rome for Naples. In 1610, believing he would be pardoned for his crime, he began his journey back to Rome but never made it. Carvaggio’s death is the subject of much debate. No body was found and there were several accounts of his death including a religious assassination and malaria.

Art-e-Facts: 5 Random Art Facts XV

September 30, 2010 By Wendy Campbell

1. Leonardo daVinci’s famous “Last Supper“ (1498) is not a true fresco. Da Vinci painted on a dry wall rather than on wet plaster and chose to seal the stone wall with a layer of pitch, gesso and mastic, then paint onto the sealing layer with tempera. As a result, the painting started to flake soon after it was completed. By 1556, the painting was so deteriorated that the figures were unrecognizable. From 1978 to 1999, Pinin Brambilla Barcilon guided a major restoration project which undertook to permanently stabilize the painting, and reverse the damage caused by dirt, pollution, and previous restoration attempts. This restoration took 21 years and on May 28, 1999 the painting was put back on display. When it was unveiled, considerable controversy was aroused by the dramatic changes in colours, tones, and even some facial shapes.

2. Painters Eleven were a collective of abstract artists active in Canada from 1953 to 1960. The group, including Jack Bush, Oscar Cahén, Hortense Gordon, Thomas Hodgson, Alexandra Luke, J.W.G. Macdonald, Ray Mead, Kazuo Nakamura, William Ronald, Harold Town, and Walter Yarwood joined together in 1953 with the purpose of exhibiting abstract art in Toronto, Canada. Painters Eleven are credited with the acculturation of English Canada’s art-buying public to abstract expressionist painting. Their influence on the next generation of Canadian artists was immense, and their art is now a prominent feature in public galleries and corporate and private collections collections throughout Canada and in many international collections.

3. Synchromism was an art movement founded in 1912 by American artists Stanton MacDonald-Wright and Morgan Russell. It is based on the idea that color and sound are similar phenomena, and that the colors in a painting can be orchestrated in the same harmonious way that a composer arranges notes in a symphony. Macdonald-Wright and Russell believed that by painting in color scales, their work could evoke musical sensations. It became abstract and expressive, hoping to unite visual and auditory stimuli through a symphony of color. This phenomenon of ‘hearing’ a color or the pairing of two or more senses – synesthesia – was also central to the work of Wassily Kandinsky, who was developing his own synesthetic paintings, or ‘compositions’, in Europe around the same time.

4. Automatic drawing was developed by the surrealists, as a means of expressing the subconscious. In it, the hand is allowed to move randomly across the paper applying chance and accident to free the artist of rational control. The drawing produced may be attributed in part to the subconscious and may reveal something of the psyche, which would otherwise be repressed. Automatic drawing was pioneered by André Masson and was practised by Joan Miró, Salvador Dalí, Jean Arp and André Breton. The technique was adapted to painting and other media including computer graphics. Pablo Picasso was also thought to have expressed a type of automatic drawing in his later work, and particularly in his etchings and lithographs of the 1960s. Surrealist artists often found that ultimately their use of automatic drawing was not entirely automatic and that it did involve some form of conscious intervention to make the image or painting visually acceptable or comprehensible. “…Masson admitted that his ‘automatic’ imagery involved a two-fold process of unconscious and conscious activity….”

5. The Venus of Willendorf is one of the earliest images of the body made by humankind and is in the collection of the Naturhistorisches Museum in Vienna. The sculpture is an 11 cm high statuette of a female figure estimated to have been made between 27,000 BC to 20,000 BC. It was discovered in 1908 by archaeologist Josef Szombathy at a paleolithic site near Willendorf, a village in Lower Austria near the city of Krems. It is carved from an oolitic limestone that is not local to the area, and tinted with red ochre. Several similar sculptures of this kind and have been discovered and are collectively referred to as Venus figurines. The apparent large size of the breasts and abdomen, and the detail put into the vulva, have led many scholars to interpret the figure as a fertility symbol. The figure has no visible face, her head being covered with circular horizontal bands of what might be rows of braided hair or a type of headdress. Other differing theories of the Venus figurines and their purposes have ranged from the figurines being examples of Paleolithic art representative of the various population phases and periods of the Aurignacian culture to the figurines as goddess’s or symbols of a matriarchy in the hunter gatherer tribes.

Sources: Wikipedia (da Vinci), The Canadian Encyclopedia, Wikipedia (Painters Eleven), Wikipedia (Synchromism), Wikipedia (Automatic Drawing), Wikipedia, Minnesota State University (Venus of Willendorf)