More pictures to ponder...

[D. Allan]

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[D. Allan]

Berthe Morisot was a granddaughter of H. Fragonnard, a sister-in-law to Manet, and studied with Courbet.

[D. Allan]

I seem to be stuck on woman artists! Well, here is another work by a famous American sculptor. Louise Nevelson.

[D. Allan]

Here is the data for the sculpture posted just above.

Nevelson, Louise (1899-1988)'Sky Cathedral' painted wood 1982 Smithsonian American Art Museum

[Amelia]

Looks like the surface of the Death Star.

[D. Allan]

"White Vertical Water", 1972. Painted wood, Twenty-Six Sections,.a-.z, Overall: 216 x 108 inches. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Gift, Mr. and Mrs. James J. Shapiro, 1985. 85.3266. © 2007 Estate of Louise Nevelson/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

[Amelia]

If you look closely at the first one, you can see chair, table and kitchen componants. The second one is made up of "mill ends". Those are the bits and pieces left over from cutting the chair, table and kitchen componants. A unique way to recycle.

FYI, if you have a scrap burner or wood stove many manufacturers give away their mill ends or sell them very cheaply.

[D. Allan]

Nevelson is known for her abstract expressionist “boxes” grouped together to form a new creation. She used found objects or everyday discarded things in her “assemblages” or assemblies, one of which was three stories high. Says Nevelson, ”When you put together things that other people have thrown out, you’re really bringing them to life – a spiritual life that surpasses the life for which they were originally created.”

[D. Allan]

Helen Frankenthaler

American, b. 1928

The American painter Helen Frankenthaler is a second-generation abstract expressionist widely considered "the country's most prominent living female artist." Inspired by an exhibition of paintings by Jackson Pollock, Frankenthaler began the experiments that culminated in her stain paintings: large-scale abstractions with thin washes of pigment, reminiscent of watercolors. This technique inspired the color field painters and earned impressive reviews for Frankenthaler from 1953 on.

For many years Frankenthaler executed stained canvases that seem nonrepresentational, but which are actually based on real or imaginary landscapes.... In addition to her two-dimensional work, Frankenthaler produced welded steel sculptures; she has also explored ceramics, prints, and illustrated books,.... She has taught at New York University, Harvard, Princeton, and Yale and has had numerous one-woman exhibitions of her work, including important retrospectives at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1969 and New York's Museum of Modern Art in 1989. Frankenthaler has won many awards and has been the subject of a documentary film. - from a bio. at National Museum of Women in the Arts.

[D. Allan]

The photo above was from wikipedia. Here is another of the very same painting from http://www.artchive.com/artchive/F/frankenthaler/frankenthaler_mtns.jpg.html

Text from Arthur Danto, Embodied Meanings.

"The Frankenthaler retrospective opens, appropriately enough, with the famous Mountains and Sea of 1952, a painting too beautiful, to use an old fashioned word, to regard merely as a historical moment in the march forward of the modernists, and too compelling, as beauty always is, to see only as a work that influenced some important artists to begin staining canvas. It is beyond question big with a future that would have been invisible when it was made, and so for us big with a past, momentous in the style wars of thirty something years ago. But it is worth the effort to try to see it as it must have been seen before the later history happened, as a cool composition of slender loops passing in and out of diaphanous washes of color pale greens and blues and pinks distantly Cubist but feminized, without the harsh angles, aggressive edges, and dangerous vertices. It is like a dance of seven veils.

"As a matter of biography, Mountains and Sea was inspired by a trip to Nova Scotia, but it could as easily be seen as a still life rather than a landscape or not read referentially at all. The picture in the catalogue looks as if it could be a reproduction of an aquarelle. The great achievement, here as in the work that followed it for nearly a quarter century, consists of Frankenthaler's adaptation of the fluidity and transparency of washes over drawn lines, and the luminosity of thin glazes without the fat opacities of oil paint, to the scale of the large canvas, then the format of the Abstract Expressionists. But it would be a wonderful painting even if it had had none of its subsequent influence, and there are passages in it I cannot see too frequently. The string of drips in the upper right corner, for example, allow an archipelago of vibrant dots to form, the brush having discharged its delicate load and then, perhaps, descended to make the streak of pale blue in which the archipelago reappears, faintly, as a dot and then another paler dot. That is as beautiful as painting gets."

[Amelia]

I like it in pastels better. :)

[D. Allan]

me too!

[D. Allan]

How about a photograph for a change? This photographer was born 1894 in Hungary, emigrated to the United States of America in 1936 and died 1985 at New York City.

"[T]he moment always dictates in my work....Everybody can look, but they don't necessarily see....I see a situation and I know that it's right."

-- André Kertész

André Kertész bought his first camera and made his first photograph while working as a clerk at the Budapest stock exchange in 1912. After years of amateur snapshot photography in his native Hungary, he moved to Paris in 1925 and began a career as a freelance photographer. There the young transplant, speaking little French, took to the streets, wandering, observing, and developing his intimate approach to imagemaking. He also met and began to photograph other artists, including Brassaï.

From 1933 to 1936 Kertész published three books of his own photographs. Immigrating to the United States in 1936, he settled in New York, where he earned his living photographing architecture and interiors for magazines such as House and Garden. It was not until he retired from commercial work at age sixty-eight that Kertész was free to focus again on the more personal subjects that had delighted him as an amateur.

-- bio. from the Getty Museum

[D. Allan]

This is an elegant photograph, simple but striking. Shadows are important as in the previous photo. The composition is impeccable - the thin dark line above the table cloth provides a nice balance to the line of the fork, and lends tranquility. The curving shadows of the tines are interesting.

[Amelia]

I like it!!!!!!! tu

[D. Allan]

OK! Then here is another by the same amazing photographer.

Notice the two silhouettes - the rooster in the foreground and the cross in the background. These two have a connection in Christianity.

And are those the twin towers in the background?

[D. Allan]

I just realized - the buildings in the background are all silhouettes too - faint foggy outlines against the lighter gray sky. And the raindrops on the windowpane - some are silhouettes and some are 'reverse silhouettes' being lighter than their background.

[John317]

Check out many more of Andre Kertesz's images:

http://masters-of-photography.com/K/kertesz/kertesz.html

One of my favorites is his photograph of the blind "wandering violin player" circa 1921.

[Tom Wetmore]

Yes, and notice that all three are in step, even the little toddler coming toward the violinist.

I love the artistic value of black & white photography. It draws out patterns and b&w portraits seem to capture character and emotion better than color. Color sometimes distracts.

Tom

[phkrause]

Yes I love what b&w photography can do. Especially if you have your own darkroom (than) and of course Photoshop (today). You can do so much. Also you can do alot more with color photos today with photoshop that years ago you couldn't do anything.

pkrause

[D. Allan]

A novel way to make a self-portrait - photograph your shadow! Nice designs here - and translucent shadows.

[D. Allan]

Jacob Lawrence, one of the most important artists of the 20th century, was born in 1917 and is best known for his series of narrative paintings depicting important moments in African American history. Lawrence was introduced to art when in his early teens, Lawrence's mother enrolled him in Utopia Children's Center, which provided an after-school art program in Harlem. By the mid-1930s, he was regularly participating in art programs at the Harlem Art Workshop and the Harlem Community Art Center where he was exposed to leading African American artists of the time, including Augusta Savage and Charles Alton, the director of the Harlem Art Workshop and, later, professor of art at Howard University. At the community art centers, Lawrence studied African art, Aaron Douglas's paintings and African American history. With the help and encouragement of Augusta Savage, Lawrence secured a scholarship to the American Artists School and later gained employment with the WPA, working as a painter in the easel division. Lawrence began painting in series format in the late 1930s, completing 41 paintings on the life of Toussaint L'Ouverture, the revolutionary who established the Haitian Republic. Other series followed on the lives of the abolitionists Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, and John Brown. The Migration of the Negro, one of his best known series, was completed in 1941. The most widely acclaimed African American artist of this century, Lawrence continued to paint until his death in 2000. - http://www.pbs.org/wnet/aaworld/arts/lawrence.html

[D. Allan]

Joshua Johnson is the first African American painter that we know of. He made his living painting portraits of the newly wealthy including sea captians and their families around Baltimore Maryland.

This portrait of the child 'Adelina Morton' is captivating. The daughter of Robert Morton & Anne Groves, she was born 1802 being about 8 years old at the time of the oil painting. Canvas size = 24 3/8 x 20 1/4 inches.

[Gail]

That Jacob Lawrence one is quite charming!

[Amelia]

I've notice that quite a few painters of the 17-1800's had a "not quite realistic" way of painting their subjects. Kind of inbetween real and surreal.