Giotto. Giovanni Previtali (1934-1988) perfeziona gli studi di storia dell'arte con Enrico Castelnuovo e Roberto Longhi (1890-1970); quest’ultimo, riconoscendo nel giovane studente la profonda padronanza del linguaggio figurativo e della storia, nonché dello strumento dell’attribuzione, nel 1955 lo coinvolge a scrivere su Paragone, rivista che Longhi aveva appena fondato.
Nella ‘61, Previtali entrò nella redazione e dal ‘62 fu nominato segretario: qui incontrò Evelina Borea, compagna e moglie di vita e studio. Lo stretto rapporto con Longhi, non distrae Previtali, in questi anni di bohéme, dalla militanza politica a salvaguardia dell’integrità del paesaggio e del patrimonio storico artistico italiano.
A Surreal End for an Unforgettable Queen: Pedro Lemebel, 1952-2015. Pedro Lemebel, the Chilean writer, artist, activist, and provocateur, died last Friday morning of laryngeal cancer.
By the afternoon, newspapers in Latin America and Spain teemed with tributes. In his native Santiago, hundreds gathered for his funeral on Saturday, and celebrities and politicians competed to offer the most extravagant praise. “Pedro Lemebel is an essential figure of Chile, a great artist who leaves an enormous void in the country,” said Claudia Barattini, the minister of culture. Chile’s socialist President, Michelle Bachelet, called him “a tireless creator,” “a fighter for social justice and defender of freedom.” This is a surreal end for a writer who called himself a “queen” (una loca) and “a poor old faggot” (un marica pobre y viejo), and whose style and obsessions were forged on the social margins and in political opposition.
But his literary début took place far from workshops or salons. Will the future be in black and white? Art by Banksy. The Pioneering Feminism of Niki de Saint Phalle. “Niki de Saint Phalle: Structures for Life,” at moma PS1, is a ravishing and scandalously overdue New York museum show of the French-American avant-gardist, who died at the age of seventy-one, in 2002, of emphysema probably caused by her use of toxic materials.
The self-taught Saint Phalle is one of the late twentieth century’s great creative personalities, ahead of her time in several respects, with traits that once clouded and now halo her importance. Her career had two chief phases: feminist rage, expressed by way of .22 rifles fired at plaster sculptures inside which she had secreted bags of liquid paint, and feminist celebration of womanhood, through sculptures of female bodies, often immense, in fibreglass and polyester resin. The shooting period lasted from 1961 until about 1963. The bodies consumed the rest of her life. Objective Events: Ian Hamilton Finlay, the Arts Councils, and the Battle as art and work. by Greg Thomas – The Drouth. Artist and poet Ian Hamilton Finlay (1925-2006) was a man of many contradictions: a writer of words and a conceiver of objects, a collaborator and a fighter.
Acutely conscious of the presence of history, he was witty and urbane, yet lived in rural isolation, making a barren Scots hillside into a garden, and invoking his revolutionary heroes there. Greg Thomas examines his performative relations with the functionaries of the art world, and assesses the ethical worth and creative achievements Finlay worked into those bureaucratic processes apparently so devoid of artistic potential. The Ian Hamilton Finlay Papers at the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, contain a typed note in the style of a press release, outlining a recent “Objective Event…staged at the Scottish Arts Council, 19 Charlotte Square, Edinburgh, on Wednesday 14 March 1979.”
Thomas Robson, Artist, L'art du détournement Portfolio. Contemporary Art. The Art Story: Modern Art Movements, Artists, Ideas and Topics. Will Gompertz: When did curators become cool? - BBC News. Art of Europe. German Art. The Three Graces. Definition of Vanitas Painting - Art History Glossary. Definition: (noun) - A vanitas painting was a particular type of still life immensely popular in the Netherlands (and Paris, to a lesser extent), beginning in the 17th century.
The phrase comes to us courtesy of a Biblical passage in Ecclesiastes, in which the Hebrew word "hevel" was incorrectly taken to mean "vanity of vanities". But for this slight mistranslation, the term would rightfully be known as a "vapor painting". Be that as it may ... A vanitas painting, while possibly containing lovely objects, always included some reference to man's mortality - most often a human skull (with or without other bones), but also by way of burning candles, soap bubbles or decaying flowers. It is doubtful that this genre would have been popular had the Counter-Reformation and Calvinism not propelled it into the limelight.[1] The Self-Portrait: A Cultural History review – 'profoundly human' "The moment when a man comes to paint himself – he may do it only two or three times in a lifetime, perhaps never – has in the nature of things a special significance.
" The Fascination of the Unfinished. Unfinished paintings are enticing cracks in the facade of art history, lures along the path to a deeper understanding of artistic processes and impulses.
For all the paintings that artists complete, countless others are left incomplete for any number of reasons — poverty or war, a change of plan or vision, the illness or death of the artist. While many of these works have been destroyed, and others forgotten, some are now recognized as significant works of art, accorded a special place in history and in an artist’s body of work, in part because they can bring us closer to understanding the mysterious process of painting, and, indeed, to painting’s future.
After all, nothing inspires a young artist like a close look at how an earlier one worked. I started thinking about unfinished canvases on my first, euphoric visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s reconfigured galleries of European paintings last spring.
The Shunk-Kender Archive - Slide Show. Log. 8 October 2018, dusan “Today, predicting the impact of human activities on the earth’s climate hinges on tracking interactions among phenomena of radically different dimensions, from the molecular to the planetary.
Climate in Motion shows that this multiscalar, multicausal framework emerged well before computers and satellites. Extending the history of modern climate science back into the nineteenth century, Deborah R. Coen uncovers its roots in the politics of empire-building in central and eastern Europe.
Grayson Perry. French Art. American Art. Previously Unseen Photographs and Basquiat Ephemera Come to Light in a New York Apartment. Alexis Adler in her East Village apartment (all images via Animal New York) Alexis Adler has one of the world’s greatest troves of 1980s art in her apartment — doubly true because the art is her apartment.
She “had relations” with Jean Michel Basquiat, as she says in a short documentary by Animal New York, and though they weren’t quite boyfriend and girlfriend, Basquiat did decorate their shared apartment with murals and store years’ worth of his sketches and ephemera in the East Village space. After becoming a working biologist and having two children, Adler is now revealing the stash of artwork, drawings, and objects to the world. There are 65 or so entries in the collection, according to ARTINFO, as well as several murals within the apartment.
There are also Adler’s hypnotizing photographs of the wunderkind artist — Basquiat posed in the bathroom, playing a clarinet, wandering around the apartment.
Art by Animals. Abstraction. Orson Welles on Art. Romanticism. Installation Art. Size does matter, Jamaicans decide. It was supposed to symbolise liberation and celestial reverence in an independent Jamaica.
Two naked 7ft-high bronze figures - a male and a female - looking skywards on a dome-shaped fountain embossed with Bob Marley's lyrics "None but ourselves can free our minds". But according to the statue's critics the artist is too light-skinned, the male figure is too generously endowed, and both are, well, too naked. Since Redemption Song was unveiled at the entrance to Kingston's new Emancipation Park a fortnight ago it has prompted a debate that has revisited myths about the black male, scratched at sores about "shadism" and brought to the fore a prudish streak in a country more renowned for taking things easy.
An unscientific straw poll, conducted just by listening in on the conversations of onlookers for half an hour and judging by the balance of letters and phone-in callers, suggests most people like it but that a sizeable number are scandalised. "It has surprised me," she said.
Technology & Art. Picasso. Turkey’s Efforts to Repatriate Art Alarm Museums. Postcards-to-japan. IMPERIAL PRESS. Henry’s room was on the third floor. It was filled with STUFF from floor to ceiling. There were stacks of newspapers, magazines, and empty bottles of Pepto Bismol. It appeared as though every single thing he had brought into the room in the forty years he had lived there had never left the room. There was hardly any space left to walk around. Henry looked like a street person. Whomever could have imagined that once he entered his room, this dirty, shuffling old man wrote and painted another world into being? Kiyoko Larner (landlord) These photos show the apartment where the elderly outsider artist Henry Darger (1892-1973) spent the last forty years of his life, almost until he died on 13 April 1973, a third-floor backroom of a townhouse on Webster Avenue in Chicago. He received no callers while still alive, other than occasional visits from the pastor of the local church or the landlord’s wife entering to change a light bulb.
Yukiko Koide (publisher) Oh Freedom! Iakovos at the Water's Edge, Chios, c1988. Luzinterruptus. Art: aesthetic + social conscience.
Renaissance.