Leonardo da Vinci, Portrait of Young Girl in Profile

The London Time describes how sophisticated forensic techniques were able to authenticate a portrait profile drawing in inks and chalks as the work of Leonardo da Vinci.

The 33×23cm (13×9in) picture, in chalk, pen and ink, appeared at auction at Christie’s, New York, in 1998, catalogued as “German school, early 19th century”. It sold for $19,000 (£11,400). Now a growing number of leading art experts agree that it is almost certainly by Leonardo da Vinci and worth about £100 million.

Carbon dating and infra-red analysis of the artist’s technique are consistent with such a conclusion, but the most compelling evidence is that fragment of a fingerprint.

Peter Paul Biro, a Montreal-based forensic art expert, found it while examining images captured by the revolutionary multispectral camera from the Lumière Technology company. ...

The fingerprint corresponds to the tip of the index or middle finger, and is “highly comparable” to one on Leonardo’s St Jerome in the Vatican. Importantly, St Jerome is an early work from a time when Leonardo was not known to have employed assistants, making it likely that it is his fingerprint.

Martin Kemp, Emeritus Professor of History of Art at the University of Oxford, is convinced and recently completed a book about the find (as yet unpublished). He said that his first reaction was that “it sounded too good to be true — after 40 years in the business, I thought I’d seen it all”. But gradually, “all the bits fell into place.”

Professor Kemp has rechristened the picture, sold as Young Girl in Profile in Renaissance Dress, as La Bella Principessa after identifying her, “by a process of elimination”, as Bianca Sforza, daughter of Ludovico Sforza, Duke of Milan (1452-1508), and his mistress Bernardina de Corradis. He described the profile as “subtle to an inexpressible degree”, as befits the artist best known for the Mona Lisa.

If it is by Leonardo, it would be the only known work by the artist on vellum although Professor Kemp points out that Leonardo asked the French court painter Jean Perréal about the technique of using coloured chalks on vellum in 1494.

The picture was bought in 1998 by Kate Ganz, a New York dealer, who sold it for about the same sum to the Canadian-born Europe-based connoisseur Peter Silverman in 2007. Ms Ganz had suggested that the portrait “may have been made by a German artist studying in Italy … based on paintings by Leonardo da Vinci”. ...

Carbon-14 analysis of the vellum gave a date range of 1440-1650. Infra-red analysis revealed stylistic parallels to Leonardo’s other works, including a palm print in the chalk on the sitter’s neck “consistent … to Leonardo’s use of his hands in creating texture and shading”, according to Mr Biro.

“Cerca Trova” (Seek and Find) appears on a banner on Vasari’s mural of the Battle of Marciano

Only 15 surviving paintings are generally attributed in whole or in part to Leonardo. His responsibility for another six is disputed.

Dr. Maurizio Seracini, an engineering professor from UC San Diego, had been pursuing a quest to recover Leonardo Da Vinci’s largest painting, a 1505 fresco depiction of the 65 year earlier Battle of Angiarhi between Florence and Milan which once ornamented the Hall of Five Hundred in Florence, which disappeared in the course of a mid-16th century remodeling by Giogio Vasari, for a number of years.

The New York Times reports that scientific instruments are now ready to test Seracini’s hypothesis that Vasari simply walled-up the Da Vinci fresco.

“The Battle of Anghiari,” (was) the largest painting Leonardo ever undertook (three times the width of “The Last Supper”). Although it was never completed — Leonardo abandoned it in 1506 — he left a central scene of clashing soldiers and horses that was hailed as an unprecedented study of anatomy and motion. For decades, artists like Raphael went to the Hall of 500 to see it and make their own copies.

Then it vanished. During the remodeling of the hall in 1563, the architect and painter Giorgio Vasari covered the walls with frescoes of military victories by the Medicis, who had returned to power. Leonardo’s painting was largely forgotten.

But in 1975, when Dr. Seracini studied one of Vasari’s battle scenes, he noticed a tiny flag with two words, “Cerca Trova”: essentially, seek and ye shall find. Was this Vasari’s signal that something was hidden underneath? ...

(N)ew analysis showed that the spot painted by Leonardo was right at the “Cerca Trova” clue. The even better news, obtained from radar scanning, was that Vasari had not plastered his work directly on top of Leonardo’s. He had erected new brick walls to hold his murals, and had gone to special trouble to leave a small air gap behind one section of the bricks — the section in back of “Cerca Trova.” ...

Dr. Seracini was stymied until 2005, when he appealed for help at a scientific conference and got a suggestion to send beams of neutrons harmlessly through the fresco. With help from physicists in the United States, Italy’s nuclear-energy agency and universities in the Netherlands and Russia, Dr. Seracini developed devices for identifying the telltale chemicals used by Leonardo.

One device can detect the neutrons that bounce back after colliding with hydrogen atoms, which abound in the organic materials (like linseed oil and resin) employed by Leonardo. Instead of using water-based paint for a traditional fresco in wet plaster like Vasari’s, Leonardo covered the wall with a waterproof ground layer and used oil-based paints.

The other device can detect the distinctive gamma rays produced by collisions of neutrons with the atoms of different chemical elements. The goal is to locate the sulfur in Leonardo’s ground layer, the tin in the white prime layer and the chemicals in the color pigments, like the mercury in vermilion and the copper in blue pigments of azurite. ...

Once he gets permission, Dr. Seracini said, he hopes to complete the analysis within about a year. If “The Battle of Anghiari” is proved to be there, he said, it would be feasible for Florentine authorities to bring in experts to remove the exterior fresco by Vasari, extract the Leonardo painting and then replace the Vasari fresco. Of course, no one knows what kind of shape the painting might be in today. But Dr. Seracini, who has extensively analyzed the damages suffered by many Renaissance paintings, said that he was optimistic about “The Battle of Anghiari.”

“The advantage is that it has been covered up for five centuries,” he said. “It’s been protected against the environment and vandalism and bad restorations. I don’t expect there to be much decay.”

If he is right, then perhaps Vasari did Leonardo a favor by covering up the painting — and taking care to leave that cryptic little flag above the trove.

Rubens chalk, ink, and water-color copy of Da Vinci study for “The Battle of Anghiari,” Musée du Louvre

24-year-old Kseniya Simonova moved the audience of the Ukraine’s Got Talent (Україна має талант) television program to tears with her sand painting depicting the impact of the German Invasion during WWII on the lives of ordinary Ukrainians. She won the competition, and the YouTube video of her performance has attracted more than 2 million viewers.

8:33 video

The
Telegraph explains the story of the animation.

The Trichoptera, commonly called sedge flies, are those busy flies one sees emerging with a pop, then flitting erratically above the surface of the stream. Caddis hatches drive trout crazy. One often sees trout chasing emerging caddis larvae to the surface, and then breaking water and leaping in the air to nail the insect. Caddises actually constitute a more important portion of the trout’s menu than the more beautiful and delicate mayflies (Ephemera), and are hardier and better able to survive warmer temperatures and pollution than many of the classic mayflies.

I’ve often collaborated with Trichoptera myself: at catching trout, not at creating art. Back when I was a bloodthirsty teenage meat fisherman and baitfished, my partner-in-crime John Zebraitis and I reposed especial confidence in the appeal of stone caddises as bait for trout. The caddises who built their nests of twigs, known as “stick bait,” were common and decently effective, but stone caddises were relatively rare, and could be found only in certain pools in particular streams. When we came on them, John and I felt like we’d won the lottery, knowing that our chances of tempting the reluctant 20” old soak known to be lurking craftily in the deep hole were starting to look good.

Heaven only knows how big a trout John or I could have derricked out the mysterious depths of the unfathomed hole on the mighty Loyalsock at Hillsgrove had we only been equipped with a couple of these dazzling stone-cases. And I can picture with a smile the arguments we might have had about whether brookies go more for opals than for lapis, and just how effective turquoise is in low water.

Spring issue, Cabinet:

(The photos illustrate) the results of an unusual artistic collaboration between the French artist Hubert Duprat and a group of caddis fly larvae. A small winged insect belonging to the order Trichoptera and closely related to the butterfly, caddis flies live near streams and ponds and produce aquatic larvae that protect their developing bodies by manufacturing sheaths, or cases, spun from silk and incorporating substances—grains of sand, particles of mineral or plant material, bits of fish bone or crustacean shell—readily available in their benthic ecosystem. The larvae are remarkably adaptable: if other suitable materials are introduced into their environment, they will often incorporate those as well.

Duprat, who was born in 1957, began working with caddis fly larvae in the early 1980s. An avid naturalist since childhood, he was aware of the caddis fly in its role as a favored bait for trout fishermen, but his idea for the project depicted here began, he has said, after observing prospectors panning for gold in the Ariège river in southwestern France. After collecting the larvae from their normal environments, he relocates them to his studio where he gently removes their own natural cases and then places them in aquaria that he fills with alternative materials from which they can begin to recreate their protective sheaths. He began with only gold spangles but has since also added the kinds of semi-precious and precious stones (including turquoise, opals, lapis lazuli and coral, as well as pearls, rubies, sapphires, and diamonds) seen here. The insects do not always incorporate all the available materials into their case designs, and certain larvae, Duprat notes, seem to have better facility with some materials than with others. Additionally, cases built by one insect and then discarded when it evolves into its fly state are sometimes recovered by other larvae, who may repurpose it by adding to or altering its size and form.

More on Duprat:

Leonardo

————————————————
Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

Fjordman observes that the Chinese have a special enthusiasm for Western classical music while Muslims commonly care little for Western music or art. When Muslims look for inspiration to the West, their admiration is focused on weapons of mass destruction, the authoritarian state, socialism, and militaristic nationalism, in other words: fascism. The leading political movement in the post colonial Islamic world has been Ba’athism, a political movement specifically modeled on German National Socialism.

Despotism comes quite natural to Islamic culture. When confronted with the European tradition, many Muslims freely prefer Adolf Hitler to Rembrandt, Michelangelo or Beethoven. Westerners don’t force them to study Mein Kampf more passionately than Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa or Goethe’s Faust; they choose to do so themselves. Millions of (non-Muslim) Asians now study Mozart’s piano pieces. Muslims, on the other hand, like Mr. Hitler more, although he represents one of the most evil ideologies that have ever existed in Europe. The fact that they usually like the Austrian Mr. Hitler more than the Austrian Mr. Mozart speaks volumes about their culture. Koreans, Japanese, Chinese and Middle Eastern Muslims have been confronted with the same body of ideas, yet choose to appropriate radically different elements from it, based upon what is compatible with their own culture.

Michael D’Antuono, The Truth, 2009

The Obamessiah’s 100th Day (4/29) was scheduled to be commemorated by the unveiling of a new “art work” in New York City’s Union Square.

WorldNetDaily:

On his 100th day in office, President Obama will be “crowned” in messianic imagery at New York City’s Union Square.

Artist Michael D’Antuono’s painting “The Truth” – featuring Obama with his arms outstretched and wearing a crown of thorns upon his head – will be unveiled on April 29 at the Square’s South Plaza. ...

Like others in the news who have depicted Obama in Christ-like imagery, D’Antuono insists he isn’t claiming the man is Messiah, but only inviting “individual interpretations.”

This actually made me kind of sick. I threw up a little in my mouth. Please excuse the mass mailing…I think everyone should see it. To me it’s sick and sycophantic, but it is also so cowardly. Insult the Christians, because you can, and never mind that we’re still in Easter.

This makes me think less of Obama, who should have gotten out in front of this messianic talk, instead of silently encouraging it. It speaks volumes about the artist, but Obama’s silent consent also speaks volumes about him.

PR Newswire:

Painter Michael D’Antuono has cancelled the planned public unveiling of his latest work “The Truth” at NYC’s Union Square Park on President Obama’s 100th day in office due to overwhelming public outrage. The artist’s decision was based in part on thousands of emails and phone calls; online blogs and other public commentary received in the first 48 hours following its release. ...

The artist insists that the work was intended purely as a political piece. “The religious reference was used metaphorically and not to insult anyone’s religious beliefs. If that is the effect that my art has had on anyone, I am truly sorry,” says D’Antuono.

Theodore Dalrymple, in New English Review, deplores the estrangement of contemporary art from tradition, technique, values, and beauty.

From having talked to quite a number of art students, it seems that art school these days resembles a kindergarten for young adults, where play is more important than work. The lack of technical training is painfully obvious at the shows the students put on. Many of the students have good ideas, but cannot execute them successfully for lack of technical facility. Indeed, their technical incompetence is only too painfully obvious.

It is very striking, too, how few art students have any interest in or knowledge of the art of the past. Do you visit galleries, I ask them?

No, they reply, a little shocked at the very suggestion, and as if to do so would inhibit them in their creativity or to condone plagiarism.

As for art history, they are taught and know very little. This is all part of the programme of disconnecting them radically from the past, of making them free-floating molecules in the vast vacuum of art.

It is true that they are sometimes taught just a little art history. I had what was for me a memorable conversation with an art student when she was my patient. She was in her second year of art school, and told me that one of the things she enjoyed most about it was art history. I asked what they taught in art history.

‘The first year,’ she said, ‘we did African art. But now in the second year we’re doing western art.’

I asked what particular aspect of western art they were doing.

‘Roy Liechtenstein.’

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

Leonardo da Vince, The Virgin and Child with St. Anne, oil on wood, circa 1508, Louvre, Paris

Reuters:

A curator at the Louvre Museum in Paris has stumbled upon some unknown drawings on the back of a painting by Leonardo da Vinci that look like they might be by the Italian master himself, the Louvre said on Thursday.

The extraordinary find was made by chance, when Louvre staff unhooked Leonardo’s “The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne” from the museum wall as part of a broad programme of study and restoration of paintings by Leonardo, including the “Mona Lisa.”

“When the work, which is painted on wood, was unhooked, a curator noticed two barely visible drawings on the back of the painting, showing a horse’s head and half a skull,” the museum said.

It was such an astonishing discovery that other Louvre staff present at the time could not believe it and initially said the marks on the wood must be stains.

“The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne” was painted in the early 1500s and no one had previously noticed the drawings—at least not to the knowledge of the Louvre.

After the initial find, the museum conducted detailed tests on the back of the painting. Photographs taken with an infrared camera revealed that there were not two but three drawings. The third one is of a Child Jesus playing with a lamb.

“This is an exceptional discovery because drawings on the back of paintings are very rare and no example by Leonardo was previously known,” the Louvre said.

It said the drawings recalled some of Leonardo’s known works and suggested that the child and lamb could have been sketches for the painting on the other side of the piece of wood.

Sketches visible on reverse of painting

1:58 London Times video

Sketch of horse’s head

TopNews reports on the latest struggle for the rights of man in the City of Light.

A huge number of models in Paris, who pose in the buff and perform as muses for artists, took to the streets in a nude march on December 15 to protest the fact that they are not respected or paid enough.

The models went on strike and posed naked in freezing temperatures in front of Paris city hall’’s culture department to shame the state, and their demand was a pay increase, proper contracts and, most of all, respect for their craft.

A shivering male model was heard shouting out through a megaphone that the disrespect shown to the models was “proof that something is badly wrong with French society”, while artists, students and art teachers sat sketching them in support.

The protest had started after Paris city hall, which runs an array of life-drawing classes, banned the tradition of the “cornet”, which is a piece of art paper rolled into a cone and passed round for tips as a model gets dressed after class.

The models, who have to survive on a minimum wage with no fixed contracts, holiday pay, security cover or job security, said the tips allowed them to survive.

In France life modelling is widely seen as a serious career choice, and the models wanted to quash the misconception that it was merely something students and retired people did for pocket money.

“This is a craft that should be respected, not just anyone can take their clothes off and hold a pose,” the Guardian quoted Deborah, 28, one of the strike organisers, who has worked as a full-time life model for four years, as saying.

“It is artistic and physically demanding work,” she stated.

Horses & rhinos from Chauvet Cave

You can’t read this excellent article by Judith Thurman, biographer of Isak Dineson, on the Paleolithic cave art of Southern France at the New Yorker web-site, but you can read it via Art & Letters Daily. Go figure.

We don’t know the purpose for which the images were made. We don’t understand why Paleolithic artists almost entirely avoided the depiction of human beings. But we marvel at their representational accuracy and their ability to move us emotionally across a separation of tens of thousands of years of time.

During the Old Stone Age, between thirty-seven thousand and eleven thousand years ago, some of the most remarkable art ever conceived was etched or painted on the walls of caves in southern France and northern Spain. After a visit to Lascaux, in the Dordogne, which was discovered in 1940, Picasso reportedly said to his guide, “They’ve invented everything.” ...

(The) earliest paintings (at Lascaux) are at least thirty-two thousand years old, yet they are just as sophisticated as much later compositions. What emerged with that revelation was an image of Paleolithic artists transmitting their techniques from generation to generation for twenty-five millennia with almost no innovation or revolt. A profound conservatism in art, (Gregory) Curtis notes, is one of the hallmarks of a “classical civilization.” For the conventions of cave painting to have endured four times as long as recorded history, the culture it served, he concludes, must have been “deeply satisfying”—and stable to a degree it is hard for modern humans to imagine.

Read the whole thing.

BBC:

Divers in France have found the oldest known bust of Roman dictator Julius Caesar at the bottom of the River Rhone, officials have said.

The marble bust was found near Arles, which was founded by Caesar.

France’s culture ministry said the bust was from 46BC, the date of the southern town’s foundation.

The ministry described the bust – which shows a lined face and a balding head – as typical of realist portraits of the Republican era.

It said other items had been found at the same site, including a 1.8m (6ft) marble statue of Neptune from the first decade of the third century AD, and two smaller statues in bronze.

Divers taking part in an archaeological excavation made the discovery between September and October 2007.

Luc Long, the archaeologist who directed the excavations, said all the busts of Caesar in Rome were posthumous.

The artist at the time of her high school graduation

Helaine S. Klasky, Yale University Spokesperson, raised some interesting issues in the administration’s statement denying the reality of that naughty Aliza Schvarts’ senior art project:

(Yale now has at least one Spokesperson, forsooth! Demonstrating that the current president and his entire skulk of deans are too self-important, or know themselves to be too inarticulate, to speak for the University. Jesus wept.)

Ms. Shvarts is engaged in performance art. Her art project includes visual representations, a press release and other narrative materials. She stated to three senior Yale University officials today, including two deans, that she did not impregnate herself and that she did not induce any miscarriages. The entire project is an art piece, a creative fiction designed to draw attention to the ambiguity surrounding form and function of a woman’s body.

She is an artist and has the right to express herself through performance art.

Had these acts been real, they would have violated basic ethical standards and raised serious mental and physical health concerns.

But Ms. Schvarts fired back a manifesto, repeating the story of her project, and artfully identifying it as “myth,” while darkly hinting at a purpose and meaning capable of shaking the Yale art department and the University’s administration to their very foundations.

For the past year, I performed repeated self-induced miscarriages. ...

To protect myself and others, only I know the number of fabricators (Note the term -JDZ) who participated, the frequency and accuracy with which I inseminated and the specific abortifacient I used. Because of these measures of privacy, the piece exists only in its telling. This telling can take textual, visual, spatial, temporal and performative forms . copies of copies of which there is no original. ...

The artwork exists as the verbal narrative you see above, as an installation that will take place in Green Hall, as a time-based performance, as a independent concept, as a myth and as a public discourse.

In other words: the supposed piece of art never existed at all, except as a concept, a narrative, and a spoof.

Then, embedded in more jargon, Schvarts delivers the ultimate ambiguity.

Is she spouting a bunch of ridiculous leftwing cant, or is she producing what looks like a classic example of the genre in order to mock and satirize it? Is Aliza Schvartz possibly really a nice, ethically-concerned Jewish girl, taking a shrewd whack at the conventional liberal consensus on sex, reproduction, and abortion in the contemporary elite university with a vicious parody of the methodology and hermeneutics of fashionably politicized “art?”

It creates an ambiguity that isolates the locus of ontology to an act of readership. An intentional ambiguity pervades both the act and the objects I produced in relation to it. The performance exists only as I chose to represent it. ... This central ambiguity defies a clear definition of the act. The reality of miscarriage is very much a linguistic and political reality, an act of reading constructed by an act of naming . an authorial act.

It is the intention of this piece to destabilize the locus of that authorial act, and in doing so, reclaim it from the heteronormative structures that seek to naturalize it.

As an intervention into our normative understanding of .the real. and its accompanying politics of convention, this performance piece has numerous conceptual goals. The first is to assert that often, normative understandings of biological function are a mythology imposed on form. It is this mythology that creates the sexist, racist, ableist, nationalist and homophobic perspective, distinguishing what body parts are .meant. to do from their physical capability. The myth that a certain set of functions are .natural. (while all the other potential functions are .unnatural.) undermines that sense of capability, confining lifestyle choices to the bounds of normatively defined narratives.

Just as it is a myth that women are .meant. to be feminine and men masculine, that penises and vaginas are .meant. for penetrative heterosexual sex (or that mouths, anuses, breasts, feet or leather, silicone, vinyl, rubber, or metal implements are not .meant. for sex at all), it is a myth that ovaries and a uterus are .meant. to birth a child.

When considering my own bodily form, I recognize its potential as extending beyond its ability to participate in a normative function. While my organs are capable of engaging with the narrative of reproduction . the time-based linkage of discrete events from conception to birth . the realm of capability extends beyond the bounds of that specific narrative chain. These organs can do other things, can have other purposes, and it is the prerogative of every individual to acknowledge and explore this wide realm of capability.

Roger Kimball, at PJM, notes that Ms. Schvartz’s “art” has successfully challenged some orthodoxies, and recognizes that the question is exactly which ones?

Yale’s response was a masterpiece of evasion. “Had these acts been real,” their statement continued, “they would have violated basic ethical standards and raised serious mental and physical health concerns.” You don’t say?... And what, by the way, was the standard being violated? I wonder, for example, whether the Yale spokesman would say that abortion itself violated a basic ethical standard? Or maybe the violation requires first deliberately impregnating oneself? (But why would that affect the “basic ethical standard” involved?) Or maybe it was videotaping the performance that was the problem?

I know that in the universe occupied by Ivy League academics, the spectacle of a woman repeatedly inseminating herself, quaffing abortifacient drugs (“herbal” ones, though: we’re all organic environmentalists here), and then video taping the resultant mess poses a problem. I mean, in that universe there really are basic ethical standards: Thou shalt not smoke, for example. Thou shalt not support the war in Iraq. Thou shalt not vote Republican. There really are some things that are beyond the pale. ...

Why do so many people feel that if something is regarded as art, they “have to go along with it,” no matter how offensive it might be? Perhaps—just possibly—Aliza Shvarts has reminded us how untrue that statement is. If so, we are in her debt.

James Taranto, too, at the Wall Street Journal, sees the ironic possibilities.

When Yale says that Shvarts’s project, “if real,” violates “basic ethical standards,” what kind of ethical standards does it have in mind?

It seems unlikely that Yale is making a moral claim against the putative Shvarts project. The abortion debate is driven by two irreconcilable moral premises: on the antiabortion side, that it is wrong to take a human life deliberately at any stage of development; on the pro-abortion side, that a woman has a right to do whatever she wants with her body.

In practice, most people’s actual positions on abortion amount to a compromise between these two absolutes. If Yale has an institutional view on abortion, surely it is closer to the pro- than the antiabortion side. And if Shvarts did what she claims to have done, she destroyed protohumans (for want of a better neutral term) no later than the embryonic stage of development—a stage at which, according to the U.S. Supreme Court, a woman has an absolute “constitutional” right to terminate her pregnancy.

Is Yale claiming that Shvarts violated academic ethics? This is a real head-scratcher. Academic ethics center on honesty; the most important prohibitions are against such actions as falsification of data or plagiarism (misrepresenting another’s work as one’s own). But Yale is claiming that Shvarts’s project violated “basic ethical standards” if she was honest in describing it. If Shvarts perpetrated a hoax, then according to Yale she was exercising “the right to express herself.” The implication is that if she was lying, she was behaving ethically.

Yale therefore is either taking a moral position in opposition to abortion or standing academic ethics on their head. Which raises an intriguing possibility: Could it be that Aliza Shvarts is an opponent of abortion who has staged a hoax aimed at embarrassing those who support or countenance abortion?

Earlier postings

Artist scamp hard at work

A new report from the Oldest College Daily advises the well-and-truly-grossed-out news-reporting and news-reading worlds that Aliza Schvarts (Y’08)’s miscarriages-as-art project was merely a naughty undergraduate joke intended to spark conversation and debate.

Aliza Shvarts ’08 was never impregnated. She never miscarried. The sweeping outrage on blogs across the country was apparently for naught — at least according to the University.

As the news of her supposed senior art project chronicling a year of self-induced miscarriages was greeted with widespread shock on campus and elsewhere, the Davenport College senior traded barbs with Yale officials on Thursday over a project she described as an exhibit documenting a nine-month process during which she claimed to have artificially inseminated herself “as often as possible” while periodically inducing miscarriages.

But while Shvarts stood by her project and claimed that administrators had backed her before the planned exhibition attracted national condemnation, the University dismissed it as nothing more than a piece of fiction.

“The entire project is an art piece, a creative fiction designed to draw attention to the ambiguity surrounding form and function of a woman’s body,” Yale spokeswoman Helaine Klasky said in a written statement Thursday afternoon.

Klasky said Shvarts told Yale College Dean Peter Salovey and two other senior officials Thursday that she neither impregnated herself nor induced any miscarriages. Rather, the entire episode, including a press release describing the exhibition released Wednesday, was nothing more than “performance art,” Klasky said.

“She is an artist and has the right to express herself through performance art,” Klasky said. “Had these acts been real, they would have violated basic ethical standards and raised serious mental and physical health concerns.”

But in an interview later Thursday afternoon, Shvarts defended her work and called the University’s statement “ultimately inaccurate.” She reiterated that she engaged in the nine-month process she publicized on Wednesday in a press release that was first reported in the News: repeatedly using a needleless syringe to insert semen into herself, then taking abortifacient herbs at the end of her menstrual cycle to induce bleeding. Thursday evening, in a tour of her art studio, she shared with the News video footage she claimed depicted her attempts at self-induced miscarriages.

“No one can say with 100-percent certainty that anything in the piece did or did not happen,” Shvarts said, adding that she does not know whether she was ever pregnant. “The nature of the piece is that it did not consist of certainties.”

Told of Shvarts’ comments, the University fired back. In a statement issued just before midnight on Thursday, Klasky told the News that Shvarts had vowed that if the University revealed her admission, “she would deny it.”

“Her denial is part of her performance,” Klasky wrote in an e-mail message. “We are disappointed that she would deliberately lie to the press in the name of art.”

Yale’s response to the supposed exhibition came at the end of a day of widespread shock. The blogosphere erupted in stunned indignation over Shvarts’ detailed description in Thursday’s News of her supposed exhibition, which she said would include the display of blood she preserved from her nine-month endeavor.

As more news outlets posted their stories online early Friday morning, Shvarts responded to the University’s second statement, asserting that her project was, in her words, “University-sanctioned.”

“I’m not going to absolve them by saying it was some sort of hoax when it wasn’t,” she said. “I started out with the University on board with what I was doing, and because of the media frenzy they’ve been trying to dissociate with me. Ultimately I want to get back to a point where they renew their support because ultimately this was something they supported.”

It was a media frenzy that Shvarts triggered herself. The article in Thursday’s News was prompted by a press release Shvarts circulated on Wednesday in which she discussed — in graphic detail — what she called a cycle of self-insemination followed by “repeated self-induced miscarriages.”

The Drudge Report linked to the News’s story early Thursday, overloading the newspaper’s Web site with traffic and attracting the attention of news outlets across the country. The article generated more press inquiries from the University than any matter since the controversy surrounding Yale’s admission of former Taliban diplomat Rahmatullah Hashemi flared up in 2006, according to a Yale official.

In an interview for the article in Thursday’s News, Shvarts explained that the goal of her exhibition was to spark conversation and debate about the relationship between art and the human body. She said her endeavor was not conceived with any “shock value” in mind.

“I hope it inspires some sort of discourse,” Shvarts said. “Sure, some people will be upset with the message and will not agree with it, but it’s not the intention of the piece to scandalize anyone.”

Shvarts said her project would take the form of a large cube suspended from the ceiling of a room in the gallery of Holcombe T. Green Jr. Hall. Shvarts said she would wrap hundreds of feet of plastic sheeting around the cube, with blood from her self-induced miscarriages lining the sheeting.

Recorded videos of her experiencing her miscarriages would be projected onto the four sides of the cube, Shvarts said.

And while some news stories late Thursday dismissed Shvarts’s exhibition as a wholesale hoax, the Davenport senior showed elements of her planned exhibition to News reporters, including footage from tapes she plans to play at the exhibit. The tapes depict Shvarts, sometimes naked, sometimes clothed, alone in a shower stall bleeding into a cup. It was all part of a project that Shvarts said had the backing of the dean of her residential college and at least two faculty members within the School of Art.

Davenport College Dean Craig Harwood — whom Shvarts said supported the project — and Shvarts’s thesis adviser, School of Art lecturer Pia Lindman, could not be reached for comment Thursday. The director of undergraduate studies in the School of Art, Henk van Assen, referred a request for comment to Yale’s Office of Public Affairs.

Which denoument makes a lot of sense. The whole business did sound just a little too far out there in a variety of ways to receive academic approval. And it’s true, we all gaped and marveled, but accepted the story at face value.

Does this prove that news organizations and bloggers are unbecomingly credulous? I don’t think so. The alleged miscarriage project was not all that far removed from any number of real examples of purported art featuring unlikely materials of organic origin, in some cases personally provided by the artist.

Aliza Schvarts’ alleged art project made news on the basis of its man-bites-dog outrageous character, but these days the relationship of major universities and the arts to perversity and shock is so warm and intimate that it all had a distinct air of plausibility.

Despite the unfortunate aesthetic and moral aspects of her prank, my own disposition is to smile and extend congratulations to Aliza Schvarts for successfully pulling so many legs. What is undergraduate life for, if not for shocking and outraging the adult bourgeois world?

Well done, Aliza.

Her taste may be questionable, but she demonstrated admirable quantities of imagination, flair, and enterprise. The world should keep an eye out for this girl. What an advertising campaign manager she is liable to make!

The Yale Daily News (fallback link, thoughtfully provided during the Oldest College Daily’s site maintenance) reports on a student art project which will inevitably receive wide coverage.

Beginning next Tuesday, (Aliza) Shvarts (‘08) will be displaying her senior art project, a documentation of a nine-month process during which she artificially inseminated herself “as often as possible” while periodically taking abortifacient drugs to induce miscarriages. Her exhibition will feature video recordings of these forced miscarriages as well as preserved collections of the blood from the process.

The goal in creating the art exhibition, Shvarts said, was to spark conversation and debate on the relationship between art and the human body. But her project has already provoked more than just debate, inciting, for instance, outcry at a forum for fellow senior art majors held last week. And when told about Shvarts’ project, students on both ends of the abortion debate have expressed shock – saying the project does everything from violate moral code to trivialize abortion.

But Shvarts insists her concept was not designed for “shock value.”

“I hope it inspires some sort of discourse,” Shvarts said. “Sure, some people will be upset with the message and will not agree with it, but it’s not the intention of the piece to scandalize anyone.”

The “fabricators,” or donors, of the sperm were not paid for their services, but Shvarts required them to periodically take tests for sexually transmitted diseases. She said she was not concerned about any medical effects the forced miscarriages may have had on her body. The abortifacient drugs she took were legal and herbal, she said, and she did not feel the need to consult a doctor about her repeated miscarriages.

Shvarts declined to specify the number of sperm donors she used, as well as the number of times she inseminated herself. ...

The display of Schvarts’ project will feature a large cube suspended from the ceiling of a room in the gallery of Green Hall. Schvarts will wrap hundreds of feet of plastic sheeting around this cube; lined between layers of the sheeting will be the blood from Schvarts’ self-induced miscarriages mixed with Vaseline in order to prevent the blood from drying and to extend the blood throughout the plastic sheeting.

Schvarts will then project recorded videos onto the four sides of the cube. These videos, captured on a VHS camcorder, will show her experiencing miscarriages in her bathrooom tub, she said. Similar videos will be projected onto the walls of the room.

School of Art lecturer Pia Lindman, Schvarts? senior-project advisor, could not be reached for comment Wednesday night. ...

The official reception for the Undergraduate Senior Art Show will be from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. on April 25. The exhibition will be on public display from April 22 to May 1. The art exhibition is set to premiere alongside the projects of other art seniors this Tuesday, April 22 at the gallery of Holcombe T. Green Jr. Hall on Chapel Street.

The establishment art world’s recent movement in the personal biological products direction at least represents a self-correcting problem. “Art works” consisting of human or animal waste or blood tend to develop “preservation issues” as their chosen media naturally breakdown or wind up being consumed by microorganisms.

Telegraph:

A rare portrait of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart has been unearthed which gives a true picture of the famous composer’s looks at the height of his fame.

It shows him in 1783, aged 27, dressed in a red tunic and a white ruff, with a wig of grey hair and an elegant but slightly hooked nose. ...

The picture has been authenticated by Professor Cliff Eisen, a music scholar at King’s College London. He described it as “arguably the most important Mozart portrait to be discovered” since the composer’s death in 1791.

Prof Eisen, who is to present his findings to academics at the Royal Musical Association on Saturday, said: “It is only the fourth known authentic portrait of him from the Vienna years, the period of his greatest professional successes and greatest compositional achievements.”

Mozart moved to Vienna in 1781, aged 25, and died a decade later.

The oil, which measures 19 inches by 14 inches, was bought by an American collector in 2005 from a descendent of Johann Lorenz Hagenauer, a close friend of the composer’s father Leopold Mozart. The collector has insured it for £2 million.

It was probably painted by Joseph Hickel, a painter to the Imperial Court of Austria.

Prof Eisen said there was strong documentary evidence to suggest the subject was Mozart, including a letter he wrote to one of his patrons in September 1782 describing his desire for a “beautiful red coat” that matches the one painted.

A magnesite or crystalline limestone figure of a lioness,
Elam, circa 3000-2800 B.C.

AFP:

A tiny and extremely rare 5,000-year-old white limestone sculpture from ancient Mesopotamia sold for 57.2 million dollars in New York on Wednesday, smashing records for both sculpture and antiquities.

The carved Guennol Lioness, measuring just over eight centimeters (3 1/4 inches) tall, was described by Sotheby’s auction house as one of the last known masterworks from the dawn of civilization remaining in private hands.

“It was an honor for us to handle The Guennol Lioness, one of the greatest works of art of all time,” Richard Keresey and Florent Heintz, the experts in charge of the sale, said in a joint statement.

“Before the sale, a great connoisseur of art commented to us that he always regarded the figure as the ‘finest sculpture on earth’ and it would appear that the market agreed with him,” they said.

Five different bidders, three on the telephone and two in the room, competed for the sculpture. The successful buyer was identified only as an English buyer who wished to remain anonymous.

The sale easily broke the previous record for the highest price for a sculpture at auction, which had stood at 29.1 million dollars and was set just last month at Sotheby’s in New York by Picasso’s “Tete de Femme (Dora Maar).”

It also beat the 28.6 million dollars paid for “Artemis and the Stag,” a 2,000-year-old bronze figure which sold also at Sotheby’s in New York in June and held the record for the most expensive antiquity to be sold at auction.

Described by Sotheby’s as diminutive in size, but monumental in conception, The Guennol Lioness was created around 5,000 years ago—around the same time as the first known use of the wheel—in the region of ancient Mesopotamia.

The piece was acquired by private collector Alastair Bradley Martin in 1948 and has been on display in New York’s Brooklyn Museum of Art ever since.

November 10, 2007–April 13, 2008
Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Currently underway at Washington’s Smithsonian-affiliated Sackler Gallery is an exhibition of the Etsuko and Joe Price Collection of Edo Period Japanese Painting. On previous display in Japan at four locations, the Price collection attracted more than 800,000 visitors becoming the most successful museum exhibition in Japanese history.

Paul Richard’s review, in the Washington Post, makes an interesting comparison:

For the beauty-loving samurai of 18th-century Japan, those competitive aestheticians, true mastery of ink and edge were arts of the same height.

Slicing through a torso with a curving steel blade and putting ink to silk with a liquid-loaded brush, both of these were stroke arts. Both required the same swiftness, the same lack of indecision. For the master of the brush and the master of the blade, who were sometimes the same person, the flawless stroke expressed a Japanese ideal—the beauty-governed union of sure, unhurried speed and centuries-old tradition, utter self-assurance and Zen purity of mind.

Roughly 150 different paintings will be displayed 50 at a time. During the unusual five-month span of the exhibition, several complete rotations are scheduled to accommodate the scale of the collection and to protect the light-sensitive works from excessive continuous exposure.

Smithsonian Press Release

The Shin’enKan Foundation offers a CD of the collection.

Sand Picture in a Bottle, Paddle Wheeler Gray Eagle
Andrew Clemens, McGregor, Iowa, c. 1885

Skinner was kind enough to send me the catalogue for their upcoming November 3 & 4 sale of American Furniture & Decorative Arts.

Glancing through it last night, I was simply astonished at the sight of Lot 590.

These unique artworks were apparently created in the late 19th century by a deaf-mute, Andrew Clemens (1852-1894), who sold them as his sole means of support. The colored sands were naturally-occurring, and were collected by the artist in the Pictured Rocks, a mile south of McGregor, Iowa.

Richard J. Langel of the Iowa Geological Survey writes:

To create his sand paintings, Clemens used only a few tools: brushes made from hickory sticks, a curved fish hook stick, and a tiny tin scoop to hold sand. His sand paintings ranged from original designs to reproductions of images from photographs.

Because the majority of the bottles that Clemens used were round-top drug jars, he painted his designs upside down. Clemens inserted the sand using the fish hook stick. The brushes were used to keep the picture straight. No glue was used in the process; the sand was only held in place by pressure from other sand grains. Once a design was completed and the bottle was full, the bottle was sealed with a stopper.

Clemens originally sold his sand paintings in the McGregor grocery store. A small bottle sold for $1; a larger personalized bottle sold for $6-$8. The popularity of his sand paintings increased as travelers and steamboat agents purchased the bottles as souvenirs. Eventually, orders for his bottles became worldwide.

Clemens’ sandbottles are avidly collected as folk art, and now sell for thousands of dollars.

McGregor Sand Artist by Marian Carroll Rischmueller

Wikipedia

The Sandbottles of Andrew Clemens

Andrew “Andreas” Clemens

Cowan’s – Painter Without a Brush

Most of us are familiar with the furniture produced by the 19th century religious cult calling itself the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing, better known as Shakers.

Shaker furniture is widely admired, collected, and frequently imitated, as its simple lines and imaginative forms have considerable congruity with modern aesthetics.

I had not been aware, however, previously that the Shakers also produced a variety of peculiar works on paper, including visionary drawings and unique imaginative efforts at the graphical depiction of musical inspiration. The examples here are very curious and strange.

These come from a book produced by the Drawing Center in New York and the Hammer Museum at UCLA, edited by Francis Morin, and titled Heavenly Visions: Shaker Gift Drawings and Gift Songs.

Hat tip to Walter Olson.

Reuters:

A diamond-encrusted platinum skull by artist Damien Hirst has been sold to an investment group for the asking price of $100 million, a spokeswoman for Hirst’s London gallery White Cube said on Thursday.

The skull, cast from a 35-year-old 18th century European man but retaining the original teeth, is coated with 8,601 diamonds, including a large pink diamond worth more than four million pounds in the centre of its forehead.

The spokeswoman said she could give no more details of the buyer.

“Damien Hirst has retained a participation in the work—he still owns a share of it—in order that he can oversee a global tour of the work that is currently being planned,” she added.

The skull caused a sensation when it first went on display at an exhibition of new works by Hirst at the White Cube in central London on June 3—not least because of its price tag.

Some critics dismissed it as tasteless while others saw it as a reflection of celebrity-obsessed culture.

Works by Hirst, who first made his name displaying diced and pickled animals, became the most expensive at auction for a living artist when his “Lullaby Spring” pill cabinet sold at Sotheby’s in London for 9.6 million pounds.

The skull is the most expensive piece to date by Hirst, already a millionaire several times over.

The sale of the skull brings to $350 million the value of works sold from the June exhibition. Generally the gallery takes 30 percent and Hirst 70 percent of the proceeds.

As an indication of the wealth he has amassed since being spotted in 1991 by art collector Charles Saatchi, Hirst, who financed the skull himself, said he couldn’t remember whether it had cost 10 or 15 million pounds to make.

He said from the outset he wanted the work, inspired by similarly bejeweled Aztec skulls, to be on public view.

He rejected suggestions that his works were more a standing joke against the art establishment than real works of art.

But when asked at the time of the exhibition what his next project would be he immediately replied: “Two diamond skeletons shagging—no just kidding.”

slideshow

Successful exercises in this kind of imposture rest upon an art market comprised of persons lacking standards and taste with too much money.

The noisome object pictured above isn’t art. It is simply a grandiose publicity stunt designed to create the opportunity for very large wager. Hirst’s consortium customers are really betting $100 million on the near-future existence of even greater fools than themselves. Personally, I wish there was a financial vehicle one could use to bet against their scheme.

Hat tips to Dominique Poirier and David Ross.

In Australia, in 1950, a Jesuit priest, a Roman Catholic lawyer, and a Jewish businessman formed a society which would award an annual prize intended to stimulate the production of “significant works of art with religious content.” They named their society and prize after the visionary English poet William Blake.

The Blake Prize For Religious Art was increased to $15,000 in 2005.

56 annual competitions later, the state of the contemporary arts is such that an artist named Priscilla Bracks submitted a lenticular image, titled Bearded Orientals: Making the Empire Cross, in which a picture of Jesus morphs into an image of Osama bin Laden.

Another artist, Luke Sullivan, submitted a statue of the Virgin Mary wearing a blue burqa, titled The Fourth Secret of Fatima.

Though these particular entries did not win, they were both included in the selection exhibited at the National Art School in Sydney, provoking some not-undeserved indignation on the part of the Australian public, and condemnation by both Prime Minister John Howard and Opposition Leader Kevin Rudd.

Ms. Bracks was sufficiently intimidated by all the negative reaction that she posted on her web-site a rather disingenuous statement proposing the implausible thesis that her “artwork” is open to all sorts of interpretations (beyond mere blasphemy), and was really intended by herself as a kind of protest against publicizing crime and violence. Right.

Obviously this sort of thing ought to have been excluded from any serious art exhibition, not because it was offensive, but because it was puerile and amounted only to a crude and simplistic expression of a particularly muddle-headed version of the tritest and most banal kind of pseudo-intellectual political posturing.

Reuters

TheAdvertiser

Priscilla Bracks in an earlier, and more complacent, photo

Hermann Mayrhofer, curator of the Leogang Museum, with cross

AP:

A valuable cross dating to the Middle Ages has turned up in a trash bin in Austria.

Police in Salzburg say a woman looking for old crockery in a trash container in the western Austrian town of Zell am See stumbled upon the precious piece in 2004.

They say she apparently she had no idea of it’s value and just stashed it behind her couch.

Now experts say the cross could be worth as much as $575,000. ...

The Austria Press Agency quoted police official Christian Krieg as saying the woman found the cross after a hotel owner who lived in Zell am See died and his home was being cleared by relatives.

The woman showed the cross to the niece of the dead man, but the niece didn’t want it and allowed the woman to take it, the news agency reported.

Last month, one of the woman’s neighbours had an inkling the cross might be something special and took it to a local museum in the village of Leogang.

The curator, Hermann Mayrhofer, alerted police. An investigation disclosed that, until the Second World War, the cross had been part of an art collection belonging to Izabella Elzbieta of Czartoryski Dzialinska, Poland.

Before the outbreak of war, Elzbieta tried to hide the piece from the Nazis by concealing it in the cellar of a building in Warsaw. But the Nazis found it in 1941 and later brought it, along with other items from Elzbieta’s collection, to a castle in Austria. It is unclear what happened next.

This summer, the cross was taken to Vienna for analysis but it has now been returned to the museum in Leogang. Experts at Vienna’s fine arts museum determined that it comes from Limoges, France, and dates to about 1200.

oil on relined canvas, 90cms x 66cms, (36” x 26”)

The Telegraph reports that a portrait recently auctioned on July 10th by Gildings, described as an “18th Century Continental School, Half-length portrait of Aesthete” and estimated to sell for £300-500 wound up selling for £205,000 (plus 12 1/2 % buyer’s premium, for a total (before VAT) of £230,625).

At least two bidders were of the opinion that the portrait was by Titian.

catalogue listing

Daniel Hopfer (c.1470-1536), Old Women Thrashing the Devil
Etching, 22.3×15.6 cm (8.8×6.2”), purchased at a recent European auction

“Gib Frid (Let me go!),” cries the devil, held to the ground, his pitchfork broken, by three old women pounding him with what I take to be bread boards, as four of his demonic auxiliaries hover nearby in the air, impotent and looking on in alarm.

Artists of the Northern Renaissance apparently viewed the variety of the forms of Nature with considerable suspicion, picturing the devil as an amalgamation of animal and avian forms: with head combining lion, goat, and dragon; limbs of lizard; birds’ heads for knee and elbow joints; and a boar’s head for a phallus.

Hopfer is attempting to convey the moral that life’s labors, the wife’s domestic chores symbolized by the bread boards, pursued with assiduity, may prove a weapon which can effectively defeat temptation.

Richard Newton, Jr., Major W. Austin Wadsworth, MFH, Riding Devilkin, 1915

John J. Head writes, in the Summer 2007 edition of the Social Register, an appreciation of the painting used to illustrate an article noticing the centenary of the Masters of Foxhounds Association of North America.

Often called the ‘Dean of American Foxhunting,’ Major William Austin Wadsworth—heir to a large land-holding in the Genessee Valley of western New York State and an 1870 graduate of Harvard with a degree in chemistry who pursued post-graduate work at the University of Berlin—was deemed by his peers, in 1907, to be suitable presidential material for the newly formed Masters of Foxhounds Association of America.

The American artist Richard Newtown, Jr. captured on canvas the qualities that so appealed to Wadsworth’s fellow masters, insofar as any painting can embody traits of character and breeding, in his 1915 oil portrait. ... Amidst soft autumnal colors, under a steel-gray sky, we observe this keen judge of dogs and horses as he surveys the pack of foxhounds he has carefully and scientifically bred to hunt his ancestral territory of 60,000 acres in Geneseo, NY. Members of the Genesee Valley Hunt, which was founded on the centennial of the Revolution, wear unique attire. In a display of pastriotism, traditional scarlet coats are eschewed in favor of dark blue melton coats, buff collars and buff breeches, the colors worn by the Continental Army.

Sandro Botticelli, Venus and Mars, 1483
tempera on panel, 27” x 68” (69×173 cm), National Gallery, London

Harvey Rachlin has a witty appreciation of Botticelli’s Venus and Mars in the Pursuits edition of the Journal.

Venus gazes at a sleeping Mars after a romantic interlude. She is draped in a flowing white gown, her curly locks cascading gently over her delicate bosom, her body resting casually against a soft apricot-colored pillow. The goddess of love reigns supreme; she has subdued the god of war. Grinning satyrs play impishly with the spoils of conquest. One has donned the war god’s helmet, wrapping his arms around the handle of the god’s mighty spear; another glances back at Venus to gauge her reaction to the sport; a third mischievously puffs a deafening blast through a large conch into the insensible god’s ear; and the fourth, at the bottom, has crawled saucily into the warrior’s discarded armor. Mars slumbers deeply in the sylvan glade—surrendered of heart, depleted of strength, his magnificent masculinity subjugated by the power of love.

Botticelli’s lighthearted scene evokes the perennial tug of war between men and women in a manner that brings to mind a modern sitcom. Mars, his physical needs gratified, wants simply to sleep; Venus, still wide awake, yearns for tender conversation, for some indication that his interest in her is more than sexual. Her ambivalent expression reflects a mixture of fulfillment and wistfulness—along with just a touch, perhaps, of smug satisfaction that her charms have reduced the fearsome god of war to a lump of inert, snoring flesh.

Read the whole thing.

Amazing Stories cover—May 1926

The Cornell University Library has built an interesting web-site based on its own collection titled: The Fantastic in Art and Fiction. Sample images above and below. Well worth a visit.

Diable, woodblock, J.A.S. Collin de Plancy, Dictionnaire Infernal, Paris : E. Plon, 1863.

Hat tip to Amy Crehore.

2:52 video morphs the female image in 5 centuries of paintings from Da Vinci to Picasso.

Things artists do to books.

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

Aiden Lassell Ripley, Woodcock Shooting

Antiques and the Arts announces a request for submissions of privately-owned works by the American sporting artist Aiden Lassell Ripley (1896-1969) for a major new book to be published next year.

Stephen B. O’Brien Jr Fine Arts, LLC is planning to publish the most comprehensive book to date on sporting artist Aiden Lassell Ripley (American, 1896–1969) and is seeking submissions. The book, which will be released in conjunction with the Aiden Lassell Ripley exhibition scheduled at the Cape Cod Museum of Art, Dennis, Mass., in August 2008, will showcase the painter’s large body of work in a hardbound volume comprising more than 160 pages and with more than 125 color illustrations.

Ripley is perhaps best known for his skill at capturing outdoor sporting scenes. He spent much of his career traveling to plantations to paint commissioned shooting scenes. Vanderbilt, Mellon, Marshall Field and Carnegie are among the prestigious names of families who commissioned Ripley’s work.

In this new survey of Ripley’s oeuvre, the authors will include watercolors, oils, drawings, magazine covers, portraits, commissions and public murals. Subject matter will cover not just the sporting paintings, but the artist’s wide range of talents — from early impressionistic landscapes of Europe and New England to later realist works depicting the outdoor life in places from the Deep South to Cape Cod.

Read the whole thing.

Aiden Lassell Ripley, Early Woodcock, etching

Jean-Luc Cornec, Telefonschafe [Telephone Sheep],
Museum für Kommunikation, Frankfurt

more photos

link

Hat tip to Karen Myers.

Marco Evaristti, edgy Chilean artist, at his latest exhibit in Santiago has served up meatballs made from his own fat.

Foxnews.com:

“Ladies and gentleman, bon appetit and may god bless,” said Marco Evaristti, a glass in his hand, to his dining companions seated last Thursday night around a table in Santiago’s Animal Gallery.

On the plates in front of them was a serving of agnolotti pasta and in the middle a meatball made with oil Evaristti removed from his body in a liposuction procedure last year.

“The question of whether or not to eat human flesh is more important than the result,” he said, explaining the point of his creation.

“You are not a cannibal if you eat art,” he added.

Evaristti produced 48 meatballs with his own fat, some of which would be canned and sold for $US4000 dollars for 10.

A veteran at shock-art, in an earlier work Evaristti invited people to kill fish by pressing the button on a blender the fish were held in.

In April 2004 he dyed an enormous iceberg in Greenland with red paint.

Santiago Times:

Six years ago, artist Marco Evaristti scandalized the Chilean art world when he displayed live fish in working blenders. The opening of his new exhibit at the Animal Gallery in Vitacura is likely to cause just as much sensation, hype and criticism when visitors are invited to eat meatballs made with Evaristti’s own fat.

The Chilean-Danish artist, who underwent liposuction for the work, describes it as a criticism of the plastic surgery market. The meatballs are canned and available for purchase; two cans have already been sold to collectors for US$23,200 each. Evaristti claims that the meatballs are not only delicious, but contain less fat than supermarket meatballs.

President Bachelet and poet Nicanor Parra were invited to enjoy the dish at the opening. Neither has given a response so far. The artist assured that he, if no one else, would enjoy the meal.

Another controversial piece consists of six fake faeces covered in gold taken from the teeth of Jewish holocaust victims…

Exhibit details:
Galería Animal
Alonso de Cordova 3105
Vitacura
M-F 10:00-8:00
Saturday 10:30-2:00
Until January 27th.

One couldn’t make this stuff up.

William Sidney Mount (1807-1868), Eel Spearing at Setauket, 1845
Oil on canvas; 28 1/2×36 in. (72.4×91.4 cm)
New York State Historical Association, Cooperstown

John Wilmerding, in the Wall Street Journal, rhapsodizes over a pleasant enough America genre painting, dragging in the Ancient Greeks, and homing in unerringly on the real subtext of the painting: the sublimely important themes of race and inequality.

Following a period of renovation and curatorial research, “Eel Spearing at Setauket” (1845) by the American genre painter William Sidney Mount (1807-1868) has gone back on view at the Fenimore Art Museum in Cooperstown, N.Y. The star of the museum’s collection, the work is also generally acknowledged to be one of the classics in the history of American art. Why? Because it is both a beautiful and a significant painting. First is its formal beauty, the serene clarity of its composition, organized around its multiple pairings and reflections…

The structure is classical, consisting mainly of stable horizontals and verticals, along with the dominant triangle formed by paddle, boat and fishing spear, reminiscent of a Greek revival pediment dominant in American architecture at the time. The boat is centered in the nearground, parallel both to the picture plane and to the shoreline behind. In its solid volume and monumental stance the standing figure recalls the spirit of Greco-Roman statuary, such as that of the spearbearer. (Mount could have seen casts of ancient sculpture in his years of study in New York.) But the stillness, harmony and sense of equipoise are also an expression of nature’s hold on the American imagination in the mid-19th century, the country’s self-confident spirit, and Mount’s personal celebration of memory and meditation…

“Eel Spearing” appears to be apolitical, though its thoughtful mood and stable structure suit the sense of racial harmony. Mount achieves this by telling his story with characters marginalized in American society at the time—the child, the woman, the black. (Imagine how much more provocative his work would have been had the dominant figure been a black male.)

Wilmerding, astonishingly, overlooks the degree to which small dogs (not to mention: eels!) were not only marginalized in the wicked America of James K. Polk, but remain marginalized today.

Power to the pointy-eared terriers and the slimey anguilliformes!

The insensitive, of course, would say the painting merely represents a pleasant and nostalgic bucolic sporting idyll.

Catherine Howard, 5th wife of Henry VIII (c.1520 – executed 13 February 1542)

Second annual contest for humorous modification (via Photoshop) of famous art works into contemporary ads.

Reuters reports:

Two lost paintings by Italian Renaissance master Fra Angelico have turned up in a modest house in central England in a discovery hailed as one of the most exciting art finds for a generation.

The works — two panels each painted with the standing figure of a Dominican saint in tempera on a gold background — are expected to fetch more than $1.9 million at auction.

They were discovered behind a bedroom door in a terraced house in Oxford, central England, when art auctioneer Guy Schwinge was called in to carry out a valuation after the owner of the house, British librarian Jean Preston, died in July.

Read the whole thing.

Telegraph

They were purchased in California in the 1960s for $380. 570News

Pablo Picasso, Le Rêve (The Dream), 1932
(hole supplied by Photoshop)

Steve Wynn has a special relationship with Picasso’s famous cubist period painting Le Rêve. He purchased it at Christie’s, New York, November 10th, 1997 for $48,402,500.

Reputedly the painting served as the original inspiration for his Wynn Las Vegas resort.

Wynn, however, decided to part with the painting and had successfully negotiated a deal to sell it to Steven A. Cohen for $139 million.

The Las Vegas Review Journal reports that, in connection with the impending sale, Wynn was in the process of exhibiting the famous painting to a group of luminaries including Barbara Walters and screenwriters Nora Ephron and Nicholas Pileggi, when, gesturing, he punctured the canvas with his elbow, leaving a hole in the female figure’s left forearm. Wynn suffers from some vision problems.

The sale is not expected to proceed. The painting, of course, will be repaired.
—————————————
UPDATE 10/21

Daniel Engber explains how the painting will be repaired:

It will be slow and tedious work. The torn ends of the canvas can probably be lined up, and conservators can identify matching fibers on either side of the rip by inspecting them under a microscope. In general, you can expect the wefts in the fabric—that is, the crosswise yarns of the weave—to split at the site of the impact. The lengthwise warps tend to get stretched out, but they may not break.

The rip itself can be mended in a few different ways. First, the conservator can line up the torn ends and affix them to a new piece of fabric that lines the back of the painting. She might also try to attach the torn ends to each other using a method called Rissverklebung, in which individual fibers are rewoven back into place.

To reweave the warps and wefts, you have to figure out the proper placement of each individual fiber. Bits of paint that are stuck to the fibers must be glued in place or removed until the reweaving is complete. (Conservators map out the location of each paint flake they remove so it can be replaced in precisely the right spot.) Because an accident will stretch out some fibers and fray others, you sometimes have to tie off and shorten some threads while attaching new material to lengthen others. Threads attached to the back of the canvas will reinforce the seam.

Closing the tear is only the first part of the process. An accident like Wynn’s can damage the painting in other places by stretching the fabric and distorting the image. To correct for these planar distortions, the conservators try to change the lengths of individual fibers or small patches of the canvas. Applied humidity can make a fiber expand across its diameter and shrink across its length—and tighten up distended parts of the weave.

Bits of paint that have fallen off the painting must also be replaced. Wynn might have surveyed the scene of the accident and saved any stray bits of paint for the conservators in a petri dish. (Chance are he didn’t strip much off the canvas—Ephron says he was wearing a golf shirt, which suggests a bare-elbow blow. An elbow covered with rough fabric would probably have done more damage.) Conservators have to touch up spots of missing paint with fresh material, color-matched to the surrounding area.

One more thing: Conservators always try to make their repairs reversible. That way, you won’t cause any permanent damage to the work if you screw up, and someone can always try to improve on your work in the future.

Reuters reports that a British Art Gallery is eliminating some nudes from a surrealist exhibition in order to avoid offending Muslims.

For years now, the liberal elites have been explaining that it was essential that the grossest obscenities be not only exhibited but governmentally subsidized, or the freedom of artistic expression would be fatally compromised. The crucifix, regardless of any possible offense to Christians, immersed in urine; the Virgin Mary depicted in elephant dung, constituted artistic statements which had to be accorded public space and defended.

It seems perfectly clear at this point that believing Christians, and people serious about aesthetic values, just needed to threaten to slap some of these phoney bastards around, and then it would have been: Good bye, Andres Serrano! Adieu, Chris Ofili!

A London gallery has decided not to show some works of art because it fears they would upset Muslims, a curator said on Friday, a week after a German opera house canned a Mozart production for the same reason.

The director of the Whitechapel Art Gallery decided to remove works by surrealist artist Hans Bellmer from an exhibition the day before it was due to open, one of the museum’s curators, Agnes de la Beaumelle, told Reuters.

“The motive was simply to not shock the population of the Whitechapel neighbourhood, which is partly Muslim,” she said.

The Whitechapel area in east London is home to many ethnic minorities including a large Bangladeshi community.

The gallery issued a statement saying that some works were not included in the exhibition because of space constraints but declined to comment specifically on what Beaumelle said….

Bellmer’s work includes dolls of naked young girls.

The Scream. 1893. Oil, tempera and pastel on cardboard. Nasjonalgalleriet.

Reuters reports that Edvard Munch’s best known painting, The Scream, stolen by armed robbers in 2004 has been recovered.

James Lileks has some sardonic reflections on the contemporary art scene in the Age of Islamic Terror. Read the whole thing.

Sign of the times: Type “naked woman cuddling dead pig” into Google, and your first result is not one of those horrid pervy sites whose pictures make you want to bleach your eyeballs.

No, you get a review of a British performance artist. For four hours she hugged a porker while spectators filed past and thought: “There’s something you don’t see every day, a fact that might be conclusive evidence of a benevolent God.”

Naturally, she got a grant for the project; public pounds paid for the dead pig, which she stabbed with a knife in order to bond with the corpse. Bring the kids! And the next time you’re in the grocery store holding some bacon, consider taking off your clothes and selling tickets. You might make enough money to make bail…

It’s hard to convince Britain’s radicalized immigrants to assimilate if it means they must pay for some naked lady getting jiggy with piggy. These are the values of the West? We must pay for this, and you call it freedom?

Good question. What is Western culture all about these days, anyway? Little but narcissism, lassitude, sneers and muted despair, it seems. No, correct that; it’s European/U.S. elite culture that seems unmoored. Standard lowbrow American culture is quite clear about what it likes: snakes on planes, loud cars going around in circles with the occasional airborne detour into the stands, high-quality TV shows, mediocre pop music, naked people without the whole arty pig thing.

It’s generally confident and not particularly self-reflective, which leaves the “elite” stratum of the arts worlds to face the true hard issues of our times. Like pig-hugging and the threat to democracy posed by Joe McCarthy.

You too can produce art like Jackson Pollock.

link

Caspar David Friedrich exhibition, 5 May – 20 August 2006, Museum Folkwang Essen.
———————H/T to SIGNANDSIGHT.

Yesterday was the natal anniversary of renowned Spanish (and Catalan) artist Joan Miró, born April 20, 1893 in Barcelona, and Google (in what I would consider a gracious tribute) modified its logo into an homage to Miró.

Google had, in the past, similiarly saluted Salvador Dali, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and such occasions as Valentine’s Day.

Google’s gesture might possibly have some very modest economic impact, enhancing the value of that artist’s work through such a widely-viewed public acknowledgement of his fame and artistic stature, but it obviously did not make Google one plug nickel. Rather than accepting this one-day tribute, however, in the spirit in which it was offered, some grasping Miró heir, who had stumbled upon the Miró-ified logo, notified the Artists Rights Society, a group representing some 40,000 artists (and their estates). The pettyfoggers and beancounters at the ARS leapt into action, demanding that Google remove the logo, which incorporated some elements from the artist’s (copyrighted) images:

It’s a distortion of the original works and in that respect it violates the moral rights of the artist,’’ said Theodore Feder, president of Artists Rights Society. “There are underlying copyrights to the works of Miró, and they are putting it up without having the rights.’‘

So, if an Internet company, like Google, wishes to pay homage (for one day) to an historic figure in the world of Art, it is not enough that Google donates its time, creative work, and publishing space, it should also donate the time of its executives and attorneys to enter into correspondence, negotiations, the drafting of legal agreements, and possibly pay a fee for the privilege of saying: “Happy Birthday, Joan Miró?”

Preposterous. This kind of dog-in-the-manger punctilio over non-economic use of cultural references is crass, absurd, and culturally impoverishing.

John Paczkowski is a brilliant reporter on Technology, but I think he is completely wrong on this one.

photograph courtesy of Yahya Abdelsamad

The Telegraph yesterday, 1/3, reported the sad news of the death of Basil William Robinson, author and Orientalist, on December 29th at the age of 93.

Born in London June 20, 1912, Robinson was educated at Winchester, and at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. While at Oxford, he prepared a a B.Litt. thesis on the collection of Persian miniatures in the Bodleian Library, which many years later was to form the basis of a comprehensive catalogue.

Upon completing his degree at Oxford, he accepted the post of headmaster of a school at Bognor Regis. He had been an enthusiast and collector of Japanese art, arms, and armor, since boyhood, and in the capacity of a collector became acquainted with A.J. Koop, Assistant Keeper of the Metalwork Department of the Victoria and Albert Museum. An inquiry resulted in a friendship, and with Koop’s encouragement, he sought a post at the Museum. He was runner-up for an Assistant Keeper’s position, but the favorite soon resigned; and, in 1939, Robinson succeeded to the appointment.

After the end of the war, Robinson was sent to Singapore to be employed, on the basis of his knowledge of Japanese swords, in evaluating large quantities of swords surrendered by the defeated enemy. He was able to obtain the services of Colonel Yamada Sakae, of the 3rd Air Force, who had been a member of the sword evaluating committee of the Japanese War Office, to assist in his task.

He returned to the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1946. In the years following the war, Robinson proved a prolific author, publishing monographs on Persian miniatures and paintings, on Japanese swords and armor, and on the woodblock prints of Hiroshige and Kuniyoshi. His The Arts of the Japanese Sword (1961) was one of a small number of post-WWII publications in European languages which played a crucial role in opening up the study of Nihonto to Western students and collectors.

He became Deputy Keeper of Metal work in 1954, and succeeded the illustrious Charles Oman as Keeper in 1966. In 1967, Robinson was elected honorary president of the To-ken Society of Great Britain. He was president of the Royal Asiatic Society from 1970 to 1973. He was Keeper Emeritus at the Victoria and Albert from 1972 until his retirement in 1976. He is remembered with gratitude for his many contributions to the advancement of learning, and with affection by many friends, students, and long-time correspondents.
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Yahya Abdelsamad, Basil William Robinson, Japanese Sword Society of the United States Newsletter, 37:1, February, 2005.

IT’S official: Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa was 83 per cent happy, 9 per cent disgusted, 6 per cent fearful and 2 per cent angry.

Nicu Sebe at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands tested emotion-recognition software on the famous enigmatic smile. His algorithm, developed with researchers at the Beckman Institute at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, examines key facial features such as the curvature of the lips and crinkles around the eyes, then scores each face with respect to six basic emotions. Sebe drew on a database of young female faces to derive an average “neutral” expression, which the software used as a standard to compare the painting against.

Dr Cynthia McVey, a psychologist at Glasgow Caledonian University, tried to explain the apparent conflict in the emotions they found in the Mona Lisa’s face.

“She could have been chuffed he wanted to paint her and … a wee bit disgusted by the old man doing the painting. He might have been in the nude or have come on to her for all we know,” she said. “Or maybe she was annoyed because she had been sitting there for ages and he’s still not finished.”