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  • Astrological Fantasy Portrait

    Astrological Fantasy Portrait

    Astrological Fantasy Portrait is a gouache painting created by Paul Klee in 1924. It lives at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The image is available via institutional open content, and tagged portraits. The planets and stars in a fantasy portrait as painted by Paul Klee.

    In 1919, Klee applied for a teaching post at the Academy of Art in Dusseldorf. This attempt failed but he had a major success in securing a three-year contract (with a minimum annual income) with dealer Hans Goltz, whose influential gallery gave Klee major exposure, and some commercial success. A retrospective of over 300 works in 1920 was also notable.

    Klee taught at the Bauhaus from January, 1921 to April, 1931. He was a “Form” master in the bookbinding, stained glass, and mural painting workshops and was provided with two studios. In 1922, Kandinsky joined the staff and resumed his friendship with Klee. Later that year the first Bauhaus exhibition and festival was held, for which Klee created several of the advertising materials. And in the same year, the first series of Bauhaus books is published with works by Gropius (International Architecture), Paul Klee, Adolf Meyer, Oskar Schlemmer, and Piet Mondrian. Klee welcomed that there were many conflicting theories and opinions within the Bauhaus: “I also approve of these forces competing one with the other if the result is achievement.”

    Klee was also a member of Die Blaue Vier (The Blue Four), with Kandinsky, Feininger, and Jawlensky; formed in 1923, they lectured and exhibited together in the USA in 1925. That same year, Klee had his first exhibits in Paris, and he became a hit with the French Surrealists. Klee visited Egypt in 1928, which impressed him less than Tunisia. In 1929, the first major monograph on Klee’s work was published, written by Will Grohmann.

    Klee also taught at the Dusseldorf Academy from 1931 to 1933, and was singled out by a Nazi newspaper, “Then that great fellow Klee comes onto the scene, already famed as a Bauhaus teacher in Dessau. He tells everyone he’s a thoroughbred Arab, but he’s a typical Galician Jew.” His home was searched by the Gestapo and he was fired from his job. His self-portrait Struck from the List(1933) commemorates the sad occasion. In 1933-4, Klee had shows in London and Paris, and finally met Pablo Picasso, whom he greatly admired. The Klee family emigrated to Switzerland in late 1933.

  • Rough-Cut Head

    Rough-Cut Head

    Paul Klee’s was a Swiss born painter, with a unique style that was influenced by expressionism, cubism, surrealism, and orientalism. His written collections of lectures, Writings on Form and Design Theory are considered as important to modern art as Leonardo da Vinci’s written works were to the Renaissance. As a child, Klee was mainly oriented as a musician, having played the violin since he was eight, but in his teen years, he found that art allowed him freedom to explore his style and express his radical ideas. Although Klee is now considered a master of color theory, he spent a long time in his search for his sense of color. At first, Klee drew in black and white, saying he would never be a painter. But as an adult, after a visit to Tunisia, in which he was impressed by the quality of light, he had found his sense of color and began experimenting with his newfound decision to be a painter.

    Klee spent much of his adult life teaching at various universities and art schools, including the German Bauhaus School of Art and Düsseldorf Academy. During his tenure at Düsseldorf, he was singled out as a Jew by the Nazi party. The Gestapo searched his home and he was fired from his job. Some of his later works were also seized by the Nazis.

    Although the artist was born in Switzerland, he was not born a Swiss citizen. His father was a German national, and citizenship being decided on paternity, Klee was born a German citizen. His request for Swiss citizenship was not granted until six days after his untimely death from undiagnosed scleroderma. Klee’s legacy includes over 9,000 works of art, which have inspired many other painting and musical compositions. In 1938 he was immortalized by Steinway Pianos in their “Paul Klee Series” pianos.

    Around 1897, Klee started his diary, which he kept until 1918, and which has provided scholars with valuable insight into his life and thinking. During his school years, he avidly drew in his school books, in particular drawing caricatures, and already demonstrating skill with line and volume. He barely passed his final exams at the “Gymnasium” of Bern, where he qualified in the Humanities. With his characteristic dry wit, he wrote, “After all, it’s rather difficult to achieve the exact minimum, and it involves risks.” On his own time, in addition to his deep interests in music and art, Klee was a great reader of literature, and later a writer on art theory and aesthetics.

  • Wheat Field With Cypresses

    Wheat Field With Cypresses

    Although restless beyond measure, with few straight lines, this landscape is one of the most classic in conception among Van Gogh’s works. It is build up in great bands that traverse the entire space. The tall dark cypress tress at one side offer a powerful contrast to the prevailing horizontals, which they resemble in form. The oppositions of warm and cool, the proportioning of parts, the relative height of sky and earth on the two sides, the horizontal intervals which we can measure on the silhouette of the distant mountain, twice broken by trees – all these are perfectly legible and well balanced.

    It is a landscape in which the painter’s perceptions of nature and his intensity of feeling are equally pronounced. The glowing wheat field, the olive trees of subtle gray in which all the colors of the picture seem to be mingled, the shaggy wavering cypresses, and the turbulent mountains have been wonderfully observed, and the light that fills this space has a vivid actuality for our eyes. The brightness emanating from the cold sky and the warm earth is realized as much through the local colors as through the play of light and shadow – Van Gogh is free with latter, and hardly aims at consistency on this point.

    The duality of sky and earth remains – the first light, soft, rounded, filled with fantasy and suggestions of animal forms, the earth firmer, harder, more intense in color, with stronger contrasts, of more distinct parts, perhaps masculine. Or one might interpret the duality as the real and of the vaguely desired and imagined. Connecting them is the single vertical, the cypress trees, as in The Starry Night, of which this painting is in other ways the diurnal counterpart.

  • Unique Forms of Continuity

    Unique Forms of Continuity

    The major Futurist work and early 20th-century epochal piece, Umberto Boccioni’s Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (Forme uniche della continuità nello spazio), will go under the hammer at Christie’s New York on 11 November with an estimate of $3.8m to $4.5m.

    The work was conceived in 1913 and cast in 1972; all of the bronze casts are posthumous (Boccioni fell from his horse and died in 1916, aged 33). The original plaster piece is housed at the Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo.

    The cast consigned, which was previously in a European private collection, is one of eight numbered bronzes made between 1971 and 1972, which were commissioned by Claudio Bruni Sakraischik, the director of the Rome-based gallery La Medusa.

    These were modelled on a 1951 example owned by Count Paolo Marinotti, who obtained the bronze cast in question from Benedetta Cappa Marinetti, widow of the Futurist firebrand Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. Other 1972 casts from the Marinotti series are in the collections of the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, and the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art.

    An image of the work appears on the 20 cent Italian euro piece. But this is not the first time Christie’s has sold the piece. “The work that [Christie’s] sold in 1975 is from the same group of casts as ours: Forme uniche della continuità nello spazio (Unique Forms of Continuity in Space); 5/8 (our example is 4/8). It sold at Christie’s London in December 1975, where it sold for 17,000 guineas ($41,140),” a spokeswoman says.

    The sculpture, considered a Futurist masterpiece, ripples outwards into the environment, penetrating the air. In his manifesto on sculpture, La Scultura Futurista published in April 1912, Boccioni stressed how his works fuse with their surroundings, saying: “We will break open the figure and enclose it in its environment.”

    Asked if the work should be placed in a museum, Roberta Cremoncini, director of the Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art in London, says: “This is an iconic image and represents a very important moment in the history of the avant-garde. Obviously, I think that it would be great if it could go on public display in a museum, but on the other hand we are lucky enough that there are various [versions] of the sculpture around the world, so in a way it is not ‘unique’.”

  • Repose By American Artist

    Repose By American Artist

    Alexander, who lived in Paris during the 1890s, achieved international success with his studies of female figures gracefully posed in elegant interiors. In this example, the provocative facial expression and supple curves reflect the contemporary French taste for sensual images of women as well as the undulating linear rhythms of Art Nouveau. With its model decoratively attired in a sweep of white fabric, “Repose” was lampooned in a French magazine as a portrayal of Loïe Fuller (1862–1928), the American dancer famous for manipulating swirling folds of silk in her performances at the Folies Bergère in Paris.

    This stunning painting by 19th century American artist John White Alexander — who focused on paintings of well-attired young women in luxurious settings — combines the fluid brushwork of fin-de-siécle portrait masters like John Singer Sargent, Cecilia Beaux and William Merritt Chase, with an Art Nouveau compositional sensibility.

    The sweeping movement of the gown, the woman’s languorous pose, and the curved forms of the divan and pillows become swirling design elements. Combined with Alexander’s subtly rich color and mastery of value, they lead your eye inexorably through the composition — grabbing your attention with the bright folds of the gown in the foreground, leading you back through the darker area of the woman’s torso and the shadows that envelop it, to the highlight of her gently lit face and forearm — drawing you back into the painting almost like a well-composed landscape.

    There are only a few passages in the painting with hard edges, notably the edge of the sleeve in front of the young woman’s mouth — accenting the bottom of her lip; the key folds of her gown where it arcs along the back of her legs, bunches under her hip and just reaches the floor — emphasizing the flow of movement in the composition; and the edges of shadows in the decorative fabrics behind her.

  • Farm in Provence

    Farm in Provence

    Vincent van Gogh was one of the world’s greatest artists, with paintings such as ‘Starry Night’ and ‘Sunflowers,’ though he was unknown until after his death. Vincent van Gogh was a post-Impressionist painter whose work — notable for its beauty, emotion and color — highly influenced 20th-century art. He struggled with mental illness and remained poor and virtually unknown throughout his life.

    In the fall of 1880, van Gogh decided to move to Brussels and become an artist. Though he had no formal art training, his brother Theo offered to support van Gogh financially.He began taking lessons on his own, studying books like Travaux des champs by Jean-François Millet and Cours de dessin by Charles Bargue.Van Gogh’s art helped him stay emotionally balanced. In 1885, he began work on what is considered to be his first masterpiece, “Potato Eaters.” Theo, who by this time living in Paris, believed the painting would not be well-received in the French capital, where Impressionism had become the trend.

    Nevertheless, van Gogh decided to move to Paris, and showed up at Theo’s house uninvited. In March 1886, Theo welcomed his brother into his small apartment. In Paris, van Gogh first saw Impressionist art, and he was inspired by the color and light. He began studying with Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Camille Pissarro and others. To save money, he and his friends posed for each other instead of hiring models. Van Gogh was passionate, and he argued with other painters about their works, alienating those who became tired of his bickering.

    Vincent van Gogh completed more than 2,100 works, consisting of 860 oil paintings and more than 1,300 watercolors, drawings and sketches.Several of his paintings now rank among the most expensive in the world; “Irises” sold for a record $53.9 million, and his “Portrait of Dr. Gachet” sold for $82.5 million.

    Van Gogh firmly believed that to be a great painter you had to first master drawing before adding color. Over the years Van Gogh clearly mastered drawing and began to use more color. In time, one of the most recognizable aspects of Van Gogh’s paintings became his bold use of color. This is evident in both Van Gogh’s landscapes and his still life paintings

  • Two Tahitian Women

    Two Tahitian Women

    Paul Gauguin, in full Eugène-Henri-Paul Gauguin, (born June 7, 1848, Paris, France—died May 8, 1903, Atuona, Hiva Oa, Marquesas Islands, French Polynesia), French painter, printmaker, and sculptor who sought to achieve a “primitive” expression of spiritual and emotional states in his work. The artist, whose work has been categorized as Post-Impressionist, Synthetist, and Symbolist, is particularly well known for his creative relationship with Vincent van Gogh as well as for his self-imposed exile in Tahiti, French Polynesia. His artistic experiments influenced many avant-garde developments in the early 20th century.

    In the summer of 1888 Gauguin returned to Pont-Aven, searching for what he called “a reasoned and frank return to the beginning, that is to say, to primitive art.” He was joined there by young painters, including Émile Bernard and Paul Sérusier, who also were seeking a more direct expression in their painting. Gauguin achieved a step towards this ideal in the seminal Vision After the Sermon (1888), a painting in which he used broad planes of colour, clear outlines, and simplified forms. Gauguin coined the term “Synthetism” to describe his style during this period, referring to the synthesis of his paintings’ formal elements with the idea or emotion they conveyed.

    For the next several years, Gauguin alternated between living in Paris and Brittany. In Paris he became acquainted with the avant-garde literary circles of Symbolist poets such as Stéphane Mallarmé, Arthur Rimbaud, and Paul Verlaine. These poets, who advocated abandoning traditional forms in order to embody inner emotional and spiritual life, saw their equivalent in the visual arts in the work of Gauguin. In a famous essay in the Mercure de France in 1891, the critic Albert Aurier declared Gauguin to be the leader of a group of Symbolist artists, and he defined his work as “ideational, symbolic, synthetic, subjective, and decorative.”

  • The Firmament Above

    The Firmament Above

    Lenore Tawney’s Waters above the Firmament owes its striking character to the simplicity of its basic concept: a large circle set into a square. This simplicity is complicated by the weight Tawney has given to the upper half of the circle, in which the warps are made of paper and fabric coated in thick blue paint. Here Tawney, known for her pioneering exposure of the warp (vertical thread element), provided a variant on that theme: she wove the circle with slits that open at regular half-inch intervals, emphasizing a third dimension, a device she utilized in many of her weavings. Trained in sculpture at the Institute of Design in Chicago and an alumna of the School of the Art Institute, Tawney’s exploration of weaving as a sculptural enterprise fits well within her body of work, which also includes laminated boxes and collages as well as constructions composed of such materials as eggshells and chairs.

    Lenore Tawney (born Leonora Agnes Gallagher; May 10, 1907 – September 24, 2007) was an American artist known for her drawings, personal collages, and sculptural assemblages, who became an influential figure in the development of fiber art. Tawney began weaving in 1954. Her early tapestries combined traditional with experimental, using an ancient Peruvian gauze weave technique and inlayed colorful yarns to create a painterly effect that appeared to float in space. Because of her unorthodox weaving methods, Tawney was spurned by both the craft and art worlds, but her distinct style attracted many devoted admirers. She is considered to be a groundbreaking artist for the elevation of craft processes to fine art status, two communities which were previously mutually exclusive. Tawney’s weavings fall into three categories: the solid straight weaving, the open warp weave, and the mesh or screen woven as background for solid areas. Tawney often went beyond traditional definitions of weaving, including needlework to add action to the line of a woven design.

    Furthering her experimentation, Tawney began creating what she called “woven forms”. These totem-like sculptural weavings abandoned the rectangular format of traditional tapestries, and were suspended from the ceiling off the wall. She sometimes incorporated found objects such as feathers and shells into these pieces. Beginning in 1964 Lenore Tawney began a series of linear drawings using ink on graphing paper. This eight piece collection would go on to inspire the 1990s series Drawings in Air, a three dimensional study of lines as threads in space. Tawney suspends threads in space with the help of plexiglass and wood framing.

    In conjunction with her drawing series Tawney began a number of collage works. The artist utilized antique book pages, envelopes, and postcards as a working surface to which she liberally applied imagery, text, and drawing. These works contained a variety of messages, some secret to humorous messages. The artist sent collages to friends and eventually created a series of collage books along with other items.

  • Two Lawyers Shake Hands

    Two Lawyers Shake Hands

    Honoré Daumier, in full Honoré-Victorin Daumier, (born February 20/26, 1808, Marseille, France—died February 11, 1879, Valmondois), prolific French caricaturist, painter, and sculptor especially renowned for his cartoons and drawings satirizing 19th-century French politics and society. His paintings, though hardly known during his lifetime, helped introduce techniques of Impressionism into modern art.

    His life, devoted entirely to his work, was to be divided into two parts: from 1830 to 1847 he was a lithographer, cartoonist, and sculptor; and, beginning in 1848 and lasting until 1871, he was an Impressionist painter whose art was reflected in the lithographs he continued to produce. Constant work was not a burden to him; while producing 4,000 lithographs and 4,000 illustrative drawings, he sang sentimental songs whose foolishness made him laugh, and, “unconcerned with his works, he was always out drinking cheap wine with barge captains.”

    Daumier’s sculptures have still not been sufficiently studied. The 15 or so small busts that he modelled in clay for the window of the satirical journal for which he worked and that remained there some 30 years occupy an important place in the history of sculpture. Scarcely differing from official busts, but with the accentuation of a detail that made them caricatures, they constitute an unforgettable gallery of the politicians of the July monarchy. The complete series has not been preserved: it included a Louis-Philippe, which Daumier hid, and other pieces that were broken in moving. A few copies of the busts were cast in bronze in the 20th century, and their originality is the more striking when they are compared with similar pieces of that period.

    He did not do so, however, for he had become preoccupied with new technical studies; earlier than others, he had discovered Impressionism—faces and bodies devoured by the surrounding light and becoming one with the atmosphere. He painted a great deal, and the more so as his studies in the new technique did not interest the satirical journals to which he now submitted drawings devoid of humorous meaning. He was supported by Charles Baudelaire and by that poet’s friends. The two men had met in 1845 and saw each other more frequently after 1848. Baudelaire, who “adored him,” wrote in 1857 the only significant article on Daumier to appear in the painter’s lifetime.

  • A History Of Women In Art Perception

    A History Of Women In Art Perception

    Throughout the centuries, women have been involved in making art, whether as creators and innovators of new forms of artistic expression, patrons, collectors, sources of inspiration, or significant contributors as art historians and critics.

    Women have been and continue to be integral to the institution of art, but despite being engaged with the art world in every way, many women artists have found opposition in the traditional narrative of art history. They have faced challenges due to gender biases, from finding difficulty in training to selling their work and gaining recognition. So how have women come forward as such strong voices in art and art history today, and how do we go about telling the stories of those who were forgotten by history?

    According to a story by Pliny the Elder, a Roman writer from the first century C.E., the first drawing ever made was by a woman named Dibutades, who traced the silhouette of her lover on a wall. Whether you choose to believe this account or not, it is worth noting that although Western mythology tells us that a woman was the first artist, her female successors received little attention until the end of the 20th century. From antiquity onwards, only a small sample of women found their way into the tales of the greatest artists. Even then, they were often described as unusually talented women who overcame the limitations of their gender in order to excel in what was believed to be a masculine field. British artist Mary Beale was a successful portraitist in the late 1600s, but much of her success was attributed to the fact that her husband oversaw their studio and presented her works as experiments in the painting methods he developed. Gwen John, whose self-portrait appears isolated and scrutinizing, struggled for recognition in a field dominated by men, including her accomplished brother Augustus.

    For centuries, women were systematically excluded from the records of art history. This was due to a number of factors: art forms like textiles and what we call the “decorative arts” were often dismissed as craft and not “fine art”; many women were kept from pursuing a general education, let alone arts training, and finally the men who dominated the discipline both in practice and history often believed women to be inferior artists. As artist and instructor Hans Hoffmann once said in a “compliment” to the influential abstract expressionist painter Lee Krasner in the mid-20th century: “This is so good you wouldn’t know it was done by a woman.”