Leave it to New York Magazine to point us in the direction(s) that we all need to be going for the next year.
As part of the current issue “How to Make it in the Art World” come across as a typical pedestrian guide to half truths and ultimate fallacy. Unless it’s right and then it’s brilliant. The articles are here: http://nymag.com/arts/art/rules/.
I thought you might enjoy and even possibly use this handy guide to the must attend global events for the next year.
I like to admit it when I’m late to the game and in this case it’s by a few years. I was over at greg.org recently and stumbled over the post about the Elsworth Kelly issue of Die Welt, in which every illustration in the newspaper is a Kelly image. After kicking around on Die Welts website I realized that there are probably electronic back issues available of the paper.
A few moments later I discovered that George Baselitz had also done an issue for them as well.
So color me impressed. Pretty interesting take on the use of “High Art” in the arena that is usually looking for context specific visual documents, and in its place we get Kelly and Baselitz. I never really thought that a Kelly artwork would be a good for the news about soccer. I guess you learn something everyday.
You can download a PDF version of these issues: Kelly | Baselitz
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With the current Exhibition on display at the NGA London, a number of interesting things about Leonardo have been getting a little bit more play in the mainstream press.
While I tend to write more often on a more modern approach to art, it is not without knowledge in the past. (And let’s be honest – anyone who has even a smattering of interest in art should have a reasonable understanding of the history of art)
I was reading the latest interview at ArtInfo this morning and the interview of Martin Kemp was pretty riveting. Among the many things he discusses about Leonard and the “Salvator Mundi.” the two that jump out at me are Leonardo’s interest and knowledge in geology and optics. The geological piece is about the Rock Crystal that the Jesus figure is holding and the optics has to do with depth of field. The depth of field one is really curious because DoF is primarily a photographic concern – and here we see Leonardo using the effect well before what we might call pre-photography.
Often we as viewers have been down the path that Leonardo is a genius – and let’s be frank – he was. However the thinking that is being show in the image of Salvator Mundi as Jesus is just phenomenal.
(small excerpt of the interview below) (URL: http://artinfo.com/news/story/750715/the-male-mona-lisa-art-historian-martin-kemp-on-leonardo-da-vincis-mysterious-salvator-mundi )
Excerpt begins here…
What was striking for me was the orb, and I’ve subsequently researched it quite heavily. The “Salvator Mundi” obviously holds the mundus, the world which he’s saving, and it was absolutely unlike anything I’ve seen before. The orbs in other Salvator Mundis, often they’re of a kind of brass or solid. Sometimes they’re terrestrial globes, sometimes they’re translucent glass, and one or two even have little landscapes in them. What this one had was an amazing series of glistening little apertures — they’re like bubbles, but they’re not round — painted very delicately, with just a touch of impasto, a touch of dark, and these little sort of glistening things, particularly around the part where you get the back reflections. And that said to me: rock crystal. Because rock crystal gets what are called inclusions, and to get clear rock crystal is very difficult, particularly big bits. So there are these little gaps, which are slightly irregular in shape, and I thought, well, that’s pretty fancy. And Leonardo was a bit of an expert on rock crystal. He was asked to judge vases that Isabella d’Este was thinking of buying, and he loved those materials.
So when I was back in Oxford, I went to the geology department, and I said, “Let’s have a look at some rock crystal.” And in the Ashmolean Museum, in a wunderkammer of curiosities, there is a big rock crystal ball, and that has inclusions, so we photographed it under comparable lighting conditions I also began to look at the heel of the hand underneath the globe in the “Salvator Mundi”; there are two heels. The restorer thought it was a pentimento, but I wondered if he was recording a double refraction of the kind you get with a calcite sphere. If this proves to be right, it would be absolutely Leonardesque. I like these things when they’re not just connoisseurship. None of the copyists knew that. They just transcribed it. Some of them do better than others, but none of them got this crystal with its possible double refraction. And one of the points of the crystal sphere is that it relates iconographically to the crystalline sphere of the heavens, because in Ptolemaic cosmology the stars were in the fixed crystalline sphere, and so they were embedded. So what you’ve got in the “Salvator Mundi” is really a “a savior of the cosmos”, and this is a very Leonardesque transformation.
Another thing I subsequently looked at is that there’s a difference from what we would call depth of field — the blessing hand and the tips of the fingers are in quite sharp focus. The face, even allowing for some of the damage, is in quite soft focus. Leonardo, in Manuscript D of 1507-1508, explored depth of field. If you bring something too close to you, you can’t see it and it doesn’t have a sense of focus. If you’ve got it an optimum point, it’s much sharper. Then you move it away and it gets less sharp. He was investigating that phenomenon. So there are these intellectual aspects, optical aspects, and things in terms of these semiprecious materials that are unique to Leonardo.”
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The Van Gogh museum is currently restoring one of the planets favorite paintings; Van Gogh’s “The Bedroom” (sometimes called “The Bedroom at Arles”). What is noteworthy about this is the blog that the museum has dedicated to showing the process from beginning to end.
The site has been there from the beginning, from posts about the trolley that moved the painting, to the condition of the stretcher. Complete with photos of the condition of the tacks that hold the painting to the stretcher – as well as the back of the painting and stretcher. It also highlights a previous version of restoring the painting and how those corrections are fairing.
I’m impressed by the very nature of using the blog as a tool for allowing an audience that is interested in seeing the work being done – but really has no reason to be allowed to see it done, see it up close. It’s not really transparency but it is a great record and fantastic behind the scenes peek.
While not updated everyday, it is certainly worth a few minutes of your time. Follow this link for the English language version.
All Photos from the Van Gogh Museum’s blog.
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