The National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, Oslo (Nasjonalmuseet for kunst, arkitektur og design)
Date: 1896
Technique: Wash, pen, graphite and black crayon on paper, 27.1 x 22.4 cm
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9/30/11
Theodor Severin Kittelsen, The Plague is Coming (Pesta kommer)
The National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, Oslo (Nasjonalmuseet for kunst, arkitektur og design)
Date: 1896
Technique: Wash, pen, graphite and black crayon on paper, 27.1 x 22.4 cm
Source
9/29/11
Félicien Rops, Coin de rue, quatres heures du matin (Parodie humaine)
Private collection
Date: 1878-1881
Technique: Pastel, coloured chalks and watercolour on paper, 22.5 x 15 cm
Painted circa 1878-1881, the present work is the first watercolour version Rops made of this subject. Coin de Rue, quatre heures du matin (Parodie humaine) is the final image of Rops's series Théâtre des cent croquis commissioned by Jules Noilly, a series of visual comments on a decadent society. At this time Rops was beginning to add a social dimension to his depictions of 'modernity', capturing the demi-monde of Parisian society.
After his move to Paris, Rops became obsessed with depicting the contemporary 'tart', her obsession with the fashion of the moment encapsulating for the initiate the primeval urge to seduce, the urge of the jungle stalking the streets of the modern metropolis. Having thoroughly researched first hand the world this type of woman inhabited, Rops came to the attention of authors of the Naturalist school, whose objective it was to treat the phenomena of modern life with scientific objectivity. His images, stories and anecdotes supplied them with the perfect material for the evocation of this metropolitan underworld. Edmond de Goncourt wrote in his journal while in the throes of conceiving his novel La fille Elisa '... show in my novels on prostitution the macabre grandeur rendered by the pencils of Rops and Guys' (Goncourt Journal, 25 November 1871). Rops had been launched on the Parisian art world by Baudelaire, who had also introduced him to Symbolism. A statuette of a skeleton in a coquettish pose, clad in a crinoline by Erneste Christophe, exhibited at the Salon of 1859, was one of a few works by contemporary sculptors that received Baudelaire's unequivocal approval. It also inspired his poem Danse Macabre. The sculpture and the poem anticipate a number of works by Rops with similar subjects, including the present work. Baudelaire's preoccupation with death had a lasting effect on Rops. Rops' painting Death at the Ball of 1865-75 (Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo), which shows a skeleton dressed as a woman, and his etching Death Dancing, of the same period, were a result of these impressions. The subject of Coin de Rue is also reminiscent of Rops' Mors Syphilitica of 1875, which shows the grim reaper masquerading as a seasoned prostitute peddling her trade in a doorway. Rops' fascination with the modern world found its most eloquent and sometimes vicious expression in his numerous representations of prostitutes, whom he often depicted as the spreaders of syphilis. Coin de Rue and Mors Syphilitica were created when new laws were being enacted to regulate prostitution in France and Belgium. Depicted both by academic and avant-garde artists, the figure of the prostitute became a contentious example of urban modernity in that she was often viewed as a product of that environment while remaining on the margins of 'proper' society. In the present work, Rops' prostitute tries to lure a dandy, representative of the bourgeoisie, into the potential dangers of paid sex. At first glance she may seem quite attractive, in a fashionable dress that hugs her curvacious figure. However, unlike her fleshy counterpart in Pornokrates, who remains in the full blush of good health and who might be called the muse of sexual love, or the alluring prostitute in the related Quatre heures du matin, the grimacing skeleton hiding beneath the fancy dress and pretty mask in Coin de Rue, shows that she embodies the risk of infection from a sexually transmitted disease.
'In Parodie humaine the flesh is merely a mask from behind which the grimacing face of death eyes its prey. It is Rops the moraliser we encounter here, aware as ever of contemporary obsessions. He gives the woman the most fatal of faces, thereby castigating the sexual morality of an era in which prostitution was an integral part of society. The prostitute has been corrupted and corrupts others in turn. She carries in her the seeds of degradation, suicide, and - most terrifying of all - syphilis. This drawing appears at the end of the tenth group of ten sketches, forming an unexpected and morbid conclusion to what was supposed to be a light-hearted album. Having been portrayed in a variety of guises throughout the hundred sketches, modern women are synthesised here into the emblematic figure of the prostitute - the archetypal instrument of evil. A trace of her is to be found, Rops seems to be saying, in all women.' (Bernadette Bonnier & Véronique Leblanc, Félicien Rops, Vie et AEuvre, Bruges, 1997, p. 78).
Rops did not produce erotic scenes for themselves but as a means of expressing his vision of the world. Works such as Coin de Rue crystallise the dark side of his iconography of prostitutes, where the drama of voluptuousness, a mixture of fantasy and social realism, turns to fear and punishment. Coin de Rue shows Rops' awareness of death and the wages of sin: Woman is shown as a prostitute whose love brings sickness and death; but if she is an instrument of the devil, she is also his victim and deserves compassion. Carnal love is sin and leads both men and women to perdition. Such ideas, which originated in Catholicism, were then being revived by Schopenhauer and were given visual expression by Rops with unprecedented perspicuity and persistence.
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9/28/11
Vincent van Gogh, The Prison Courtyard
The State Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow (Музей изобразительных искусств им. А.С. Пушкина)
Date: 1890
Technique: Oil on canvas, 80 x 64 cm
Van Gogh painted The Prison Courtyard while “imprisoned” himself, in the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum in Saint Rémy. He died 5 months later of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, the culmination of his long struggle with physical and mental illness.
The Prison Courtyard expresses the artist’s hopelessness and despair. In the lower part of the painting, thirty-three inmates form a human corona, pacing heads down, in defeated rote and joyless resignation. In spite of the shared misery and monochrome prison garb, they are not uniformly anonymous; some faces can be deciphered, particularly the one in the center, whose blond hair is lighted by an imperceptible sun’s ray. That is van Gogh himself in what has been interpreted as a “metaphoric self-portrait”.
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9/27/11
Caspar David Friedrich, Owl in a Gothic Window
State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg (Государственный Эрмитаж)
Date: c. 1837
Technique: Sepia over a pencil sketch, 37.8 x 25.6 cm
Source
9/21/11
Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, Faust
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
Date: c. 1652
Technique: Ink on paper/Dry-point, etching and engraving, 21 x 16 cm
An old man looks up from his work. A bright, radiating disk has appeared at the window of his study. Within the circle of light is a mysterious text. It is an anagram - that is, words in which the letters are in a different order. Reading from the inside out, it says: INRI ADAM Te DAGERAM AMRTET ALGAR ALGASTNA, although just what that means is unclear. To the right of the disk, a hand can be distinguished, which points to something resembling an oval mirror. Although the room is poorly lit, many things can still be perceived; the books, the globe and the skull, left rear, all suggest that the man is educated.
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9/20/11
Arnold Böcklin, The Isle of the Dead (Die Toteninsel) - The fourth version
Date: 1884
Technique: Original in oil on copper, 81 x 151 cm
Financial imperatives resulted in a fourth version in 1884, which was ultimately acquired by the entrepreneur and art collector Baron Heinrich Thyssen and hung at his Berliner Bank subsidiary. It was burned after a bomb attack during World War II and survives only as a black-and-white photograph.
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9/17/11
Francisco de Goya, The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters (El sueño de la razón produce monstruos)
Date: 1797-99
Technique: Etching, aquatint, drypoint and burin, 21.5 cm x 15 cm
Plate 43 of Los Caprichos
The series Los Caprichos is probably Goya's best known. Comprising eighty plates, Goya privately published the series, which was first advertised for sale in the Spanish newspaper Diario de Madrid in 1799 as being a criticism of "human errors and vices," although the subjects are often obscure and interpretation purposely difficult. Lampooning both political and religious figures, Goya soon found it diplomatic to present the original plates to the king for his Calcografia, in exchange for a pension for his son.
The Sleep of Reason is a self-portrait of the artist, surrounded by demonic-looking animals. It was intended as the frontispiece for the series, but Goya soon thought better of this, probably because the subject related too closely to two plates in Rousseau's 1793 Paris edition of Philosophie at a time when the very name of Rousseau was anathema to religious and political leaders in Spain. Instead, Goya created another, more traditional, self-portrait as the frontispiece and buried The Sleep of Reason well within the series, as plate 43.
In Los Caprichos Goya begins to push the boundaries of the intaglio process to achieve a sense of ambiguous space coupled with a modernist sensibility. This series grew out of Goya's developing sense of isolation, the result of a protracted illness he suffered in 1792/93, leaving him totally deaf. This, along with his difficult position as court painter to King Carlos IV at a time when he was becoming increasingly dedicated to the cause of the Spanish peasants, left him feeling compromised. Relying on a variety of influences, Los Caprichos served as a coded expression of the artist's growing involvement in Madrid's political milieu.
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9/14/11
Hugo Simberg, The Stream of Life; By the River of Life (Elämän virralla)
Valtion taidemuseo, Ateneum, Helsinki
Date: 1896
Technique: Watercolor and gouache, glued to etching on paper, 23.60 x 14.20 cm
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9/12/11
Édouard Manet, Illustration for 'The Raven' by Edgar Allan Poe
Date: 1875
Technique: Etching
Published by Richard Lesclide, together with a French translation of the poem by Stéphane Mallarmé.
Source
9/7/11
Odilon Redon, Spirit of Forest (Specter from Giant Tree)
The Woodner Family Collection, New York
Date: 1880
Technique: Charcoal and black chalk heightened with white chalk, 45.7 x 28.5 cm
Source
9/5/11
9/2/11
Paul Gustave Doré, Liberty
The Cleveland Museum of Art
Date: c. 1865-75
Technique: Brown wash and gray and white gouache with graphite on beige wove paper; 465 x 329 mm
Gustave Doré is best known for his skill as a draftsman (often seen in book illustrations), as well as for his sense of the fantastic and visionary. In the present drawing, his fluid washes and flowing lines of white add to the dramatic scene of a liberating angel breaking chains. The drawing relates to Doré's Defense of Paris (Memories of 1870), which treated an event from the recent Franco-Prussian War with a figure representing Liberty. A major difference between the painting and the drawing is that Doré represented soldiers in contemporary uniforms in the painting, but in the drawing of Liberty, he conceived a broader theme in which crowns and medieval costumes evoke an earlier time.
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Edward Burne-Jones, The Wheel of Fortune
Musée d'Orsay, Paris
Date: 1883
Technique: Oil on canvas, 200 x 100 cm
"My wheel of Fortune is a true-to-life image; it comes to fetch each of us in turn, then it crushes us," was Burne-Jones' heartfelt or disillusioned comment. The work is a perfect example of his taste for classical myths and medieval legends, which mingle uneasy sensuality and a feeling of disquiet, which make his symbolism particularly bitter. This Fortune is one of his most powerful compositions. The wheel spans the whole painting from top to bottom, turning in a relentless rise and fall, while the implacable, gigantic goddess forms a pendant for the powerless mortals: a slave, a king and a poet.
The canvas is entirely covered with the bodies and the wheel, the palette ranges from steel grey to brown, accentuating the suffocating mood and the sense of hopeless fatality. The female figure is draped in an antique toga falling in Botticelli-like folds drawn with remarkable skill; the nudes are inspired by Michelangelo's figures for the Sistine Chapel.
The painting was exhibited in London in 1883 and immediately acclaimed as a capital work in the Pre-Raphaelite movement.
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9/1/11
George Frederic Watts, Can These Bones Live?
Date: 1897-98
The Belgian Symboilst painter Fernand Khnopff knew Watts’s work well and favourably reviewed this work. Even though the title is taken from a passage in the Bible, Watts work intended it to be a withering attack on his country. “The bones in the painting”, he said to a visitor to his studio, “refer to the state of the nation”. At the heart of this dark picture is a fallen oak tree that crushes a skeleton, and lying around are various symbols to emphasise the point, including an assassin’s knife, a champagne glass and horses hooves filled with dice. According to the original architect of the Watts Gallery Christopher Hatton Turnor, Watts “persistently wore a black band on his arm. After a time I asked him who he was in mourning for? – no-one – ‘I mourn for the stupidity of my country.’”
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