Baya Mahieddine | The Young Artist Who Inspired Picasso. Born in Algeria in 1931, Baya’s life was far from easy. Orphaned at the age of five, she was raised by her grandmother. Unable to attend school, she worked as a servant for a French woman named Marguerite Camina, who would later be described by the artist as her adoptive mother. Camina noticed the talent that her young servant displayed in making figures from clay, and encouraged her to develop her craft. Instead of following the typically Western models of art production that were being taught at the time, the young Baya drew on her own personal experiences and imaginings, alongside the traditional tribal art of Algeria.
Sharon Obuobi describes Algeria's visual culture as boasting ‘intricately designed traditional textiles, ceramics, gardens, and architecture’, and these motifs reoccur in Mahyeddine's paintings. By the time she was 16, Mahyeddine had her first exhibition in Paris. Inspired by her spontaneity and natural talent, Picasso invited her to work with him in 1948. Dresses on washing lines pay tribute to Kosovo survivors of sexual violence. A conceptual artist is transforming a football pitch in Kosovo into a giant art installation, with thousands of dresses hung on washing lines in a powerful and poignant tribute to survivors of sexual violence.
The exhibition, Thinking of You, will go on show in the city stadium of Pristina, the capital of Kosovo, on Friday, the 16th anniversary of Nato forces entering the city after a three-month bombing campaign. An estimated 20,000 Albanian women – and some men – were raped by Serbian army, police and paramilitaries during the 1999 Kosovo war as Albanian separatists fought against the Yugoslav regime led by Serb strongman Slobodan Milosevic.
Alketa Xhafa-Mripa, a Kosovo-born artist and British national, said the idea for her installation came as she listened to interviews given by survivors of sexual violence who said their voices were rarely heard. The dresses are to be hung on 45 washing lines on a football pitch, which could be seen as a symbol of masculinity and machismo. Beautiful Watercolor Paintings of Architecture by Thomas W. Schaller. "Don't paint the scene in front of you. Paint the light that defines it and gives it life. " Though he was raised on a farm in the Midwest, Thomas W. Schaller spent the majority of his life in Manhattan where he worked as a commercial architectural artist. Today, however, he works for himself, as a watercolor painter based in Los Angeles.
Schaller made the jump to a different profession after one of his artist friends asked him what he wanted to do with his life. "I told him I wanted to be a painter, a 'real artist,'" he recalls, "but then I proceeded to detail all the reasons I had constructed that seemed to make that dream impossible. That day, Schaller's life changed. "That said, I did build up a wealth of technical skills upon which I can draw - perspective, scale, composition, etc, - that have become almost a kind of 'muscle memory' for me as a painter.
Schaller doesn't just paint buildings, rarely are they seen as isolated subjects. Claerwen James: portraits of melancholy children - in pictures. The unexpected math behind Van Gogh's "Starry Night" - Natalya St. Clair. Flower paintings. Title: Marilyn ,130 x 90 cm, oil on canvas. Dark Themed Interiors: Using Grey Effectively For Interior Design. From Michelangelo to Caravaggio, why masterpieces are coming out of the woodwork | Art and design.
The attribution of two bronze nudes to none other than Michelangelo is one of those rare art stories that are genuinely important and authentically sensational. And like so many truly significant art history discoveries, this one does not involve digging a lost masterpiece out of a cellar or finding it in a Nazi hoard, but is instead a scholarly argument for re-attributing a work known for centuries. A lot of the time, this kind of connoisseurship leads to the opposite: sceptical de-attribution. Paul Joannides, the art historian whose immense knowledge lends the Cambridge claim authority, put some of the final nails into the reputation of the Venetian painter Giorgione when he all but demolished the idea that Giorgione painted the Sleeping Venus, one of the icons of the Renaissance. He and others argue it is by Titian. One hundred and fifty years ago, there were lots more Giorgiones, Leonardos and other masterpieces by big-name artists than there are today.
Michelangelo bronzes discovered | Art and design. Two handsome, virile naked men riding triumphantly on ferocious panthers will on Monday be unveiled as, probably, the only surviving bronze sculptures by the Renaissance giant Michelangelo. In art history terms, the attribution is sensational. Academics in Cambridge will suggest that a pair of mysterious metre-high sculptures known as the Rothschild Bronzes are by the master himself, made just after he completed David and as he was about to embark on the Sistine Chapel ceiling. If correct, they are the only surviving Michelangelo bronzes in the world. They will go on public display at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge from Tuesday. Crucial to the attribution of the bronzes, which belong to a private British owner, has been a tiny detail from a drawing by an apprentice of Michelangelo, now in the Musée Fabre in Montpellier, France.
Last autumn, Paul Joannides, professor of art history at Cambridge University, connected the sculptures to the drawing. Form Matters: Wearable Concrete Jewelry. Concrete is a pretty amazing material. Form Matters explores the dual nature of concrete — of how it can be used to create architectural masterpieces meant to last hundreds of years to wearable, everyday accessories. It examines the overlapping nature of architecture, art, and fashion. Designed by Liani Douglas for Douglas & Company, the accessories consist of simple lines with subtle tension. Their subtle geometric forms are reminiscent of architectural pieces, such as concrete pipes and culverts, but with a cantilevered plane. The bracelets are a concrete mix of 40% sand and 60% Portland cement and water. Meet the women redefining street art | Art and design.
If there is a gender disparity in the art world, it is all the more acute in street art. While some claim the physical danger of working outdoors makes women reluctant to participate, artists like Swoon, Vexta, ELLE and Maya Hayuk have battled through, undeterred by discrimination both on the street and in galleries. New York-based ELLE sums it up. “I understand the deterrents – potential jail time, the humiliation of community service, destruction of property (or beautification, depending on your view), late nights, dark places, high climbs.
All of this reminds me of that Always commercial, Like a Girl, where all of the girls and boys run exactly the same until about age 12, then take the meaning of running ‘like a girl’ to mean flailing hands and legs and skipping and not sincerely running hard and kicking ass.” ELLE’s early experience of street art began as an ambition to go as hard as her male peers. She says that women’s work is still often marginalised. Culture - Could anyone paint a Vermeer? A new documentary centres on an inventor and his claims that Vermeer relied more on tricks and technology than artistic talent to create his famous works. Tom Brook reports. Inventor Tim Jenison is the focus of the new documentary Tim’s Vermeer. His mission: to prove that a Vermeer masterpiece could be created by an amateur like himself. In the film Tim Jenison uses technology to recreate the master’s painting The Music Lesson − it’s an experiment that could show that Vermeer relied on fancy tools rather than artistic genius.
The movie is a collaboration from magic act Penn (who narrates) and Teller (who directs). The Artist Who Draws All Her Daughter’s Outfits -- The Cut. Can there be copyright in one's own bottom? And what about a bottom pose? Yesterday this Kat discovered an intriguing piece of news which raises an issue of sure interest to, say the least, copyright aficionados: is there copyright in a bottom pose? A few days ago The Guardian reported that, according to very serious "legal periodical" Closer magazine, "TV and social media personality" Kim Kardashian is unimpressed with bottom copycat by "internet bottom sensation" Jen Selter. Apparently the latter has been posting photos of her bottom on Instagram, posing as only Kim thought she was able to do. What a shame. According to the very humourous Guardian reporter, "one of the gangplanks of Kim Kardashian’s global celebrity [is] her nonpareil ability to take photographs of her own large buttocks with a cameraphone.
" So now “Kim thinks Jen copies all her poses … she is fuming as she feels her curvy bum is one of her most unique selling points and feels that Jen is just trying to cash in.” Can Kim claim copyright infringement over her poses? Infringement? In conclusion. The big-eyed children: the extraordinary story of an epic art fraud | Art and design. There’s a sweet, small suburban house in the vineyards of Napa, northern California. Inside, a family of devout Jehovah Witnesses bustles around, offering me a cheese plate. A Siamese cat weaves in and out of my legs. Everything is lovely. Sitting unobtrusively in the corner is 87-year-old Margaret Keane. This story begins in Berlin in 1946. Fifteen years laterand Keane was an art sensation. Walter himself was not a melancholic man. “No,” I said. This conversation apparently took place at an outdoor art exhibition in San Francisco in 1955. Margaret’s memory of their first meeting is quite different. The centre of Walter’s universe in the mid-1950s was a San Francisco beatnik club, The Hungry i.
“He had me sitting in a corner,” she tells me, “and he was over there, talking, selling paintings, when somebody walked over to me and said: ‘Do you paint too?’ He was. Margaret was furious. Margaret takes me back to the beginning. Margaret felt trapped. “Did you see any of the money?” Top hats off to Marie Duval, a lost Victorian cartoonist sensation | Art and design. The cartoonist Marie Duval is one of the forgotten wonders of 19th-century art. Her drawings have something in common with Honoré Daumier, but also look forward almost uncannily to modern comics in their fantastical surreal wit. It’s exciting that a research project at the University of Chester aims to recover the lost fame of this Victorian woman artist and restore her to her rightful place in the story of modern culture.
Duval (1850-1890) was born Isabelle Émilie de Tessier and worked as an actor as well as an artist. She married another British caricaturist Charles Ross, then began to make her mark – or rather didn’t, for it seems likely that Ross has been falsely credited with much of her brilliance. The old story. Ross and Duval, or Duval and Ross, created one of the world’s first iconic cartoon characters, Ally Sloper, a rogue as famous in Victorian Britain as Dennis the Menace would be a century later. This was new in comics. The big-eyed children: the extraordinary story of an epic art fraud | Art and design. Selected MoMA Publications. Carry That Weight: The Revival of Feminist Performance Art. Mattress Performance: Carry That Weight began nearly five weeks ago. Throughout the performance the artist Emma Sulkowicz, a 22 year-old Columbia University senior, will carry a boxy blue mattress everywhere she goes on campus.
Weighing in at fifty pounds, the mattress stands in for the mattress on which she was raped by a fellow student. Sulkowicz’s work is profoundly simple: a young woman visually manifests the psychological weight of the crime committed on her body and demands recognition of that burden. Carry That Weight is a purely visual performance, one so piercing it resists language. Like most performance art, Sulkowicz’s piece has clearly defined parameters, what she terms “rules of engagement.”
Carry That Weight implies that within the discourse surrounding rape, the separation of these categories are meaningless. I could write an entire history of art on the bodies of rape victims. Rape is a difficult film to watch. What striking words—the safety of terrorizing women. Violence Is Mine. Paul Chan, The 7 Lights, 2005-07 (detail)louisemakesstuff/flickr Post-internet art reflects a certain undercurrent of violence without being didactic about its source.
In a number of contemporary artists whose works deal with the digital — the so-called post-internet artists — a marked, almost frightening feature is their tendency towards violence. The figure, which had been largely absent from contemporary art for the past few decades, has returned, but only to be pulled apart, dissected or made to disappear — not with any visible bloodshed or abjection, but clinically, echoing in style the unreality associated with the digital. This return to the body as a subject of hostility suggests that the proximity on the internet to representations of extreme violence is a kind of imbrication — an unresolved culpability from those watching toward what’s seen. Even apparently placid, disembodied life online always has violence at its margins or, to use a more appropriate metaphor, in its feed. Nsaikia : Amazing to have highlighted ... Nsaikia : I want to recreate this each ...
Walkin-vagina-installed-in-johannesburg-womens-prison-8792192. Visitors are invited to walk through the artwork, by 30-year-old artist Reshma Chhiba, in a reaction against the former symbol of oppression. As they do, the scarlet walls ring out with screams and laughter. The "yoni" - the Sanskrit word for vulva, or vagina - is skirted by acrylic wool imitation pubic hair over a tongue-like sponge walkway.
Chhiba said: "It's a screaming vagina within a space that once contained women and stifled women. It's revolting against this space... mocking this space, by laughing at it. " The prison, in the central Johannesburg area of Braamfontein, dates back to 1892, and its Womens' Prison held Winnie Madikizela-Mandela in 1958, when she was imprisoned for protesting against apartheid segregation, and again in 1976. The artist said the work also opposes deeply entrenched patriarchal systems, and taboos around the vagina. "You don't often hear men talking about their private parts and feeling disgust or shamed," as women often do, she said.
Pictures at an Exhibition. LS Lowry's rage against the machine | Art and design. Know them, Daughters of Men – Guest post by Adrien. She that gazes at her being gazed on by him – Guest post by Adrien. An ‘unvalued person’: guest post by Adrien. Weeping Nude | Edvard Munch | The painting really does say it all... | #art. Works On Paper | Harland Miller | International Lonely Guy. Harland Miller’s Penguin Classics-Inspired Art.
The temple raiders. Marina Warner · Once a Catholic…: Damien Hirst · LRB 5 July 2012. Freedom and Art by Charles Rosen. The Art of the Heist: Valuing Art through Its Theft. In Mali, Finding Art as Real as Life Itself. Italian museum burns artworks in protest at cuts. When Bad Is Good. TaxCut Money Collage. Break the silence over fakes. Freedom and Art by Charles Rosen.