Showing posts with label kitsch. Show all posts
Showing posts with label kitsch. Show all posts

Saturday, November 3, 2018

Three-Dimensional Personages in Western Art

Doccia Manufactory (Florence)
Sleeping Endymion
ca. 1755-65
porcelain figurine
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Jean-Louis Lemoyne
Bust of Jacques-Rolland Moreau
1712
marble
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

"Lemoyne became a prominent sculptor and official portraitist at the court of King Louis XV.  Jacques-Rolland Moreau, member of a wealthy bourgeois family, was a royal counselor and high treasurer for wars.  The sitter was depicted wearing an elaborate curled wig and open lace-trimmed shirt, with heavy drapery around the shoulders.  The animated style of the bust and its technical virtuosity reflect the influence of Gian Lorenzo Bernini, the great Italian Baroque sculptor who had worked briefly in France for the court of Louis XIV in the 1660s."

 – from curator's notes at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Jean-Baptiste Lemoyne
Bust of Mlle Victoire Martin
1750
terracotta
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Chelsea Manufactory (London)
Italian Beggar
ca. 1753-57
porcelain figurine
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Roman sculptor
Hermaphroditus
1st century AD
marble statuette
Walters Art Museum, Baltimore

Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux
Bacchante with lowered eyes
1872
terracotta
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

"Commissioned by the architect Charles Garnier for the facade of the Paris Opéra, Carpeaux's monumental decorative sculpture La Danse was unveiled on July 26, 1869.  The figural group, consisting of a slim central youth shaking a tambourine, with a putto at his feet and encircled by six joyously dancing bacchantes, quickly became the talk of Paris for its frank sensuality and unidealized female nudes.  Nearly as shocking was the act of vandalism to which the sculpture was subjected when, during the night of August 27, 1869, a bottle of ink was hurled at it, staining the left front bacchante.  Despite its controversial reception, La Danse (now in the Musée d'Orsay, Paris) is regarded by many as the artist's masterpiece.  Although unused in the end, this terracotta bust of a maiden with vine leaves twined in her hair was one of Carpeaux's studies for the final work.  Carpeaux probably modeled this version with the intent of replicating it in an edition of cast terracottas."  

– from curator's notes at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Augustin-Jean Moreau-Vauthier
Florentine Lady
ca. 1892
ivory bust with silver-gilt collar
Walters Art Museum, Baltimore

"A lady carved of ivory wears a silver-gilt lace collar set with pearls.  She recalls images of Marie de' Medici, Queen of France, as painted by the Flemish 17th-century masters Peter Paul Rubens and Frans Pourbus the Younger.  Moreau-Vauthier, who sculpted in bronze, marble, and terracotta, is especially known for his work in ivory and chryselephantine (a combination of ivory and silver or gold).  An eclectic sculptor, he was equally adept at the Gothic, Renaissance, and Rococo styles."

 – from curator's notes at the Walters Art Museum

Mino da Fiesole
Roman Emperor
ca. 1455
marble relief
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

"Crowned with laurel and dressed in armor, this unidentified Roman emperor's face is shown in pure profile while his shoulders twist, adding a sense of three-dimensionality and movement to the figure.  The relief is a reminder of the importance of ancient models for Renaissance Florentines.  Giovanni de' Medici, for example, commissioned reliefs of the Roman emperors as decorations for the family palace."

 – from curator's notes at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Georg Baselitz
Untitled
1982-83
limewood
Tate Gallery

"Untitled is a monumental figurative sculpture by the German artist Georg Baselitz made from roughly hewn limewood.  At two and a half metres tall, the figure, whose legs seem trapped within the wooden base, towers high above the viewer.   . . .  Untitled was made in Baselitz's studio in Schloss Derneburg, a castle near the city of Hildesheim in northern Germany that the artist bought in 1975 and in which he lived until 2006.  . . .  From late 1982 and for a year thereafter Baselitz produced a series of eight sculptures, consisting of five standing figures – including this work – and three large heads.  Like Untitled, the other four standing figures in this series display ambiguous gestures with their arms, which the artist described in 1983 as 'extreme postures that look abstract, that are highly artistic, are highly charged with meaning, but are never thought through.  Everyone knows how powerful they can be.'  Preparatory drawings reveal that Baselitz carved these sculptures directly from tree trunks, often using chainsaws and axes.  He claimed in 1983 that he worked with wood because he wanted 'to avoid all manual dexterity, all elegance, everything to do with construction.'"  

– from curator's notes at the Tate Gallery

William Reid Dick
Winged Figure
ca. 1930
bronze statuette
Tate Gallery

Hellenistic Greek sculptor
Aphrodite drying her hair
1st century BC
bronze statuette
Walters Art Museum, Baltimore

attributed to Longton Hall Manufactory (Staffordshire)
Hercules and the Nemean Lion
1753-54
porcelain figurines
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

attributed to Vauxhall Manufactory (London)
Hercules and the Nemean Lion
1756-60
porcelain figurines
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Adam Lenckhardt
Cleopatra
1632-35
ivory statuette
Walters Art Museum, Baltimore

Erastus Dow Palmer
Bust of Flora
1857
marble
Walters Art Museum, Baltimore

Monday, November 6, 2017

20th-century Watercolor Paintings

Koloman Moser
Loïe Fuller in the dance, The Archangel
1902
watercolor
Albertina, Vienna

Léon Bakst
Preliminary study for the décor of the ballet, Le Dieu bleu
1911
watercolor, gouache
Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers University

Georges Rouault
Spring
1911
watercolor
Hermitage, Saint Petersburg

Anna Ostroumova-Lebedeva
Statues of the Horse Tamers with fountain on the Quirinal Hill, Rome
1911
watercolor, gouache
Hermitage, Saint Petersburg

Poem

Over the flat slope of St Eloi
A wide wall of sandbags.
Night,
In the silence desultory men
Pottering over small fires, cleaning their mess-tins:
To and fro, from the lines,
Men walk as on Piccadilly,
Making paths in the dark,
Through scattered dead horses,
Over a dead Belgian's belly.

The Germans have rockets. The English have no rockets.
Behind the lines, cannon, hidden, lying back miles.
Before the line, chaos:

My mind is a corridor. The minds about me are corridors.
Nothing suggests itself. There is nothing to do but keep on. 

– by Ezra Pound, "abbreviated from the conversation of Mr. T.E.H."  (Thomas Ernest Hulme (1883-1917), English philosopher and poet killed in action in World War I)

John Singer Sargent
Portrait of Mrs William James
1921
watercolor
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Lovis Corinth
Flower-vase on a table
1922
watercolor
Albertina, Vienna

Emil Nolde
Red Clouds
1930s
watercolor
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

Reginald Marsh
Smoko the Human Volcano
1933
watercolor
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

Michael Rothenstein
Portrait of artists Eric Ravilious and Edward Bawden
1933
watercolor
National Portrait Gallery, London

Homage to Wilfrid Scawen Blunt

Because you have gone your individual gait,
Written fine verses, made mock of the world,
Swung the grand style, not made a trade of art,
Upheld Mazzini and detested institutions;

We, who are little given to respect,
Respect you, and having no better way to show it,
Bring you this stone to be some record of it.

–  on January 18, 1914, Ezra Pound traveled with William Butler Yeats, F.S. Flint, Richard Aldington, Victor Plarr, and Sturge Moore to the country home of poet and political essayist Wilfred Scawen Blunt (1840-1922). This poem was among the manuscripts presented to Blunt inside a small marble box with decorative carving by the sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska.  

Karl Schmidt-Rottluff
Reflecting Clouds
1936
watercolor
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

Oscar Bluemner
Oranges
before 1938
watercolor
Phillips Collection, Washington DC

Eric Ravilious
Farmhouse Bedroom
1938
watercolor
Victoria & Albert Museum, London

Oliver Messel
Set-design for the opera, Cenerentola
1952
watercolor, gouache
Victoria & Albert Museum, London

Frank Auerbach
Study for Primrose Hill
1974
watercolor
British Museum