Stealing the Mona Lisa

The Mona Lisa, Leonardo, c. 1503-1506, 30"x 21", Oil on Wood, the Louvre, Paris, France

On the night of August 21 1911, the Mona Lisa disappeared from the walls of the Louvre, apparently stolen by someone who had hidden in the museum overnight and hurried off with the painting the next morning, persuading a plumber to let them out.

The masterpiece did not reappear until December 1913, when a young man bedecked with a splendid moustache turned up at the office of an art dealer in Florence. He claimed to have brought the Mona Lisa to Florence from Paris in order to restore the painting to its rightful home in Italy. The apparent patriot also requested a 500,000 lire reward for his hard work (a not insignificant amount, although, as visitors to Italy pre-euro will vouch, the lire was always a currency which enjoyed confounding currency conversion with its delayed decimal place).

The dealer was understandably bemused, but intrigued, and an inspection of the painting at the young gentleman's hotel was arranged with the director of the Uffizi gallery. To the great surprise of the dealer and the director, it really was Da Vinci's masterpiece.

Soon the police were called, and the "patriot", Vincenzo Perugia was arrested. At his trial Perugia maintained it was an act of patriotism, not financial greed, that drove him to take the painting. The Italian public quickly adopted Perugia as a national hero and admirers dispatched hundreds of letters and gifts to his prison cell...

- "Mona Lisa's theft set the blueprint for art crime", excerpt of blog post by Hugo Gorst-Williams, www.guardian.co.uk

What other masterpieces have been stolen, recovered, or destroyed? What's missing now? How and why was it stolen? How was it recovered?

The web site, guardian.co.uk, offers a sub site for news about art thefts and thieves, artwork recovered, ongoing investigations and related information.

Link "Mona Lisa's theft set the blueprint for art crime", Full Text

Link Art and Design, Art Thefts at www.guardian.co.uk

Link The Theft of the Mona Lisa, Treasures of the World, PBS web site

Kathe Kollwitz - Artist

Self Portrait, Kathe Kollwitz, Color Stone Lithograph,

20.5 x 15 inches, approximately

"I would like to exert an influence in these times when human beings are so perplexed and in need of help." - Kathe Kollwitz, 1922

Käthe Kollwitz, July 8, 1867 – April 22, 1945, was a German painter, printmaker, and sculptor whose work offered an eloquent and often searing account of the human condition in the first half of the 20th century. Her empathy for the less fortunate, expressed most famously through the graphic means of drawing, etching, lithography, and woodcut, embraced the victims of poverty, hunger, and war. Initially her work was grounded in Naturalism, and later took on Expressionistic qualities...

...In 1933, after the establishment of the National-Socialist regime, the Nazi Party authorities forced her to resign her place on the faculty of the Akademie der Künste. Her work was removed from museums. Although she was banned from exhibiting, some of her work was used by the Nazis for propaganda... Wikipedia

Link Wikipedia, Full Text

Link Kathe Kollwitz, Google Image Search

The Annunciation

The Annunciation, oil and tempera on panel, 39 x 85, Leonarda da Vinci, circa 1472–1475, Uffizi Gallery, Florence, Italy

...And, behold, an angel of the Lord stood before her, saying: Fear not, Mary; for thou hast found grace before the Lord of all, and thou shalt conceive, according to His word. And she hearing, reasoned with herself, saying: Shall I conceive by the Lord, the living God? and shall I bring forth as every woman brings forth? And the angel of the Lord said: Not so, Mary; for the power of the Lord shall overshadow thee: wherefore also that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of the Most High. And thou shalt call His name Jesus, for He shall save His people from their sins. And Mary said: Behold, the servant of the Lord before His face: let it be unto me according to thy word... The Gospel of James (circa 150 AD)

Like the Nativity, the complex meaning of the Annunciation is shaped by the past, cultures, the present, and context. Probing meaning in visual art, and the meaning of a specific art work, is very challenging. Observations and analysis are captured along the remarkable continuum of history. The quality of these observations depend entirely on the capabilities of the observer to seek out the mind of the artist.

Link The Annunciation, Leonardo da Vinci, Wikipedia

Link Iconography, Augusta State University

Link Uffizi Gallery, Florence, Italy

Neil Welliver - Landscape Painter

Birches, oil on canvas, Neil Welliver

Neil Welliver (July 22, 1929 - April 5, 2005) was an American-born modern artist, best known for his large-scale landscape paintings inspired by the deep woods near his home in Maine.

Welliver was born in Millville, Pennsylvania. He graduated from the Philadelphia College of Art (now part of the University of the Arts) and then received an MFA from Yale University. At Yale, he studied with the abstract artist Josef Albers. Welliver taught at Yale from 1956 to 1966, and in 1966 began teaching at, and eventually became chairman of, the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Fine Art, from which he retired in 1989.

While teaching at Yale, Welliver's style evolved from abstract color field painting to the realistic transcription of small-town scenes in watercolor. In the early 1960s he went to Maine, where he began painting figures outdoors, the large oil paintings often focusing on his sons canoing or female nudes bathing. In 1970 he moved permanently to Lincolnville, and by the mid 1970s the figure as subject had given way to the exclusive study of landscape... Wikipedia

Link Eulogy

Link Neil Welliver and the Healing Landscape, Edgar Allen Beem

Link Full Text, Wikipedia

Bates College Museum: The Thousand Words Project, Words and Brushstrokes

Light in Brook, Oil on Canvas, Neil Welliver, 1985

Bates College Museum, Lewiston, Maine

Tools of the Trade:

Words and Brushstrokes

Everyone has heard the old adage that “a painting is worth a thousand words.” What does this really mean, and how can it be useful to those interested in learning more about art? To answer this question, we must examine other questions. First, what is the job of a painting? Many would include the task of communication in their answer. How do we communicate in most situations? We all agree that most of the time, people communicate with words—whether spoken or written.

Why then, is a picture worth a thousand words? Words are in some ways symbolic--just like pictures can be. The word for a thing is not the thing itself. For instance “paintbrush” communicates the idea of a paintbrush, but is not the paintbrush itself. Similarly, a picture of a paintbrush might just be smears of paint creating an illusion of a paintbrush. But it is not a real tool that one can pick up and use. So pictures and words are very similar, in that they communicate ideas about the world around us.

How do artists use their brushes?...

- The Thousand Words Project, Bates College Museum web site

Link Full Text

Link Web Site

China: The Six Principles of Painting - Xie He, 550 CE(AD)

...The Six principles of Chinese painting were established by Xie He, a writer, art historian and critic in 6th century China. He is most famous for his "Six points to consider when judging a painting"... taken from the preface to his book "The Record of the Classification of Old Painters"... Keep in mind that this was written circa 550 CE(AD) and refers to "old" and "ancient" practices. The six elements that define a painting are:

1- "Spirit Resonance," or vitality, and seems to translate to the nervous energy transmitted from the artist into the work. The overall energy of a work of art. Xie He said that without Spirit Resonance, there was no need to look further.

2- "Bone Method," or the the way of using the brush. This refers not only to texture and brush stroke, but to the close link between handwriting and personality. In his day, the art of calligraphy was inseparable from painting.

3- "Correspondence to the Object," or the depicting of form, which would include shape and line.

4- "Suitability to Type," or the application of color, including layers, value and tone.

5- "Division and Planning," or placing and arrangement, corresponding to composition, space and depth.

6- "Transmission by Copying," or the copying of models, not only from life but also the works of antiquity... -Richard R. Wertz web site

Link Full Text

Link Wikipedia

Arthur Wesley Dow - Visual Artist/Educator on Composition

Arthur Wesley Dow (American, 1857-1922). August Moon, ca. 1905. Woodcut print. 5 5/16 x 7 1/4 in. (13.5 x 18.5 cm). Collection of Edgar Smith, New York / Photo: David Heald

...art lies in the fine choice. The artist does not teach us to see facts: he teaches us to feel harmonies. -"Talks on the Appreciation of Art", The Delinator (Jan 1915) - Wikiquote

Arthur Wesley Dow (April 6, 1857 - December 13, 1922) was an American painter, printmaker, photographer, and influential arts educator. Dow taught at major American arts training institutions for 30 years including Teachers College, Columbia University; the Art Students League of New York; Pratt Institute; and his own Ipswich Summer School of Art. His ideas were quite revolutionary for the period, he taught that rather than copying nature, art should be created by elements of the composition, like line, mass and color. His ideas were published in the 1899 book Composition: A Series of Exercises in Art Structure for the Use of Students and Teachers. He taught many of America's leading artists and craftspeople, including Georgia O'Keeffe, Charles J. Martin[citation needed], two of the Overbeck Sisters and the Byrdcliffe Colony. - Wikipedia

Link Composition: A Series of Exercises in Art Structure for the Use of Students and Teachers, Digitized Google Book

Link Quotes, Wikiquote

Link Wikipedia

Starry Night - Vincent Van Gogh

Starry Night(created after the painting), Reed Pen and Pencil, 18.5 x 25.5 inches, Vincent Van Gogh, 1889, Museum of Architecture (?), Moscow, Russia

Starry Night, Oil on Canvas, 29x36.25 inches, Vincent Van Gogh, 1889, MoMa

Letter from Vincent Van Gogh to his brother Theo Van Gogh (excerpt)

June 17 or 18, 1889

...At last I have a landscape with olive trees and also a new study of a starry sky. Though I have not seen either Gauguin's or Bernard's last canvases, I am pretty well convinced that these two studies I've spoken of are parallel in feeling.

When you have looked at these two studies for some time, and that of the ivy as well, it will perhaps give you some idea, better than words could, of the things that Gauguin and Bernard and I sometimes used to talk about, and which we've thought about a good deal; it is not a return to the romantic or to religious ideas, no. Nevertheless, by going the way of Delacroix, more than is apparent, by colour and a more spontaneous drawing than delusive precision, one could express the purer nature of a countryside compared with the suburbs and cabarets of Paris... - source: Vincent van Gogh. Letter to Theo van Gogh. Written 17 or 18 June 1889 in Saint-Rémy. Translated by Mrs. Johanna van Gogh-Bonger, edited by Robert Harrison, number 595.

When he wrote this letter, Vincent Van Gogh was 36 years old. He died July 29, 1890.

Link Full Text

Link Starry Night, Museum of Modern Art, NYC

Slaughterhouse | The New Republic - Jed Perl

Self Portrait, Oil/Canvas, Francis Bacon, 1971

Francis Bacon: A Centenary Retrospective, Metropolitan Museum of Art

Is there such a thing as a wrongheaded tradition? I believe there is. And the most enduring one is surely the tradition of the artist as a romantic outlaw, which in the last half-century has been pretty much owned by Francis Bacon. His canvases, modernist melodramas with just the right crowd-friendly dash of old-fashioned grandiloquence, are the subject of a retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Bacon, who died in 1992 at the age of eighty-two, may well be the greatest exemplar of a wrongheaded tradition that we have ever seen. He had a knack for adapting all the wrong elements from all the right artists... - excerpt

Link Full Text, Slaughterhouse, Jed Perl, The New Republic, June 17, 2009

Charlie Rose talks with Jed Perl, Art Critic - Video

A conversation with Jed Perl, art critic for "The New Republic" about his book "New Art City: Manhattan at Mid-Century". - Charlie Rose web site

Link Charlie Rose web site

Link Articles by Jed Perl

Link The New Republic

Who Gets to Call it Art? - Ben Street

Letter from London: Who Gets to Call it Art?

Art 21 Blog
December 7, 2009

What does contemporary art look like? What a ridiculous question! It doesn’t look like anything, does it? No one in their right minds would want to begin to map out a common style across the thousands of different approaches littering the white floors and gray walls of contemporary art galleries all over the world. There have been attempts to bracket artists together, notably by Jerry Saltz in a lovely unprintable phrase that’s apparently still in style (judging by this year’s Venice Biennale), but they only ever glance at comprehensiveness. Talent contests like the Turner Prize begin to look like meaningless conflations of the Oscars, the Pulitzer, and the Nobel... - Art 21 Blog

Link Full Text, Letter from London: Who Gets to Call it Art?, Ben Street

Link Art 21 Blog

Sculptor - Ron Meunck

Mask II, Ron Meunck

...(Ron) Meunck's sculptures faithfully reproduce the minute detail of the human body, but play with scale to produce disconcertingly jarring visual images. His five metre high sculpture Boy 1999 was a feature in the Millennium Dome and later exhibited in the Venice Biennale.

In 1999 Mueck was appointed as Associate Artist at the National Gallery, London. During this two year post he created the works Mother and Child, Pregnant Woman, Man in a Boat and Swaddled Baby. - Wikipedia

Link Ron Meunck, Wikipedia

Link Working Process

Drawing Technique - Trois Crayons

Trois Crayons Example. Young Girl, Watteau

Trois Crayons refers to a drawing technique using three colors of chalk: red (sanguine), black, and white. The paper used may be a mid-tone such as grey, blue, or tan. Among numerous others, the French painter Antoine Watteau drew studies of figures and drapery using trois crayons. - Wikipedia

The technique may be used to organize the light relative to form, to create emphasis, rhythmic dialog, and balance.

Link Wikipedia

Special Exhibit: Watteau to Degas, French Drawings at the Frick Collection, NYC

Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684–1721),Woman Lying on a Sofa, c . 1717–18, red, black, and white chalk, 21.7 x 31.1 cm, Fondation Custodia, Paris

Watteau to Degas: French Drawings from the Frits Lugt Collection

October 6, 2009, through January 10, 2010

Curators at The Frick Collection were invited to select for the exhibition and its accompanying catalogue Lugt's finest eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French drawings, and the sixty-four works featured in the exhibition illuminate both Lugt's taste and that of his successors. Included are drawings and watercolors by well-known masters of the French School such as Watteau, Boucher, Fragonard, David, Ingres, and Degas, as well as by important figures who are less familiar to the general public. This is the first time that a group of French master drawings from the Fondation Custodia has traveled to New York. - Frick Collection web site

Link Watteau to Degas Exhibition web site

Four Things I've Learned About Designers by Warren Berger

For the last two years, I’ve been doing to designers what they usually do unto others. Which is to say, I’ve been observing and studying them, asking a lot of questions and trying to discern patterns. Here are a few things I’ve learned along the way. - Warren Berger, Dec. 1, 2009, AIGA web site

AIGA, the professional association for design, stimulates thinking about design, demonstrates the value of design and empowers the success of designers at each stage of their careers. AIGA’s mission is to advance designing as a professional craft, strategic tool and vital cultural force. Founded in 1914, AIGA remains the oldest and largest professional membership organization for design, and is a nonprofit, 501(c)(3) educational institution..

Link Full Article, Four Things I've Learned About Designers, Warren Berger

Link AIGA web site