Domenico Ghirlandaio

Domenico Ghirlandaio, Italian Renaissance painter from Florence. Read about a fresco he painted, Madonna della Misericordia, in the Chapel of the Vespucci, in Ognissanti, in which Amerigo is present, in The mysterious history of Columbus : an exploration of the man, the myth, the legacy , by John Noble Wilford.

 

 Amerigo is second from left.

Upper Broadway's buried treasures

Standing on what was once the estate of the bird painter John James Audubon, known today as Audubon Terrace, at Broadway and 155th Street, is an assemblage of elegant Beaux-Arts structures built during the first three decades of the 20th century. Some of the original tenants—including the American Indian-Heye Foundation, the American Geographical Society and the American Numismatic Society—have moved out, but fortunately the Hispanic Society of America remains firmly planted.
In fact, it is taking over some of the vacated spaces. Now that the Hispanic Society has completed the first phase, at a cost of about $5.5 million, of its continuing renovation under the direction of architect Maria C. Romañach and with the aid of Spain's Ministry of Culture, New Yorkers no longer have any excuse to disregard its jaw-dropping collections.

One of our walking tours a few years back covered exactly this area; I remember Trinity cemetery across 155th Street. We walked around the area.

Upon entering the Society's elegant courtyard, the first work one encounters is the magnificent and commanding portrait by Francisco Goya of "The Duchess of Alba" (1797). Several other Goyas are on the balcony above, which serves as a venue for a quick survey in Spanish painting from the late Renaissance to the late 19th century.

 I don't think of a Goya anywhere outside a museum.

 The Hispanic Society of America
Joaquín Sorolla's 'Ayamonte'

 The Hispanic Society of America
Diego Velázquez's 'Portrait of a Little Girl'

Le Blute-Fin Mill

This image released by Museum de Fundatie, Zwolle, Netherlands, on Wednesday, Feb. 24, 2010, shows a painting entitled 'Le Blute-Fin Mill', by Vincent van Gogh. The newly authenticated Van Gogh has gone on display 35 years after an art collector bought it in Paris, convinced it was painted by the famed Dutch master but never able to prove it. Louis van Tilborgh, curator of research at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, said 'Le Blute-Fin Mill' was done in 1886. He said its large human figures are unusual for a Van Gogh landscape but it has his typically bright colors.

(AP Photo/Museum de Fundatie, Zwolle)

Heart of the Andes

For all their powerful visual drama, many of the iconic landscapes of the American painter Frederic Edwin Church (1826-1900) are relatively small in size and were originally intended for private collections. But one of his greatest paintings is also one of his largest, the monumental "Heart of the Andes," currently on view in the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Lehman Wing. Painted in 1859, this canvas (measuring more than 10 feet by 5 feet) embodies Church's large-scale vision of scenic majesty and his overriding belief that God was revealed in the wonders of nature.


Like other members of the Hudson River School, Church was influenced by the idea of the "sublime and picturesque" initially published by the 18th-century Anglo-Irish writer and statesman Edmund Burke. A 1756 Burke essay attempted to identify the differences between that which is beautiful and that which is sublime or great. Beautiful objects, wrote Burke, are "comparatively small," "smooth and polished," "light and delicate." Burke identified sublime or great objects as "vast in their dimensions . . . rugged and negligent"; "the great ought to be dark and gloomy . . . solid, and even massive."


Hudson River School painters ventured beyond the picturesque rolling scenery of the Catskills and New England in search of the sublime. Church set his sights toward South America. In this he was influenced not only by Burke, but by the German naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt, who had toured that continent extensively from 1799 to 1804. In 1807, Humboldt urged painters to "seize, with the first freshness of a pure youthful mind, the living image of manifold beauty and grandeur in the humid mountain valleys of the tropical world."


Church voyaged to South America in 1853 and 1857, exploring the rivers, lakes and mountains of Colombia and Ecuador, and making numerous sketches and studies. He turned them into finished works in his Manhattan studio. It was an artist's duty, he believed, to record details of topography and plant-life with scientific accuracy, but also to arrange those details imaginatively to achieve the most effective—indeed the most exalted—composition possible.


Church therefore painted "Heart of the Andes" not to reproduce a specific Andean view, but to create an ideal one. Onto the tradition of idealized, sometimes dreamlike landscapes of such 17th-century French masters as Nicolas Poussin and Claude Lorrain, Church grafted the fruits of his meticulous studies—not only of mountains, plains, rivers and waterfalls, of every kind of tree and shrub, bird and beast he encountered, but of the atmospheric effects of clouds and skies in the region. Not to mention details of local architecture and costumes of the native folk, which he carefully included in his composition.

 

Our eyes travel from the top of the great canvas—the cloud-figured sky forming a deliberately "Olympian" meteorological backdrop—along the diagonal planes of the looming mountains. The snow-clad peaks in the extreme distance are seemingly born of the sky-blue tear in the cloud cover, the violet and purple shadows of the closer range represent Church's careful record of the region's geology. Near the center of the canvas, a broad, grassy plateau ends suddenly in an escarpment sheltering a forest and a village—replete with church tower—beside a river whose placid waters reflect the architecture. Closer still is the opalescent mist of the river's steplike waterfall, and to its left, a roadside shrine with its group of praying travelers. Equally clear is the superbly rendered tangle of vegetation and wildflowers in the lower-right corner of the picture, the various textures of ferns, foliage, bark and exposed roots in the copse of trees clinging to the eroded cliff just beyond.

For sheer technique, one of the painting's most telling passages is the juxtaposition of the leafy crown of the tallest birch tree in that copse, vividly painted with innumerable strokes of greens and browns, against the soft misted grays of the mountain peak beyond: Though we are looking at two thin layers of oil paint, the contrast of textures persuades our eyes to perceive immense distance between the two. And as the final touch, in the far-left foreground is Church's signature "carved" into the highlighted trunk of another tree.

Obviously this kind of Romantic-scientific thinking was not limited to painting at the time, and Church's contemporary, Walt Whitman, evokes a similar vision in these lines: "O sun of noon refulgent! / . . . Thou that impartially infoldest all, not only continents, seas, / Thou that to grapes and weeds and little wild flowers givest so liberally, / Shed, shed thyself on mine and me . . ."

El Greco in . . . Greece

The stunning 1983 discovery of the signature of Domenikos Theotokopoulos on an exquisite Byzantine icon dramatically enlarged our knowledge of the enigmatic painter far better known as El Greco (1541-1614). This small egg tempera on wood panel depicting the Dormition of the Virgin has long been owned by the archdiocese of the Greek island of Syros but was rarely seen. It had suffered passages of overpainting and minor abrasions, and these were delicately removed or restored in the wake of its new acclaim. Yet even with some of its decorative surface effaced, it bears the markings of what would be El Greco's richly synthetic career. The panel follows the traditional, stylized format of the popular Byzantine subject, and embodies the deeply emotive character of Greek icon painting as a whole. But it reflects as well a burgeoning interest in the depiction of real space and of animated, sculptural figures, and so suggests the artist's early exposure to the naturalistic painting of Italy even before he sailed from his native Crete for Venice around 1567.

View Slideshow


The Onassis Cultural Center in New York

Hudson River Homecoming

The majestic paintings of the 19th-century Hudson River School enjoy tremendous popularity today because of their Romantic and often highly dramatic depiction of nature. America's first national school of landscape painting, it was essentially founded by the English-born Thomas Cole (1801-1848), who regarded America as "the new Eden" and painted it as such. Cole produced many of his visionary, panoramic landscapes and architectural fantasies as allegories of human experience, often imbuing them with religious overtones in tune with the public spirit of his time.

Thomas Cole, 'Scene From "The Last of the Mohicans"' (1827).

His mantle was worn with increased sophistication by his pupil Frederic Edwin Church (1826-1900), by the Düsseldorf-trained Albert Bierstadt (1830-1902), and by such contemporaries as Asher Durand (1796-1886), Sanford Robinson Gifford (1823-1880) and John Frederick Kensett (1816-72). Moreover, the school's Romantic urge to glorify the serene wonders of nature—with its mountains veiled in mist and scenery often bathed in the glowing light of dawn or sunset—influenced the somewhat younger group of landscape painters known as the Luminists and served as a springboard for a later generation of artists including George Inness, Albert Pinkham Ryder and, of course, Winslow Homer.

 Surprisingly, one of the finest and earliest collections of the Hudson River School is maintained not along the Hudson, but on the banks of the Connecticut River at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford. Founded in 1842, and housed partly in its original castellated building designed by Alexander Jackson Davis, the Wadsworth Atheneum is the nation's oldest public art museum. Its riches include important old masters, a magisterial representation of 19th- and 20th-century masterpieces and a vast collection of important decorative arts.


Hudson River school : masterworks from the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art.

Q 758.1 K 

Caillebotte

New book. Painting is entitled Oarsmen rowing on the Yerres, 1877.

The Floor Scrapers is one of his magnificent paintings. There is, of course, a website: http://www.gustavcaillebotte.org/. Back on 18 November 2008 I made an entry on Caillebotte.

Vermeer's "The Milkmaid"

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