Showing posts with label monochrome. Show all posts
Showing posts with label monochrome. Show all posts

Sunday, July 27, 2025

Red Notes

Lap-See Lam
Phantom Banquet Ghost
2019
painted polystyrene and neon
Moderna Museet, Stockholm

Didier Lapène
Le Musée de Pau
2006
oil on canvas
Musée des Beaux-Arts de Pau

Johann Peter Krafft
Orpheus at the Tomb of Eurydice
1805
oil on canvas
Belvedere Museum, Vienna

Sigurd Lewerentz
The Stockholm Exhibition
1930
lithograph (poster)
Röhsska Museet, Göteborg

Anna Rosina Lisiewska (Anna Rosina de Gasc)
Portrait of Philippine Charlotte von Braunschweig
ca. 1770-80
oil on canvas
Bildgalerie von Sanssouci, Potsdam

Broncia Koller
Self Portrait
ca. 1910
oil on canvas
Leopold Museum, Vienna

Ferdinand Andri
Seated Woman in Red Dress
(Helene Zarci)

1927
oil on canvas
Leopold Museum, Vienna

Otto Friedrich
Lady in Red
1909
oil on canvas
Leopold Museum, Vienna

Anders Zorn
Self Portrait in Red
1915
oil on canvas
Zornmuseet, Mora, Sweden

Joseph Anton Settegast
Portrait of Dorothea Veit
ca. 1844
oil on canvas
Kunsthalle Mannheim

Max Slevogt
Portrait of a Rider
1906
oil on canvas
Kunsthalle Mannheim

Jann Haworth
Rhinestone Ring
1963
satin stuffed with polyester
Moderna Museet, Stockholm

François Gérard
Alexandrine-Anne de la Pallu, marquise de Flers
ca. 1810
oil on canvas
Musée Carnavalet, Paris

Annelie Wallin
Untitled (Bernini's St Teresa in Ecstasy)
ca. 1990
screenprint
Moderna Museet, Stockholm

Frederic Matys Thursz
Vermilion II
1983
oil on canvas
Moderna Museet, Stockholm

Antoni Tàpies
All Red
1961
oil paint and sand on canvas
Moderna Museet, Stockholm

They took him to see the well that measures the Nile, which is almost identical to the one at Memphis: it is constructed of close-fitting blocks of polished stone and has an engraved scale marked in cubits; the river water seeps underground into the well, where its level against the markings registers the rise and fall in the level of the Nile for the benefit of the inhabitants of the area, who are able to gauge the degree of inundation or shortage of water by the number of divisions covered or exposed.*  They also showed him the sundials that cast no shadow at noon, for in the latitude of Syene** the light of the sun is perpendicularly overhead at the summer solstice and thus throws equal illumination on all sides of an object, precluding the casting of a shadow.  Likewise the water at the bottom of wells is directly illuminated.  Hydaspes, however, was not much impressed by these sights, which were already familiar to him: exactly the same occurred, he said, at Meroe in Ethiopia.

*This whole passage is extremely close to the description of the Nilometer at Elephantine by Strabo.  No doubt Heliodorus and Strabo derive their information from the same source.  Devices of this kind were essential in a country whose agriculture depended entirely on the annual inundation of the Nile.

**Syene lies almost exactly on the Tropic of Cancer, where the sun is directly overhead on the day of the summer solstice – which, of course, is the time of year when this section of the novel is set.  The shadowless sundial and illuminated well bottom are often mentioned in connection with the city.  

– Heliodorus, from The Aethiopica, or, Theagenes and Charikleia (3rd or 4th century AD), translated from Greek by J.R. Morgan (1989)

Saturday, July 26, 2025

Blue Notes

Anna Ancher
Sunlight in the Blue Room
1891
oil on canvas
Skagens Museum, Denmark

Erik Andriesse
Untitled (Blue Sunflower)
1984
acrylic on canvas
Dordrechts Museum

Oscar Antonsson
Nationalmuseum - Midnight Concerts
1937
lithograph (poster)
Moderna Museet, Stockholm

Karel Appel
Titre Bleu
1984
oil on canvas
Moderna Museet, Stockholm

Joseph Beuys
Vitex Agnus
ca. 1970
lithograph
Moderna Museet, Stockholm

Marcel Broodthaers
Société
1969-72
paint on vacuum-pressed plastic
Moderna Museet, Stockholm

Daniel Caffe
Mother and Child
ca. 1805
pastel on paper
Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden

Marie Louise Ekman
Skoaltare
1968
screenprint
Moderna Museet, Stockholm

Peter Esdaile
Blue Guru
1971
oil on canvas
Nasjonalmuseet, Oslo

Johanne Hansen-Krone
Man in Blue Recognition
1983
acrylic on canvas
KORO (Public Art Norway), Oslo

Jean Heiberg
Self Portrait in Blue Pullover
1931
oil on canvas
Göteborgs Konstmuseum, Sweden

Manolis Polymeris
Figure in Blue
1951
oil on panel
National Gallery, Athens

Johs Rian
Blue II
1963
oil on canvas
Nasjonalmuseet, Oslo

Piet Mondrian
Composition with Large Blue Plane,
Red, Black, Yellow and Gray

1921
oil on canvas
Dallas Museum of Art

Lucio Fontana
Spatial Concept: Waiting
ca. 1958
pigment in synthetic resin on canvas
Göteborgs Konstmuseum, Sweden

Yves Klein
Monochrome Blue - YKB-73
1961
pigment in synthetic resin on cotton, mounted on panel
Museum Ludwig, Cologne

This is the popular version, but the substance of their belief in the river's divinity is this: they believe that human life and existence derive principally from the conjunction of moist and dry elements, and their theory is that all other elements are subordinate to these two and occur only in combination with them; the Nile embodies the moist element; their own land, the dry.  This much they disclose to all and sundry, but to initiates they reveal the truth that the land is Isis and the Nile Osiris, with these titles imparting a deeper meaning to the material objects.  The goddess longs for her husband when he is away and rejoices at his return, mourns his renewed absence and abominates Typhon like a mortal enemy.* There is, I imagine, a school of natural philosophers and theologians who do not disclose the meanings embedded in these stories to laymen but simply give them preliminary instruction in the form of a myth.  But those who have reached the higher grades of the mysteries they initiate into clear knowledge in the privacy of the holy shrine, in the light cast by the blazing torch of truth.

Well, may the gods pardon me for saying this much.  The greatest mysteries may not be spoken of: let us respect their sanctity . . . 

*Typhon (or Seth), the slayer of Osiris, in this allegory is identified with the desert sun and drought. 

– Heliodorus, from The Aethiopica, or, Theagenes and Charikleia (3rd or 4th century AD), translated from Greek by J.R. Morgan (1989)

Wednesday, November 11, 2020

Monochrome Paintings - Twentieth Century

Paul Winstanley
TV Room V
1997
oil on canvas
Tate Modern, London

Ivor Williams
Soldier
ca, 1940-45
oil on canvas
Aberystwyth University School of Art
Museum and Galleries, Wales

Patrick Procktor
Al
1992
oil on foamcore
Yale Center for British Art

Ernest Young Procter
Witches at Play in the Night Sky
ca. 1920
gouache and pastel on paper
Penlee House Gallery and Museum, Penzance, Cornwall

Robert Rauschenberg
Almanac
1962
oil, acrylic, and silkscreen on canvas
Tate Gallery

from republic

and the leveling of the land, enduing it in sameness, cured malaria
as the standing water in low glades disappeared,
                                                          as the muskegs drained
typhoid and yellow fever decreased
                                   even milksickness abated
thanks to the rise of the feeding pen
                          cattle no longer grazing on white snakeroot

vanquished:     the germs that bedeviled the rural areas
                                                            the rural areas also
vanquished:     made monochromatic and mechanized, made suburban

– D.A. Powell (2008)

Isabel Rawsthorne
Male Baboon
ca. 1964
oil on canvas
Tate Gallery

Charles Shearer
Study of Classical Bust
ca. 1976
oil on board
Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen

John Turner
Satyr (after a Cast from the Antique)
1942
oil on canvas
University College London Art Museum

John Singer Sargent
Sketch of Dame Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth
1906
oil on canvas
National Portrait Gallery, London

Anthony Fry
Dance White
1960
oil on canvas
Southbank Centre, London

Victor Davidson
Study of a Cast after the Antique
1970
oil on board
Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen

Vilhelm Hammershøi
Royal Palace Church in Copenhagen
1910
oil on canvas
Nationalmuseum, Stockholm

Charles Maussion
Walking Man No. 3
1950
oil and crayon on canvas
Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts,
University of East Anglia, Norwich

Ambrose McEvoy
In a Mirror
ca. 1911
watercolor
Tate Gallery

Alan Lumsden
Untitled
(Stuffed Crane on Kitchen Chair)
1970
oil on board
Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen

Tuesday, November 10, 2020

Monochrome Paintings - Nineteenth Century

Sydney Prior Hall
Gladstone Reading
ca. 1890
gouache
National Portrait Gallery, London

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres
Odalisque
ca. 1824-34
oil on canvas
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Gustave Moreau
Hélène Glorifiée
ca. 1890
oil on canvas
Musée Gustave Moreau, Paris

Will Hicok Low
Keats' Last Sonnet
1887
oil on canvas
Art Institute of Chicago

Owen Jones
Luxor
before 1874
watercolor
British Museum

Thomas Duncan
Study of Casts of Famous Antique Sculptures
ca. 1830
oil on canvas
Royal Scottish Academy of Art and Architecture, Edinburgh

from Xian of Eight Rivers

Everything is reflected:
an unimaginable number of movements,
of patterns, thoughts, images,
of which we see the copies in immense numbers,
but never the originals.

– Curzio Malaparte (1898-1957), translated by Walter Murch (2012)

Henry Fuseli
Lady Macbeth with the Daggers
1812
oil on canvas
Tate Britain

Caspar David Friedrich
Window Overlooking a Park
ca. 1810-11
watercolor
Hermitage, Saint Petersburg

Honoré Daumier
The Amateurs
ca. 1865-68
watercolor
Walters Art Museum, Baltimore

Thomas Barker
Three Girls Asleep under a Tent - Morning
ca. 1815
oil on canvas
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

Louis-Léopold Boilly
Girl at a Window
ca. 1800-1820
oil on canvas
National Gallery, London

Jacobus Ludovicus Cornet
The Room of Cornelis de Witt in Prison,
the Gevangenpoort, the Hague

1844
watercolor
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Edward Burne-Jones
Cupid's Hunting Fields
1880
oil on canvas
Victoria & Albert Museum, London

Alfred George Stevens
Lower Limbs of Ornamental Figure
ca. 1860
oil on canvas
Victoria & Albert Museum, London

Samuel Prout
Stonehenge
ca. 1805
watercolor
Victoria & Albert Museum, London