03 Mar 2012
How and Why Artists Steal
“It’s not always good to have ideas. Some people have a gift for coming up with ideas. But for those that don’t it is a real struggle. Oddly,” Paul Arden writes in his latest guide for creative wannabes, “the
01 Mar 2012
Oscars and Art 2012
Did you notice how so many of the Oscar nominations for Best Picture were movies about movies, including the winner The Artist? For those living in caves this winter, The Artist is a mostly silent film about a silent star unable to make the tran
23 Feb 2012
Faces in Our Minds
Humanity’s existence is so dependent on recognizing faces that our visual system specializes in it, reserving a large proportion of the brain’s neurons solely for that purpose. Amazingly we can even recognize a person in profile when we have
10 Feb 2012
Titian’s Danae..a “new” self-portrait
I've found a clearer image of Titian's own face, a previously unseen self-portrait, made from the clouds in his Prado Danae. You can see the tip of his nose in the center of this image, his far eye quite clearly indicated above it and sl
09 Feb 2012
The Artist as Creative God
The idea within esoteric Christianity that God is our innermost self, the universal self that we all share, has inspired many Western artists over the centuries to depict themselves as God in the process of creation. The ceiling of the Sistine C
05 Feb 2012
What is Art?
Edward de Bono, the polymath and creative thinker, has argued that argument as a way of thinking began with the Gang of Three: Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. Argument then became the default mode for human thought and while the method has served
04 Feb 2012
Physiognomy and Every Painter….
In the previous entry we saw how Degas’ beloved Little Dancer Aged Fourteen is partly modelled on the physiognomic ideas of Johann Caspar Lavater (1741-1801) and others. I mentioned this because Lavater also wrote: “Every painter paints
30 Dec 2011
Carpaccio’s Dragon’s Blood
Carpaccio’s remarkable series of wall decorations on the saga of St. George in a small Venetian scuola captured my attention twelve years ago, at the start of my own quixotic quest to convince the art world that the subject of true art is
22 Dec 2011
Quiz: Can you see what Picasso’s up to?
OK, here's your chance to figure out a drawing before I give you my opinion. It's by the young Picasso of his girlfriend when they were on a summer vacation in the Spanish Pyrenees. It seems simple enough but nothing by Picasso is really
21 Dec 2011
The Renaissance Portrait from Donatello to Bellini #5
Continuing our series in honor of the Metropolitan Museum's current exhibition of Renaissance portraits we have Botticelli's portrait of Michele Marullo Tarcaniota on the left compared to Botticelli's earlier self-portrait on the rig
16 Dec 2011
Importance of Interpretation
People use this site to help develop their ability to interpret works of art and thereby increase their aesthetic satisfaction. To look at art without trying to interpret it leaves you looking at a pretty picture, little more. Certainly the brus
10 Dec 2011
Portraits: Icons of America
Portraits make popular art exhibitions because we all think we can “read” a face. It’s part of being human. Everyone is his or her own expert on other people’s faces. Besides, portraits help satisfy our natural inquisitiv
01 Dec 2011
The Renaissance Portrait from Donatello to Bellini #2
For a late portrait Raphael was asked to paint a Neapolitan princess he had never seen, a problem he solved by sending Giulio Romano to Naples do a drawing from life. The painted portrait (left) was mostly done by studio assistants after a desig
30 Nov 2011
The Renaissance Portrait from Donatello to Bellini
On December 21st the Metropolitan Museum, New York, will be opening an exhibition titled The Renaissance Portrait from Donatello to Bellini. As long-time users know, the whole idea behind this site and its blog is that art, especially Renaissanc
23 Nov 2011
Rembrandt’s Hand
We have already seen (in Donatello’s Davids and Goliaths) that Donatello identified with both David and Goliath. Both his giants (in the marble and bronze versions) have double vision, out-sight and insight, the two forms conveyed by one eye o
16 Nov 2011
Picasso’s Visual Illusions In the Sculptor’s Studio
Some of Picasso's late etchings look as though they may have been tossed off without much thought. It's only when you can begin to study them closely that you realize how brilliant he was. In this print called In the Sculptor's Studi
10 Nov 2011
The Importance of an Artist’s Turban
I've been looking forward to discussing turbans for some time because, for an art lover, a little knowledge can go a long way. Almost everyone thinks of them as oriental in some manner but, up until the end of the eighteenth century, you could f
04 Nov 2011
Quotation of the Week #5
‘…the symbolical creations of geniuses are unfortunately harder to nail down to a definite subject than the allegorical inventions of minor artists.’
Erwin Panofsky, art historian (1892-1968)1
30 Oct 2011 | 2 Comments
Cubism Explained
No-one, to my mind, has ever satisfactorily explained Cubism. Indeed I have found the explanations and their complexity totally confusing. Roland Penrose, a close friend of Picasso, claimed that Cubist images try:
‘to state t
20 Oct 2011
Picasso’s Eyeball
Yesterday I asked if anyone knew of a link between Manet’s Absinthe Drinker and Picasso’s Blue Period paintings. There are several. They both use Marcantonio Raimondi’s Portrait of Raphael, a small engraving, as their source; both were pai
19 Oct 2011
Find the link
What do you think links Manet's Absinthe Drinker to Picasso's Blue Period paintings?
Answer here.
17 Oct 2011
Delacroix on Color and Line
Writers on art once believed that Raphael and the School of Rome privileged line and contour whereas Titian and the Venetian School worshipped color, thereby making the overall palette and tonality of Venetian pictures in the Renaissance more si
13 Oct 2011
Rembrandt and the Face of Jesus
America’s a religious and largely Christian country so an exhibition titled Rembrandt and the Face of Jesus, currently in Philadelphia and soon to travel to Detroit, ought to be a popular hit. It caught my interest because – face it
10 Oct 2011
Quotation of the Week #4
"Meaning is for those who are ready for it, for those who are trained for it. The rest get pretty pictures."
Les Bursill, an aborigine on aboriginal art
04 Oct 2011
John Sloan and his Ashcan Paintings
I mentioned a month ago that I would be reviewing Michael Lobel’s article in the Art Bulletin on John Sloan, the Ashcan artist of early twentieth-century New York.1 In it he looks at half a dozen works by Sloan between 1907 and 1910 to dem
01 Oct 2011
Quotation of the Week #3
“In painting, the idea is an image that the intellect of the painter has to see with interior eyes in the greatest silence and secrecy.”1
Michelangelo Buonarotti (1475-1564)
17 Sep 2011
Artists are Animals
“Artists are animals” may seem like a derogatory statement but artists are animals and both art and intelligence are products of nature. We are not separate. We all play our part in the cosmos, all created by similar processes: rats,
11 Sep 2011
The Kimbell Gets a Surprise
Nicolas Poussin’s Sacrament of the Ordination (1640's) is one of the masterpieces of Western art. I wrote about it last year when it failed to sell at auction. Now the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas has acquired it for $24 m
09 Sep 2011
Murder and Butchery by Picasso and Chagall
A recent article on Chagal discusses his well-known identification with animals. It concludes with a drawing called The Butcher (top) which is so similar in meaning and method to Picasso’s The Murder (bottom), both drawn in the early 1930
02 Sep 2011
Art Bulletin’s Bumper Issue
This month’s Art Bulletin, the magazine of the U.S. College Art Association, is a bumper issue as far as we are all concerned. One article by Michael Lobel reveals how John Sloan, a member of the Ashcan School in early twentieth-century Americ
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