BS: Fine Art Resources

Subject: BS: Fine Art Resources
From: JohnInKansas
Date: 08 Oct 02 - 04:44 AM


A recent quest to satisfy a personal curiosity (remotely related to folklore) led to my finding several web resources that might be of interest to some others. Maybe someone's kid needs resources for a school paper, if nothing else.

Art History Resources on the Web, Chris Witcombe's Research Resources page. Artists categorized by "period" and "school" with links to representative sites with samples of the artists' work. No pictures at this site - but it's the front door to about anything you'd likely want to know about the history of "fine art." Also very handy if you know an artist you like, and want to find others similar - use the "search on page" function in your browser to find one, and see how he/she is classified, and go from there.

ArtCyclopedia, the best place to go to find a specific artist or work of art. Primarily a search engine, with links to the museums actually "owning" artworks, and to museums and web sites that display scans of specific works or collections by specific artists. This is the place to go first if you know the artist's name. Some links to sites selling prints, but they are generally easy to identify, and you don't have to go there - lots of options. For the casual browser, "web collections" for an artist (scroll down on the artist's page) are most useful.

Art Renewal Center. Front pages "feature" a popup about the ARC or its recent activities, but no advertising except of themselves. A very fine collection of jpg scans, with most running 35K to 120K or so, and with separately downloadable "high-resolution" scans (up to 270K or more) of selected works. Extensive biographies of many artists, along with commentaries - if you look for them a little. Good documentation on individual paintings, but usually requires some reformat when copying. You can go directly to the Artist Index at ARC if you wish. This is probably the "nicest" place to just "wander through the museum."

Web Gallery of Art (euroweb) home page.
Nice background music at the home page. For routine "looking," the WGA has the most uniformly/completely documented scans, (and easiest to copy and paste documentation) usually giving artist, date created, medium, size, and present location - if known. Good quality scans, typically between 35K and 200K jpeg. One of the fastest loading sites, for the thumbnails, making it a fairly easy place to just "wander," although some artists are split into multiple "threads," making for occasional "backups" and "restarts." You can go directly to the WGA Artist Index, but you don't automatically get the nice music there.

CGFA, Carol Gerten-Jackson's Fine Arts(?) site.
Not as large a collection as preceding ones, but other sites frequently include scan filenames with a _CGF or _CGFA included, indicating it's a respected source.

Olga's Gallery index page.
Quite a few popups. Reasonable quality, but has a mixture of jpg, bmp, and gif scans. A couple of "special interest" galleries are "linked" from Olga's, notably the "orientalist-art" sites. A few might want to look at Harem Paintings or Odalisques.

Numerous other sites have very fine displays, but these few seem to form a "core" of the easily accessible "fine arts" resources. Many museums have web sites, but generally only display scans of works they own; so the more general collections at the above sites are a lot quicker when you want an overview of an artist or two.

More about my quest, and its (tenuous) relation to folk music, perhaps later.

John

Subject: RE: BS: Fine Art Resources
From: Greyeyes
Date: 08 Oct 02 - 07:38 AM

I'm constantly on the look-out for useful links to add to our libraries website, so this is really useful; thanks.

Subject: RE: BS: Fine Art Resources
From: JohnInKansas
Date: 08 Oct 02 - 08:03 AM


A year or so ago, I finally got a copy of a "Session Book" that's been used by a local bunch of people who call themselves "Irish players," and found that it was a mishmash of largely un-useful junk. It had apparently been started with a "core" of tunes (legible) assembled by some "unidentified" person, added to with a second smaller "collection" of partly legible tunes, with random inserts of whatever various people had "downloaded" from unidentified sources and passed out to whoever happened to be nearby. A perfect session book!

One of the reasons it took me more than five years to get a copy was that noone wanted to "claim ownership," possibly due to fear of the copyright police.

I decided that that situation could be remedied, so I reset all the identifiable tunes in consistent notation, verified as far as possible the "trad" status of all of them (excluding a half dozen found to be "owned," which were omitted) and put them all in a book, with a floppy of simple midis for each tune. The book has been offered "at cost" to the locals - but I find that most of them consider fair cost to be "I can copy Joe's at the office," and since Joe now has the only copy I sold - - at least they've got something legible.

But:

In order to "decorate things" a little, I inserted a few "almost appropriate" illustrations - mostly scans from Dover "copyright free illustration" books. I recently came across a source that partially identified one of the illustrations I had used, and I decided to see if I could track it (or any of the others) down.

It turns out that the first picture is not hard to find. Put "Devil with Bagpipes" into Google and you get a couple of pictures identifying it as by Erhard Schoen, ca 1530. (I called it "First Time Guest at a session (as seen by the regulars)" in the book.) Actually finding anything about who Erhard Schoen was is a little more difficult - but it's there if you poke around.

THE FOLK CONNECTION: It was while looking for a second picture ("My office staff - yeah, sure!" - only remotely similar to Tintoretto's "Women Playing Music") that I came across an apparently authoritative statement to the effect that "all sexy/sensual/suggestive pictures in classic art contain elements of sadism." This was too much like the commonly bandied complaints about all the blood and gore ("The woman always gets murdered") in folk music, and it called for immediate research.

Having recently found the Art History Resources site (see previous post) I felt obligated to begin with the 14th century and look at representative samples of all the sexy/sensual/suggestive pictures I could find. This is not as much fun as it may sound like at first. There are a lot of ugly/repulsive/nasty pictures to be viewed in finding the "good stuff" (artisticly good, that is - of course).

The first conclusion I came to was: NEVER DOWNLOAD A FILE WITHOUT LOGGING WHAT IT IS AND WHERE YOU GOT IT. I eventually found it helpful to "save as" using a filename consisting of "Artist_PaintingName_Site.jpg," AND to paste the artwork information into a log in Word at the time of downloading. Going back to look for something can be a real PIA, if you don't remember where you got it.

My tentative conclusion on the original question is that sadism is generally present - to some degree - in most artworks with a "religious" theme (i.e. the religion of the day), but the vast majority of "nudes" in early classic art use the excuse of "foreign or antiquarian" themes (Greek and Roman mythology, predominantly, with a few "Oriental" themes) and only rarely have overt sadistic content. It's an open question, though. I found only one painting prior to about 1800 that was "just a pretty (semi-naked) woman" without a "theme" or "moral" obviously attached.

It is fairly easy to question whether more than a very few artists prior to the early 19th century ever actually saw a naked female - but fertile imaginations can make some nice pictures too.

Having never "studied" art before, it's been fun. Now what do I do with 1200 jpg files and my 29MB pdf of the "collection" I made for my "analysis"?

John

Subject: RE: BS: Fine Art Resources
From: GUEST,Fred Miller
Date: 08 Oct 02 - 09:25 AM

John, do you remember where you found the statement that all sexy/sensuous representations in classical art contain elements of sadism? Do they mean Classical as in Greek? All those broken noses? the amputated arms of Venus? Do they mean that nudity was always meant as a signifier of vulnerability, to an extent that it had an innate sadistic element when depicted? I majored in naked women in college, and I don't get it. But then, although I never fell below an A in an art history class, I barely understood it as a subject at all. I think they ought to teach aesthetics.

Subject: RE: BS: Fine Art Resources
From: GUEST,Bill Kennedy
Date: 08 Oct 02 - 10:08 AM

there is that oft repeated and probably apocryphal tale of John Ruskin fainting on his wedding night when he discovered his wife had pubic hair, having only seen ancient classical representations of the female form. Interesting show and catalog from the Tate, now at Brooklyn museum, on the Victorian Nude. Anyone that says 'all' anything is usually off the mark, and I don't think there are elements of sadism in a fractin of a percent of paintings from the 14th c. onward, or before for that matter, I don't know where that statement was from , but it's obviously part of the writer's personal agenda & opinion, not real history.

Subject: RE: BS: Fine Art Resources
From: JohnInKansas
Date: 08 Oct 02 - 10:47 AM

The statement was in a commentary at one of the web sites I visited early in my tour of the net, and I didn't make a note of the source. I took it as a slightly veiled reference to censorship - whether by "the church" or via the inhibitions of art patrons. It clearly was a commentary on the art of "the Christian era."

Obviously, I used it as a convenient "excuse" to go look for pictures of naked women.

It was apparently "acceptable" to portray nudity in a "Classical Antiquity" setting, since most patrons "knew" from all the naked Greek and Roman statues that "all of them" were wildly lascivious - hence one could claim "historical accuracy." While some of the legends are pretty raw, my own personal moral perspective does not give credence to the prevalence of "sadistic" content in many of these. The moral rationalisation "but we're not like that" is probably a central element in rendering these depictions "acceptable."

A very few "biblical" heroines could be depicted nude, with Eve of course leading the pack (punished for original sin). "Susanna and the Elders" (brutally assaulted, and falsely accused by authority) probably comes a close second, with "Judith" (seduction and murder "for the good of the people") trailing well behind. "Lot and his Daughters" (incest and bad reputation) trails along somewhere in this group. It was quite a few years before "The Magdalene" became a briefly popular subject - and then never "quite" nude, just haphazardly draped. It does seem that all of these subjects suffered greatly, or came to a bad end.

My own generalization would be that it seems it was always necessary to "justify" a nude female with some appropriate "moral message."

Giovanni Bellini's "Naked Young Woman in Front of the Mirror" from 1515, stands out as about the only "early" nude I found that's just a pretty picture. (Of course, maybe I just don't know the story that goes with it?) Given the "stylized" depiction common for the period, this picture is also astonishingly "modern."

But then, I've only been an art student for about a month.

John

Subject: RE: BS: Fine Art Resources
From: JohnInKansas
Date: 08 Oct 02 - 08:37 PM

It should be emphasized that the resources given in the opening post in this thread are reputable, and that the subject matter discussed here is a very narrow sampling of the few works of art that were "appropriate" to my very specifically delineated "research." These few works are in no way representative of the vast majority of the works that will be found using those resources. The resources themselves are, in my opinion, appropriate for use with and by children mature enough to deal with the subject matter typical of "formalized art," with the same appropriate supervision needed for any kind of work involving the web.

Discussion and links that follow in this post relate to the subjects of nudity and sensuality in art.

CHILDREN OF IMPRESSIONABLE AGE SHOULD ASK A PARENT OR OTHER RESPECTED ADULT TO "PREVIEW" THE LINKS THAT FOLLOW TO DETERMINE WHETHER THEY MAY BE APPROPRIATELY VIEWED BY THE CHILD - BEFORE THEY CLICK.

Adults who do not find the subject matter to their liking are welcome to skip to the next post, or find another thread - and DON'T CLICK HERE.

I found that most of the Greek/Roman themes, and the paintings and sculptures based on them, were sufficiently familiar to me to present no real "aha insights." The following are a few "examples" that did, for one reason or another, impress me in some way. Others may have a different reaction, but...

JUST A NICE PICTURE - Nearly the only example I found in "early CE art" of "just a pretty face" without moralizing, rationalizing, or otherwise apologizing:

Bellini, Giovanni, Italian painter, Venetian school (b. ca. 1426, Venezia, d. 1516, Venezia)
"Naked Young Woman in Front of the Mirror," 1515, Oil on canvas, 62 x 79 cm
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

Giovanni Bellini at WGA Click on "Paintings after 1509" and go to the 4th picture from the bottom. Click on the picture to enlarge. The third picture from the bottom provides a "detail" from the painting.

PRETTIEST EVE - "Eve" is an automatic nude, and is without doubt the "most painted" subject in the category. In my own thoroughly biased opinion, the "prettiest Eve" I found is a "late-comer," appearing after it apparently became more acceptable to paint "realistically" (or after a few more painters had actually seen a naked woman). Perhaps it's a little unfair to compare something this "modern" to the older artists, bu it's one I'd not seen before, and the painter is apparently not well known:

Wiertz, Antoine (1806-1865): Belgian Romantic
"Eve experiencing her first guilt after sinning," 1839, Oil on canvas, 134 x 67 cm
Left hand section of the triptych "Christ in the Tomb."
Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels, Belgium

Antoine Wiertz at ArtMagick. Click on the first painting to enlarge and show more info on the painting. Click again on the enlarged painting to get an even larger one.

SWEET SUSANNAH - (Susana, Susannah, or Susanna) Susanna and the Elders was a very popular subject, almost rivaling Eve for frequency of painings. The most commonly seen is perhaps:

Allori, Alessandro, Italian painter, Florentine school (b. 1535, Firenze, d. 1607, Firenze)
"Susanna and The Elders," date unknown, Oil on canvas, 202 x aa7 cm
Musée Magnin, Lyon

Alessandro Allori at WGA third painting.

Not often seen, and to my eye a lot prettier (personal taste?):

Reni, Guido, Italian Baroque Era Painter, C.1573-1642
"Susanna and the Elders," c.1620 Oil on canvas 44.49 x 46.46 inches / 113 x 118 cm
Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence, Italy

Guido Reni at WGA. Click "Paintings (Page 1)" and go to last picture on the page. Click to enlarge.

STUNNING IMPACT - Your mileage may vary, but this one picture stands out as the one that made me stop and just look. Perhaps it doesn't stand up as well to repeated or prolonged viewing as some others, but "That There's a GRRRRRL!" (It helps to know the story?)

van Hemessen, Jan Sanders, Netherlandish Mannerist Painter, C.1500-1566
"Judith," 1540, Oil on panel
Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago

van Hemessen at WGA 7th picture.

MOST AMAZING - C'mon folks, this here's a mealy-mouthed wimp-assed POET, fer cryin' out loud - and he did THAT? And then he QUIT? And that's the only one he ever did?

at ARC

Lots more - that's just sample to get you started if you're interested.

Do your own research on the more "modern" Bouguereau (try ARC), Waterhouse, Alma-Tadema, Ingres, Leighton, Major, etc.

Those who wan't the more "bizarre modern" stuff can put either of the "two Peruvians" into a search at ArtCyclopedia - not to find the Peruvians, but to find the web sites that do that stuff (2 Peruvians = Vargas and Boris Vallejo)

John

Subject: RE: BS: Fine Art Resources
From: GUEST,Fred Miller
Date: 09 Oct 02 - 06:40 PM

Thanks for putting this stuff together here, it's a fun and interesting batch of links, and I plan to nose around more in it.

Btw, the first artist that ever mattered to me, when I was a kid, was Leonardo, and I recently looked at those things again after years. It's funny how much I'd never noticed about the stylistic effects that got to me--like his feeling for that certain grey, evenly lit weather, the abstract almost 2 tone faces, how he rarely ever painted the whites of eyes. Now it leaps right out at me.

Subject: RE: BS: Fine Art Resources
From: Glade
Date: 09 Oct 02 - 08:53 PM

Lucas Cranach the Elder painted 'Venus in Landscape' and 'The Judgement of Paris' sometime in the 1500's (he died c. 1554 - it's on record, I just can't rememember the exact date). The Venus is especially non-moralising and nonsadistic as far as I can see - just a lovely, high breasted, long-waisted young woman strolling along in a large hat.
The sites are cool - thanks,

Glade

Subject: RE: BS: Fine Art Resources
From: JohnInKansas
Date: 10 Oct 02 - 01:49 AM

Cranach, Lucas the Elder German painter (b. 1472, Kronach, d. 1553,
Weimar). Also known as: Lukas Cranach the Elder. Father of: Lucas Cranach II

There are a number of paintings with "Classic Greek/Roman" themes that, at least at first glance, appear to escape the "necessary moral" justification - but it does appear that the fact of their being a "foreign" (time or place) subject was one of the ways an artist found it "permissible" to paint such subjects. He probably couldn't have called it "the cutie next door."

The moral may have been "They did ..., but we don't, if we want to go to heaven." Perhaps there was even the implied - "we know what happened to them. They're not around anymore and we broke the noses off all their (obscene) statues."

Incidentally, perhaps the "prettiest" nude Leonardo did was called "Leda" (and the Swan). Unfortunately, the painting frequnetly passed of as his is now attributed to "Leonardo school" with the notation "the original does not survive."

I certainly don't want to be seen as "defending" the proposition about cruelty/sadism - anymore than I'd want to defend "the girl always dies in folk songs." It was just a convenient "hook" to get into a real look at some good stuff that I missed while I was busy taking my 11 semesters of calculus.

Unfortunately, I may have to back out of this whole thing. I keep coming up with nagging little questions begging to be answered, like:

How many times did Boucher copy that painting of the poor little O'Neill girl? I find at least 3 that various web sites try to pass of as the same one.

And what happened to Flora's nipple (Carriera)?

John

John

Subject: RE: BS: Fine Art Resources
From: JohnInKansas
Date: 05 Feb 03 - 02:42 AM

My most recent visit to The Art Renewal Museum found their pop-up (used for "current events") touting a drawing contest for high school age students. Three place prizes awarded, grades 9 thru 12, for "realistic drawings only."

Entries can be mailed in, contest ending May 1.

Details at the pop-up link on the above site, or at the sponsor's own site at Sherry Ross Contests

Anyone with kids in the right age range might take a look.

John

Subject: RE: BS: Fine Art Resources
From: GUEST
Date: 05 Feb 03 - 10:57 AM

The late Sir Kenneth Clark wrote an entire book on the subject of the nude in art. Titled "The Nude." It's a wonderful look at the wide range of emotions and aesthetic conventions found in representations of the nude (male and female) in western art. Grab a copy and peruse, it's wonderful...and if you're female it is the perfect antidote to all those sticklike women in the fashion mags: whatever your body type, some artist has depicted it in a loving celebratory fashion.

Subject: RE: BS: Fine Art Resources
From: KateG
Date: 05 Feb 03 - 05:06 PM

Sorry, I didn't realize that my cookie had died (or maybe the dog ate it). The recommendation for Kenneth Clark's book "The Nude" was from me.

Subject: RE: BS: Fine Art Resources
From: JohnInKansas
Date: 06 Feb 03 - 05:06 AM

I'll second the recommendation on Sir Clark's book. It is an excellent, and fairly thorough review; and well illustrated. Unfortunately - at least in my copy - there are no color prints, which doesn't do justice to many of the paintings, or to some of the sculptures. (If there has been a "color" edition - which would be great - I certainly wouldn't be able to afford it.)

The Nude: a study in ideal form, Kenneth Clark, Princeton University Press, ©1956 Trustees of the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC., ISBN 0-691-01788-3 (paperback), ISBN 0-691-09792-5 (hardcover).

My paperback copy was about $25 (US) in 1995 at Barnes. I haven't seen the hardcover in my local shops.

The book is identified as "The second volume of the A.W. Mellon Lectures in Fine Arts, which are delivered annually at the National Gallery of Art, Washington."

While I personally don't agree with some of his assessments of what's the "best," those with formal art educational will certainly find him "speaking the party line" on the more recent stuff.

John

Subject: RE: BS: Fine Art Resources
From: JohnInKansas
Date: 05 Mar 03 - 07:15 PM

Just noted an announcement at Art Renewal (scroll down):

"From 1st February 2003 to April 27th the Panorama Museum Bad Frankenhausen in Germany is showing 120 works of students, teachers and graduates from the Florence Academy of Art under the title "Realism Revisited.

"This exhibition contains 120 works by twenty-six of the best teachers and graduates from The Florence Academy of Art.
The artists are: Anthony Ackrill, Jacqueline Apel, Elena Arcangeli, Rupert Atkinson, Jura Bedic, Lotta Blokker, Robert Bodem, Paul S. Brown, Kamille Corry, Simona Dolci, Hunter Eddy, Joakim Ericsson, Luise Camille Fenne, Farigh Ghaderi, Daniel Graves, Adrian Gottlieb, Maureen Hyde, C.-Clarissa Koch, Urban Larsson, Dana E. Levin, Paula Rubino, Angel Ramiro Sanchez, Andrea J. Smith, Frank Strazzulla, Jr., Charles Weed, Nelson H. White"

At the Panorama Museum site, most of the artists' names (above) are linked to sites with at least a few representative works, so that those of us who can't make the exhibit can see what sort of stuff they're doing. There is also a short "philosphy" essay by one of the "instructor artists" that may be of interest, especially to those with "formal" exposure to art theory.

Wish I could be there.

(Some our webmakers might want to look at the Panorama site just because it's really "pretty.")

John

Subject: RE: BS: Fine Art Resources
From: JohnInKansas
Date: 21 Apr 03 - 03:58 AM

Those with contact with budding or working artists may be interested in a new addition at the Art Recovery website.

A recently added Living Masters Gallery displays a selected work from each of several living (mostly fairly young) artists. Clicking on the thumbnail takes you to the full "page" (or pages) for that artist.

ARC has also added, a bit at a time, a listing of "approved Ateliers" that may be of interest to the very serious student.

Most museums, web and otherwise, give the impression that "learning how to paint well" became unnecessary somewhere around 1920 (or earlier). The ARC site continues to show examples of "realist" art – their chief focus – and it is rewarding, to me at least, to find this easy access to currently working artists of this kind.

I suspect it should be helpful in stimulating interest in students with a talent for doing good work if it can be shown that the effort is still appreciated by at least some in the art world.

John

Subject: RE: BS: Fine Art Resources
From: Sam L
Date: 21 Apr 03 - 09:40 AM

Now now, I'm not sure I get the impression that good descriptive painting became necesarily unnecesary, but with photography, and film, and colorful images everywhere, in everyone's junk mail, it gets harder to convincingly answer the question Why paint something? There are still good painters doing it, and there are good painters who don't find it relevant to their aims. And long before 1920 there were plenty of descriptive painters who just weren't very interesting because they didn't ask themselves the harder questions.

I think practically everyone should learn to draw, but I'm not sure I should encourage kids to pursue a line of work that has almost no viable legitimate market. There's not much of a middle, and the high and low ends of the market are both saturated with sham commercial values, hokum, and fads. Quit if you can.

Subject: RE: BS: Fine Art Resources
From: JohnInKansas
Date: 21 Apr 03 - 12:45 PM

Fred -

I think you hit on one point of the ARC site, which is that there's more hokum than art in the business recently - and that's one of the reasons why it's difficult for more than a few to make a living at art.

A good painting is still something to be appreciated; but the critics (dealers) seem to have made everyone belive that it's more important to psychoanalyse the artist rather than to enjoy and appreciate the art.

Whether to encourage a kid to work at learning to do good (art) work is rather too individual a thing for sweeping generalizations. The examples in the "Living Artist" gallery are a good starting point for a kid to see what a few are doing now, and most of the artists represented there can also be found - with contact information - in the Atelier listings. The kid probably won't listen to us anyway, but knowing what's going on may help him/her make better choices.

John

Subject: RE: BS: Fine Art Resources
From: Peg
Date: 21 Apr 03 - 01:00 PM

Great thread! Thanks for those links, very useful.

There's a wonderful poster shop in Glastonbury that may not be in business much longer mainly because they choose to do things the legal (and thus more expensive way) in terms of attaining the proper copyrights and permissions for art reproductions. I always buy a bit of something from them when I visit. They also a have a website where you can order cards, posters and prints online...they specialize in the pre-Raphaelites and they sell a number of images I have not seen available anywhere.

www.glastonburyromantics.co.uk

Subject: RE: BS: Fine Art Resources
From: Sam L
Date: 21 Apr 03 - 05:20 PM

John, thanks for the all these links.

   I'm just in a mood, trying to finish some portraits that won't let me finish them. I really don't know what a good painting is, today, can't finish anything, and it's pissing me off.

Subject: RE: BS: Fine Art Resources
From: JohnInKansas
Date: 21 Apr 03 - 07:55 PM

Fred -

I believe one very well known portraitist defined a portrait as "a painting of a person with a bad mouth," if that's any help.

Sometimes the mood just isn't there, but often it's just being mischievous and peeking around a corner somewhere. It usually comes back - hopefully in time.

John

Subject: RE: BS: Fine Art Resources
From: Sam L
Date: 22 Apr 03 - 10:01 AM

Thanks John. I believe that was Sargent, something wrong with the mouth. With these I'm doing it's more a suspicion that the little boys I'm painting are not going to identify with the ways their moms want them presented. They are somewhat momified. I finished one, feel better.

But I have to say that the artists on the ARC site turn out to be almost exactly what I dislike in painting and portraiture. The sentimentality, the sugary color, all the touristy exotic theatrical business, notes of escapist fantasy, the smooth babes and a few buff dudes, pointless still-lifes, it adds up to cloying and facile illustration, all surface and no real interest, to me. Even the pieces that try to leave a little "edge" with some unfinished painting look staged and self-conscious, presentational, eager to please--rather than purposeful and engaged. These painters are pretty satisfied with how they represent the world, and the paintings probably congratulate themselves even in the dark. I'm quite sure I suck, but stuff like this gives me permission to paint anyway.

   The site features Bougereau on the home page, which is not surprising, and he is kind of interesting in that it's very weird when fantastic subjects are painted to the -nth degree of vividness. Sheer intensity is always kind of interesting, even in crude "outsider" work. But one can doubt whether he ever had that intention, or made the most of it. His monomaniacal emphasis of his technique over anything else that might matter in life is interesting in terms of his psychology (he sometimes repainted the same composition again, for good measure) but not far beyond that, which is what you decry in contemporary art.

I think some painters put themselves in the service of a particular vision, or pursue a line of question, limit themselves, make tough choices, sly omissions, and it's not psychoanalysis to follow that, it's psychology in the proper sense of real art. The Mona Lisa wouldn't make any sense if Leonardo had painted the whites of her eyes, like a good realist should have. The ARC painters curtly ignore a lot of serious work by a lot of serious artists, and that's deadly arrogant and backward of them.

Subject: RE: BS: Fine Art Resources
From: Peg
Date: 22 Apr 03 - 11:42 AM

I worked as an art model for many years. One painter I worked for privately also did portrait commissions. She was working on one of a young boy who had red hair. His mother was concerned there was too much red in the kid's hair in the portrait. The artist was frustrated; she had met the child and was oslty working from a photograph (which is not how she prefers to work but the parents agreed to this). She finally realized after meeting the dad (who was a full-blown carrot-top) that the mom was somehow embarrassed about having a redhead for a kid and wanted to think the red hair gene would be bred out somehow...

She did some gorgeous paintings of me; I wish I could afford to buy one of them. She did gift me with a color study sketch for a painting we did not end up doing, while she was cleaning out her studio.

She is very talented and has a real gift for painting the figure; her use of color is romantic but not overblown, and she does not mix her paints too much so as to have tiny ribbons of color in the final painting...

Subject: RE: BS: Fine Art Resources
From: JohnInKansas
Date: 22 Apr 03 - 06:00 PM

Fred M – et. al.

There's no question that the ARC site is pretty one-sided; but it's intended as an emphasis of what has been ignored by others rather than a rejection of all the rest. There are some editorials that take a rather bitter view of some "modern" trends, but the main purpose of the site is to give credit to those who have been "left out" by others.

The WGA site (link at first post this thread) is an excellent example of "the old style museum" where nothing later than about 1800+ qualifies as "art." They "ignore" all but the "classics," and there is not a particular problem with that. That is their "thing to do." Unfortunately, that is what many museums attempted to do with their physical collections, at least until recently; and the WGA is what most of the general public probably expected to find if they visited their local museum a few decades ago.

Unfortunately(?), around the turn of the century in 1900 or a little before, money from the industrial/commercial revolution (largely $American$) hit the scene (another thing for which we can be blamed?). All the "old masters" were owned by (mostly) european museums, and the critics and dealers had a lot of very rich customers and nothing to sell. Someone like Bouguereau, who typically took a year to finish a painting that was already sold (although he did finish four or five every year) was of no value to the dealers or to the critics.

Traditional art training, in which an aspiring artist spent 10 or more years under the direct supervision of an established artist or two, and then – if he was lucky enough – a few years touring great art centers to study the old masters, was also a serious limitation on the supply of art to sell.

There are always a few rebels around to criticize established traditions – especially traditions that they feel "exclude" them. Rossetti and his band of hippies (you want shallow, trite, and repetitious?) are probably the best known of the rebels of the time, although most of the frequently exhibited "modern masters" belong in – or near – the group. The historical pivot for the success of their "revolution" was the available market for (by then contemporary standards of greatness) decently good but mostly mediocre paintings that a dealer could deliver.

As with any revolution, there were some good results and some bad. Where Bouguereau fought substantial and vicious opposition to admit the first females into the existing "establishment," Rossetti and his crew drove most of their women to suicide or insanity – and seem to have suffered a rather high incidence of suicide within their own ranks. (Rodin has a "blot" or two of this ilk, also.)

Possibly the "best(?)" result of this change in order was that it produced a substantial quantity of art and got it in the hands of people who could display and brag about how great it was (an essential purpose of any art museum?). It produced a few masterpiece works – but no more or less than came from prior eras or schools. It also broke from the traditions of (Bouguereau's?) "finished technique" which was incompatible with the need to produce enough art to satisfy the market.

Art has always been popular with the masses, and it is doubtful that there is more interest in art now than in past centuries(*). It is true that many more people want an art education. Unfortunately, when one divides the number of "living masters" by the number of educational institutions impelled to "teach art," the number is vanishingly small, so most schools settle for "someone with credentials." (Usually meaning a MFA degree from another school that settled for someone with similar credentials.) There is no field where the "those that can, do; those that can't, teach" is more blatently flaunted than in the art departments of our colleges and universities (IMHO of course, and I'm not too sure about excluding a few psych and bus admin courses I've seen).

The analysis and criticism of art has its place, and the attempt to be creative with imperfect skills and techniques may also be ecouraged; but the currently popular denigration of actually learning how to work with the materials needed (largely because the "teachers" don't know how?) is pure hucksterism. Too much of the teaching in today's schools has as its only purpose the immolation of those with tenure, who trade their overblown analyses in the manner of a circle-jerk – and to hell with beauty and meaningful creativity.

The art at ARC has a narrow focus simply because a large body of work has been literally "expunged" from conventional art history. (Of some 30 "history of art" books I've checked recently, only one even indexes Bouguereau, with no examples of his work.) The site seeks simply to fill the gap left when the realists were not productive enough to meet the demands of the market, and were wiped out of the history books.

I haven't found any one site with good representation of more "modern" artists, largely because most of them seem to be under copyright by the "print makers."

The sentimentality, the sugary color, all the touristy exotic theatrical business, notes of escapist fantasy, the smooth babes and a few buff dudes, pointless still-lifes, it adds up to cloying and facile illustration, all surface and no real interest, to me. Unfortunately, this sounds to me much like a "learned and parroted" classroom essay. You'd probably get at least a "B." On the other hand, I'll accept that it may be your own thoughtful analysis, and I won't argue.

(*) So far as I've found, the only "duplicates" or "repaintings" Bouguereau made were "reductions" for the use of the engravers in making "prints" for public sale and/or for exhibit publicity. "Evening Mood" may be an exception to this, with a single "recolored" palette production. He did do numerous preliminary sketches and studies. W. Bouguereau has possibly half his known works with a more accurate(?) tie to production dates and where exhibited. And most of his works weren't nudes – although you can't really tell that from what gets talked about.

John

Subject: RE: BS: Fine Art Resources
From: Sam L
Date: 22 Apr 03 - 07:57 PM

Great post, John.

I think the nudes get talked about because they're the most interesting, especially to some 70's photorealists. No, not learned or parroted, they didn't teach this sort of thing when I was in school, not even to denigrate it. I just looked at the pictures, which it seems to me it would be hard to deny in point of fact, with the images in front of you, have exactly that bag of stuff going on in them. What grade would I get if I just said "bleah"?

   But I'd love to hear how anyone else would describe it, short of it's "spiritual" whatever effect on them, or it's breath-taking beauty, which to me is like watching a hypnotized person make barnyard animal noises.

Your general analysis of modern stylistic "revolution" has it's points, but it largely ignores the invention of photography, and modernist literature, music, dance, and art that doesn't function by the same market rules as art-objects for sale. It also ignores other highly disciplined crafts--which is what painting is when it can't be bothered to become art. It ignores the many significant painters who already had the training and the talent, but set it aside to pursue more interesting work. I'm not sure what grade you'd get, but who knows, who cares. It's especially endearing that ARC acts as though facile hokum is a new emerging aesthetic paradigm, as if it ever took a break, ever quit panting in everyone's face.

It's silly to argue any unearned aesthetic quality for fashionable art-world pranks and mere intellectual armatures troted out in un-felt, arbitrary forms. But it's equally silly to argue that that the exercise of the craft of painting has of itself any artistic depth or quality. Literate people can write without being Tolstoy. Same goes for people who can paint--it's the very fact that classical technique isn't rigorously taught that supports the scam, the con, the canard that it's inherently artistic, in and of itself. It's work. It's just like any other work. The ARC stuff looks just like a bunch of Soviet Russian painters, or illustrations in how to paint books. That's the real content in it, too.

Subject: RE: BS: Fine Art Resources
From: JohnInKansas
Date: 23 Apr 03 - 03:06 AM

I don't think there's any great disagreement between us. There is no question that the ARC content is rather narrowly constrained, relative to the "entire world of art," by their concentration on the "realists;" but that's somewhat true of most sites and to some extent of most museums. There are far too many portraits (that all look alike to me) and too many sailing ships (that all look alike to me), etc.

The only place I've found "the all inclusive answer" was D. Adams and it was "42," as I recall.

As something of a newcomer to this whole "art thing," I'm still researching profound questions like:

Wouldn't politics be a lot more civilized with more formal state portraits like Sophia Hedwig, Countess of Nassau Dietz, in her pose with her three sons for Paulus Moreelse in 1621? (WGA)

Would batman have been so crazy about Robin if he'd met Albert-Joseph Pénot's Batwoman? (1890 - at AMK)

And What did happen to Flora's nipple? (Carriera 1730s, WGA)

I believe the BRI quotes Voltaire as having said something to the effect of "To succeed in the world it is not sufficient to be ignorant. One must also be polite." Perhaps it's time for me to retire from this thread for a while – just to be polite.

John

Subject: RE: BS: Fine Art Resources
From: JohnInKansas
Date: 23 Apr 03 - 03:14 AM

Alas - WGA, the Web Gallery (euroweb) seems to have changed their linkup since my last visit, and the two WGA links above both go to the index. You'll have to proceed from there via the artist names to get to the pretties.

Quite a few sites request that you not link directly to pictures, but in the past WGA has permitted links to the artist pages with thumbnails. They have apparently found a way to block that as well. The link to AMK (ArtMajik) goes to a thumbnail page.

John

Subject: RE: BS: Fine Art Resources
From: Sam L
Date: 23 Apr 03 - 10:00 AM

Well, sorry if I gave offence, I mean none. I suppose I might get a little ruffled by the suggestion that my thoughts aren't my own, but it's all right. And yes, some of the dopey opinions on the ARC set me off--after all, when Picasso was thirteen he wasn't too far from the level of mastery they espouse.

   The more usual view of the modern art market is that it was born in the 1880's, when old money aristocrats began selling off works at auction houses like Christy's and Sotheby's, which are still around today. That's what I've read, anyway, but I've found over the years that much of what I was told in art history classes was wrong, fabled, or even perhaps invented on the spot in a lecture. There was a great cowboy drama about Bob Rauschenberg that was wrong in almost every single detail.

   Your comment about Rodin makes me wonder if you've seen Camille Claudel, one of the only bio-movies about artists I really like. Also wonder if you've come across, might enjoy an aesthetic journal put out by the AMA, I think it's at aesthetics-online.org. I got hooked by an essay that compared trying to teach aesthetics in art schools to how ethics got a foothold in business schools.

   I quite enjoy talking about and arguing about art, and it depresses me that it seems to be regarded improper, like giggling in church. People don't much talk about art, even in art schools--they stay to the side of the subject, mostly. Anyway, this is a great thread, and a service to 'Cats that you're doing. Thanks.

Subject: RE: BS: Fine Art Resources
From: JohnInKansas
Date: 23 Apr 03 - 04:02 PM

Fred -

I guess the ignorant part got in the way of the polite part. I didn't mean that there was an issue between us - only that I seem to be monopolizing the thread and probably need to take a break and see if anyone else might want to get into it.

The aristocrats as sellers is certainly the other side of the coin, so to speak. It's true that there was a spurt in the selling - but to sell you have to have a buyer, and it was the bidding by the newly rich (we always assume American, but they were all over the world) that made it attractive to sell off a few of the family treasures. No real conflict between the two versions - it just depends on whom you choose to blame(?).

Camille Claudel is one of a couple I've encountered recently who seem to have been victimized by Rodin. I haven't seen the movie (or read the book) but ran into a bio fairly recently. I think at one of the "women in art" sites, but it didn't pop up in a quick look at my notes. (But I did find my notes on Carriera's "other" Flora.)

I suppose that one of my reasons for my recent "research" is that I've generally been rather underwhelmed by what gets pushed as "the greatest" art. I find that, although I'm greatly impressed by many of the popularly worshipped artists, I frankly don't care much for having their stuff around where I'm likely to see it too often.

I've found several artists whose work I like having around - some pretty impressive and some just pleasant; but I can't say that I've picked a particular list of favorites. I suppose I should hang a Rubens and a Wtewael just because of their great sense of humor, and I could frame poor Miss O'Murphy. (You gotta feel sorry for the sweet young thing because you know she didn't expect Boucher to sell five copies when she posed for it.) But for the present I'll probably just continue browsing.

John

Subject: RE: BS: Fine Art Resources
From: Sam L
Date: 23 Apr 03 - 06:25 PM

Hi Peg,
Yes it's funny the stuff you get into with comissioned portraits. The first I ever did was for a couple of actor-friends who perhaps spent too long in front of the mirrors in the green room. Thought I'd never make them happy, but that's part of the fun. If it weren't funny it would be impossible. I mix my colors, but use acrylics, which are glassy to layer, the pigment never gets quite evenly dispersed in the medium, so to get very sharp and smooth it's almost like tempera, with thousands of tonal touches and lappings. But it gets a less humid, breathier "air" in the spaces and shadows than that slightly underwater oil paint feeling. Modeling is a tough job, and my wife hates it so much I can't even ask her. I've developed a complex about asking anyone to sit, feel I'm imposing, and can't work unless other artists are there too. It's their fault.

John--O' you should hunt up the movie, Camille Claudel. Foreign section, it's around. Gerard Depardeau plays Rodin.

I have that same reaction to many contemporary old-master-type realists--and for many in the contemporary popular canon, except I'm not as impressed by the cutting edge stuff that doesn't work for me. I suppose I favor the middle range, and it is lost in polemics like the ARC "philosophy".

My own stuff looks more like ARC painters than, say, Julian Schnabel (I'm afraid I've even indulged in some "sugary color" and sentimentality) and it is frustrating me out of my head that my work seems invisible. I lost a bid for a show today because they didn't want to show straight portraiture. I guess I might've looked at it the same way, and although that's not what I'm trying to do, and my work is not quite so uniformly polished--not all over--my work seems to be sucked into the vortex of looking like, you know, that sort of thing. People say It looks just like a photograph! Like you blew up a photograph! Gee, wish I'd thought of that, woulda saved me some trouble. I'm not in a good position to be impressed by my own technique, and I--perhaps like everyone else working in this vein-- imagine I'm doing something a little different.

            More Ranting, then some fave descriptive painters

   Forgive me for going on, but this is a very pressing concern for me, and I can't get over the ARC stuff. It kills me. Despite what the resident philosopher says, all the works seem utterly cold to me. If it's so humanist and all that, why isn't it ever genuinely funny? Not just fake-funny, ticklish, like those Woody Allen references where you have to laugh to congratulate yourself for getting it. Think of all the varieties of human experience none of it approaches. Boucher is better by far--how come none of the contemporary guys at the ARC get that fun and kinky? I think because they are trying to impress, to be "redolent of the gold dust of the masters" but without all that bothersome feeling for life. I have a little painting of my wife's face, very close up, cropped and boxed into the frame, that I'd put up against all the cold smooth academic nudes at the ARC in terms of physical presence, beauty, and eroticism--and did I mention I'm not even very good? Still it's better, I'm going to have to make more, bolder stylistic choices like that, or give up.

I work in an oriental rug shop, we have the old ones, up to $80,000, and I get a good dose of people trying to buy culture. People ask what's a good book to learn about rugs, and there aren't any, really. Or they're all partly okay. They are all written from a point of view, by rug dealers and collectors. The ARC claims that modernism and post-modernism are a con game, whereby dealers make money. Yep, they do. And I notice the man who writes this collects 19th century art, and has his own agenda, also. That's just how it is. I'll accept that modernist art is a sham, but not that it's essentially a different kind of sham than 19th century art. That's what art is.

As he says, Bouguereau "capture's the very soul of his subjects". Okay, I can only reasonably take that to mean he is very convincing. I mean, really.... But unlike a lot of his emulators, his stuff looks good, when it's actually in front of you, while most of the rest look better in reproductions. Like candy apples at the fair, they are disappointing to eat. There is a real sense in which it is lame to be derivative--you just don't have the same energy for things you don't kind of "discover". And it shows.

   Anyway, I like Hopper, although he's a clunky painter he's got hold of a thing--like the nursery room you get ready before your baby is born, and then it's there, empty, waiting. It's a powerful feeling. Balthus--nobody has ever painted adolescent knees with such conviction, or young girls so stubbornly sitting or sprawling there in the picture for their own reasons, which are none of your business, mister. I love those odd, punky kids. And I like William Bailey, the barbi-ish nudes, but especially the table top still lifes. And I like other painters, and other kinds of painters and artists, here and there, who are outside the scope of trying to make a little point.

Subject: RE: BS: Fine Art Resources
From: JohnInKansas
Date: 23 Apr 03 - 10:44 PM

Fred -

I may have to look up Camille Claudel. The bio or two that I've seen were fairly brief, but her story has the makings of a good movie. Unfortunately, I'm about a one-movie-per-year sort, and I just took someone's recommendation and watched "Ada." Great ratings by the critics a while back, but such utter bilge I may have to wait two years before I'm ready for the next one.

I think we've agreed that the ARC site has a rather specific bias, but it's intentional. The artists they display most prominently represent a style and a period that has not been much valued and that deserves to be kept as one worthy aspect of the art world. With over 2,500 artists and nearly 22,000 images (with a goal of 50,000) in the field of art they have chosen to display it's hardly sensible to complain that they don't have someone in another genre that you like better. (Suggestions of other artists that I can look up elsewhere are appreciated, though.)

It's also true that they do a lot of ranting about the "excesses of modern art." They're politicians with a campaign going. You can respect the politician (or not) without necessarily believing and agreeing with everything he/she says. A closer look at what they rave about will show that it is the ridiculous excesses that are the complaint. While it's easy to read this as a criticism of all "interpretive" art, I don't believe that's their intent. There are plenty of others to take care of the worthwhile stuff that is outside their scope. If it is their intent, so what. I'll disagree and feel even less guilty about not joining their association and paying dues. And I'll enjoy their collection when I'm in the mood for their kind of art.

There seem to be few web resources representing post-realist(?) art in any coherent way, so I've made little real progress in looking at much of it. It takes a lot of skipping from museum to museum to gather a meaningful impression of even one single artist. I've found a number of individual works that I like, but can't claim any real favorites. I'm sure the situation, and my response to some of these works would be different if I were trying to "find my own muse;" but basically I'm just an idler on an extended tour.

John

Subject: RE: BS: Fine Art Resources
From: Peg
Date: 24 Apr 03 - 01:59 AM

Camille Claudel is well worth seeing; it stars two of France's greatest actors, Isabelle Adjani and Gerard Depardieu.

Subject: RE: BS: Fine Art Resources
From: Sam L
Date: 24 Apr 03 - 11:35 AM

Ada? Not Nabokov's Ada, is it? I don't know of it.

No, I didn't mean to complain that ARC doesn't have other people I like better, just to toss out a few I like, and try to indicate why. But I was trying to indicate what kinds of things seem missing in work I find rather empty, though I can't say what should be there--just something, some kind of particular stuff. I'm a wee bit proud of my line about Hopper. I may certainly be missing something in a casual scan of works by many different artists, and not even seeing the works in the actual--which makes all the difference sometimes. But that's why one prods and all--sometimes somebody helps you out, gives you a clue. But there is some sort of element at work, some kind of rampant excess, that makes it too easy to generalise about that kind of "classical" stuff. It's like a national style, somehow. Like airbrush. There's nothing wrong with airbrush, it's just a technique, like any technique, there's nothing to complain about. But for some reason, somehow, almost everyone who uses it gets sucked in, does "airbrush" art, it takes over. There's something like that going on. There's nothing intrinsically amiss, nothing necesarily wrong, but somehow you know you aren't going to find much of interest, and I don't. I remember De Kooning trying to explain his reaction to a Soviet show, and he couldn't pin down what was wrong. Because it was just illustration? No, he said, because you could say Raphael was illustration too.And you could, that's not it. It seemed to him to be "the wrong sort of pressure". I'd say the stuff on the ARC doesn't seem to be about a genuine attempt to share a human vision of the world, it seems more about a means of sharing a vision, which it forgets to get around to.

    I really do think there's a perfectly good reason these people are left out of the popular art world, and it's quite simply that they are not convincing to most people who are actively into art, however convincing they may be to people who aren't. There aren't any rules to appeal that. They ignore the dialogue, don't listen, and want to be heard. The ARC guy can suppose he could do this or that absurd sounding installation, and be considered great by the art world today, well, let him actually try. It's really not that easy. You start to care what you are doing, whatever it is. It's like when my brother said he could play folk-style guitar "if he wanted to". I said "but you can't want to, and that's the thing." Photo-realists are considered, and taught, because they are convincingly addressing and exploring aesthetic issues and ideas about representation that are involved not just in painting, but literature also--like those Borges stories that "review" a non-existant book, the idea that a medium can perfectly represent a thing of it's own kind--things that people find engaging. And not novel for it's own sake, or arbitrary--Shakespeare had the same kinds of concerns, in some degree. The first novel was a fictional manuscript. These concerns come up in the so-called art-world like threads, and sometimes people are interested and engaged, but there's no appeal if nobody responds. I don't get how it's humanist to ignore everyone's concerns, and simply insist that you are interesting, too. A clue as to why, and how, in what respect, would help. A lot of successful post-modern painters use the old techniques, too, and well. The conspiracy of exclusion is a vain fantasy of artists who aren't bad, or evil, just boring to many.

I really liked your balance of the ideas of the art market, it's very like what I suppose about it. Another traditional view of the development of painting is that it had to identify itself as an art more distinct from what photography can do. And there's something to it. The ARC philosophy hits on that idea that Bouguereau captures the souls of his subjects--well, is that like how some cultures believe a photograph steals the soul? Why paint it? But it's not a completely convincing idea either. A painted image is just not the same, no matter how "photographic" the style of painting, it feels different, it's a different kind of fiction. Does it have much power, anymore, without a real special degree of aesthetic attention--I don't think so, really, you have to have a thing for it. That's all right. Painting is an embattled medium, and it's subbornly materialist, I think, hard to make sense out of.

Subject: RE: BS: Fine Art Resources
From: Sam L
Date: 24 Apr 03 - 01:23 PM

And I should've been clearer I'm talking about the Living Masters gallery on the Art Renewal link, not the Museum.

I'm embarrassed to have gone on about it so much, quibbling with a guy whose name I can't recall. The short version came to me when I mowed the yard. Those painters are just too self-important to be interesting. They can't risk appearing silly in order to say anything, or make an odd observation, and I find it tiresome, and extremely predictable. Their technique, however hard-earned, is really just a gimmick, like any other, to get people's attention, and they take themselves too seriously to engage you. They are like the John Goodman character in The Big Lebowski, for whom every subject is about Nam. Everything is about their ability to paint.

Subject: RE: BS: Fine Art Resources
From: Sam L
Date: 25 Apr 03 - 10:07 AM

Flora's nipple seems to be okay, but she apparently has no areola. (Nor an aureole, as in religious paintings.) I knew a woman who had the opposite attributes, but have never seen this.

The state portrait shows a similar effect--and what's that thang leaning over the ballustrade in the background?

   I don't know about the bat woman, she has a rather small doll-like head which seems disturbing--other than that she seems like the girl next door, more or less. Catwoman seems more intriguing, despite her poor sewing technique.

Subject: RE: BS: Fine Art Resources
From: JohnInKansas
Date: 25 Apr 03 - 02:51 PM

There appear to be two Carriera "Flora" paintings. The one you're most likely to have found, "Flora," 1730s, Pastel on paper, 47 x 32,5 cm Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence, is at the Web Gallery of Art (WGA) and has what could have been a healed "surgical" scar and adjacent "hematoma" - or it could be a partial and rather incomplete restoration after the work was damaged.

The few examples of Rosalba's work don't give the impression she'd draw something that wasn't there, and it does appear to be something deliberately incorporated in the work. We tend to think that medicine was rather primitive in that era, so evidence of a surgical procedure of this kind is rather startling - but probably only because of our ignorance of history.

There have also been many "fads" throughout history that might account for some sort of ritual "defacing" of the body - but I know of nothing from this era along that line. (Similarly realist paintings of todays earth inhabitants will probably puzzle future idlers.)

If the work was defaced, it would be interesting (mildly) to know when this instance of prudery (the most likely reason for defacing) occured.

Virtual Uffizi has what appears to be a different "Flora," much more difficult to find: Uffizi
Rosalba Carriera, 1675-1757, Pastel on paper, 47x32.5, At the Uffizi since 1890. No such interesting "features" there.

I've been unable to find anything by Hopper or Balthus on the web that resembles your descriptions of their work. There seem to be only about a dozen of Balthus' later works posted. I did find some reviews that indicate that he was something of a master marketer, and his style changed greatly in later years. (One reviewer suggests he was trying to escape the "Balthus the pornographer" references.) Apparently he was quite secretive about his personal history until late in the 1980s - '90s, so if you're interested in his personal demons and got your info from older sources you might want to do a search to update.

Was it Floris (Banquet of the Gods?, 1550, Oil on panel, 150 x 198 cm
Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerp        - at WGA) who used the face of a detested competitor on every character in his painting as a "political statement?" Who was the other artist?

John

Subject: RE: BS: Fine Art Resources
From: Sam L
Date: 25 Apr 03 - 09:41 PM

I always loved it that Balthus refused to have any personal interest. There was an article in the New Yorker some time ago that got all into Freudian stuff, hidden meanings, personal demons, and it was funny and silly as could be. Yes, he does paint some young girls with erotic intonations, then denies it. But I find their eroticism is pretty much their own, and about what you'd expect, and I don't think any normal person would really find any of it pornographic. I think it's more shocking because it's not presentational eroticism, aimed at the viewer. He's not perfectly brilliant, always, and was less than prolific. I'll see if I can find anything. I believe the guy is still alive, incredibly. He's about a hundred years old.

Subject: RE: BS: Fine Art Resources
From: JohnInKansas
Date: 26 Apr 03 - 12:24 AM

The ArtCyclopedia site unfortunately shows:
Balthus, [French Painter, 1908-2001]
Also known as:   Count Balthasar Klossowski de Rola.

It would appear that he is no longer living.

The last significant exhibition of his work in which he participated appears to have been about 1991; and showed only his later stuff in the archived catalog, as far as I can tell. No little girls there. A couple of "poster" sites have notices about his "copyrights administered by ..." which may explain why there's so little of his stuff on the web.

John

Subject: RE: BS: Fine Art Resources
From: Sam L
Date: 26 Apr 03 - 08:34 PM

Mm, sad to hear it. One of the points of the article I mentioned was whether his "count" title was a fiction, a vain pretention, and I sometimes got the feeling he was just messing with people about his biographics. There seemed to be a joke being played. So I started to complain that the New Yorker had rejected my own research showing that when Balthus painted himself as The King Of Cats, he was really only a minor duke to a family of mole-rats, which he had dressed up as cats.

   If any of his earlier stuff turns up, you'll find him very tame as a pornographer--I think it was really the self-posession of his young girls that shocked people. They aren't like the harem slaves in romantic pictures or the wage-slaves in academic studies, or Matisse nudes, but seem to have their own opaque agenda. It makes you notice something about how women are most often painted, to see these peculiar, self-absorbed adolescent girls. He loved Piero Della Francesca, was careful of form, used color with old-fashioned taste and judgement, had a powerful feel for timeless moods in children and landscape. The writer Guy Davenport nicely observed how sometimes his street-characters and fairy-tale drama figures had a marionette quality. You can imagine strings on them,like puppets. The sculptural feel of his tempera paintings has been interesting to me in my own stuff.

Hopper's pictures may not particularly look like my little metaphor about it. But he tended to paint odd, marginal moments, which create a dramatic question as to what was happening, or about to happen. Like the nursery before the baby is born, the point of his images seems poignantly unspoken. He once painted a movie theatre and focused to one side of the screen, on a bored usher, looking blankly at nothing at all. I was just trying to summarise his odd and intense style, which makes me reflect on heavy pessimism and doubts, and the absurd and great lengths hope can stretch to in spite of it.

These are just a couple of people who count for me as modernist "realists" with convincing humanist concerns and sentiments, which don't seem too easy, pat, or conventionally contrived. I guess I admire people who risk a joke that might fail, or an observation that might make people think they are weird or stupid, or even a frank, unadorned confession. It's an admirable trait in the modernist canon, although some of the humour does fail, and some of the attempts really are weird and stupid, some of the tedious confessions are themselves a crime. But when it works it's a great sense of connection with something alive, even if the painter is dead.

   Thanks for enduring my input here, I don't get to talk about art much!