Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Sammlung Schack, Munich
Date: 1836
Technique: Oil on cardboard, 53 x 42.5 cm
Source 1
Source 2
3/31/12
Moritz Ludwig von Schwind, The Dream of the Prisoner (Der Traum des Gefangenen)
Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Sammlung Schack, Munich
Date: 1836
Technique: Oil on cardboard, 53 x 42.5 cm
Source 1
Source 2
3/29/12
Cosmè Tura, St George and the Princess
Museo del Duomo, Ferrara
Date: 1469
Technique: Tempera on canvas, 349 x 305 cm
In 1469 the cover of the organ of the Cathedral in Ferrara was painted by Tura. The Annunciation was visible in the closed state of the organ, while in the open state the panel representing St George and the Dragon was shown. The cover of the organ was transferred to the Museum in 1735.
The organ frontal for the Cathedral must serve as an introduction to the painter, although he was about thirty-nine years old when it was finished and obviously a fully formed painter. The shutters were painted with tempera, although Tura seems frequently to have employed oils as well. They are emotionally charged, full of movement and intense expressionism. In the St George the frightened princess, placed close to the picture plane, moves swiftly to the left of the single canvas she occupies. Her fluttering, irregular draperies with decisive hills and valleys are carefully studied, but they do not follow the structure of her body or even her pose, becoming instead alive and rebelliously independent of the forms they hide.
Light is effectively rendered as an expressive device without becoming a particularly naturalistic component, striking here and there, helter-skelter, although a certain concentration on the left may be isolated. Highlights are also found on the right-hand edges of forms, especially in the canvas showing St George impaling the dragon. Color is equally antinaturalistic. The tight-fitting leather costume of the saint is outlined, pale maroon against a golden sky. His gray horse, ferociously participating in the confrontation, is accentuated by a calligraphic arrangement of thin red straps. There are strong echoes of Mantegna, perhaps in part filtered through Squarcione, in motives like the rendering of the winding trail with figures on the hill behind the princess and a tight application of paint, which permits abundant minuscule detail. Critics have called attention to connections with later Donatello, especially with his reliefs made for nearby Padua. These are difficult to isolate within the personal expressive idiom of the St George, except for the shared intensity in treating sacred figures and narratives.
Source
3/28/12
Adolf Hirémy-Hirschl, Ahasuerus at the End of the World
Private collection
Date: 1888
Technique: Oil on canvas, 55 x 90 in.
The bearded man is Ahasuerus, the legendary wanderer at the end of the world. He is the last man in the polar wilderness, caught between the angel of hope and the specter of death. Before him lies a fallen female figure, the personification of dead humanity, as crows circle ominously. (From Color and Light: A Guide for the Realist Painter by James Gurney)
Source
3/26/12
3/25/12
Viktor Alexandrovich Hartmann, Paris Catacombs (Парижские катакомбы)
Russian Museum, Saint Petersburg (Государственный Русский музей)
Date: 1864-67
Technique: Watercolor, 12.9 x 17 cm
People pictured are Hartmann, Vasily Kenel, and a guide holding the lantern.
Source
3/22/12
John Everett Millais, Ferdinand Lured by Ariel
Private collection
Date: 1850
Technique: Oil on canvas, 65 x 51 cm
Ferdinand Lured by Ariel is a painting by John Everett Millais which depicts an episode from Act I, Scene II of Shakespeare's play The Tempest. It illustrates Ferdinand's lines "Where should this music be? i' the air or the earth?". He is listening to Ariel singing the lyric "Full fathom five thy father lies". Ariel is tipping Ferdinand's hat from his head, while Ferdinand holds on to its string and strains to hear the song. Ferdinand looks straight at Ariel, but the latter is invisible to him.
The painting was Millais' first attempt at the plein air Pre-Raphaelite style, which he did at Shotover Park near Oxford. He wrote to his close friend and Pre-Raphaelite colleague Holman Hunt that he had painted a "ridiculously elaborate" landscape. Referring to Hunt's belief in devotion to detail he wrote that "you will find it very minute, yet not near enough for nature. To paint it as it ought to be would take me a month a weed — as it is, I have done every blade of grass and leaf distinct." He painted the face of Ferdinand from another Pre-Raphaelite, Frederic George Stephens. The clothing and the pose are derived from plate 6 of Camille Bonnard's Costumes Historiques, which represents the costume of a "young Italian" of the fifteenth century.
The supernatural green bats were the last additions to the composition. Their grotesque poses put off the patron who had originally undertaken to buy it, since they were a radical departure from the standard sylph-like fairy figures of the day. They adopt the poses of "see, hear, speak no evil."
The invisibility of Ariel and the bats is suggested by their semi-merger with the green background. The connection with natural camouflage is implied by the presence of the green lizards hiding in front of the clump in the right foreground.
Source
3/21/12
Wilhelm List, Daylight and Twilight (Tag und Dämmerung)
Private collection
Date: 1904
Technique: Oil on canvas
The present work is one of List’s most accomplished secessionist paintings. In Tag und Dämmerung, List describes night turning to day, a brief moment which according to Greek mythology was at Tartarus where Atlas held up the Heavens. List's lyrical interpretation shows Night with wings up-lifted, her face in shade and her head illuminated by a crown of stars, casting her gaze heavenward to the encroaching dawn sky heralded by the gilded male figure of Day who clasps an arc of golden light and moves into the Heavens, infusing the sky with a brilliant glow. The work certainly compares in conception and execution with Gustav Klimt's work of the period. This is evident in the strong vertical format of the composition, the allegorical subject matter and the distinctive hatching of the parallel brush strokes which both Klimt and List employed and which was a distinctive feature of secessionist painters of the time.
Source 1
Source 2
3/17/12
3/15/12
3/13/12
Carl Gustav Carus, The Goethe Monument
Kunsthalle, Hamburg
Date: 1832
Technique: Oil on canvas, 72 x 54 cm
Carus was a great admirer of Goethe, who in turn highly appreciated both Carus's theoretical writings and his painting. Carus's painting of the Goethe monument is described in a contemporary journal as follows. "In a lonely rocky area stands Goethe's sarcophagus, and upon it a harp; moonlight falls through its strings, illuminating two angels who kneel reverently before it. Mists swirl around the base of the monument. It would seem that Goethe's manifold and magical contacts with Nature have inspired the ingenious artist to this Ossianic idea."
Goethe, who devoted himself so intensively to questions of the world and humanity, has been recast in Carus's picture into an unworldly and lonely Romantic figure. His imaginary grave evokes Romantic yearning in terms of an actual destination, an envisioned place of pilgrimage, an altar, a holy of holies.
Source
3/11/12
Alessandro Magnasco, Sacrilegious Robbery
Quadreria Arcivescovile, Milan
Date: 1731
Technique: Oil on canvas
The painting illustrates a crime committed on January 6, 1731. Thieves were trying to force an entry into the church of S. Maria in Campomorto at Siziano (Pavia) to steal the holy vessels used for mass. They were seen off by skeletons which issued from the graves in the surrounding cemetery. The macabre scene is a large votive piece. The events are watched by the Virgin who we see in the top right-hand corner organizing the skeletons' sortie and decreeing the punishment for the thieves, who were subsequently hanged. The canvas belongs to the church where the attempted sacrilegious robbery took place but for safety reasons it is kept in the Diocesan Museum in Milan.
Source
3/9/12
Felix Jenewein, The Plague (Pestis) I
Date: 1901
Technique: Lithograph, printed in colours, 35.2 x 47.5 cm
One of six plates in a portfolio with title pages and introduction by Karel B. Mádl.
Subject described by Karel B. Mádl as follows: "The first victims of the plague fall suddenly in the open air, under a ruddy sky, in which hangs ghastly the pale disc of the moon, and moves the threatening tail of the comet. The mighty body of the traveler is struck down as by lightening, and is cut down in deadly convulsions. The strong limbs quiver and are being contorted. Death came down among the people with terrible violence and the witnesses of this visitation are terror stricken. Two figures only suffice to show us the sad, voiceless land, and the painter places us into the midst of the dismay, caused by the plague."
Source 1
Source 2
Felix Jenewein, The Plague (Pestis) II
Date: 1901
Technique: Lithograph, printed in colours, 43.3 x 37.9 cm
One of six plates in a portfolio with title pages and introduction by Karel B. Mádl.
Subject described by Karel B. Mádl as follows: "A universal dying spread over the towns and the country, like a rapacious flood. "Not many bodies were accompanied by a dozen neighbours; the bier was carried, not by honourable, worthy citizens, but by sextons of the lowest people, called plague servants, who were dearly paid for their service and which they performed hurriedly. The priests did not lose time in saying prayers and in performing rites, and buried the bodies in an empty grave ", says Boccaccio. Jenewein is here equally striking and even more intensive than the old author. The sky is dark, the trees uplift sadly their bare branches and the gray outlines of a cathedral loom behind. In the background a long, ghastly procession with coffins hastens onward. Men quake and as a personification of human pain and terror a woman with bloodshot and staring eyes meets the procession; it is a mother, burying her own child."
Source 1
Source 2
Felix Jenewein, The Plague (Pestis) III
Date: 1901
Technique: Lithograph, printed in colours, 43.4 x 37 cm
One of six plates in a portfolio with title pages and introduction by Karel B. Mádl.
Subject described by Karel B. Mádl as follows: "The suffering and misery are on the increase. There seems no end of them, the minds of men grow confused, and finding no help they seek the causes of these irresistible attacks of death, and in their frenzy seize anyone, whom they suspect of spreading the poison, and who is unable to afford them help. The Black Death used to be followed by bloodshed. Here lies one victim of it. From a naked body life is escaping in a pool of blood. The infuriated people stoned a physician, because he was suspected to be the originator of the plague, or that he refused them help."
Source 1
Source 2
Felix Jenewein, The Plague (Pestis) IV
Date: 1901
Technique: Lithograph, printed in colours, 42.9 x 37.5 cm
One of six plates in a portfolio with title pages and introduction by Karel B. Mádl.
Subject described by Karel B. Mádl as follows: "Madness increases. If [i]t is impossible to stop or to overcome the tyranical invasion of plague, it is better to enjoy, what life can still offer, and to plunge into intoxicating pleasure, as the last remedy against the plague. "By day and by night", says Boccaccio, people flocked into taverns, drinking and revelling, visiting also houses of the worst repute. They made merry, and laughed and jested." That, which Boccaccio describes with his clever pen Jenewein represents still more powerfully in his picture, the madness and intoxication of bacchantic voluptuousness. The lowest filth came uppermost and spread like a new contagion. There is no shame, no moral feeling; everything is drowned in drunkenness, fornication and blasphemy. How the drummer beats the drum, and the mob of half naked men and women, intoxicated with passion reel and stagger!"
Source 1
Source 2
3/6/12
Felix Jenewein, The Plague (Pestis) V
Date: 1901
Technique: Lithograph, printed in colours, 42.6 x 37.5 cm
One of six plates in a portfolio with title pages and introduction by Karel B. Mádl.
Subject described by Karel B. Mádl as follows: "But God continues in his merciless chastisement and His hand crushes and breaks down every revolt with new plague-terrors. Thousands, yea millions of dead bodies lie about and hands do not suffice to bury them. They are exposed to birds of prey in streets, squares, fields and roads. Men exhausted their power of resistance and grow conscious of their nothingness and of their sins; blood thirsty shrieks and merry voices were silenced and across the lonely plain move figures in unspeakable sadness bowed down, laden with a heavy cross and penitent. Prayers and groans for mercy rise up to the gloomy sky."
Source 1
Source 2
Felix Jenewein, The Plague (Pestis) VI
Date: 1901
Technique: Lithograph, printed in colours, 35.2 x 47.8 cm
One of six plates in a portfolio with title pages and introduction by Karel B. Mádl.
Subject described by Karel B. Mádl as follows: "Heaven is reconciled. The terrible phantom of Plague vanished. The storm is over; under the ground sleep the dead and above it there remained part of miserable humanity. Tapers burn on numberless graves and on the brightening sky appears a rainbow of peace. An awful remembrance of experienced wretchedness and misery lingers and covers the smiling landscape with ashes and darkness. It is useless to point out the chalk-drawing, covered with a light and expressive colour, for it speaks eloquently for itself, showing a great intensity and depth of feeling of Jenewein. I tried to point out here the connection between the Plague and that which preceded it, as well as the soil, from which the cycle Plague has sprung up, the ethical basis and the artistic expression, and in all this Felix Jenewein succeeded."
Source 1
Source 2
3/5/12
Karel Hlaváček (1874-1898)
Karel Hlaváček was born in the family of a poor worker. In the years 1885-1892 he visited the higher middle-class school in the Prague middle-class neighbourhood Karlín, where he was also active as a gym teacher and organiser at the Czech nationalistic gymnastic club Sokol (Falcon). Since 1893 he wrote short texts and poems for the magazine of Sokol. After his graduation he studied 2 years as an external candidate Classical Philology at the Faculty of Arts at the Charles-Ferdinand University of Prague. In this period he started following evening courses drawing at the School of Applied Art and worked as a freelance journalist for the Národní noviny (National Paper). At that time he had no steady job and was dependent on small allowances and support from his parents. At the end of the year 1894 he started cooperating in the new magazine Moderní revue (Modern Review). In 1895 he met the love of his life Marie Balounová. In that same year he had to draft into the army and was transferred to Southern Tyrolia, but after three months he was freed from military service because of his bad health condition.After his return from Italy Hlaváček started working intensively for the Moderní revue, in which he published his expressive work, his art critics, critical notes and his poems. In the period of his cooperation at Moderní revue he got closely befriended with Jiří Karásek ze Lvovic, Arnošt Procházka, Antonín Sova and Karel Kamínek. In 1897 Hlaváček’s design won the written out match for a new head of the Cracow magazine Żicye which was edited by Stanisław Przybyszewski. In that same year Hlaváček started his cooperation as an artist with the magazine Nový Kult (New Cult) of Stanislav K. Neumann. Still in the same year he got tuberculosis. Although his friends paid for a cure, his illness had a quick development, because Hlaváček’s organism was very weakened by an inborn heart abnormality and by his long life in poverty. In June 1898 Hlaváček died of tuberculosis and was buried at the cemetery of Prague-Libeň.
In spite of his very short life Hlaváček made history in Czech literature. He was not only famous as a poet, but also as an expressive artist and illustrator. He illustrated for example the volumes Prostibolo duše of Antonín Procházka and Větry od pólů of Otokar Březina. Also his portraits of Antonín Sova, Arnošt Procházka and Emile Verhaeren are well-known.
Source: Universität Wien
Artwork
Walter Richard Sickert, Jack the Ripper's Bedroom
Manchester Art Gallery
Date: c. 1907
Technique: Oil on canvas, 50.8 x 40.7 cm
Sickert rented a studio in the East End of London, a notoriously rough and brutal area, as he wanted his art to convey the seediness of life. His landlady told him that she thought a previous lodger may have been infamous murderer, 'Jack the Ripper'. The horrible murders had happened close-by and this was clearly a big attraction for Sickert. His new studio inspired a series of murky interiors.
The blackness and blurred shapes in this painting make the viewer a detective. If you stare hard, pieces of furniture can be made out but the pink stroke of paint on the floor is ambiguous: it could be the effect of light from the window but perhaps is something worse.
Source 1
Source 2
3/1/12
Władysław Podkowiński, Chopin's Funeral March (Marsz żałobny Chopina)
Muzeum Narodowe w Krakowie
Date: 1894
Technique: Oil on canvas, 83.5 x 119.5 cm
/.../ Just how much artists intently listened to the Chopin inspirations is demonstrated by the last work of Władysław Podkowiński, Marsz żałobny Chopina (Chopin's funeral march), started in the fall of 1894, unfinished, because it was interrupted by the artist's death. The impulse for creating this symbolic composition was a poem by Kornel Ujejski Marsz pogrzebowy (Funeral march) from the series Tłumaczenia Chopina i Beethovena (Translations of Chopin and Beethoven). The poet's story about a man in despair after loosing his love was brought to several metaphorical signs deprived of any literalness - to a somber, forested landscape, outlines of bells, birds and angels, clouds of mist and the figure of a man with his hands spread and face twisted with spasmodic grimace, showing faintly in the depths. Independent of the literary inspirations, the young painter, harassed by attacks of progressive tuberculosis, concluded a metaphor of his own fate in the work - the battle with pain, fear and intense sense of dying. Cezary Jellenta, an outstanding critic, author of the theory of intensivism, thoroughly analyzed this canvas, writing that Podkowiński, like no one else, understood that "despair, when it fills the entire essence of a person, takes away his sight and ability to comprehend - and plunges him into one terrible, stone deaf muddle of impressions". Marsz żałobny Chopina was a modernist masterpiece of "intensity of feelings" and spoke to this, what Jellenta thought was most important, and what manifests through:
unity and speed, immediacy, lightning fast impressions, that great painters can sometimes achieve, who audaciously blended all the minor effects and shapes into a single, mighty painting, into one enormous accent and mood: clash, whirlwind, thunderbolt, distress, danger, vividness.
(Aleksandra Melbechowska-Luty)
Source 1
Source 2
Władysław Podkowiński, Frenzy of Exultations (Szał uniesień)
Muzeum Narodowe w Krakowie
Date: 1893
Technique: Oil on canvas, 310 x 275 cm
Frenzy of Exultations, or better known as just Frenzy, is an 1893 painting by Polish artist, Władysław Podkowiński, and is credited as the most famous work in his output. It is considered the first work of symbolism in Polish art, which lasts when Poland was torn off by neighbours: Russia, Germany and Austria.
The painting shows a naked, redheaded woman riding a black, frenetic horse. The horse reveals its teeth, and its tongue hangs out. Its nostrils are dilated and foam runs from its mouth. The woman riding the horse clasps its neck with her eyes closed, her loose hair fans out and flows upwards to mingle with the horse's mane. The canvas is over 3 meters in height, resulting in life sized figures.
The color range is quite narrow and is composed of blacks, browns and grays contrasting with the white and yellow. The image is divided into light and dark parts. The upper left corner is illuminated, directing attention to a clear figure of a woman and the horse's mouth. The right side of painting shows whirled darkness in which you can see the horse's hind and tail.
The concept of this work dates back to Podkowiński's stay in Paris in 1889, but the emergence of successive oil sketches and charcoal studies in the second half of 1893 was the consequence of the growing drama of unrequited love in the artist's life. In his vision, Podkowiński elevates erotic ecstasy to an absolute value, regarding it, in accordance with the psychologism current for that time, as the cosmic power and determinant of the human condition. Setting about the execution of the huge painting, he employed the academic method of preparatory sketches that correspond to the final version while differing slightly one from another in size and colour. Reduced in colour scheme, they range from the ultramarine version (lost), through work enlivened with green, to the subsequent ones, in which intense orange predominates. The avalanche of stones was removed from final version as well. In comparison with the sketches, the final, monumental composition gained in dynamism and the previously weak contrast of colour intensified to that between golden and black, and the tension between light and shadow was more polarised. This could be an effect of his private life drama and the progress of his lung disease.
Podkowiński started to paint in Warsaw between 1893 and 1894. The creation process lasted at least three months and according to a friend: at the end he was painting from his bed. The painting was shown at the Zachęta exhibition on 18 March 1894. The exhibition was accompanied by an atmosphere of sensationalism and scandal but around 12,000 people saw the picture, making nearly 350 rubles for the gallery.
Despite the success of the painting, it couldn't find a buyer: 3000 rubles was offered, but Podkowiński asked for 10,000.
On the morning of 24 April 1894 (37 days since the exhibition opening), just before the planned end, the painting was cut with a knife by its creator. The reasons for this act are unclear.
Podkowiński's act of desecration may have contributed to the rumors that the image portrayed a woman towards which the artist had an unfulfilled affection. The dasmage of the image, and Podkowinski's death soon afterwards fueled the speculation of his death being a suicide. Providing a rationale for this explanation are the traces of cuts on the canvas showing that only the image of the woman was subject to the attack. The object of the artist's feelings could be Ewa Kotarbińska, whom he met during his summer stay in a palace near Warsaw. She was a brunette, but some record that her family saw a similarity between her and the woman in the painting and harshly condemned him.
After Podkowinski's death the painting was restored by Witold Urbański. The restored work was lent to other exhibitions in Łódź, Kraków, Moscow and Saint Petersburg. Finally, the canvas was purchased by Feliks Jasieński in 1901 for 1,000 rubles, and in 1904 was given to the National Museum in Kraków.
Source 1
Source 2
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)