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.”

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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 x 15.6 cm (8.8 x 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 x 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.