Henri Matisse, Océanie, 'le ciel' (1948) for sale at C|&|Co, NYC
Oceanie is a masterful, two-part work by Henri Matisse, comprising ‘le ciel’ and ‘la mer’; both pieces realizing the artist’s self-described “dream of….an art of balance, purity and serenity…”
The pair of decorative, mural-sized compositions draws explicitly from ‘reveries’ of his 1930 experience in Tahiti, the exotic iconography of which would become the mainstay of his late-era paper cut-out, collage series. (‘Oceanie’, or the English, Oceana, is a term ascribed to a broad archipelago of South Pacific Ocean and its islands.)More
Charles Harold Davis, Landscape in France (n/d), pencil on paper. American practitioner in Barbizon style. Collection of Lyman Allyn Museum
Italy had long been the most popular destination for Americans prior to the Civil War, but by the 1870’s, France had become the country of choice. For it then seemed that every young American artist yearned to embark on a Grand Tour of Europe and study in Paris. In fact, approximately twenty-two hundred were documented there during the post-Civil War period. Many were drawn to the city of light by the prestigious government-sponsored Ecole des Beaux Arts, or by the more accessible private academies, including the acclaimed Academie Julian. American artists also discovered, Grez-sur-Loing, Barbizon, and the adjacent Forest of Fontainebleau, where they worked alongside French painters. Their interest in Barbizon was partially in response to the radically modern changes effected by the Second Empire’s urban planner and architect, Baron Hausmann. Many Parisian neighborhoods were razed to allow for the erection of the larger buildings and wider boulevards needed to accommodate the rapidly growing population. The rural life at Barbizon exemplified the antithesis of the industrialization of Paris.More
Christus, Petrus (ca.1410-1475-6). A Goldsmith in His Shop, Possibly St. Eligius (1449), oil on oak panel, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Robert Lehman Collection (1975.1.110)
A visit to New York’s, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Old Masters Collection, provides the interested viewer with an opportunity to look closely at pictures painted on wooden panel, canvas, and occasionally, stone or metal. Here, we will refer to their collection and concentrate on the materials, techniques and physical history of European works from north of the Alps, with an eventual detour to Italy, which will be the subject of Part II of this article. The paintings being considered during the 15th-17th century belong to the genre now classified as “easel paintings” – rectangular in format, enclosed in a frame, and intended to hang or stand upright. Some of the very smallest pictures, especially those with a religious subject, might have been kept in a special box with other treasures. Other small pictures were originally diptychs or triptychs: two or three panels hinged together that could stand open during personal devotion and then be folded for transport or storage. Larger pictures, now all too often framed and presented in museums as separate entities, frequently belonged to multi-part structures – usually three parts or more (the latter referred to as polyptychs) – which functioned as altarpieces placed on or above church altars. Increasingly, as the Renaissance progressed, painters produced paintings with secular themes in single-field format, which also became the preferred form for religious pictures.More
This is the tale of a man and an island—and how, in the course of time, their stories became entwined. It is also a tale of devotion to a craft, passion for a cause, and the recognition that sometimes, when we least expect it, fate charts an unexpected course for each of us.
The man is Roberto Dutesco, a Romanian-born photographer splitting his time between New York City, Montreal, Canada and San Paulo, Brazil. The island is Sable, a tiny spit of sand in the North Atlantic, far removed from civilization as we know it. The passion is Dutesco’s concern for the preservation of the island and its wild horses. As for devotion to a craft—that is manifest in his photographic studies of the horses, which are on exhibit at the SoHo, Wild Horses Gallery, in New York City.More
Self Portrait in the Studio, (1968), private collection
The fourth of five children born to James and Ruth Porter, Fairfield Porter grew up in Winnetka, Illinois, just north of Chicago. His father’s mother had owned the land that later became Chicago’s Loop area, and the Porters were very comfortable; Fairfield never had to work, except for some years in the forties. His chief artistic influence as a child was his father, who was an architect and had built the Greek Revival house they lived in. His father loved Italian pictures and placed photographs of famous paintings and buildings and plaster casts of Greek sculpture all over the house. There were trips abroad to the great picture galleries of Europe and Fairfield developed personal opinions about art and the history of painting by the time he was fourteen.More
An industrial park is not a likely spot to discover passion, at least not the kind we report on in ARTES e-Magazine. But, the big, black SUV in the parking lot means that the ‘artist is in the house’. Print maker, Roxanne Faber Savage approaches her task with a particular passion that makes the process of creating art look both deliberative and revelatory at the same time. Roxanne is fast becoming a master of the trade, but allows herself to be surprised by the process of print making each day. This trait serves as a critic’s marker for what expertise in any creative endeavor should be all about: allowing for the element of surprise in a medium that an artist has come to know well.More
And by obligation, of course, I mean the artist’s motivation to deliver a work of art to the world that represents a highly individualized statement about a relevant theme or subject. In doing so, should the impact, legitimacy and enduring success of that creative effort be measured by the response of the viewer, alone? Is art deemed ‘important’ or ‘timeless’ if it resonates with the consciousness of the public? Or is it ultimately a private exercise in expression by the artist, requiring no moral or didactic justification, wherein capturing the attention and interest of the viewer is merely incidental? Is it true, as French artist and critic, Théophile Gauthier, argued in the 19th century, that the artist’s embrace of, ‘Art for art’s sake’ would protect him from the purely utilitarian and pragmatic demands of public taste and other external influences? And must art remain aloof from the currents of public taste to remain cogent today? This polemic is at the heart and soul of the long-standing debate about the creative forces that have shaped the artistic arena in the modern era.More
The Museum of Art’s, Chace Center, the largest gallery at Providence’s Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), was filled to the brim with an astonishing array of architectural scale models and tiny figurines, fashioned entirely out of clay. The mash-up of small male figures – the sculptor’s version of Everyman with strikingly similar facial and bodily characteristics–brings to mind countless crowd scenes found in Hollywood-version, Depression Era movies. A collaboration of New York ceramicist Arnie Zimmerman and Lisbon architect Tiago Montepegado, the convoluted twists and turns of this bustling model city readily invite reflections on the history of man. Think Balzac’s La Comédie humaine or the densely populated panels of Pieter Bruegel and Hieronymus Bosch: here mankind is seen variously at work, daydreaming, carousing, or marching off to war–in short, going through the daily grind of an industrialized society.More
58 floors above Paris, from 'Tour Montparnasse', in the heart of the district
Montparnasse- Walking pensively along Avenue du Maine recently, I imagine young Picasso, Braque, Brancusi, Modigliani, Soutine or Chagall tracing the very same path to the studio of fellow artist, Marie Vassiliev, who regularly offered plentiful lunches for only one franc, filling their bellies for the day. Afterwards, they returned to their modest nearby studios, as if entering portals into another dimension. There they would labor in their own universes, each in a solitary search for the line, color, shape and material that would express their creative vision.
Like many immigrants, artists and intellectuals at the beginning of the last century, they gravitated to the center of artistic and political freedom—Paris, France—the most progressive city in what was then, perhaps, the only republic in Europe. Paris was their light. Like a single, short spark in the continuum of human history, this group of artists formed the brilliant cluster of stars that blazed the transition from traditionalism to modernism in art. The fruits of their toil now reside in great museums and are coveted by the most prestigious art markets and collectors in this earthly world.More
The Adoration of the Magi, 1585-91, Michael Damaskenos, 1530/35-92/93, egg tempera and oil on wood, 110 x87 cm
Seeing the known anew is the grace of every great exhibition. In front of The Adoration of the Magi, by Michael Damaskenos at “The Origins of El Greco: Icon Painting in Venetian Crete,” at the Onassis Cultural Center in New York City, this belief strikes a particularly strong note. Painted in 1585-91, the sensation is of standing in front of the work of a contemporary young painter, fresh, a little cocky, defiantly regaling against the trend in a white box Chelsea gallery. A postmodern mash-up of Byzantine, Renaissance, Gothic and Mannerist styles, it appears so modern as to have been painted in this moment, yet sits entirely in its own time. With a central figure that seems to be a true portrait, a fashionable celebrity magus with courtly crew in tow, he stares frankly and directly out at us from dead center in the picture plane, the antithesis of the symbolic iconographic tradition. He seems to break through the “fourth wall,” caught by the camera’s eye and catching ours in a winking moment while his cast of characters goes on about their business, feverishly unaware.More
