The Rembrandt Affair

I just finished a phenomenal book by Daniel Silva.  The latest in a long series about Gabriel Allon, an Israeli assassin and art restorer, The Rembrandt Affair is centered around the dirty history of one fictional painting.  Though this story is fictional, there are many true ones like it.  Because art is so old, it carries almost all the secrets of society.

In the mass round up of Jewish people during WWII, agents of the SS were relentless in their search for art pieces--Hitler even had a special department tasked with collection of rare art.  This book tells the story of an executive SS officer who bargains the lives of Jews for their art.  Though Jews were ordered to turn in all valuable things like jewelry and art, many kept them for potential leverage and sentimental value.  The SS officer, Kurt Voss, took a Rembrandt, Portrait of a Young Woman, from a family of prominent Dutch Jews in exchange for their youngest daughter's life. Events like these, along with the frequency of art theft, makes provenance the most important thing about a painting.

The book also addresses the extremes of art restoration.  When the painting is stolen from the original restorer, it ends up covered in blood and has a bullet hole.  There are also two deep creases that originated from the documents that were hidden between it and an additional canvas that was added to seal the documents in.  Using a solution that has acetone as the reactionary agent, art restorers use cotton swabs to meticulously move varnish from the canvas.  To replace the hole, a new patch of canvas is added and filled in the same style of rest of the canvas.  Art restoration is a tedious task that takes immense skill and the ability to mirror the work of the original master.

The painting in the book, Portrait of a Young Woman, does not exist but the closest actual painting would be Rembrandt's Portrait of Hendrickje Stoffels.  Hendrickje Stoffels was Rembrandt's famed mistress.  He got her pregnant, however, he was unable to gain approval from the Catholic church to marry her because of the child they had out of wedlock.  The sensual mood of this picture is displayed in the clothes and body position.  She is wearing a large fur shawl-like piece with what looks like a thin silk underdress.  The cut is extremely low and show almost her entire chest.  She seems to be lying or sitting on a bed.  The bed being a deep red could symbolize the passion in their relationship.  Her face is a peaceful gaze that seems to be unaffected by having to pose for her lover to paint her. The large earrings and the swooping gold necklaces display the opulent gifts that Rembrandt blessed her with.  Rembrandt was considered the leader of the Old Dutch Masters and he lived a lavish life in his house in Amsterdam. 

Dress To Impress(ionism)

Ben,  Sarah B.,  Anna Claire, Megan, Peter (me)

A couple weeks ago, a dedicated group of Art History students, including myself, piled into the mini-van and headed off for a night of adventure dressed in out finest artsy garb.  We made our first stop at the Local Taco, an over-priced, hip restaurant (not sure if they want to be called that) on the outskirts of downtown.

When we finished out gourmet tacos, we headed to the Frist Center for a lecture by Gloria Gloom about the effect of the Franco-Prussian War on the Impressionist movement in France.  Though the lecture ended up being largely about fashion, it provided us with a great insight into the social life of Parisians during that time period.  The most important point was the importance of court life before the fall of the 2nd Republic and the rise of the common person after.  This can easily be seen in the mood and dress before and after.

Impression: Sunrise (1872)

The exhibit, The Birth of Impressionism, was very well put together and showed the story line of Impressionism.  It is difficult to give Impressionism a single definition because it encompasses a large variety of pieces depicting a large variety of subjects. For the most part, works from this era show life 'as is'.  There are rarely floating objects or flying cherubs of any kind.  Objects are subject to gravity and are given mass.  Almost all works were done with oil on canvas which had become a standard at the time. One of the most characteristic features of this movement are the small and thin yet visible brush strokes.  These can be seen in Claude Monet's Impression: Sunrise, which happens to the be the painting that the movement was named after.  Along with the brushstrokes, Impressionism features ordinary subjects, open composition, unusual visual angles, the inclusion of movement, and an emphasis on the correct use of lighting.  When combined, they make some of the most real paintings ever made.  I highly suggest that anyone who has not seen this exhibit go because this is a once and a lifetime opportunity to see a collection of masterpieces from the Musée d'Orsay in France.  Click on this link to see how the public has reacted to it.

For our final stop, we visited the recently up for business Pinkberry where we enjoyed totes the best hun cal fro yo. To understand what I just said, watch this (happens around 2:50): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gspaoaecNAg.

The Economics of Art

Why does Damien Hirst's The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (also known as a shark in formaldehyde) sell for $12 million dollars?  Is art a better investment than stocks and bonds?

Check out this Podcast done by NPR's Planet Money team: Why A Dead Shark Costs $12 Million Dollars

p.s. The first 5 minutes of the podcast is about the old finance reform bill so ignore it.

College of Arts AND Sciences?

How can one place teach two completely different subject? I thought wearing a lab coat and having inch thick glasses was disjoint with turtlenecks and French cigarettes.  It turns out they aren’t.  The influence of science can be seen in many areas such as the human form, mass, and gravity.  As the scientific understanding of the world evolved, so did the realism of art.  Scientific advances by people like Galileo and da Vinci created a new understanding of how people interact with their surroundings.  Gone were the floating objects and the figures that didn’t create shadows; in were the straight lines of perspective and the fluid style of motion.

A good example of depicting motion is Raphael’s Galatea, pictures above.  Based on the poem Stanzas for the Joust of Giuliano de’ Medici by Angelo Poliziano, this fresco depicts the beautiful Galatea fleeing her hideous lover, the Cyclops Polyphemus.  This piece is filled with movement and tension.  The centaur on the right strain to move and the trumpeters exuberantly blow their horns.  The cupids draw their arrows tightly while their small wings keep them aloft.  Raphael uses all these moving figures to draw the eye back to the radiating Galatea at the center.  This gives the effect of her being the source of their great energy.  The direction of the sunlight adds to the focus of the painting.  The sunlight comes in from the top left corner and lands right on Galatea.  The shadowing in the bottom right corner is proof that Raphael understood the properties of light.  Lastly, the foreshortening done on the cupids creates the effect that they are spiraling away, giving this piece even more 3-dimensionality.  Though many of the subjects in this piece are mythical, Raphael shows a deep understanding of the science behind motion and light and the effect it has on the observer.

How Romantic of You

Despite his every attempt, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres was unable to resist the attractive themes of Romanticism.  Ingres was one of Jaques-Louis David's understudies, but he didn't last for long.  David was educated in the Neoclassical style, but he pushed his students to expand the horizons and find their own artistic identity.  Ingres, fed up with this barbaric deviation from the strict Neoclassicism, left that school and went out on his own.  The main difference between Neoclassicism and Romanticism is that the first involves primarily the observed state of life, whereas the second usually involves an elaborate fictional story behind work.

Grande Odalisque

Many of his compositions, including the Apotheosis of Homer, were strictly Neoclassical, but his Grande Odalisque was demolished by critics for it's Romantic themes.  The reclining nude female is a common Greco-Roman, but by portraying her as a odalisque he used an exotic Romantic image.  An odalisque is a female slave most commonly found in the seraglio (female apartments) of the Turkish sultan.  The nude woman style can be seen in Titian's Venus of Urbino (1538).  The face is a near imitation of Raphel's soft featured and calm style, which can be seen in his Madonna in the Meadow (1505).  The extreme relaxation shown is similar to the Italian Mannerism artist Jacopo da Pontormo's style in his Madonna with the Long Neck and Venus, Cupid, Folly, and Time.  Ingres also uses the same elongated body shape and the cool color scheme that creates a calm and relaxed feeling.  No matter how traditional the painting of the subject is, the subject itself is purely Romantic, which puts this work in the transitional period between Neoclassicism and the revolutionary Romanticism.

Venus of Urbino

Madonna in the Meadow

How Original...Not

Admit it, when we find things that are really clever or really good, we like to tell the world about it as if it is ours.  For example, for Lit class we had to write a 'riddle poem'.  I found a very clever one that went like this, "I drink the blood of the earth/and the trees fear my roar/yet a man may hold me in his hands."  Figure it out yet?  Didn't think so.  It is a chainsaw! Clever, right? I know.  This natural tendency that we have to take from our predecessors and incorporate or flat out copy it for our own uses is prevalent in art.

The Romanesque period is a prime example of that natural tendency.  A majority of the works from this period draw heavily from the Roman period, hence the name Romanesque.  A specific piece to look at is the head reliquary of Saint Alexander from Stavelot Abbey in Belgium. This piece, made in 1145 CE, is almost a copy of the face of Augustus in his statue in Primaporta, Italy, which was made around 30 CE.  The face on Polykleitos's Doryphoros, made in 450BCE, also matches that of Saint Alexanders.

Though made of two completely different materials, they have the same straight mouth, taught cheeks, prominent brow, and long nose.  Their hair even curls the same way; they must have had the same stylist.  Saint Augustine is made of silver repoussé, gilt bronze, gems, pearls and enamel, whereas Augustus is a marble copy of a bronze original. Both of these works were designed to show the calm power that the subject holds, or in the case of Saint Alexander, held.  Alexander's head rests upon a gold reliquary that carries influence from the byzantine age.  A reliquary is a container for holy relics, so in this case it would most likely be ashes or bones of some sort.

The eerie similarity of these two works calls into questions the plagiary rules back then and what morals these copiers had.  Also, the lack of protection for intellectual design is appalling.  Someone better be collecting copyright checks.

You Should Really Reconsider Entering!

For the often illiterate population, symbols and sculptures were the only way institutions were able to transfer messages.  The use of didactic sculpture has been used for ever but the most popular was during the Greek and Roman periods.  The reliefs on buildings like the Parthenon functioned as narratives for the people.  Used at practically every corner in Rome, the technique faded for a while until Romanesque architects renewed it.  In the 11th and 12th centuries, there was flurry of new narrative stone reliefs and sculptures.  The art work was transferred from the doors themselves to the surrounding areas of the door.

In the picture on the left you can see the standard design of a Romanesque church portal.  The most important part is the tympanum, which is the large lunette above the doorway that would house the main work.  The wedge shaped blocks that make up the archivolts around the tympanum are called voussoirs.  The lintel, which often holds images of worshipers, is the horizontal beam above the doorway.  Lastly, the columns holding the whole thing up have two different names.  The middle column is called trumeau and the side columns are jambs.

The typical tympanum depicts Jesus in the middle in a mandorla.  He is surrounded by scenes or references to the New or Old Testament.  Many are scary and are intended to scare the common worshiper into considering their actions.  One of them depicts Jesus in the middle with the good side and heaven to his right and the evil side and hell to his left.  We decided to model our tympanum in class after one similar to the good vs. bad one.  We chose to do a Star Wars theme, and chose Darth Vader as our 'Jesus'. On Darth Vader's right there is Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, and finally Yoda.  On the Vader's left is Darth Maul and Jabba the Hut.  The figures in the lintel are matched with their particular side.  The good figures are Rebel fighter pilots and the evil figures are Federation battle droids.  Along the archivolt the images are matched to their respective sides as well.  On the good side they are Millenium Falcons and on the evil side they are Death Stars.  Obviously, we took some creative liberty making Vader the main guy.  This also opened my eyes to how bad of a painter I am and showed me that paining is not meant for detailed images without the right brush.

Vessel for the Dead

During the Hiberno-Saxon period in England and the Vendel era on mainland Europe, a simple grave wouldn't cut it.  A common practice for the burial of Kings and other important figures, normally connected to the 'military' at the time, was to pack a ship with all the gold and other valuables they could find and send it off to sea or bury it.  The picture to the left is a painting of a funeral of a Russian noble by Henryk Siemiradzki.  If you were lucky, they maybe set it on fire.  Obviously this waste of gold is the main source of our current hike in gold prices.

Used all across the Baltic Sea, the most famous burial site is Sutton Hoo near Woodbridge, Suffolk, England.  Scholars often draw connections between this burial and the one described in the English poem Beowulf.  This find is significant for a couple reasons. Though many other burial sites in this area have been found, all of them have been looted.  The burial ship at Sutton Hoo had remained untouched by looters, so the find has left us with a plethora of artifacts from the time.  Because this was an age where history was not recorded as diligently as others and most of it was passed on through myths, the hard evidence from this discovery is critical to the understanding of this period.

The site at Sutton Hoo is composed of both  burial mounds and the more famous ship burial.  The ship used has long disintegrated but the outline was left in the sand.  Archaeologist believe that it measured 90ft long, 14ft at its widest point and about 5ft deep.  However, the buriers were feeling 'hipster' that day and decided that burying a boat on land would be cool.  Most the artifacts are held in the burial chamber, which was a very heavy oak container that was set in the middle of the boat.  It was originally thought that there was no body, but modern day tests have shown that the is a very high probability one existed.  Buried with the ship were helmets, silver bowls and spoons, swords, spears, purse, shoulder clasp, great buckle and many other thing like textiles.  The ship was then covered by a large earthen mound that finally put this ship to rest.

The Hermitage Hotel

 A masterpiece of Beaux-Arts architecture, The Hermitage Hotel makes its place at the intersection of Union Street and 6th Avenue in downtown Nashville.  Commissioned in 1908 by 250 Nashvillians and first opened on September 17, 1910, The Hermitage's construction puts it in the middle of a Beaux-Arts era that swept the nation between 1880 and 1920.  Now the last commercial building remaining in this style in Tennessee, it was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1975.

The Beaux-Arts, which is a wild mix of Baroque, Rococo, Imperial Roman, and Italian Renaissance architecture, is the perfect style to represent the people who stayed at The Hermitage Hotel.  Playing host to six US Presidents and a long list of other celebrities, The Hermitage was a hot spot for the powerful and elite of Nashville and beyond.  The first of these was President Taft who came to be entertained in the Hermitage's lavish dining room, followed by Woodrow Wilson the next year.  The Hermitage also served as the campaign headquarters for Democrats Edward H. Crump and, later, John F. Kennedy.  Franklin D. Roosevelt and his wife also made a visit there on his campaign promoting the "New Deal" policies; this drew an enormous crowd of people trying to get a glimpse of the famous couple.

Beaux-Arts, which literally translates as 'Fine-Arts', is characterized by a symmetrical facade and flat, low-pitched roofs.  These are contrasted by elaborate wall designs composed of decorative garlands, floral patterns, and cartouches. The outside ground floor is rusticated, which means that there is masonry cut in large blocks separated by deep joints which emboldens the wall.  The exterior of the mezzanine (second floor from the outside) pulls from the Ancient Greek realm.  It is composed of seven pairs of ionic columns holding up a small two foot rectangular pediment.  The ornate facade is what composes the eclectic style of the Beaux-Arts school.

 
This mezzanine, which sits level up from the lobby is characterized by its painted ceilings.  The style of painting ceilings alludes to the Italian Renaissance and the phenomenal frescoes that came of that era.  The Imperial Roman architecture can be seen in the Italian sienna marble used on the wall panels in the entrance and the lobby seen above.  In the expansive dining room, the walls are lined floor to ceiling with ornate panels made of Russian walnut.  The stained glass ceiling is placed in the vaulted roof of the lobby, a style credited to the English and Middle Ages Gothic architects.

  Following with the helter-skelter decoration of the Hotel, the famous men's bathroom at the Grille is done in a curious art deco style.  Voted the best bathroom in the nation, it features lime green and black leaded-glass tiles, lime green fixtures, authentic terrazzo floors, and a shoeshine station.  It has four stools, three urinals, four sinks, spotless mirrors and a Sultan telephone that connects to the front desk.  Occasionally the ladies are allowed in for a peak of the world famous restroom.

December 27

Clare Coyle Taylor's sketch titled December 27 is a compact piece of art measuring just over six inches square. Within this small square, Taylor uses a tool typically reserved for children, a colored pencil, to create a skillfully disorganized array of lines. This disorganization doesn't seem to find a purpose in the sketch like a mind that continually wanders without finding an end. Frequently they run into each other, forming pockets of gray matter, where thoughts are formed but soon forgotten for others along the line. Occasionally these pockets form a coherent thought, highlighted with a burst of color contrasted to the dull background. The painting is split, like a personality, between two sides: the top left corner and the bottom right corner. In these corners lay a complex of lines so tightly woven to form solid shapes--creating a definable personality.

The Moonlit Landscape

The Moonlit Landscape by Washington Allston

With the expansion of America westward came new subjects to paint. Most of the artists coming to America at this time were from Europe and trained in the classical styles of painting. Upon encountering this polar opposite of a landscape, these artists instantly fell in love with the expansive scenery that America offered. By the 1800’s Romanticism gripped the world. At times it manifested in the passion shown between people, but America fell in love with itself and it came out through these wonderful landscapes.

Following in the tradition of Romanticism, Allston uses lighting and proportions to emphasize the mood behind the painting. The first thing one might note is how brightly the landscape is lit by what is supposed to be the moon. This is part of the effect that Allston is going for. The luminescence of the painting is created in part by Allston’s creative use of glazes. By layering his paints with glaze, Allston creates a glowing effect that, along with the atmospheric color, enhances the majesty of the landscape. To fit an impeccable amount of detail into this 25in x 36in canvas, Alston uses extremely fine and measured brush strokes.

The placement of the figures is essential to accentuating the landscape. Allston does this by creating them as sharp images in the bottom center and blurring the rest of the landscape. By drawing the observers eye to the bottom initially, it makes the observer see the rest as the background, however, because of the scale between the people and the background, it makes the background look expansive. The objective of the artist is not to show the people but to make the expansive landscape the main attraction. The stark contrast between the sky and the landscape as well as the cloud structure helps to accentuate the moon in the center. The line of moonlight divides the painting and goes through the arch of the bridge. This heavenly ray of moonlight helps add to the majestic mood and glow of the painting, which developed, with Allston’s help, into the style of the Hudson River School.

The City From Greenwich Village

When I think of a city, I imagine streets crowded with people, and heaven-scraping buildings lit by football field sized billboards; however, in John Sloan’s (1871-1951) The City From Greenwich Village (1922) he shows us an unglamorous cityscape from the Roaring Twenties. 

From a quick glance this painting looks like a dark city, maybe during the Great Depression, meant to convey a message of sadness.  Upon closer examination, however, the simple basics of a generic city appear. The elevated track, the hanging streetlights, the bottom level shops, the water tower atop the apartment building and so on. 

If this painting is of just another block in another city, then why did Sloan paint it? Obviously there was some sort of personal attachment to the place.  The slightly heavy brush strokes that give the painting a blurred look possibly indicate that it was recalled from a memory. Sloan explains:

“Looking south over lower Sixth Avenue from the roof of my Washington Place studio, on a winter evening. The distant lights of the great office buildings downtown are seen in the gathering darkness. The triangular loft building on the right had contained my studio for three years before.”

In his quote, Sloan points out another ‘hidden’ feature of this work.  In the top left corner the peachy glow of the city contrasts with the purple hues of the rest of the painting, dotted with yellow light throughout.  Possibly Sloan did this to set the culture of this particular street apart from the liveliness of the Roaring Twenties at full tilt.  This stretch of street has the feel of a calm suburban neighborhood in an urban setting.  Is this a protest against the invasion of skyscrapers and all-night clubs? Or could Sloan simply be showing us the beauty in the calm neighborhoods of urban life.