The Struggle for Reality: Giacometti and the Impossible Real

In Robert Hughes' article for Time magazine, written only 8 years after the artist's death, Hughes articulates Giacometti's struggle to make meaningful marks. The article sorts through common misconceptions, and also, indirectly, addresses the struggle to create.

...The painting('s)... real subject is the artist's lifelong obsession as a sculptor: the enormous difficulty of seeing anything clearly at all and the near impossibility of truthfully remaking what is seen into a lump of clay or a scribble on paper. Giacometti saw his own efforts as condemned to frustration. "There is no hope of achieving what I want, of expressing my vision of reality. I go on painting and sculpting because I am curious to know why I fail."...

       - Robert Hughes, Art: An Obsession with Seeing, Time Magazine, April 8, 1974

Link Full Text
Image: Giacometti, Head of Diego, Oil/Canvas, 1961

Arts and Citizenship - Pittsburgh Filmmakers

Arts and Citizenship via Maura Doern Danko, the Carnegie Museum of Art, and YouTube

PittsburghFilmmakers — May 26, 2009 — Shot and edited at Pittsburgh Filmmakers.

Edited by Gretchen Neidert

Cinematography by Matthew Day
Music by Charlie Humphrey

Crew:
Joseph Morrison
Will Zavala
Gretchen Neidert
Ann Toriano
Andrew Swensen
Greg Grant
Patrick Bowman
Daniel Baliban

Produced by: Pittsburgh Filmmakers / Pittsburgh Center for the Arts 2009

"The Beethoven Mystery, Why haven't we figured out his Ninth Symphony yet? By Jan Swafford"

Beethoven's inscrutable Ninth

Symphony still mesmerizes

This summer, as every summer, the end of the Boston Symphony's Tanglewood season will be marked by another round of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. The world over, the Ninth has become an indispensable adornment for socio/musical hooplas. Chances are, it will be played soon by an orchestra near you. If you know Western classical music, you know this one. Probably half of humanity can hum the little ditty that serves as the theme of the choral finale—a setting of Schiller's revolutionary-era drinking song, "Ode to Joy."

Which is all to say, the Ninth has attained the kind of ubiquity that threatens to gut any artwork. Think Mona Lisa. Still, as with Lisa, when that kind of success persists through the centuries, there are reasons...   -source: Slate, "The Beethoven Mystery, Why haven't we figured out his Ninth Symphony?" Jan Swafford

Link  Full Text, Slate, "The Beethoven Mystery, Why haven't we figured out his Ninth Symphony?" Jan Swafford

"The Brilliant Line", Following the Early Modern Engraver - Andrew Raftery, RISD Museum of Art

Madonna with the Pear, Albrecht Durer, Engraving, 1511, RISD.

"Engravings are objects of exquisite beauty and incomparable intricacy whose visual language is composed entirely of lines...Andrew Raftery, an accomplished engraver and Associate Professor of Printmaking at the Rhode Island School of Design, analyzed how Early Modern engravers worked within established line systems and also diverged from them." - source: http://risdmuseum.org/thebrilliantline/

A Webby Award nominee for Best Art Website and highly interactive, the visitor can selectively view different stages of the process, from first ideas to final statements, to better understand the printmakers' art and craft.

Link The Brilliant Line, RISD Museum of Art, online exhibit, Andrew Raftery

"Portraits help bring closure to fallen troops' loved ones." - CNN

For 12 hours a day, Michael Reagan works on portraits of fallen military personnel. So far, he's done more than 2,000.

Edmonds, Washington (CNN) -- For Michael Reagan, the portraits always start the same way.

"I do the eyes first so I get this connection with the face," he said. "I am pretty exhausted after a picture. Just try staring at a photograph for five hours without any distractions."

Reagan, a professional artist for 40 years, is known for his vivid etchings of politicians, celebrities and athletes.

Today, he has a new subject: fallen members of the military.

It all started three years ago when the wife of a Navy corpsman who was killed in Iraq asked Reagan to draw her late husband.

Reagan insisted on doing the portrait for free. Then he had a realization.

"I looked at my wife and told her what happened and said, 'Now we need to do them all,' " Reagan remembered..."   - CNN web site

Link CNN web site, Full Text and Video

Matisse: Radical Invention 1913-1917 - Art Institute of Chicago Exhibit

Henri Matisse. Bathers by a River 1909–10, 1913, 1916–17. Charles H. and Mary F. S. Worcester Collection, 1953.158. © 2010 Succession H. Matisse / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.

"It has bothered me all my life that I don't paint like anyone else." 
 - Henri Matisse

"Matisse: Radical Invention, 1913–1917 examines what is without question the most innovative, momentous, and yet little-studied time in the artist’s long career. Nearly 120 of his most ambitious and experimental paintings, sculptures, drawings, and prints from the period are on view. Matisse himself acknowledged the significance of these years when he identified two paintings, Bathers by a River and The Moroccans, as among his most pivotal. These monumental canvases from the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, inspired the collaborative work of this exhibition and serve as major touchstones within it. This is the first exhibition to offer an in-depth investigation of Matisse’s art from this time, revealing information uncovered through extensive new art-historical, archival, and technical research."  - Art Institute of Chicago web site.

Link Matisse, Radical Invention 1913-1917, Art Institute of Chicago, March 20 - June 20, 2010

Did Renaissance painters 'cheat' with optical aids? - Samuel Reich, NewScientist

"IT IS one of the most provocative suggestions in art history: did some Renaissance artists use lenses or mirrors to help them paint more accurately? Analysis of a 16th-century artwork dubbed a "Rosetta stone" for optical techniques suggests they did.

The theory that Renaissance artists used optical projection was proposed in 2000 by artist David Hockney and optical scientist Charles Falco of the University of Arizona in Tucson. Most art historians have yet to be convinced..."  - Samuel Reich, New Scientist

Link Full Text, Samuel Reich, "Did Renaissance painters cheat with optical aids?", New Scientist
Image: Lorenzo Lotto, Husband and Wife, Oil, 1523, The Hermitage, St. Petersburg, Russia

Lewis Center for the Arts, Princeton Univeristy

"I dream of it."  - Yo-Yo Ma

Mission: The Lewis Center for the Arts is designed to put the creative and performing arts at the heart of the Princeton experience. This mission is based on the conviction that exposure to the arts, particularly to the experience of producing art, helps each of us to make sense of our life and the lives of our neighbors.

The Lewis Center for the Arts will allow Princeton to fully engage with a range of programs that integrate the creative and performing arts into a broad liberal arts education. The Center will give a new focus and force to the Programs in Creative Writing, Dance, Theater, and Visual Arts, as well as to Film and Video, Musical Performance and to the Princeton Atelier. It will also have close links to the Center for African American Studies, School of Architecture, Department of Art and Archaeology, Council of the Humanities, Department of Comparative Literature, Department of English, Department of Music, Princeton University Art Museum and the McCarter Theatre Center.

Link Lewis Center for the Arts, Princeton University

Raoul Middleman - Painter

Irrepressibly enthusiastic about his art, Middleman is steeped in the roots of the imagery of Western painting. His tumultuous canvases with their splashing brushstrokes -- landscapes, seascapes, portraits, still life’s or narratives -- each one conveys his sense of joy and pleasure in its creation. Middleman explores the whole range of the painter’s art. His portraits -- perverse and confrontational -- take as their subjects his family, friends, neighbors, street people, pulling truths from these faces his subjects may not have known were there. His landscapes are like cantatas composed of painterly fugues of light and shadow, line and color. He’s painted the French countryside, the Cape Cod seacoast, the farmlands of Maryland and Pennsylvania. Tramping around the Baltimore harbor area for most of his adult life he finds beauty in rotting wharves, abandoned factories, rusted oil tanks. The thread that holds this explosion of productivity together is the joy he encounters in his work.

His landscapes are inherently unstructured. They are given a meaning by their treatment: what is selected as a motif, the sense of near and far, the path the eye takes through space, how the light fails, how the air envelops, how the frame is filled -- and first and foremost how the brushstroke picks out the contrasts, opacities, and transparencies -- what shines and what is shaded.

Middleman’s work is in the collections of the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington DC, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, among many others. - Kouros Gallery

Link Slide Show, Raoul Middleman at Work
Link Raoul Middleman web site
Link Kouros Gallery, NYC

National Gallery of Art - Quick Takes

Descent from the Cross, Rembrandt Workshop, Oil/Linen, 1650/52, NGA


Adoration of the Magi, Fra Filippo Lippi, Fra Angelico, Tempera/Wood, 1440/1460, NGA


The Kitchen Maid, Chardin, Oil/Linen, 1738, NGA

On Sunday, I went to the National Gallery of Art - West Building. These are some of my observations.

The Rembrandt paintings express such a broad range of thought and feeling - like life. Regardless of subject matter, he seems to consistently explore a portraiture of sorts. During this visit, I thought about the connections between the way he thinks about the head and the way he approaches landscape and narrative. I think his deep understanding of the head infuses his work with unrivaled emotional depth and awareness. I look at his work as often as possible and each time experience something different and new.

This time, the Italians offered me a fresh look at the round format. Aware of linear perspective and yet unencumbered by it, they freely altered scale to better express their ideas. A meaningful composition in the round reveals a more obvious relation between the composition and format and helps deepen my understanding of composition in general.

Looking at the space in the Chardin paintings was a remarkable visual experience. Instead of receding pictorial depth, his space seemed to also press forward - almost bubble towards the viewer. Two paintings - The Kitchen Maid and The Attentive Nurse - defy obvious and predictable pictorial space. In both, especially The Kitchen Maid, the figure seems to be on the verge of falling head first out of the painting. He is a genius at pictorial tension and balance.

What marvelous teachers!

Link National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC