Thursday, October 31, 2019

Anonymous Figure Drawings from Italy (16th-18th centuries)

Anonymous Italian Artist working in Tuscany
Draped Standing Figure with Outstretched Arm
16th century
drawing
Art Institute of Chicago

Anonymous Italian Artist after Bernardino Gatti
Five Putti with Books
16th century
drawing
Art Institute of Chicago

Anonymous Italian Artist after Carlo Urbino
Standing Draped Male Figure
16th century
drawing
Art Institute of Chicago

Anonymous Italian Artist after Federico Zuccaro
Standing Female Allegorical Figure
16th century
drawing
Art Institute of Chicago

Anonymous Italian Artist
Sheet of Anatomical Studies
16th century
drawing
Art Institute of Chicago

from Fountain

The shoulders and elbows of people in the museum evoke more reaction

in me than most of the paintings.

– Ari Banias (2018)

Anonymous Italian Artist after Raphael
Woman with Two Children
16th century
drawing
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Anonymous Italian Artist after Lattanzio Gambara
Standing Prophet holding a Book
16th century
drawing
Art Institute of Chicago

Anonymous Italian Artist after Giulio Romano
Menelaus holding the Body of Patroclus
16th century
drawing
Art Institute of Chicago

Anonymous Italian Artist after Taddeo Zuccaro
Male Allegorical Figure
16th century
drawing
Art Institute of Chicago

Anonymous Italian Artist after Pordenone
Frieze with Mythological Sea Figures
16th century
drawing
Teylers Museum, Haarlem

Anonymous Italian Artist after Paolo Veronese
Overdoor with Allegorical Figures
17th century
drawing
Art Institute of Chicago

Anonymous Italian Artist after Raphael
Guard drawing his Sword
17th century
drawing
Art Institute of Chicago

Anonymous Italian Artist
Four Putti
17th century
drawing
Art Institute of Chicago

Anonymous Italian Artist after Raphael
Standing Man Pointing
18th century
drawing
Art Institute of Chicago

Anonymous Italian Artist after Raphael
Seated Youth Writing
18th century
drawing
Art Institute of Chicago

Gelatin Silver Prints by Celebrated Photographers

Berenice Abbott
Flam and Flam, 165 East 12th Street, Manhattan
1938
gelatin silver print
Art Institute of Chicago

Berenice Abbott
Glass Brick and Brownstone Fronts
1938
gelatin silver print
Art Institute of Chicago

Yousuf Karsh
Berenice Abbott
1989
gelatin silver print
Art Institute of Chicago

Eugène Atget
Untitled (Pool in Landscape)
ca. 1919-21
gelatin silver print
(printed by Berenice Abbott after 1927)
Art Institute of Chicago

Brassaï
Leaving the Opera
1935
gelatin silver print
Art Institute of Chicago

Cotillion, from The Beggar's Opera

Youth's the season made for joys,
Love is then our duty:
She alone who that employs,
Well deserves her beauty.
Let's be gay
While we may,
Beauty's flower despised in decay.

Let us drink and sport today,
Ours is not tomorrow:
Love with youth flies swift away,
Age is naught but sorrow.
Dance and sing,
Time's on the wing,
Life never knows the return of spring.

– John Gay (1728)

Bruce Davidson
Untitled
1960
gelatin silver print
Art Institute of Chicago

Duane Michals
Hotel Room
1965
gelatin silver print
Art Institute of Chicago

Jack A. Jaffe
Michelangelo's David
ca. 1960
gelatin silver print
Art Institute of Chicago

Bob Thall
Chicago (18th Street Pilsen)
1972
gelatin silver print
Art Institute of Chicago

William Clift
Auditor's Office, Old City Hall, Boston
1970
gelatin silver print
Art Institute of Chicago

Bob Thall
Sanitary and Ship Canal at Pulaski
1983
gelatin silver print
Art Institute of Chicago

Bob Thall
Woodbury County Court House, Sioux City, Iowa
1976
gelatin silver print
Art Institute of Chicago

William Clift
Entrance Gate and Façade, Old City Hall, Boston
1970
gelatin silver print
Art Institute of Chicago

William Clift
The Chanel, Mont Saint Michel
1999
gelatin silver print
Art Institute of Chicago

Wednesday, October 30, 2019

Twentieth-Century Faces by Celebrated Photographers

George Platt Lynes
Gian Carlo Menotti
1938
gelatin silver print
Art Institute of Chicago

Yousuf Karsh
Audrey Hepburn
1956
gelatin silver print
Art Institute of Chicago

George Platt Lynes
Kay Boyle
ca. 1935
gelatin silver print
Art Institute of Chicago

Paul Strand
Young Boy, Gondeville, Charente, France
1951
gelatin silver print
Art Institute of Chicago

Robert Frank
Chattanooga, Tennessee
1955-56
gelatin silver print
Art Institute of Chicago

The Children of Stare

Winter is fallen early
On the house of Stare;
Birds in reverberating flocks
Haunt its ancestral box;
Bright are the plenteous berries
In clusters in the air.

Still is the fountain's music,
The dark pool icy still,
Whereupon a small and sanguine sun
Floats in a mirror on,
Into a West of crimson,
From a South of daffodil.

'Tis strange to see young children
In such a wintry house;
Like rabbits' on the frozen snow
Their tell-tale footprints go;
Their laughter rings like timbrels
'Neath evening ominous:

Their small and heightened faces
Like wine-red winter buds;
Their frolic bodies gentle as
Flakes in the air that pass,
Frail as the twirling petal
From the briar of the woods.

Above them silence lours,
Still as an arctic sea;
Light fails; night falls; the wintry moon
Glitters; the crocus soon
Will open grey and distracted
On earth's austerity:

Thick mystery, wild peril,
Law like an iron rod: –
Yet sport they on in Spring's attire,
Each with his tiny fire
Blown to a core of ardour
By the awful breath of God.

– Walter de la Mare (1906)

George Platt Lynes
George Tooker
1945
gelatin silver print
Art Institute of Chicago

Robert Frank
Movie Premiere, Hollywood
1955-56
gelatin silver print
Art Institute of Chicago

George Platt Lynes
Burt Lancaster
1947
gelatin silver print
Art Institute of Chicago

Elliott Erwitt
Batsk, Siberia
1967
gelatin silver print
Art Institute of Chicago

George Platt Lynes
Farley Granger
1947
gelatin silver print
Art Institute of Chicago

Blythe Bohnen
Self Portrait, Pivotal Motion from Chin, Medium
1974
gelatin silver print
Art Institute of Chicago

Blythe Bohnen
Self Portrait, Pivotal Motion from Chin, Large
1974
gelatin silver print
Art Institute of Chicago

Blythe Bohnen
Self Portrait, Horizontal Elliptical Motion, Small
1983
gelatin silver print
Art Institute of Chicago

Blythe Bohnen
Self Portrait, Vertical Motion Up, Medium
1983
gelatin silver print
Art Institute of Chicago

Yousuf Karsh
Jessye Norman
1990
gelatin silver print
Art Institute of Chicago

Drapery Explorations by Artists - Renaissance to the Present

Daniele da Volterra
Drapery Studies
ca. 1530-35
drawing
Minneapolis Institute of Art

Ferraù Fenzoni
Drapery Study - Seated Youth
ca. 1590-1600
drawing
Minneapolis Institute of Art

Domenico Fetti
Study of Drapery
before 1624
drawing
Minneapolis Institute of Art

The Guinea Pig and the Green Balloon

I approached the luminous stranger who came to me
from darkness in a gown of lettuce leaves, in a velvet

cloak of green that appeared at first another piece of dark,
but pulled apart into the glow-sphere that danced

in swaying steps, the lucent majesty that slipped toward me
from the reigning silence black above my cage.

Oh extravagant – and were my teeth too sharp to greet
or sharp enough?  I do not understand now what was meant

to happen and what was a mistake – but know the bursting,
the sickening snap of ecstasy wrenched back to the body

and the green gown flung in crippled circles traced
like diagrams of wasting moons above my head – or portals

to another world, I thought, but as I thought, the shriek
dissolved, the body crumpled from the air and landed

on its side beneath the salt lick. All night I tended
the wasted skin and careful, brought it water,

alfalfa, made a bed of cedar chips and tried to gather
molecules of breath that floated from the plant shelf.

When I remembered morning, I began to cry, began to pray
for night to stay until the green took shape again

and if that shape were gone, I prayed for night
to stay, to be held in the same forever-dark

in which I first looked up and saw the gentle body,
and saw the graceful swaying of the stranger coming

as if for me – now I do not know – but then,
as if for me, and all my loneliness gone.

– Oni Buchanan (2003)

Jan de Bisschop
Standing Draped Man
before 1671
drawing
Minneapolis Institute of Art

Adriaen van de Velde
Standing Male Figure - Drapery Study
before 1672
drawing
Minneapolis Institute of Art

A.J. Defehrt
Dessein - Draped Figures
(illustration page from Diderot's Encyclopédie)
ca. 1762-77
etching with engraving
Art Institute of Chicago

attributed to François Boucher
Draped Woman, Half-Length
before 1770
drawing
Art Institute of Chicago

Albert Joseph Moore
Study for A Garden
ca, 1869
drawing
Art Institute of Chicago

Elliott & Fry
Portrait of Miss Constance MacDonald Gilchrist
1877
albumen print - cabinet card
Art Institute of Chicago

Edward Burne-Jones
Draped Male Figure
ca. 1888-91
drawing
Art Institute of Chicago

Yousuf Karsh
Ruth Draper
1936
gelatin silver print
Art Institute of Chicago

Henry Moore
Group of Draped Standing Figures
1942
drawing
Art Institute of Chicago

James Welling
Green Drapes 1
2000
C-print
Art Institute of Chicago

James Welling
Green Drapes 2 
2000
C-print
Art Institute of Chicago

James Welling
Green Drapes 3
2000
C-print
Art Institute of Chicago