This is the deathbed portrait of an unknown man with the hairstyle of the 1640s, commonly described as being the portrait of James, Duke of Monmouth, executed in 1685.
The Telegraph informs us that art historians are proposing to employ facial recognition software developed for Counter-Terrorism to identify the unknown subjects in some well-known works of art.
Software developed to recognise terrorist faces is being adapted to solve the mystery of portraits of unidentified people. ...
A feasibility study is being conducted by two art historians and an electronic engineer at the University of California. They describe FACES (Faces, Art and Computerised Evaluation Systems) as a “new tool for art historians”. The project has received a $25,000 government grant.
Conrad Rudolph, professor of art history at the university, said: “Before the advent of photography, portraits were, almost by definition, depictions of people who were important in their own worlds. But, as a walk through almost any major museum will show, a large number of these unidentified portraits from before the 19th century have lost the identities of their subjects.”
His paintings are hanging in an estimated one of every 20 homes in the United States. Fans cite the warm, familiar feeling of his mass-produced works of art, while it has become fashionable for art critics to dismiss his pieces as tacky. In any event, his prints of idyllic cottages and bucolic garden gates helped establish a brand—famed for their painted highlights—not commonly seen in the art world.
“I’m a warrior for light,” Kinkade told the Mercury News in 2002, alluding not just to his technical skill at creating light on canvas but to the medieval practice of using light to symbolize the divine.
—————————————————-
Art Critic Jerry Saltz did not have very kind words for the deceased or for his artistic pronouncements.
The reason the art world doesn’t love Kinkade isn’t that it hates love, life, goodness, or God. We may be silly or soulless or whatever, but we don’t automatically hate things with faith and love or that other people love. We’re not sociopaths. (Well, most of us aren’t.) The reason the art world doesn’t respond to Kinkade is because none — not one — of his ideas about subject-matter, surface, color, composition, touch, scale, form, or skill is remotely original. They’re all cliché and already told. This is why Kinkade’s pictures strike those in the art world as either prepackaged, ersatz, contrived, or cynical. Unoriginal rote things done in his perfectly conventional, balanced people-pleasing way produced these confected conglomerations of things people wanted to think they wanted to think about, democratic paintings whose meanings are hidden from no one, whose appeal is to not to vex or disturb, to produce doubt or newness. As Kinkade said, “I work to create images that project a serene simplicity that can be appreciated and enjoyed by everyone.” Joan Didion wrote that Kinkade’s pictures “typically feature a cottage or a house of such insistent coziness as to seem actually sinister, suggestive of a trap designed to attract Hansel and Gretel. Every window lit, to lurid effect, as if the interior of the structure might be on fire.”
Kinkade’s “serene simplicity” wasn’t limited to his ideas about imagery. They had everything to do with what Andy Warhol called “business art.” Kinkade was willing to go the full Warhol. He mass-produced his pictures, making prints and images painted by factories filled with assistants. A recent ad advertised “a Master Highlighter Event … an 8-hour personal stage appearance by a certified Thomas Kinkade Master Highlighter. At the event, a highlighter enhances images of the gallery’s choice.” Needless to say, these are the very things that artists like Kinkade, and of late David Hockney, have railed about when they’re done by Jeff Koons, Takashi Murakami, or Damien Hirst. In fact Kinkade makes Koons & Co. look like a boutique. After all, Jeff Koons never built his own gated communities in California, with houses and grounds in the likeness of his paintings, with starting prices at $425,000. (As for creating serenity, it’s often mentioned that Kinkade “has a long history of cursing and heckling other artists and performers … that he openly groped a woman’s breasts … and once relieved himself on a Winnie the Pooh figure while saying “This one’s for you, Walt.”
This Hopper-esque painting of houses in Manayunk, a neighborhood in the northwest section of Philadelphia, viewed from the Cynwyd Trail by Nancy Herman reminded me very powerfully of the view of house roofs I saw looking out the attic window of my boyhood home in Shenandoah, Pennsylvania. I was startled and a bit moved by nostalgia. It seems that densely built, working class Pennsylvania neighborhoods have a pretty strong degree of architectural similarity.
The artist writes:
This is the last painting from the Cynwyd Trail for now. I know I will be returning to these close-ups of Manayunk from the trail sooner or later as I love the shapes created by the roof tops. While I am painting them I imagine living in these houses, which adds to the fun. Everything looks so cheery on this sunny afternoon but what is it really like to live there?
She actually sells these for only $125. If that one weren’t already sold, I’d have liked to have acquired it.
Hat tip to Vanderleun. How did he find it, I wonder?
The Aurignacian culture of the Upper Paleolithic (Late Old Stone Age) flourished between 45,000 and 35,000 years ago (or so we think, theories of carbon dating are subject to revision).
The Aurignacians are generally awarded the title of being our earliest genuinely human ancestors in Europe on the basis of artistic achievement. It was they who produced the Hohle-Fels Venus, the Chauvet cave paintings, and the Stadel cave Löwenmensch (“Lion Man”), all powerfully moving, but cryptic and fundamentally incomprehensible to us, artistic expressions.
The last object, the Löwenmensch, was discovered in a cave in the Swabian Alps in 1939. WWII resulted in its being neglected for 30 years, but eventually scholar attention arrived. The fragments were assembled, and interpreted. First, as a deity or a shaman representing a lion god, later as (Gawd help us!) a “cave lioness” and an icon of Stone Age Feminism.
Near the end of the last century, a few more pieces were discovered, so scientists are now in the process of removing earlier “restored” bits and having a go at reassembling the original artifact absent recent interpolations. The results will be very interesting.
Harry B. Nielson, Mr. Fox’s Hunt Breakfast on Christmas Day, chromolithograph print published in Vanity Fair, Christmas, 1897
The hunter characteristically admires, and even identifies with, his quarry, and that sense of identification commonly leads to the visualization in the hunter’s imagination of the animal object of the chase as a fellow sportsman, participating in the hunt with equal pleasure and enthusiasm and equal relish of tradition.
The fantasy of the quarry-sportsman gives rise to one of the most popular and best-loved genres of sporting art, images of La Chasse Renversé, the roles of hunters and hunted reversed. No foxhunter’s den is completely furnished without a humorous print like A.C. Havell’s Foxhunter’s Dream or the beloved Mr. Fox’s Hunt Breakfast (above).
The same comedic effect, and the same sportsman’s pleasure in thinking of his adversary in the field as fellow sportsman, can be found in shooting prints, like the very well-known contemporary print by Alexander Charles-Jones “Cocks Only,” which gleefully depicts a line of Ringnecked Pheasants in hunting vests, smoking cigars and drinking while peppering a discomfited group of incoming naked men.
Another classic example of the same humorous genre by Snaffles, published in Hoghunter’s Annual in the 1930s, depicts a couple of senior ranking boars smoking cigars and admiring trophy mounts of British officers acquired in the hunting field.
I had assumed, without any special investigation or thought on the matter, that this genre of sporting humor was specifically British and Victorian, but I was decidedly wrong.
What I have referred to as La Chasse Renversé is, at least, a common medieval artistic humorous subject, found in all sorts of forms and expressions, in paintings, sculpture, manuscript illuminations, and even tiles, representing a variation of all kinds of humorous reversals referred to in general as Le Monde Renversé. I feel sure, at this point, that a thorough search would produce similar examples of sporting facetiae from Classical Antiquity.
Some excellent examples of the hare turning the tables on the hunter were posted at Archivalia.
The Hunter’s Doom,” marginal illumination to The Romance of Alexander by Jehan de Grise and his atelier, 1338-44, Bodleiana Ms. 264, fol. 81v
Alfred Munnings, A Huntsman on a Grey in a Landscape, Sir Alfred Munnings Art Museum, Dedham
click on the image for larger version – The huntsman has paused and is having a nip from his saddle flask.
The BBC has uploaded nearly 63,000 images of paintings in British collections. They are planning to get to 200,000, and they are inviting volunteers to assist in tagging the images to assist future searchers, which as a pastime to fiddle with on one’s PC may even beat Freecell.
Michelangelo?, Crucifixion With The Madonna, St John And Two Mourning Angels, 16th century, currently, Ashmolean Museum
The British Province of the Society of Jesus must be gearing up for a major weekend in Las Vegas. They just sold the oldest intact surviving European book, the Stonyhust Gospel, to the British Library for £9m ($14.3m). Now, they’re getting ready to put up the spout a painting identified by an Italian art historian as a Michelangelo which could conceivably fetch $100m or more at auction.
Campion Hall, one of six Permanent Private Halls (essentially small-scale divinity schools, operated by different religious denominations or religious orders thereof) at Oxford University, owns a painting purchased by a previous master at a Sotheby’s auction in 1930.
It was scientifically-examined using infrared photography by Antonio Forcellino, an art historian who has written several books on Michelangelo (including the just-published The Lost Michelangelos), who found that the painting was based upon a cartoon in hand of Michelangelo himself.
The painting was previously believed to have been executed by Marcello Venusti, a Mannerist painter who sometimes worked from Michelangelo’s designs. But Forcellino was convinced that the painting was really the work of the master’s own hand, and he was able to associate the painting with a close friend of the famous artist, Tommaso Cavalieri, by the presence of 18 seals of the Cavalieri family coat of arms still present on the edge of the panel.
Arnold Böcklin, Im Spiel der Wellen [At Play in the Waves], 1883, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen Munich, Neue Pinakothek
It’s a good idea to look in from time to time at the Polish art blog Spod pędzla (pronounced “Spod pendzla,” and meaning “from the brush”). “Estees” comes up with some very amusing items, like this Symbolist painting of mermaids in the process of being sexually harassed by two male mythological beings by the Swiss painter Arnold Böcklin (1827 – 1901).
The German history & images source GHDI supplies some information and context:
In 1899, when the craze for Arnold Böcklin’s work was in full swing, the art historian Cornelius Gurlitt (the brother of Böcklin’s Berlin dealer Fritz Gurlitt) wrote that the German public regarded this painting as “one of the greatest achievements of our century.” When it was painted in 1883, art critics had been less sure. Enthusiasm for the painting had grown, however, by the time of its showing at the Third Munich International in 1888. Offering his interpretation of the work, Ferdinand Avenarius of Der Kunstwart declared that the worried mermaid being pursued by the laughing triton personified the ocean itself and the natural forces of water and sky. Actually, a rather ordinary episode in the artist’s life appears to have provided the immediate inspiration for this composition. Böcklin had been swimming in Italy with the family of Anton Dohrn, the zoologist who commissioned Hans von Marées’s Oarsmen. Dohrn dove into the waves, swam some distance underwater, and suddenly resurfaced near the women in the bathing party. The ladies’ surprise caught Böcklin’s fancy, and he decided to portray a similar scene drawn from the world of mythical underwater creatures. His compostion thrusts the viewer into the rising and falling waves, which are shown without the slightest hint of land in the distance. Dohrn’s features can actually be seen in the face of the triton, whose freely expressed and ribald intentions make this the most playful of Böcklin’s works. In the early years of the twentieth-century, when overzealous members of the moral purity movement were subject to ridicule and denouncement, In the Play of the Waves offered ample basis for caricature – moral zealots, complete with fig leaves, were shown swimming into the frame of the painting in order to arrest the mermaids.
It is clearly a centaur puffing and paddling vigorously after two mermaids in the rear, while a more relaxed, and more completely submerged, lustful triton is leering lasciviously as he closes upon the person of a far-more-refined and delicate mermaid, who looks decidedly dismayed by his clearly inescapable advances.
Antoine Joseph Wiertz, Dernières pensées et visions d’une tête coupee (Last Thoughts and Visions of a Decapitated Head), 1853
The Belgian artist Antoine Joseph Wiertz (1806-1865) devoted most of his art to expressions of the Romantic era’s obsession with death.
Wiertz took a personal interest in the scientific question of just how long consciousness survived in the head of the victim of execution by guillotine, and in 1848 used hypnosis to attempt to share the pains and rapidly fading consciousness of a murderer undergoing decapitation for the crime of bludgeoning his landlady. The result (above) was a triptych completed in 1853.
There is a state museum devoted to Wiertz’s art in Brussels.
China intentionally insulted the United States during the recent state visit by Hu Jintao by arranging for a Chinese pianist to play a Korean War-era anti-American propaganda song (referring to Americans as “jackals”) in the White House.
Well, you have to hand it to Obama. He has struck back devastatingly, and with truly Oriental cruelty, by presenting the Chinese leader with a huge and magnificently preposterous piece of modern art, a massive semi-abstract oil painting by a couple of Chinese brothers from Chicago, featuring caricature images of Ronald Reagan and seven of the worst presidents in US history plus a spiral line intended to represent the great Wall of China on a textured background.
Ownership of this noisome object (which looks like a failed elementary school art project) would be declined by the gaudiest Szechaun restaurant in San Francisco, but the Chinese People’s Republic will have to hang it in a place of honor (being a state gift from the American president, after all), where it will loom as a permanent reminder not to mess with the United States. Zhou you, China!
), who found that the painting was based upon a cartoon in hand of Michelangelo himself.
