19th Century American Artists and the Grand Tour
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
The Metropolitan Museum of Art Early Renaissance Collection Reveals Painting Techniques’ Coming of Age
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
Canada’s, Sable Island Wild Horses, Subject of Roberto Dutesco Photography
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
New York & Connecticut Architectural Firms Exhibit Green Building Solutions
Contemporary art is the art of our times. Although time can seem linear, exacting and in some ways predictable, life today can nevertheless feel chaotic and filled with contradictory agendas. Health issues, economic woes, war and global warming seem to headline the news constantly. Artists, sensitive to their surroundings, perceive these sudden shifts as critical matter deserving of attention and often attempt to address them before their importance fades. Occasionally, the realities of today’s world are skillfully combined with the sensitivity of the artistic perspective. Connecticut’s, Sacred Heart University, Gallery of Contemporary Art, addresses this union of aesthetics and technology in its current exhibition, The Art of Sustainable Architecture, in meaningful and dramatic ways.
“Sustainability is a topic of our time,” Sophia Gevas, SHU’s gallery director, says with conviction. “We can no longer ignore the environmental challenges our world is facing. These problems are real and there are real solutions that are both beautiful and quantifiably which can make a difference in our quality of life.”
above: Exterior Facade & Courtyard of the General Theological Seminary, NYC
Architect: Beyer Blinder Belle Architects & Planners. Photo Credit: Fed Charles
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Water on the Moon
Water is heavy. Anyo
ne who has traipsed a 24-pack of bottled water from the driveway to the house knows just how heavy water can be. Water is essential to this planet and life-sustaining for those of us who live on it.
The recent indignity suffered by the moon at the hands of scientists attests to how important finding water on a distant planet or moon is to our chances of successfully traveling there and thriving once we arrive. Astronauts can recycle their waste water on the way, but lugging a supply of H2O across the vast expanse of space to meet our needs for months or years is both costly and cumbersome (imagine the fuel costs and handling issues if you carried a 400-gallon drum of water in the trunk of your car!). An elementary problem like sustained hydration becomes a major concern for NASA scientists.
For those of us who are earth-bound and plan to continue to be so, what can the quest for water on the moon teach us about ourselves? As artists, we hope to communicate vital information through our work across the seemingly boundless void between ourselves and the ‘dark side of the moon’, called, public perception. And what constitutes sustenance for artists while they work? Sure, food, clothing and shelter—the wellspring of life as we know it on this planet. But, what else drives us to create as a means to those practical ends?
Our own person
al version of a moon probe happens when we send our latest work on a trajectory out into the world. And, for the artist, analysis of the ‘six-mile high spray’ at point-of-impact takes the form of the response of critics, gallery owners, collectors and editors who stand by, binoculars and notes pads at the ready. Everyone watches and waits to see if there are life-giving elements in the work and whether a spur of interest can move the viewer to explore, in depth, the various complexities of the piece and their meaning. For a few lucky artists, pioneering colonies of believers may soon set up encampments over these small, life-emitting oases of earnest intentions, known as the ‘artist’s vision!’
For artists of any stripe, we harbor a shared belief in the universe of ideas. All things are possible in the world of the imagination. There is no out-there, out there. It is all in here. The studio version of a moon probe is wet paint poised on a brush before a blank canvas; a pencil hovering above a clean sheet of paper; or restless hands poised on the silent keyboard of a grand piano. Through our creative effort, we hope to find water, insuring that our journey can be sustained. We are hoping against hope to find signs of life.
by Richard Friswell
*Art by Roxanne Faber Savage
The Art of Fairfield Porter: An American Painter Celebrated a Sense of Place
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
Print Maker, Roxanne Faber Savage, Lets the Medium Speak for Itself
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
Green Architecture Company Works with UNICEF to Build African Schools
“It takes a village to raise a child,” is the oft quoted ancient African proverb when discussing education and building community. Partners for Architecture, an architecture firm in Stamford, CT, that bases its mission on this core value, flew into action when approached by UNICEF (the United Nations Children’s Fund) in October 2008 to create one master plan for eighty schools to be built across the borders of four civil-war ravaged African countries: Republique de Guinea, Côte D’Ivoire, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. The LAB4LAB (Learning Along Borders for Living Across Boundaries) project objective is to ease conflict by creating safe places of community education and social activity to stimulate development and interdependence between the countries. A goal easier said than done, Partners for Architecture’s role was to translate this utopian concept into a real, physical solution within six weeks time.More
Contemporary Art Strives for Something Other Than Beauty!
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
Chace Center in Rhode Island Features the Clay Wizardry of Arnie Zimmerman
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
The Bourdelle Museum, Paris: a Treasure in Montparnasse
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
El Greco and the Icon Painters of Venetian Crete
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
Architect, Robert Venturi is Subject of Yale School of Architecture Show
There will be no ruins of Las Vegas. Everything of its previous history is absolutely erased by design. Nothing will be left to uncover, as David Macaulay did in his post-apocalyptic comic, Motel of the Mysteries, which imagined a Howard Carter-like excavation of a roadside motor lodge.
What seemed absolutely contemporary in 1968, when Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown wandered the Strip (since renamed Las Vegas Boulevard) with an assortment of Yale architecture students, has vanished, like the Stardust Hotel into its imploding cloud.
So there is a reluctant dismay – more like a nostalgia begrudged – that accompanies this Yale exhibition, a composite of two separate retrospectives of work by the architects.More
19th Century American Artists and the Grand Tour
Eighteenth-century American artists relied on European art long before they set sail for the Continent. Mezzotints after French and English portraits were imported by the hundreds during the eighteenth century and supplied the colonists with what was often their only contact with fine art. John Singleton Copley wrote to Benjamin West on November 12, 1766:
“It would give me inexpressible pleasure to make a trip to Europe where I should see those fair examples of art that have stood so long the admiration of all the world. … I think myself peculiarly unlucky in Living in a place into which there has not been one portrait brought that is worthy to be called a Picture within my memory, which leaves me at a great loss to guess the stile that You, Mr. Reynolds, and the other Artists practice.”
Yet Copley was more fortunate than most Colonial artists. He had access to the first art gallery to open in America. English-trained artist John Smibert (1688-1751) brought an art collection to Boston consisting of prints, copies of Old Master paintings, and casts after antique sculpture. Beginning in the 1730s, Bostonians could view oil on canvas copies of some of the best-known European paintings in his gallery-cum-studio. With few exceptions, colonists living outside Boston had to content themselves solely with mezzotints—mainly Baroque-style portraits of aristocracy—to learn about European art.More
High Tech Lighting Solutions for High Rise Living
As more people select high-rise living in cities across the country, they are facing the tremendous challenge of how to get lighting where they want it, when the construction is primarily concrete. Often they are given a few junction boxes from which to draw power for their lighting needs. Sometimes they don’t even have that.
For example, the dining room in this luxurious 52nd story condominium at the Millennium Tower in San Francisco had little for the lighting designer, Randall Whitehead and interior designer, Michael Merrill to work with. Even though they had ten foot ceilings there wasn’t even a junction box in the ceiling for a power source.
The two designers worked together to come up with a solution that provided both ambient light and accent light for the space. They decided on the concept of fabricating of a series of box beams. The only power source they had to work with was a power feed for motor controlled blinds located in the upper corner of one wall near the ceiling line. A soffit was created along the wall to allow power to be run seamlessly from one beam to the next. The new soffit also helped balance the boxed-in HVAC ducting on the opposite wall.More