Google Art Project

A story in El Universal lead me to this: Google exhibirá en línea más de 30 mil obras de arte. Subtitled En Art Project participan 151 museos de 40 países, entre ellos México, España y Argentina. El programa optimiza la consulta, la riqueza y diversidad de las obras presentadas.

Cada museo o institución asociada decide y elige qué obras quiere dejar para su libre consulta en Art Project. (Foto: Archivo EL UNIVERSAL)

Each participating museum or institution will be able to decide which works of art it wishes to have a prt in the Project.

Más de 30 mil obras de arte de 151 museos de 40 países, entre ellos España, México, Argentina, Colombia y Perú, serán accesibles a partir de ahora por internet dentro del programa "Art Project", que hoy presentó Google en el Museo de Orsay de París. 

Over 30 thousand art works from 151 museums from 40 countries, among them Spain, Mexico, Argentina Colombia and Peru will be accessible online beginning now, in the Project, which Google presented today in the Orsay Museum, in Paris.

Paris Metro

Found this in my files, dated 10 April 2001. This is NOT the Metro stop near the hotel where we stayed in Paris.

Great Buildings Collection. Architect: Hector Guimard.

Chopin's 'Soul and Heart'

By BYRON JANIS

March 1 was the 200th anniversary of the birth of the great composer and pianist Frédéric François Chopin. Or was it? Not according to his sister Ludwika, Franz Liszt and Chopin's close friend Jules Fontana. They all said, at one time or another, that he was born on March 1, 1 809, despite Chopin's insisting his birthday was a year later. To add to the mystery, there is a birth certificate issued by the parish church in Brochów, Poland (and on display there to this day)—near Zelazowa Wola, the small town outside Warsaw where Chopin was born. It gives us still another date: Feb. 22, 1810, the same date inscribed on Polish monuments and on his burial site at Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris.

Getty Images - Portrait of Frederic Francois Chopin (1810 - 1849), Polish composer and pianist

Mr. Janis is a world-renowned concert pianist particularly known for his interpretations of Chopin. PBS will air a documentary about his life in October and J. Wiley will publish his memoirs in the fall.

Kandinsky

Sketch for "Composition II." 1909-1910

View Slideshow




Beginning in 1929, Solomon R. Guggenheim, advised by his friend Hilla Rebay, the notoriously difficult painter, collector and connoisseur of modernist art, bought more than 150 works by Vasily Kandinsky (1866-1944), along with many by other similarly high-minded artists. In 1939, Guggenheim put his collection on display at his Museum of Non-Objective Painting—the direct ancestor of the present Frank Lloyd Wright-designed museum on Fifth Avenue that bears his name. Rebay was the first director. "Uncle Solomon's garage," as his niece, the vanguard enthusiast Peggy Guggenheim, called the museum's first incarnation, included permanent galleries devoted to Kandinsky, a reflection of Guggenheim and Rebay's enthusiasm for the rigorous nonrepresentational approach the painter developed in his quest for what he called, in his writings, "the spiritual in art." Now, the Guggenheim returns to its original mission with a comprehensive retrospective, "Kandinsky," opening Friday and on view through Jan. 13. It's the first major exhibition devoted to the Russian-born artist and theorist—possibly the very first abstract painter—since the Guggenheim's three-part survey more than a quarter century ago.

That exhibition is surveyed in the book Kandinsky at the Guggenheim. (1983). Vivian Endicott Barnett. New York : Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum : Abbeville Press. One of the paintings accompanying the article in today's print Wall Street Journal, and part of the online slideshow is Black Lines (Schwarze Linien). December 1913. Oil on canvas. 51 x 51 5/8 in. The painting is also the cover of the forementioned book.

Another painting in both locales is Succession. April 1935. Oil on canvas. 81 x 100 cm.

The forementioned book is one of several that HWPL has; it also owns video about him, and 26 slides of some of his artworks.













The New York Times also has a review of the art exhibit, and accompanying art work.

Surrealist biomorphism: “Capricious Forms” (1937), a work from Kandinsky’s Paris period, is part of a retrospective at the Guggenheim.











Picture With a Circle" (1911)


Audio Slide Show Color, Movement, Transformation