simcoe/ART

Angelo Bronzino, "Eleanor of Toledo" (1544), The Uffizi, Florence

After a rather lazy month on my part, I am going to put forth a better effort to post more often in August. Sometimes life interrupts our passions, and some things have to be set aside temporarily. But on with the post…..

- The Guardian UK has a great article about a Renaissance  practice which is being gradually…well, um….. uncovered. It seems that certain painters would use their canvases to cover other works of art which may have been considered inappropriate, heretical or politically dangerous. It has been discovered that this was done by such giants as Bronzino (left), Pontormo and even Titian.

- The National Gallery of Art is holding an exhibition on the much overlooked 17th C. Dutch painter Judith Leyster. It seems that much is being made of this exhibition, with The New Yorks Times even saying that it is a “400-year-old answer to the art historian Linda Nochlin’s famous question ‘Why have there been no great women artists?’” Here is a slide show on the exhibition and here is the Times article.

- Locally, the Taft Museum of Art just announced it’s 2009-10 exhibition schedule. Like a lot of museum’s nowadays, the Taft has scaled back, even cancelling its summer exhibit. Instead it is promoting smaller, but in many ways more interesting shows including Drawn by New York and Dutch Utopia: American Artists in Holland, 1880–1914. Sounds like a great season. Read the press release for more details.

Francisco de Goya, "The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters" (1797-1799)

The etching on the left, by Francisco de Goya, is one of the pieces of art that first drew me into this. The message spoke to me. It said that the silence of human reason doesn’t merely mean a dormant mind, but also points to a more dangerous foe — apathy. Goya first created El Suenos as part of a series of etchings, Los Caprichos (Fantasies). Their point was to ”speak against the predominance of superstition, the ignorance and inabilities of the various members of the ruling class, pedagogical short-comings, marital mistakes, and the decline of rationality. ” (Robert Hughes)  To me, they are Goya’s homage to the Enlightenment which was reaching its penultimate mark at in the late 18th C. For Goya himself they depicted: “the innumerable foibles and follies to be found in any civilized society, and from the common prejudices and deceitful practices which custom, ignorance, or self-interest have made usual”.

Yinka Shonibare, "The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters (Africa)", Sothebys, London

Louis Edouard Fournier, "Funeral of Shelley" (1889), Walker Gallery, UK

This world is the nurse of all we know,
This world is the mother of all we feel,
And the coming of death is a fearful blow
To a brain unencompass’d by nerves of steel:
When all that we know, or feel, or see,
Shall pass like an unreal mystery.
- “On Death”, Percy Bysshe Shelley

Jasper Johns, "Three Flags" (1958), Whitney Museum of Art

This composition of wax and pigment on a canvas (encaustic style) by 20th C. American  painter Jasper Johns stirs many things in me. It reminds me of the beautiful geometry of our flag. It brings back, from childhood, memories of prints my grandmother had on her wall…..cheesy folk art images of Main Street USA, images I’m sure that Johns was trying to invoke.  But looking at it now, it informs me that even though I consider myself rather jaded and suspicious of sentimentalism, I am truly jingoistic at heart. At our core, at our very base, the United States is a nation that meant something and still means something beyond just our shores. From France in 1789 to Tehran in 2009, crowds still quote Thomas Jefferson’s beautiful prose: “We hold these truths to be self-evident…” Have a thankful Independence Day.