June 7, 1916: Charles Burchfield And A Hot Day In Ohio

We can intuit from looking at Poplar Walk (dated June 7, 1916) an extremely hot day.  It is no accident that the sidewalks are painted in a vivid orange, radiating heat even stronger than the yellow lawns; notice that the grass is only green where it is shadowed by the trees.

Those poplar trees are ecstatic, their branches arching upwaex into the light, their decorative foliage suggests that Burchfield had been looking at Asian art.

In 1916 Charles Burchfield graduated from the Cleveland School of Art.  At age twenty-three the artist was on the brink of the most creative period of his life. He spent that summer at his mother's home in Salem, Ohio.  

Burchfield's working method was to sketch outlines and make color notations in graphite, then apply watercolor over them. In Poplar Walk he left a few areas of the white paper show through drawing the eye deep into the distance.

The largest collection of Burchfield's work is housed in the Burchfield Penney Art Center in Buffalo, New York across the street from the Albright-Knox Gallery.

Image - Charles Burchfield, Poplar Walk, June 7, 1916,  transparent and opaque watercolor on white paper with color notations in graphite Munson Williams Proctor Art Institute, Utica, NY

Paula Rego: The Dance

I can' prove it but I think Paul Rego saw Winslow Homer's Summer Evening although she said that the idea for the painting came  from her husband. Rego's paintings are  full of her fascination with such disparate subjects fairy tales, politics, and sexual transgression so it is hardly a stretch to see The Dance as a symbol for 'the dance of life. We see a woman standing alone as she watches two couples dance, one perhaps courting, the other of an obviously pregnant woman.  In the background is a trio -  grandmother, mother, and daughter. All her possible choices are  arrayed before her eyes under a full moon.

Paula Rego was born in Lisbon, Portugal in 1935, an only child in a privileged family. At the time the country was ruled by the fascist dictator Antonio Salazar.  His regime was hostile to women, a Latin version of kinder, kuche, kurche, So, although Paula's mother began to draw at the age of four there was no chance that she could make a career of art.

In 1951 Rego moved to England to study art at the Slade School under the care of a guardian; her family was quite conservative although strongly anti-fascist. Her father commissioned her to create murals for a workers' canteen in 1952 but it was a decade later before she began to exhibit her work in group shows in London. 

The British Royal  Academy has described Rego as "one of Europe's most influential contemporary figurative artists."  In 2010 she was made a Dame by Queen Elizabeth for her contributions to the arts. Indeed the British were so fond of Rego that they routinely referred to her as a Portuguese-born British artist.

Rego died on June 8, 2022. Her granddaughter Grace Smart, a theatre designer, tweeted : "Paula Rego  was a fantastic and world changing artist, and grandma. She taught us how to sew, draw, put on eyeliner, and tell uncomfortable stories." That last may be what the late critic Robert Hughes was referring to when he remarked that if there were two or more people in a Rego painting something bad would happen to one of them.

Image: Paula Rego - The Dance, acrylic on paper mounted on canvas, Tate Museum, London.

 

Winslow Homer: Summer Night

It may surprise us today but during his lifetime Winslow Homer's work received a mixed reception. Potter Palmer, an early collector of Impressionist art from Chicago, turned down Homer's offer to sell of Summer Night. So the painting languished for the rest of the decade on loan to the Cumberland Club in Portland, Maine.

But all that changed in 1900 when Homer included the work in his entry to the Exposition Universelle in Paris.  Among its  admirers were Claude Monet and Paul Cezanne, two very different artists.  After Summer Night was awarded a Gold Medal, the French government bought the picture, which is how it is eventually found a home in the Musee d'Orsay.  Summer Night is included in the Lafayette Database, a project of the Louvre museum that inventories all the American artworks held by French museums.

Summer Night was painted in Prout's Neck where Homer was living in the 1890s. We can almost hear the music two young women are dancing to and the crash and roar of the waves that their comrades on the shore  are spellbound by.  To make sound come at us off the canvas is nothing short of amazing. One of Homer's great gifts was his ability to evoke sensations in the viewer, arguably the  aim of the Impressionists, but to do it with a realist technique.

Image: Winslow Homer - Summer Night, 1890, oil on canvas, Musee d'Orsay, Paris.

Judy Chicago: Rediscovering Praxilla of Sikyon

 

"Most lovely of the things I have loved and lost; the sunlight,

"next, bright stars, the moon,

ripe gourds, the fruit of apple trees, the pears."

               - Praxilla, circa 441 BCE 

Anyone who has studied ancient Greece has probably heard of Sappho of Lesbos. Born around 630 BCEm Sappho lived for about six decades and her lyric poetry earned her the sobriquet "the Tenth Muse."  Higher praise cannot be imagined. 

Praxilla was a native of Sikyon, a city-state on the Gulf of Corinth. It took Judy Chicago's Dinner Part  to pay proper tribute to Praxilla of Sikyon, one of thirty-nine women honored with hew own specially designed place setting at a non-hierarchical triangular table. You can see in this photo some of the 999 women whose names are inscribed in gold on a white tile floor. More than four hundred women participated in making The Dinner Party.

Lesser known than Sappho, in her day Praxilla was called "immortal tongued'", in a time and place  where women participated in public and religious events. Today her lyric poems survive only in fragments and paraphrases; primarily "table songs" they were meant to be sung after dinner as guests imbibed wine from drinking gourds. 

Image: Judy Chicago - Praxilla,  (from The Dinner Party), ceramic, textile, porcelain with rainbow and gold luster, 1974-1979, Brooklyn Museum, photo courtesy of the museum.

Raoul Dufy: The Picture Stares Back

 

It's time to take Raoul Dufy more seriously than we usually do. We take the measure of the ills of this world by comparing them to the pleasures and happiness that are the stuff of Dufy's art.  It was in the shadow of the oncoming Second World War that he created his largest and most joyous work La fee electricite for the 1937 World's Fair in Paris, after all.

Dufy (1877-1953) was born into a large family in Normandy. He didn't begin to paint until he turned eighteen.  Inspired by Henri Matisse's Luxe, Calme et Volupte, Dufy was in the process of honing his own style when he painted this still life in 1919.

What the French call nature morte (dead nature) in English is called still life. Let's imagine what these  live  fruits are thinking. It's daunting to think that they  could judge us as we judge them, but they are alive so it's possible.  Are they nursing any grievances against their fate? Cherries are difficult to grow, easily damaged and so are highly prized. Of course they get their own special bowl  placed close to the viewer.  Bananas, at a dime a dozen, sulk in the background.  Other lesser fruits are jumbled together to the side but two strawberries are having none of this hierarchal arrangement.  They have pushed their way to the very edge of the canvas as though calling 'look at us'. 

Image; Raoul Dufy - Nature morte aux fruits , circs 1919, oil on canvas, Collection of Pierre Levy.

Gabriel Orozco: A Porcupine Eats A Tortilla

 

It sounds like the beginning of a shaggy dog story, A Porcupine Eats a Tortilla. This cutest member of the rodent family munches on a tortilla, secure in the knowledge that those sharp spines will protect from any other creatures who might be tempted to steal its food. Hanging over the image is a question: where did that tortilla come from?

"I've found that sometimes the studio is an isolated place, an artificial place like a bubble - a bubble in which the artist is by himself. It becomes too grand as a space. What happens when you don't have a studio that you have o be confronted with reality all the time.

"I try always to be intimate with the world...with everything I can, to feel love for it, or interest in it.

"For me photography is like a shoebox. You put things in a box when you want to keep them, to think about them. Photography is more than a window for me; photography is more like a space that tries to capture situations." - Gabriel Orozco

Gabriel Orozco  is a Mexican artist who refuses to be pinned down; he has lived and worked in many places and has made art in various media-  photography, painting, and sculpture.

Image: Gabriel Orozco - A Porcupine Eats a Tortilla , 2021, pigmented photo print, Marian Goodman Gallery, NYC.

Nils-Udo: Garden By A Stream

This stunning photograph by Nils-Udo highlights the fragility of nature's beauty through an image of bindweed flowers reflected in a  tranquil stream.

The Caring Gallery is the first charity art gallery in Paris. Now is playing host to its third exhibition, Close to the Eyes, Close to the Heart, dedicated to biodiversity and safe-guarding the environment.  Thee gllery will donate ten per cent of its receipts to the French branch of the Jane Goodall Institute. It is curated by Anne-Sophie Berard.

Its first exhibition, Let's Dream of Better Days, was a n invitation to emerge from our pandemic isolation to connect with others and with the natural world. After this initial success, the gallery presented Politically Intimate, focusing on women's lives.

Nils-Udo is an artist from Bavaria who has been creating environmental arts for decades. He uses photography to capture the ephemeral aspects of the natural world we are part of.

Image: (courtesy Connaissance des Arts) Nils-Udo - Lit de ruissseau, fleurs de liseron (Streambed with bindweed flowers), detail, Galerie Pierre-Alain Charllie, Paris.

Charmaine Watkiss: Tenacity Serves the Warrior Well

"I learned to make my mind large, as the world is large, so that there is room for paradoxes."  -  Maxine Hong Kingston

Charmaine Watkiss iis a British artist whose parents emigrated from Jamaica.  She finds inspiration in the culture of the African Caribbean diaspora.

Watkiss works primarily with pencil and paper to create life-sized figures.  She uses material from history in ways that demonstrate the relevance of the past to the present. Tenacity Serves the Warrior Well is a self-portrait; the woman warrior wears a ceremonial floral collar and she radiates the power of the sun. Her hands are clasped calmly as she gazes into a distance we can't see.  The greenery behind her looks like Chinese brush painting so' looks like bamboo. to me!

Image: Charmaine Watkisss - Tenacity Serves the Warrior Well, 2022, watercolor and pencil on paper, courtesy of the artist, London.

Odilon Redon: A Green And Pleasant Woodland Floor

"What is it that makes April and May the most pleasant months of the year? It is the verdure of the fields, which prompts the small birds to sing  and to praise Spoung and its delightful gay green livery." - J. de Courtois, Le blason de toutes de toutes armes et escutz, 1495, translation by Michel Pastoureau

Like spring leeks and onions whose .saturation goes from nearly white bulbs to emerald green, this scene is a bosky dell indeed. 

Odilon Redon (1840-1916) His artworks fall into two very different aims...prints haunted by macabre and fantastic creatures  or situations.     His oil paintings and  pastels showed such adroit use of color that even the great Matisse was an admirer.  Sous-bois au printemps is so delicately done that it appears it could be a pastel.

Image: Odilon Redon - Sous-bois au printemps, no date given, oil on paper, Musee d'Orsay, Paris

Jean-Baptiste Leroux: A Green Thought In A Green Shade

To those of us who love spring best of all the  seasons, we cherish it for the reemergence of the sensual world. Le jardin (French for ornamental garden)  and le potager (French for vegetable garden) compete for our ministrations. 

In "The Garden,"  British poet Andrew Marvell (1621-1878) imagined it as a place for  place for contemplating the beauty of nature, albeit  a highly  cultivated version.  As anyone who has ever donned a pair of gardening gloves knows there is a world of work that goes into cultivating that serenity.

Jean-Baptiste Leroux was born in Touraine, France. The Loire River meanders through the region and this  geographical  happenstance, made it a favorite of  Renaissance French kings. During the Hundred Years' War, Torraine became the seat of king, safely away from Paris. For its many elegant chateaus, the region was nicknamed "the Garden of France/" 

The young photographer Leroux made that journey in reverse.. In Paris he became the director of the Nikon Gallery in Saint-Germain-des-Pres. After meeting the owner of the nearby Chateau de Courance, Leroux began to exhibit his garden photographs. His favorite subjectss are gardens and architecture. His eponymous  Collection Jean-Baptiste Leroux is part of the Reunion of French National Museums.

Image: Jena-Baptiste Leroux - Potager, undated, color positive photography, Collection Jean-Baptiste Leroux, Paris.

Spring: Weather of Expectation

Very little is known about this painting other than its title  Le printemps de la riviere du sud (Spring on a Southern River), said title likely given by the Musee Guimet where the painting lives. The artist's name and era are unknown but painting of colored inks on paper is  "antique" and China is the country where it was made.  Just because we don't know much doesn't mean we can't enjoy its  vision of flowers bursting from the cloudy winter waters.  I like to think of the flowers bursting up and out of the earth,\.

Musee Guimet was founded in 1879 by wealthy industrialist  Emile-Etienne Guimet to display his extensive collection of art  from southeastern Asia. He had assembled the collection at the behest of France's minister for  public education. On his travels Guimet visited Greece, Rome, and Egypt as well, so the breadth of the museum's treasures makes it a must-visit museum on a trip to Paris. 

Image: Le printemps de la riviere du sud, Musee Guimet, Paris.

Ilya Kaminisky and Alexander Archipenko: Ukrainian Artists

'Years later, some will say none of this happened; the shops were pen, we went to see puppets in the park.

And yet on some nights townspeople dim the lights and teach their children to sign. Our country is the stage: when patrols march, we sit on our hands. Don't be afraid, a child signs to a tree, a door.

When patrols march, the avenues empty. Air empties but for the screech of strings and the tap tap of wooden fists against the walls." - "And Yet, on Some Nights" by Ilya Kaminsky, from Deaf Republic, Minneapolis, Graywolf Press: 2019

Alexander Archipenko (1887-1964) was born in Kyiv when it was part of the Russian Empire. After stuying at art schools there he moved to Moscow where he was able to exhibit some works in group shows. In 1908 he moved to Paris where he lived in La Ruche,  a Russian art colony. While in Paris his sculptures earned him th nickname "the father of Cubist sculpture.

Archipenko emigrated to the United States in 1923, becoming a citizen six years later. He broke with the neoclassicism of Rodin and Maillol; he reimagined the human figure in three dimensional space through contorted planes set in negative space.

Ilya Kaminsky was born in Odessa in 1977 when Ukraine was one of the union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Kaminsky is hard of hearing as a result of a case of mumps he suffered as a small child.  The Kaminsky family was granted political asylum in the United States in 1993 because of Ukrainian anti-semitism.  Ilya Kaminsky settled in Rochester, New Yotk.  He has published two collections of poetry Dancing in Odessa (2004) and Deaf Republic.(2019). Three Per Cent, published monthly by the University of Rochester Press has been inspired by Kaminsky's championing of literary translation.

Image: Alexander  Archipenko - Carousel Pierrot 1913, paint on plaster, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NYC.

Inimitable Rose Wiley

"Wife and servant are the same,

  But only differ in the name:"

    - Lady Mary Chudleigh (1656-1710), from "To The Ladies"

"for better for worse divorce is always stressful but..."

Rose Wiley's paintings have an exuberance that, once seen, is unforgettable. Her sources cut a broad swath through visual media - and from every period in art history - greeting cards, comics, magazines and newspapers, film stills.  She combines figures and texts from these and other sources, creating new stories .she calls "personal visual diary-making." 

The genesis of Lords And Ladies was ab article about a divorce that appeared in The Guardian newspaper. A bride stand on a wedding cake while her husband flees the scene. He is modeled on Philip IV of Spain as he appeared in a portrait made nu 1620 by Rodrigo de Villandrando. (in the collection of the Prado in Madrid). The lettering for the bride's words forms a lattice pattern whiles Philip's title looks like a signature

Wylie usually paints by placing an upstretched canvas on her studio floor. This enables her to make gestural brushwork that makes for an improvisational feel to her work.

Rose Wiley was born in Kent, England in 1934.  She graduated from the Royal Academy of Art in 1981, although she had studied at the Folkston School of Art in the 1950s. Like many women of her generation, Wiley was sidetracked from her career when she married a fellow artist and raised three children. 

Image: Rose Wiley - Lords And Ladies,  2008, oil on canvas, National Museum of Woman in the Arts, Washington, DC.

Louise Moillon: A Bunch Of Asparagus

 

"someone will remember us/ I say/ even in another time." - Sappho, Fragment 147

In full, the title of this painting is Fruit Basket With A Bunch Of Asparagus but the foretaste of spring in the  bunch of asparagus is irresistible. The eye is drawn by a spotlight of mysterious  origin to the to the lower right quadrant of the canvas. Against an indeterminate backdrop,  fruits and vegetables are rendered with a naturalism replete with elegance as well as clarity.

Most of Louise Moillon's paintings were made between 1629 and 1637;a short but impressive career bracketed by a long life. Her father and stepfather were artists and art dealers who provided the young Louise with a workshop, training, studio space of her own, and - crucially - clients for her work. Who her primary teacher was is uncertain although her uncle has been suggested. Eventually  King Charles the First of England acquired five of  Moillon's still lifes  for the royal collection. Indeed, during her lifetime, Moillin's work was widely admired but, like so many other female artists, her reputation faded after her death for lack of champions.

Louise Moillon (1610-1696) was born in Paris; her family resided in the Pont Notre Dame section of the city, a haven for French Protestants who had been forced into internal exile by ferocious religious wars between Catholics and Protestants. Thanks to her father's participation in art local fairs, the young Louise came to know several Dutch painters.  Their influence on her style is apparent. Her still life paintings are ensconced in the atmosphere that Lawrence Gowing identified in the paintings of Vermeer aas "an envelope of quiet air."

Image: Louise (Louyse) Moillon - A Basket Of Fruit And A Bunch Of Asparagus, 1630, oil on wooden panel, Art Institute. of Chicago.

On The Avenue With Marisol Escobar

Strolling along Fifth Avenue is to experience of real life catwalk; it's a ritual that has a long and storied history. Marisol Escobar's society lady in On The Avenue is impossibly slim with impressively long legs. Cloaked in a 1960s sheath, she wears two accessories that were de riguer then: a little dog and a hat. And that hat looks like the artist planted a Ponytail palm on her head. I know, because there is one just like it sitting in my living room. Ponytail Palms are not actually palms which is only fitting as fashion works best with a pinch of artifice. For Marisol, mimicry was useful for critiquing  sexual politics in a way both pointed and fanciful.

 

Marisol studied with the Abstract Expressionist painter Hans Hoffmann in the early 1950s but her sculptures began  to prefigure Pop Art by the late fifties. So it was hardly surprising that she attracted the attention of  Leo Castelli, whose Manhattan gallery, opened in 1957, became the forward outpost of Pop.

 

Seymour Knox, a founder of the Albright-Knox Gallery in Buffalo. purchased several works by Marisol in the early 1960s for the museum. Whenever I would visit the city I looked forward to seeing The Generals (1961-62). Simon Bolivar and George Washington sit astride a larger-than-life sized wooden horse. Another favorite of mine, Baby Girl (1963), shows a little girl sitting with a Marisol doll om her lap. An early critique of the postwar culture that infantilized  women?

Marisol had a cosmopolitan personality that fit the New York art world nicely. Born in Paris to wealthy Venezuelan family, Marisol grew into a worker bee in art.   "(C)onside ring her work habits, the frequency with which she appears at uptown art openings an parties is nothing short of astonishing."  

With the loss of her longtime dealer Sydney Janis in 1989 Marisol lost a gallerist whose simpatico with her work would be not be easily replaced. The Albright-Knox Gallery has long been home to the largest collection of Marisol's work: when she died, Marisol left her estate to the museum.

Image: Marisol Escobar - On The Avenue,  19561-62, acrylic paint and graphite on plaster and wood.

The Toyland Of Joaquin Garcia-Torres

T

This little figure in the bowler hat reminds me of the wooden sculptures made by Marisol Escobar. He doesn't look happy.

Parisian-born, the daughter of Venezuelan expatriates, Marisol Escobar (1930-2016) was an American sculptor

known for her larger than life figures and elongated shapes.

Joaquin Torres-Garcia (1874-1949) made wooden toys 1917-1932 an interest that grew out of his  sculpture-making. Cut, sanded, and panted by hand, the toys often featured detachable parts. In 1814 after the school closed he began to sell his toys and he had his first exhibition devoted to them in 1916 Joguines d;Art (Art Toys).

Torres-Garcia was born in Montevideo, Uruguay but in 1891 the family returned to his parents' homeland. In Barcelona Joaquin enrolled in art school. Recognition  came in 1903 when Antoni Guadi invited the younger artist to collaborate on creating stained glass windows for the (still incomplete as of today) cathedral Sagrada Familia. 

Torres-Garcia began teaching at the Mount D'or School in Barcelona in 1907.A proponent of the  progressive pedagogy of Maria Montessori, he included  making of wooden toys in his curriculum  He got the idea to make toys with detachable parts to encourage the students to be creative.

During a  stay in Paris in 1912, he discovered Cubism  But the need to make a living turned him into an itinerant  artist who would crisscross the Atlantic several times. Visiting New York City and meeting the Dutchman Piet Mondrian  influenced  his toy-making; the constructions became more geometrical and the surfaces arose from the construction rather than applied as decoration.

By the time of his death in New York in 1949, Torres-Garcia was recognized as an important figure in introducing modernism in the Americas. His paintings are included in the collections of Reina Sofia in Madrid, Centre Pompidou in Paris and  the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Image - Joaquin Torres-Garcia - untitled toy, circa 1917-1932, oil painted on carved wood,   Ortizar Prijects, NYC.

Cubist Cheese

 

For some unfathomable reason the British writer G.K. Chesterton started the rumor, "Poets have been mysteriously silent about cheese."

In this still life by Luis Fernandez, there is Swiss cheese in front, I think ,and a brick of Stilton (possibly) in back. As for those apples, all  angles and marmoreal faceted surfaces,  they remind me of glass paperweights. Welcome to the world of Cubist cheese. Salvador Dali's notorious limp watches  in The Persistence of Memory (1931), were inspired by Camembert.  Cheese in art has a long and intriguing history.

How cheese is aged is a story in itself.  Affinage is the process of aging cheese in a cave; an affineur is a person who tends these works in progress for months or even years, until they are ready to be eaten. Other French terms are fromage (cheese), fromager (a cheese monger) and fromagerie (cheese shop). All cheeses that have rinds need to be aged in a cave. And the rinds need to be carefully monitored, high humidity maintained and mold evenly brushed over the surface of the wheel at regular intervals. What this means is that during the pandemic, affineurs are essential workers.

On Sunday, September 26, 2021, a group calling themselves 315 Foodies (for the Central New York Area Code 315) met to assemble what the Guinness Book of World Records was on hand to certify as the world's longest charcuterie board at 315 feet. Cheese mongers from around the region took part, using wooden cheese boards that interlocked like puzzle pieces; each board one foot long.

Before there was cheese in upstate New York, there was water.  About 11,000 BCE, a glacial waterfall carved out the gorge where Little Falls now stands. From this point, rivers to the east drain toward the Atlantic and to the west the fluvial deposits go toward the Great Lakes.  The Mohawk River gorges and the Erie Canal, both running east to west, made a flourishing mill culture that brought prosperity to Little Falls -  grist mills, paper mills, flour mills, sawmills, and textiles mills.

During the second half of the 19th century the city was known as "the cheese capital of the world," thanks, in no small part,  to the promotional zeal of local newspaperman Xerxes Willard. Then, as now, dairy farming and cheese making are important to the New York State economy. The Chobani yogurt Company was founded in 2005 by a Turkish immigrant in South Edmeston, a hamlet located south of Little Falls.  

Note: History records three painters named Luis Fernandez, one a 17th century Spanish history painter, one a contemporary Venezuelan, and this Luis Fernandez (1900-1973) , an Asturian artist who studied at the School of Arts and Crafts in Barcelona.  In 1924 Fernandez moved to Paris where he met Braque, who introduced him to Cubism.  Fernandez died in Paris in 1973.

You can order a wide selection of chesses and other comestibles at Calle1945.

Image: Luis Fernandez - Nature morte, pommes et fromage (Still Life with Pommes and Cheese), no date given, oil on board, Musee d'arte moderne, Paris.

Landscape With A Tree Of Light: August Macke

"What I most cherish is the observation of the movement of colors." - August Macke

The image of a tree of light evokes thoughts of spring , two months away or almost a year in the past, depending on your January mood. August Macke's mood in his Landscape With A Tree Of Light is one of sun-bathed wonderment. There is an all-at-once quality in Macke's pictures that suggests an acquaintance with Italian Futurism. His painter friend Franz Marc characterized Macke's  special gift as "a brighter and purer sound to color than any of us; he gave it the clarity and brightness of his whole being."

August Macke (1887-1914) was born in Westphalia and died on the battlefield at Champagne during the second month of World War I. Although he was just twenty-seven, his artistic career was already  eight years, At his death, Macke had produced some 600 paintings. He had painted his first watercolor when he was fifteen. With his friend Franz Marc, the two founded Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), a group of German Expressionist painters. 

Meeting Robert Delaunay was the pivotal artistic relationship in Macke's career; the older painter's chromatic Cubism altered Macke's use of colors. Nevertheless, Macke continued to portray scenes of everyday life, a subject matter he had learned earlier from the Impressionists. 

\Image - August Macke - Landschaft mit hellum Baum (Landscape With A Tree Of Light), 1914, watercolor overlaying pencil, State Museum, Berlin.

Happy New Year

Come, children, gather round my knee;

Something is about to be.

Tonight's December thirty-first,

Something is about to burst.

The clock is crouching dark and small,

Like a time bomb in the hall.

Hark! It's midnight, children dear

Duck! Here comes another year!

 - "Good Riddance, But Now What?" by Ogden Nash

The  artist Jay De Feo (1921-1989) was admired fort the fearlessness of her work. Born Mary Joan, she acquired the nickname Jay as a girl. Her mother was a nurse and her father was a traveling doctor with the Civilian Conservation Corps: eventually Jay and her mother settled in California.

 In 1959, the year she painted The Jewel, De Feo became a member of Bruce Connor's Rat Bastard Protective Association in San Francisco. Also, that year her work was included in a group exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York..  The year before De Feo had begun work on her monumental painting The Rose, which would take ten years to complete.

Image Jay De Feo - The Jewel, 1959, oil on canvas, Broad Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

 

Giovanni Agostini da Lodi: The Holy Family

According to the Italian Malaguzzi Valeri, he definitively identified the artist in 1912.  The American expatriate Bernard Berenson  gave himself credit for the attribution, dating the discovery to 1890..  Given his track record, I am inclined to doubt Berenson but the one they agreed on was that the identification of of the late 15th century Lombard painter took four hundred years. We may also consider that the esteemed art historian Adolfo Venturi sided with Berenson.

Moving between Milan and the Veneto, Agostini da Lodi  was a bearer of Milanese style to Venice. His contemporaries prized the artist's work for its extravagance. but I like this Holy Family for its directness and simplicity. These qualities would have enhanced its power to make the Nativity vivid for n audience that mostly could not read and did not have direct personal access to Biblical stories.

Image: Giovanni Agostini da Lodi - The Holy Family - oil on wood pane, 16th century, Louvre, Museum.