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Emily

01/06/06 at 02:49 PM

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#16

Rothko, Slow Swirl at the Edge of the Sea

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Emily

01/07/06 at 09:42 AM

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#17

Malevich, Cavalerie Rouge

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Cindy

01/07/06 at 09:50 PM

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#18

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Cindy

01/08/06 at 11:29 AM

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#19

Rembrandt- The Philosopher in Meditation.

duncan

01/11/06 at 10:54 PM

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#20

Raphael (from the Sistine Chapel):

duncan

01/11/06 at 10:59 PM

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#21

Michelangelo:

duncan

01/11/06 at 11:00 PM

Michelangelo:

01/20/06 at 02:20 PM

The Lady of Shalott

Waterhouse 1888

Waterhouse's painting of my ALL TIME favorite poem

by Alfred Lord Tennyson- "The Lady of Shalott"

Much too long to post here, but a must read! It's below

http://multimedia.rice.iit.edu/shalott/poem.html

Miranda - The Tempest

Miranda-The Tempest

Waterhouse 1916

Nymphs finding the Head of Orpheus

Waterhouse 1900

The Fall of Icarus

La Belle Dame sans Merci Sir Frank Dicksee painting of a favorite Keats poem John Keats (1795–1821).

La Belle Dame Sans Merci
O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms!
So haggard and so woe-begone?
The squirrel’s granary is full,
And the harvest’s done.
III.
I see a lily on thy brow
With anguish moist and fever dew,
And on thy cheeks a fading rose
Fast withereth too.
IV.
I met a lady in the meads,
Full beautiful—a faery’s child,
Her hair was long, her foot was light,
And her eyes were wild.
V.
I made a garland for her head,
And bracelets too, and fragrant zone;
She look’d at me as she did love,
And made sweet moan.
VI.
I set her on my pacing steed,
And nothing else saw all day long,
For sidelong would she bend, and sing
A faery’s song.
VII.
She found me roots of relish sweet,
And honey wild, and manna dew,
And sure in language strange she said—
“I love thee true.”
VIII.
She took me to her elfin grot,
And there she wept, and sigh’d fill sore,
And there I shut her wild wild eyes
With kisses four.
IX.
And there she lulled me asleep,
And there I dream’d—Ah! woe betide!
The latest dream I ever dream’d
On the cold hill’s side.
X.
I saw pale kings and princes too,
Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;
They cried—“La Belle Dame sans Merci
Hath thee in thrall!”
XI.
I saw their starved lips in the gloam,
With horrid warning gaped wide,
And I awoke and found me here,
On the cold hill’s side.
XII.
And this is why I sojourn here,
Alone and palely loitering,
Though the sedge is wither’d from the lake,
And no birds sing. OK...sorry all...I got carried away! Thanks for tolerating me

01/26/06 at 10:17 PM

More Hopper.

01/27/06 at 12:01 PM

How about a painting for the chinese New Year, Jan 29. Xin Nian Kuai Le and Gung Hay Fat Choy!

http://www.chinapage.com/paint1.html

Cindy

02/05/06 at 11:22 PM

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#26

This is a picture done by my son's girlfriend who is a very talented photography student. I asked her to design this for me and gave her the general concept and she ran with it. It looks great framed and up on the wall. (I hope I attached this ok; if not I'll try this again tomorrow; it's past my bedtime!)

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Knikkipic.bmp (670.95 KB, 54 views)

Lynne

02/10/06 at 01:18 PM

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#27

Here's one my son did when he was 8. He said it was a self-portrait but now says it's just a drawing. It makes me smile, tho.

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Cindy

09/02/06 at 10:30 AM

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#28

Haven't seen this thread in a while. Some of Wolf Kahn's beauties.

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duncan

10/01/06 at 11:46 AM

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#29

An interesting article on I found one what may be a rather interesting book on the lives of some of the most influential Impressionists painters:

The Sunday Times
July 02, 2006

Suffering for Their Art
REVIEWED BY JOHN CAREY
THE PRIVATE LIVES OF THE IMPRESSIONISTS
by Sue Roe

Chatto £18.99 pp366

To judge from their paintings, the impressionists led idyllic private lives — afternoons on the river, seaside holidays, sun-dappled fields and gardens, bars, cafes, ballerinas. They painted happiness, and must surely have been happy. Sue Roe’s businesslike if sometimes gushy group biography reminds us that the contrary was true. It would be hard to find a school of painters who were subjected to more misery and humiliation, or underwent such disasters, personal and national.

In 1870, only four years after the group started to cohere, the French army suffered bloody defeat on the battlefield of Sedan, and Napoleon III’s imperial splendours crumpled before the might of Prussia. Frédéric Bazille, one of the group’s founders, died in the fighting. Manet and Degas, serving in the national guard, witnessed the horrors of the siege of Paris, the uprising of the working class in the Commune (during which many of the city’s buildings were torched) and its suppression by a terrified government that cost the lives of 20,000 Communards. Renoir came within a hair’s-breadth of being executed in the final roundup. Monet and Pissarro escaped to England with their families, but Pissarro’s studio was ransacked and turned into a slaughterhouse by the conquering Prussians, who used his canvases as butchers’ aprons. Sisley’s house at Bougival was also wrecked and his paintings destroyed.

The vituperation that greeted the first impressionist exhibition in 1874 was partly due to the war. For the art-loving classes were still sore about the puncturing of their national glory, and the Commune had opened their eyes to the seething mass of poverty, misery and anger on which their comfortable lives depended. They were ready to spy a socialist under every stone, and a group of painters who chose to depict ordinary events and common people became, in their muddled logic, dangerous revolutionaries. High art, they believed, should be uplifting and heroic, whereas to paint workers enjoying the sunshine on their day off was an affront to dignified standards, and probably an incitement to mob violence. Besides, paintings should be meticulously accurate and properly finished, just like any other manufactures, whereas the sloppy, slapdash “impressions” turned out by Monet and his friends implied disrespect for honest workmanship. “A monkey with a box of paints” could do better.

The jeers of the public and the sarcasm of critics seem funny in retrospect, but they were not funny for the impressionists. Roe sharply evokes the straits to which they were reduced. Pissarro tramped the streets of Paris with paintings under his arm, trying in vain to find a buyer. Guillaumin took a night-shift job cleaning drains. Monet spent most of his life begging from every friend and relative who might conceivably give him a few francs. When his wife, Camille, died in 1879, he wrote urgently to an acquaintance beseeching him to retrieve Camille’s locket from the pawnbroker, since it was the only keepsake she had treasured and he wanted to put it round her neck before they buried her.

Roe brings out how different the members of the group were in almost every respect. Manet was the most detached. Unlike the others he moved in high society, and while they were still struggling to make a name he had already achieved celebrity status with his outrageous challenges to respectability such as Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe. Vain and ambitious, he refused to show work in any of the impressionist exhibitions because, despite his flaunted rebelliousness, he longed for public recognition, and eventually received the Légion d’honneur just two years before his agonising death from syphilis.

Degas was closest to him in social rank, but different in everything else. Unlike the promiscuous Manet, he led a strange, solitary life, ending up in a dusty attic studio, and Manet’s pursuit of honours seemed to him ridiculous — “What on earth did he want them for?” Manet revelled in his power over women, driving the proud and moody Berthe Morisot half out of her mind with desire (she eventually married his brother and gladly set aside her ambition as a painter in exchange for the delights of motherhood). But Degas held women at a distance, turning his ballet-dancers and laundresses into anatomical studies. “Women can never forgive me,” he boasted. “I show them without their coquetry in the state of animals cleaning themselves.” Unlike the other impressionists he also hated flowers and the countryside.

Pissarro was the most humanly appealing of the group. A Portuguese Jew from the Caribbean, he had an instinctive sympathy with outsiders, encouraging the gross and boorish Cézanne, whom Manet dismissed as a buffoon, and gradually teaching him where his talents lay. He understood where the young pointillists Seurat and Signac were going, and introduced them to the group. A committed socialist, he chose Julie, a servant girl from Burgundy, as his wife, much to his parents’ dismay and, disdaining to rely on the labour of others, he lived with her on a smallholding where they grew their own vegetables and kept rabbits and chickens for food. It was hard going. Two of their children died, and Julie, a farm-worker’s daughter with a strong practical streak, never tired of reminding him that art was for the rich, and that his job was to put food on the table.

Renoir, the only working-class member of the group, had a way of winning everyone’s hearts. His father was a tailor, and he first showed his talent as a child by drawing on the floor with tailor’s chalk. He started as a porcelain painter, then graduated to fine art and used prostitutes as models, insisting that they were “good sorts”. The sight of ragged children on the streets wrung his heart, and he tried to set up a tiny-tots centre to care for them. During the Franco-Prussian war, he was drafted into the cavalry and found that he was a natural with horses. The secret, he said, was to treat them as he did his models. He let them do exactly as they pleased, and soon they were willing to do anything he wanted.

A myth that Roe’s book dispels is the idea that the foes of impressionism were the bourgeoisie. Most of the painters were themselves bourgeois, the sons of bankers and successful businessmen, and they started out living on allowances from their parents. Paul Durand-Ruel, the dealer who bought their paintings, introduced them to America and established their worldwide reputation, was an inveterate bourgeois, an ardent royalist and a practising Catholic. Monet wanted nothing more than to become a bourgeois gentleman with a big garden and servants, an ambition he finally realised, thanks to Durand-Ruel, at Giverny. In fact, the foes of impressionism belonged to no particular social class. Nor, of course, were they less intelligent than us. They were merely people who felt sure they knew what a true and genuine work of art was, or was not — an illusion shared by many art lovers even today. Roe’s book should teach us that opinions on such matters are just opinions, but it probably will not. What it will do, for those of us not already specialists in the period, is enormously enhance the interest of the next impressionist exhibition we go to.

duncan

10/01/06 at 11:49 AM

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#30

I also found this, which I find rather fascinating, for some reason:

The Forger Who Fooled the World
(Filed: 05/08/2006)
Frank Wynne tells the extraordinary story of Han van Meegeren, the Dutch artist whose ‘Vermeer' made him a folk hero

I've always loved a forger. It's difficult not to feel a surge of joy at the thought of an eminent critic waxing lyrical over the glories of a "17th-century masterpiece" on which the paint is barely dry. If the pinnacle of Western art is arguably Leonardo da Vinci, his shadow self in the pantheon of forgers is Han van Meegeren.
Han van Meegeren's The last supper (1940-1941)

In May 1945, shortly after the liberation of Holland, two officers arrived at the studio of van Meegeren, then just a little-known Dutch painter and art dealer. The officers, from the Allied Art Commission, were responsible for repatriating works of art looted by the Nazis. They had come about a painting discovered among the collection of Hermann Göring: a hitherto unknown canvas by the great Johannes Vermeer, entitled The Supper at Emmaus.

Since the Nazis had kept detailed records, it had been easy to trace the sale of the painting back to van Meegeren. Now, they wanted only the name of the original owner so that they might return his priceless masterpiece. When van Meegeren refused to name the owner, they arrested him and charged him with treason. If found guilty, he faced the death penalty.

The artist was entirely innocent of the charges against him, a fact he could easily have proved. But in doing so, he would have to confess to a series of crimes which he had plotted for decades and which, in five short years had earned him the equivalent of $60 million. Han van Meegeren was a forger.

He loathed modern art - he thought it childish and decadent, a passing fad for ugliness which would soon fade. For years he had eked out a living painting gloomy portraits of rich patrons in a faux-Rembrandt style and had winced as he heard his work ridiculed by his peers. A prominent critic reviewing van Meegeren's second solo exhibition wrote, "A gifted technician who has made a sort of composite facsimile of the Renaissance school, he has every virtue except originality."

The time had come, van Meegeren felt, to revenge himself on his critics. He devised a plan to paint a perfect Vermeer - neither a copy, nor a pastiche, but an original work - and, when it had been authenticated by leading art experts, acquired by a major museum, exhibited and acclaimed, he would announce his hoax to the world.

His first step was concocting an ingenious mixture of pigments that "would pass the five tests which any genuine 17th-century painting must pass". Now he had only to paint a masterpiece.

The Supper at Emmaus was unlike any acknowledged Vermeer. Van Meegeren, true to his perversely moral scheme, painted it in his own style, adding only subtle allusions to works by the Dutch master, before signing it with the requisite flourish. He had it submitted to Abraham Bredius, the most eminent authority on Dutch baroque art of his day, and the critic took the bait.

Writing in the Burlington magazine, Bredius opined: "It is a wonderful moment in the life of a lover of art when he finds himself suddenly confronted with a hitherto unknown painting by a great master… And what a picture! We have here a - I am inclined to say the - masterpiece of Johannes Vermeer of Delft."

Suddenly the world was at van Meegeren's feet. The Supper at Emmaus was bought by the prestigious Boijmans Gallery in Rotterdam for the equivalent of $6 million. More importantly for van Meegeren, it was advertised as the centrepiece, the crowning glory of the gallery's exhibition, 400 Years of European Art.

During the exhibition, van Meegeren would loudly proclaim the painting a forgery, a crude pastiche, and listen as the finest minds of his generation persuaded him that his painting was a genuine Vermeer. His triumph was now complete. He had only to do what he had promised himself: to stand up and claim the work for himself, thereby making fools of his critics. Instead, within a month, he was working on a new forgery.

In less than six years, van Meegeren would paint a further six "Vermeers", earning the equivalent of $60 million. With money, came vice - he revelled in fine champagne, became addicted to morphine and was compulsively unfaithful to his wife.

He bought dozens of houses and hotels, but even then he could not exhaust his wealth, so he hid hundreds of thousands of guilders in gardens, heating ducts and under the floorboards of his many properties. Often he would forget where he had hidden the money, and 30 years after his death, the Dutch were still turning up cashboxes stuffed with pre-war notes.

As van Meegeren's addictions to alcohol and morphine took hold, and the standard of his forgeries plummeted, still experts accepted them as genuine. He discovered that, regardless of how incompetent his painting, how crude his anatomy, how uncertain the provenance, the most erudite Vermeer critics were prepared to sanctify his work. His one mistake had been to allow one of his paintings to fall into enemy hands.

No expert eye discovered van Meegeren's forgery. He was unmasked only because, after six weeks in prison, he cracked: "‘Fools!" he roared at his jailers. "You think I sold a priceless Vermeer to Göring? There was no Vermeer - I painted it myself."

There was one thing van Meegeren had not counted on: no one believed his confession. It was one of the officers who naively suggested that if van Meegeren had painted Göring's Vermeer, he could paint a copy from memory. Van Meegeren arrogantly refused. "To paint a copy is no proof of artistic talent. In all my career I have never painted a copy! But I shall paint you a new Vermeer. I shall paint you a masterpiece."

And so, surrounded by reporters and court-appointed witnesses, and supplied with liberal quantities of alcohol and morphine, he worked for six weeks painting one final "Vermeer", in a desperate attempt to prove himself guilty.

Having been denounced by the press as a traitor, a "Dutch Nazi artist", van Meegeren was now a folk hero - the man who had swindled Göring. The Reichsmarschall was told that his beloved Vermeer was a forgery while awaiting execution in Nuremberg. According to a contemporary account: "[Göring] looked as if for the first time he had discovered there was evil in the world."

In the wake of his confession and the scandal it caused, van Meegeren truly knew the fame he had craved. The trial, when it came, was a three-ring circus. Experts tripped over each other to exculpate themselves. Van Meegeren - more than the prosecuting counsel - was determined that he should be found guilty of committing these "masterpieces", but even now, experts conspired against him, arguing that at least one of his forgeries might be genuine.

In the end, however, van Meegeren got his wish: on November 12, 1947 he was found guilty of obtaining money by deception and sentenced to one year's imprisonment.

But he would never serve a day of his sentence. While prosecution and defence wrangled to secure a full public pardon from the Queen, the forger - long a consummate hypochondriac - finally succumbed to angina. He was hospitalised on the day before he was scheduled to serve his sentence and died some weeks later.

Han van Meegeren's greatest gift to the art world is doubt. If forgers throughout the ages have taught us anything, it is to re-examine why we love what we love, to overcome our obsession with simple authenticity and appreciate the work for itself. Is a minor Rothko truly worth more than the finest Ellsworth Kelly? Are we captivated by the serenity and light of a Corot watercolour, or simply the signature?

"Perhaps," as the art critic Emily Genauer wrote, "we are almost at the point of sophistication where we are able to enjoy a work of art for what it is."

Perhaps. Then again, as Theodore Rousseau pointed out, "We should all realise that we can only talk about the bad forgeries, the ones that have been detected; the good ones are still hanging on the walls."
Frank Wynne is the author of 'I Was Vermeer: The Legend of the Forger Who Swindled the Nazis', published by Bloomsbury (£14.99) on Mon.

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