Tuesday, May 21, 2024

Arresting Compositions - I

Anonymous British Artist
Don't Keep a Diary
ca. 1942
lithograph (poster)
Victoria & Albert Museum, London

Herbert Bayer
Auto-Portrait
1932
gelatin silver print (photomontage)
Victoria & Albert Museum, London

Jan Boeckhorst
Apollo and Daphne
ca. 1640
watercolor and gouache
Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Brassaï
Graffiti
ca. 1955
gelatin silver print
Tate Gallery

Günter Brus
Untitled
(series, Night Quartet)
1982
drypoint
Tate Gallery

Claude Cahun
Untitled (Assemblage)
1936
gelatin silver print
Tate Gallery

Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux
Sketch for Pietà
ca. 1870
tempera and watercolor on paper
Princeton University Art Museum

Frankie Creith
Garment I
2002
paper, net, gauze - stitched and varnished
Victoria & Albert Museum, London

Charles Demuth
In Vaudeville - The Bicycle Rider
1919
drawing, with watercolor
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

Herman Faber
Corpse with Wrapped Head and Feet
ca. 1890
drawing
Philadelphia Museum of Art

Marcel Fromenti
Fashion Illustration for The Lady
1953
drawing
Victoria & Albert Museum, London

Gaetano Gandolfi
Faun in Landscape bearing Putti on Tray
ca. 1785
drawing
Victoria & Albert Museum, London

Alberto Giacometti
Still Life with Two Plaster Heads
1950
oil on canvas
Milwaukee Art Museum

Great Exhibition (London)
Admission Ticket of W.E. Gladstone
1851
ivory
British Museum

Marsden Hartley
Geometric Figure
ca. 1920
oil on canvas
Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen

      Beyond their official duties within the papal curia and their involvement in the sodalities, humanists also took part in the complex ceremonial and festive life of the Eternal City.  Because of Rome's centrality to Christendom, it offered more opportunities than did other Italian centers for humanistic contributions to ceremonial events, whether in the form of orations, poems, or iconographical programs.  Such occasions for public display showcased humanists' talents.  Thus, they were among those offering sermons before the popes; they delivered orations to cardinals entering conclaves; they delivered funeral orations; and they took part in such pageantry as Alexander VI's celebration of the Jubilee Year (1500), Julius II's triumphal entry into Rome (1507), and Leo X's coronation rites (1513).  Not all such occasions lent themselves to expressions of papal ideology, inasmuch as purpose and context placed constraints upon content.  For example, the Masters of the Sacred Palace, the pope's official theologians, sought to ensure that orations delivered before the popes during the liturgy adhered to strict standards of decorum.  Focusing upon the solemnity being observed, such presentations were not supposed to celebrate the papacy's military or diplomatic successes.  Still, they provided a setting in which humanists could position themselves near the center of the revival of Rome's cultural and intellectual life.  

     Public processions, by contrast, could blazon papal claims and ambitions.  The possesso, the ceremonial procession of a pope-elect from the Piazza San Pietro to the Lateran, included a series of traditional rituals, such as the tossing of coins to the crowd at designated points.  In the coronation of Leo X, however, the focus had shifted decisively to the procession itself, in which music, elaborate costumes, and decorative triumphal arches replete with art and inscriptions gave graphic expression to Roman humanist ideology, associating Leo both with Biblical precedents such as the "Lion of Judah" and with classical gods and goddesses such as Apollo and Athena.  The new pontiff, the arches proclaimed, would initiate a golden age that would flourish particularly in Rome.  Thus, in their programs for ceremonies, as in their formal writings, humanists expressed their shared ideology and, by implication, reinforced their own role as spokesmen whose harmonious voices defined and dignified the Renaissance papacy. 

– Kenneth Gouwens, from Remembering the Renaissance: Humanist Narratives of the Sack of Rome (Brill, 1998)

Max Dupain (1911-1992)

Olive Cotton
Max Dupain
ca. 1930
gelatin silver print
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Max Dupain
Self Portrait
ca. 1935
gelatin silver print
Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney

Olive Cotton
Max
1935
gelatin silver print
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Max Dupain
Fashion Shot
1937
gelatin silver print
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Max Dupain
Fashion Shot for retailer David Jones
1937
gelatin silver print
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Max Dupain
Surreal Portrait of Miss Peggy Buchanan
for The Home
 [Australian magazine]
1938
gelatin silver print
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Olive Cotton
Max Dupain
1939
gelatin silver print
Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney

Olive Cotton
Max after surfing
1939
gelatin silver print
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Max Dupain
Miss Noleen Woodward
1940
gelatin silver print
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Max Dupain
Portrait of Loudon Sainthill
(illustrator and stage designer)
1946
gelatin silver print
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Max Dupain
Ticket Sellers, Minerva Theatre
1946
gelatin silver print
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Max Dupain
Meat Queue
1946
gelatin silver print
Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane

Max Dupain
Office of Harry Seidler & Associates, Architects,
Milsons Point, Sydney

1973
C-print
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Max Dupain
Theatre Royal, Sydney
designed by Harry Seidler & Associates

1976
gelatin silver print
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Max Dupain
Untitled
1978
gelatin silver print
Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney

Jill White
Portrait of Max Dupain
1989
gelatin silver print
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

"I find that my whole life, if it is going to be of any consequence in photography, has to be devoted to that place where I have been born, reared and worked, thought, philosophised and made pictures to the best of my ability.  And that's all I need."  – Max Dupain

Monday, May 20, 2024

Decorative Impulses

Roman Empire
Necklace
2nd-3rd century AD
gold, garnet, emerald
Art Institute of Chicago

French Workshop
Dagger Handle
ca. 1300-1320
ivory
Victoria & Albert Museum, London

Martin Schongauer
Shields with Rabbit and Moor's Head, held by Wild Man
ca. 1480-90
engraving
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

Giovanni della Robbia
Frieze Fragment with Cherub Head
ca. 1510
glazed terracotta
Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri

Giovanni Bernardi
Adoration of the Magi
ca. 1520
glass relief-panel
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

Francesco Salviati
Emblematic Design with Double-Headed Horse and Moth
ca. 1550-60
drawing
Morgan Library, New York

Burgundian Workshop
Cabinet
1580
walnut and oak
Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Bernard Picart
Ornament with Head in a Wreath
ca. 1710
etching
Philadelphia Museum of Art

Johann Heinrich Koehler
Dwarf as Gardener
ca. 1720-25
ivory, silver, copper, diamonds
Gemäldegalerie, Dresden

John Michael Rysbrack
Putti supporting Architrave
ca. 1730
marble
Victoria & Albert Museum, London

Augustus Pugin (designer)
Wallpaper Fragment
(Heraldic Lion-Heads and Monogram)
ca. 1850
color woodblock print
Victoria & Albert Museum, London

Franz Heinrich
Summer Room of Queen Olga at Stuttgart New Palace
ca. 1870
watercolor
Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart

British Workshop
Window Cornice
1931
carved and painted wood with silk brocade
(commissioned replica of 18th-century cornice)
Philadelphia Museum of Art

Dana Bartlett
Ornamental Design
ca. 1934
watercolor and gouache
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

Jim Blashfield
The Doors
1967
lithograph (poster)
Victoria & Albert Museum, London

Susan Phillips McMeekin
Design for Dragon Clock
ca. 2012
presentation drawing, with watercolor
Victoria & Albert Museum, London

from Scorpio, or, The Scorpion 

This belt of fretted stars that so promiscuously plays
Upon our eyes, we learn to name them all,
Picking our favourites out like horses in a race.
But now their steady passages recall
How, geared to the years,
They tick our lives out: and we cease to see
Much hope in false futurity:
Instead we falsify stars that have been
With promise that we alter since those stars,
Raising reality
Not in what we see,
Nor in what meteors there yet may be,
But in fixed stars we would we once had seen.

– Joseph Gordon Macleod, from The Ecliptic (1930)

Wight - Shunsen - Sander - Salle

Normana Wight
Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones
(series, Movies on Television)
ca. 1985
screenprint (postcard)
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Normana Wight
R. Redford, All the President's Men
(series, Movies on Television)
ca. 1986
screenprint (postcard)
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Normana Wight
William Hurt
(series, Movies on Television)
ca. 1986
screenprint (postcard)
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Normana Wight
Self Portrait with Blue Hand
1986
screenprint (postcard)
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Natori Shunsen
Ichikawa Sumizo VI as Shirai Gonpachi
in The Floating World's Pattern

1926
color woodblock print
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Natori Shunsen
Nakamura Ganjiro I as Sakata Tojuro
in Tojuro's Love

1925
color woodblock print
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Natori Shunsen
Nakamura Kaisha I as Okaru in
Love Suicides, Eve of the Koshin Festival

1928
color woodblock print
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Natori Shunsen
Onoe Baiko VI as Sayuri
in Bridge of Return

1925
color woodblock print
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

August Sander
The Architect Hans Poelzig, Berlin
1929
gelatin silver print
Art Institute of Chicago

August Sander
The Dadaist Raoul Hausmann
ca. 1930
gelatin silver print
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

August Sander
Gerd Arntz (painter)
1929
gelatin silver print
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

August Sander
Otto Freundlich (painter)
1929
gelatin silver print
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

David Salle
Low and Narrow
1994
lithograph, woodcut, etching and collage
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

David Salle
Long and High
1994
lithograph and woodcut
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

David Salle
High and Low
1994
lithograph, woodcut and screenprint
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

David Salle
Up and Down
1994
lithograph, woodcut, etching and collage
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

from Music is International

     Orchestras have so long been speaking
This universal language that the Greek
     And the Barbarian have both mastered
Its enigmatic grammar which at last
     Says all things well. But who is worthy?
What is sweet? What is sound? Much of the earth
     Is austere, her temperate regions
Swarming with cops and robbers; germs besiege
     The walled towns and among the living
The captured outnumber the fugitive.
     Where silence is coldest and darkest,
Among those staring blemishes that mark
     War's havocking slot, it is easy
To guess what dreams such vaulting cries release:
     The unamerican survivor
Hears angels drinking fruit-juice with their wives
     Or making money in an open 
Unpoliced air. But what is our hope,
     As with an ostentatious rightness
These gratuitous sounds like water and light
     Bless the Republic? Do they sponsor
In us the mornes and motted mammelons,
     The sharp streams and sortering springs of 
A commuter's wish, where each frescade rings
     With melodious booing and hooing
As some elegant lovejoy deigns to woo
     And nothing dreadful ever happened?
Probably yes. We are easy to trap,
     Being Adam's children, as thirsty
For mere illusion still as when the first
     Comfortable heresy crooned to
The proud flesh founded on the self-made wound,
     And what we find rousing or touching
Tells us little and confuses us much.
     As Shaw said – Music is the brandy
Of the damned. It was from the good old grand
     Composers the progressive kind of 
Tyrant learned how to melt the legal mind
     With a visceral A-ha; fill a
Dwarf's ears with sforzandos and the dwarf will
     Believe he's a giant; the orchestral
Metaphor bamboozles the most oppressed
     – As a trombone the clerk will bravely
Go oompah-oompah to his minor grave –.
     So that to-day one recognises
The Machiavel by the hair in his eyes,
     His conductor's hands. Yet the jussive
Elohim are here too, asking for us
     Through the noise. 

– W.H. Auden (1947)