Umbrellas

Umbrella forms are hanging from lower boughs of trees on the 2000 block of W Berteau in Chicago.

The wind animates these forms, but has also blown some of them down.

12 Umbrellas

 

11 Umbrellas

 

6 Umbrellas

 

5 Umbrellas

 

4 Umbrellas

 

3 Umbrellas

 

3 more umbrellas

Carel Weight: All Souls

Carel Weight is simply one of my favorite painters of all time. His imagery is steeped in isolation and anxiety, and he paints the kind of psychologically disturbing and haunting images that I adore. Born in London in 1908, he worked as an artist and teacher in England throughout his adult life, and although he exhibited his paintings regularly, he kept a comparitively low profile as an artist. At one point he had the opportunity to take the route of exclusive gallery representation, which would have increased his wealth and fame significantly, but he opted to hold ambition in check so that his friends might still be able to afford his work. His paintings are not well known internationally, which is a loss for those of us who delight in idiosyncratic vision. However, UK blogger ‘I Love Total Destruction’ has an entry on him here, and since I began writing this entry months ago, Paul Behnke blogged about Carel Weight here, so there are contemporary artists who hold him in esteem and there is the hope that Weight’s work will reach a wider audience.

Weight’s paintings are captivating for many reasons - his color sense is perfectly in tune with his mysterious imagery, his realism is modified by the emotions of fear and anguish, and his compositions reveal a deep understanding of 2-d image structure. Formally, he was an accomplished painter and a teacher to some of England’s best-known contemporary artists, including David Hockney, whose 1968 portraitAmerican Collectors (Fred and Marcia Weisman) at the Art Institute of Chicago shares a similar sensitivity to uncomfortable personal relationships that was Weight’s great strength.

It isn’t mastery over materials that keeps me looking at Weight’s work though - it’s his crazy, compelling, haunted voice, and how he gives us a frank look at the unknowable world of individual emotional lives. He paints human beings in almost every canvas, and gives us portraits that are at least as much about the personality of the sitter as they are about a depiction; see his riveting portrait of Orovida Pissaro, the French Impressionist’s grand-daughter, whom Weight referred to as ‘magnificent.’ 1 Weight also painted people in the midst of tense and theatrical situations, showing victims fleeing aggressors, people in flight from burning buildings or flood, and impending traffic disasters. Many of his canvases show people sitting or standing among one another yet in unmistakable isolation, such as the 1965 canvas The Silence at the Royal Academy of Art. Of all his paintings, the ones I love the most show people and apparitions together as a way to underscore the emotional complexities of the painting. Weight incorporates apparitions into his paintings with great success as a content vehicle when they’re commonly used a device, overt or witless. To me, that’s quite an accomplishment.

I can’t tell you when apparitions first appeared in his paintings; a large number of his works were eradicated when his London studio was bombed during WWII, early in his career. However, a broad overview of Weight’s work from the beginning of his career as an Official War Artist to his lengthy tenure at the Royal Academy of Art shows that his figures were both solid and diaphanous during the second World War, by 1942 at least.

Carel Weight, Hammersmith Nights, Oil on board, approx. 6” x 8.5”, 1942, © the estate of Carel Weight

Weight stated unequivocally “I have always been terrified by the idea of ghosts.” Terrified by an idea is one thing, but is there evidence that ghosts were real for him? The only literal ghost I’m aware of in his work is found in “The Presence,” a canvas from 1955, depicting a scene at Bishop’s Park at dusk. On seeing this canvas, one Londoner told Weight that she had seen that same apparition there. Weight admitted that he liked “to weave fantasy into the context of quite ordinary things” but then also said that the woman made him think there was “a likelihood that the ‘presence’ is not just a figment of my own imagination.” 2 This ghostly presence is found in the bottom center of the canvas; she is a transparent figure wearing a headcovering and holding what appears to be a basket, with her full-length dress rendered in light turquoise, picking up the shade of the park bench behind her.

Carel Weight, The Presence, Oil on Canvas, 1955, 47.5” x 80”,© the estate of Carel Weight

I’ve found no source that can state if real-world experience was at the heart of Weight’s other painted apparitions. That would be interesting to know because of how he depicts them; they are matter-of-fact, rendered without gore in the case of the haunted, or syrup in the case of the angelic.

In some works, Weight makes apparitions exist as a sort of natural conclusion; they aren’t by themselves terrifying or gory, but it’s their presence as something natural and ordinary that gives pause. Most often, people describe apparitions with the word ‘otherworldly,’ but in Weight’s case it doesn’t apply, as these isolated, ethereal beings seem the most unaffected occupants in the world. In ‘The Departing Angel,’ Weight is simply showing us an afterlife extension of the reality of isolation among the living:

Carel Weight, The Departing Angel, 1961, Oil on canvas, 36” x 36”

© Royal Academy of Arts, London, Photographer: John Hammond

Weight’s departing angel is neither luminous nor particularly hopeful, but has a resigned appearance that tells me that the artist’s outlook to the end of time remained bleak. His apparitions are painted with a sense of fluidity, and in contrast I notice how his living figures appear immobilized, as though they suffer some kind of emotional quarantine. They brood, they worry, and they have a sickness of spirit that keeps them disengaged with each other as well as the world around them. In this same painting for example, one would think that a young woman who has just ended a visitation from an angel might be feeling some sort of ecstasy, but here she calmly remains seated, as though she’s recollecting something mundane.

Weight often portrayed living figures in resignation and grief, highlighting their sadness with closed body language like folded hands resting in the lap. The painting ‘Fallen Woman’ doesn’t include an obvious apparition but shows a dejected woman seated in a dark alcove next to two empty terra cotta pots and behind a bare trellis that figures as a sort of cage. She has a mysterious circle inscribed above her head; it’s a ring of black on the brick, and there’s a shadow of this ring shape to the right. From my vantage point as a painter, these circles seem to be the first attempts at head placement on the part of the artist, so they function as a type of phantom for me.

Fallen Woman, Carel Weight, 1967.jpg

Carel Weight, Fallen Woman, 40” x 23”, 1967, © the estate of Carel Weight

The most typically angelic figure that I know to exist in his paintings is found in ‘The Battersea Park Tragedy,’ which commemorates children who were killed when a car jumped the track on an amusement ride. The grieving woman reflects on “the closeness of tragedy, the bolt from the blue.” 3 But the sobbing angel -possibly one of the children- is unable to ascend, bare feet trapped at the ankles in the red roller-coaster track.

The Battersea Park Tragedy, Carel Weight, 1974.jpg

Carel Weight, The Battersea Park Tragedy, Oil on Canvas, 72” x 96”, 1974, © the estate of Carel Weight

Memories, loneliness, and internal fears and terrors are present in his work, and apparitions function as the uniting factor between internal and external worlds. A jarring skeletal form clutches a female figure from behind in the painting ‘Sunshine and Shadow,’ yet doesn’t seem to terrify her; it merely impedes the woman’s movement so she seems trapped by a memory of her past. Her innocence is portrayed by nudity and sunshine in the top half of the painting, where the young figure is oblivious to an ominous form watching her from the shadows:

Sunshine and Shadow, Carel Weight, c1968.jpg

Carel Weight, Sunshine and Shadow, Oil on Canvas, 21” x 13”, 1968,© the estate of Carel Weight

In ‘Thoughts of Girlhood,’ an old woman fixed in a metal chair recalls her youth, with the memory of her buxom figure an integral part of her lush garden landscape.  Both the living woman and her fond memory supply us with a blank emotional landscape, perhaps suggesting that the subject never really found happiness in her long life, except perhaps in the pleasures of her garden:

Thoughts of Girlhood, Carel Weight, 1968.jpg

Carel Weight, Thoughts of Girlhood, Oil on Canvas, 36” x 48,” 1968, © the estate of Carel Weight

The most disturbing people in Weight’s paintings never seem to be the apparitions oddly enough, but the running children who are terrified, screaming, and painted mostly in the lower third of the canvas, often toward a corner, in a desperate effort to flee the confines of the scene. I’d like to think that Weight gives these young, living souls some hope in that they often extend beyond the edge of the canvas, partially escaped.

Carel Weight, Frightened Children, Oil on canvas, 36” x 48”, 1981, © the estate of Carel Weight

Carel Weight, The Invocation, Oil on Panel, 20” x 24”, 1976, © the estate of Carel Weight

1. Mervyn Levy, Carel Weight (Chicago: Academy Chicago Publishers, 1986), 64.

2. Levy, Carel Weight, 23.

3. Levy, Carel Weight, 31.

_____________

Courtney, Carol. “Obituary: Professor Carel Weight.” The Independent, August 15, 1997. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/obituary-professor-carel-weight-1245500.html

Levy. Mervyn. Carel Weight. Chicago: Academy Chicago Publishers, 1986.

271 New Picassos? Too Good to be True

To borrow a line from Cory Doctorow, “Just look at this banana drawing. Just look at it.” Ok, Cory has a thing for bananas, not Picasso, but for me the ‘just look at it’ sentiment is the same. Just look at art.

Like most people, I was expectant when I heard of the new trove of Picasso works, but seeing a slideshow of 11 selected works on the French website Liberation Next was a huge disappointment. I finally had a chance to see a few carefully selected pieces out of 271, and wondered immediately where the good examples were. Why wouldn’t they want to publish the good ones? Perhaps some of the remaining 260 works are Picasso’s, but I don’t believe that all these other 11 pieces are his work. Here’s why.

First, I need to lay a little groundwork. For those of you who haven’t studied art, or art history, or Picasso, you might not know that he was born with a gift -which was a pitch-perfect understanding of the language of drawing, accompanied by a relentless desire to work. His drawing is always facile, his level of draftsmanship was freakishly accurate even at an early age, and he was compelled to bend this facility as he developed as an artist throughout his life.

Of all the elements of drawing, it is his understanding of form that’s most notable. When you look carefully through a lifetime of his work, you see that he understood how to convey form in drawing/painting like no one else, remarkably, consistenly, and I’ve not seen anything he’s drawn or painted where he has been relieved of that understanding. This is what you need to remember when you’re looking at Picasso- he couldn’t ‘flatten out’ a form in a way that kids do, or draw the clunky way that beginning drawing students do. There’s no struggle with transforming line, or any of the other elements of drawing, into form. When he said that he always wanted to draw like a child, he meant that he wanted to be able to draw in that delightful, flat way that kids have, by using shapes that remain firmly 2d and don’t suggest an illusion of three dimensions behind the picture plane. His understanding of form was his specific gift, and present at a very early age - it’s what made him a prodigy, and he worked toward getting rid of it - notably with cubism- but was never entirely successful. It’s always there in his work, even in the flattest, most linear things he drew. This gift he had was like perfect pitch - you can’t get rid of it or make it go away.

To show you what I mean, let’s start with a sketch of some pigeons he made at eight, possibly nine. He’s concerned with form, and this drawing is an example of what he meant when he said he never drew like children draw:

Five years later when he started art school at 14, he made this drawing from a plaster cast:

And a drawing from a living model, still at art school a year later at 15:

 

When I was teaching, I found that very few people knew about this very early work of Picasso’s, and learning about it somehow legitimized his other work for them. Knowing about this helped them learn to pay attention to what they saw in art. Now, just look at this supposed Picasso drawing. Just look at it.

 

I hardly know where to start.

Here’s the first nail, historically speaking: the date on the upper left corner of the drawing says 6-1-21-. As is the custom in Europe, Picasso wrote dates with the day first, then the month, so it would be January 6th, 1921, which means that Olga would have been 8 months pregnant with Paulo, Picasso’s first child, born February 4, 1921. Oops, the forger forgot to take into account personal history.

Again, Picasso understands form. I photoshopped the head away from the drawing so you can look at the body. The head is what distracts people, being the most ‘Picasso-esque’ part of the picture, and makes people rethink their initial ‘this doesn’t look quite right’ position. Even if you initially miss how utterly unconvincing her figure is in terms of form and fluidity, you have to admit that this alleged Olga is a far cry from 8 months along. Picasso wouldn’t have ignored that fact in a drawing he did of Olga at 8 months, nor would he try to hide it - her pregnancy and how it changed her svelte ballerina’s body into a solid, thick form was the point of his work at this time. He was in the midst of painting massive, chunky, extra heavy figures, clearly pleased with his ability to transform Olga’s body with his own, as well as his brush.

Now take a look at some of the other things that jump out, like the awkward hands, covered with work gloves, sorta. It’s as if the forger remembered ‘Oh yeah, Picasso was making really meaty hands then, so I better try to make them look big and heavy’ and then pressed his graphite heavily onto the paper, going back over the countour in short movements because he was pressing so hard. Next, look at her left hand, and then notice the small left hand above it. The small one was drawn first, then the forger moved over to draw the shoulders and collar, and then noticed that the proportion of the hand was too small, then had to draw it bigger to come closer to the correct proportion. In order to keep it looking massive, he drew it by pressing heavily again on the paper.

Oh, and then he added a wedding ring, sure, ‘cause they were married, get it? Please find me a drawing or painting Picasso did of Olga (or any of his wives) wearing a wedding ring, because I’ve never seen one. Did you see how the right arm looks broken at the wrist? The forger has no idea how a hand joins an arm - no understanding of form. Would you kindly look at that shirt collar that doesn’t have any body inside it? It’s completely flat.

Whoever drew this also doesn’t understand how gesture becomes contour. Look at the way the scribbling stays scribbling, and doesn’t indicate a chair edge, or a collar edge, or a lap edge. Picasso’s drawing speed wasn’t about scribbling, it described something about the subject. And what is going on with those wimpy, hairy lines on her left shoulder? They aren’t there to indicate a darker value, nor do they follow the form of the body, they just start and stop within the shape of the shoulder, not coming near the edges of the form, but filling it in, without defining anything. They’re equivocal, plainly different in feeling from the short, heavily-made marks of the hands. There’s also an odd wavy line in her lap that doesn’t mean anything. This drawing has a thoroughly hesitant and dubious quality. But Picasso never doubted his ability to draw; he was never unsure of the language of drawing. He would draw over information he had drawn before, but not apprehensively - he just drew, with confidence, because he never had to wonder if he’d ‘be able to get it right this time.’

And, pardon me, but can you tell me why her butt looks like the bottom of a cloud that a second-grader would draw? This forger simply doesn’t understand the fundamental tools of drawing - line, contour, gesture, shape, value, form - and has no idea how to control them in the quick yet convincing way that Picasso did. There’s no facility.

Here’s the drawing, annotated, so these points might be easier for you to see:

 

Here’s an authentic drawing of Olga and Paulo that Picasso made shortly after his birth, about a month after the fake one above was purportedly made. Just look at this Picasso drawing. Just look at it.

 

Here’s another thing to notice - look through Picasso’s legitimate work, and you’ll find he never made unconvincing hands or feet. Even if the hands or feet were pared down and linear, he always understood the form behind them- I’ll get to this again in a second. Take a look at this newly discovered fake from the treasure trove:

 

This drawing is supposedly from 1920, according to the website, so Olga would be the model. Oh, wait - the whole pose was copied from a print from the Vollard Suite from 1934, in which his blonde mistress Marie-Therese served as a model, along with Olga. Recall that Picasso’s work is autobiographical. He was engrossed with Olga in 1920 - she was his muse and model, a Russian brunette ballerina. He didn’t hire a blonde model in 1920 so he could practice figure drawing. Some may argue that the facial features on the fake drawing bear a resemblance to those of Marie-Therese, especially the forehead to the nose. But dear forger, if you’re going to try to fake a Picasso, don’t use cross-hatching to disguise the fact that you can’t draw a neck, or don’t know how to deal with a head of hair, or aren’t sure about where an ear would go exactly, or can’t find body contours, or can’t draw the edge of the box she’s sitting on, or can’t figure out how high up a knee should be if she’s crossing her legs, or are timid about drawing private bits if the pose suggests it. Just look through his work - Picasso was not timid at all about drawing and painting women’s private bits. Or men’s, to be fair.

Now look again at the hands and feet- all four are tossed off - no crosshatching in them at all, because the forger avoided them. If he used any crosshatching on the hands and feet, he would run the risk of making them all look worse than they do now. And if Picasso were going to draw the figure in a way that suggests an unnatural positioning of limbs, why only do it in one tiny part of the drawing instead of throughout, like always? The forger drew the knee and leg down to the ankle so it would face toward us, then wrenched one ankle 90 degrees to the side at just the point where the foot meets the ankle.

Here’s the same fake drawing, annotated:

 

Here’s the etching from the Vollard Suite the forger used as inspiration, Femme assise au chapeau et femme debout drapee. The print is in an edition of 250, so there are plenty floating around, not to mention its appearance in books:

 

Here’s the extent to which the forger tried to be clever. He knew this image was an etching, and knew Picasso would have drawn it on the grounded copper plate as a mirror image. The forger thinks, “I’ll make an early drawing of this pose, reversed, you know, to show precedence for the etching and lend viability to the forgery.”

Note the etched image as Picasso would have drawn it, reversed, next to the forgery:

 

Another example of a forgery from the group is the head of Olga, and it makes me laugh, not because it quotes so heavily from the 1917 portrait Picasso did of her the year before they were married, but because the forger quoted the clouded eye of his 1903 painting Celestina for one of Olga’s eyes- that’s just funny. Also funny is the painting of the hand with the huge green halo around it, this time done in the style of Van Gogh! And the fakey ‘nude lying on the beach’ of 1920? There’s so very much to pick on in that one. The collages too - there are qualities that aren’t right in them either.

I’m not trying to say that this French electrician is a forger or liar, but having people learn how to see that these are fakes is important. Other people can decide if this whole new ‘trove’ of Picassos is a carefully conceived plot to absorb some of the millions floating around in the art world.

I’ve only covered two of these 11 works in detail, and that will do for now; I hope write more on this subject sometime in the future. The ‘experts’ say that the work is worth 80 million dollars, but truly, there are better places to put that money in the art world. There’s plenty of worthy artwork out there - just look. 

Van Eyck's Muse, Arnolfini's New Wife

Jan Van Eyck’s 1434 painting of the Arnolfini Marriage is a peach, one of those images that continues to stir up the fire for the love of painting. It’s one of the first truly saturated paintings I know of; brimming with symbolism, Van Eyck jammed every square centimeter of the modestly-sized surface with photo-realistic detail. It’s magnificent now, but was an absolute stunner in its day. No wonder the Duke of Burgundy treated Van Eyck well. You can take a closer look at it here, at the National Gallery’s website.

I’ve been paying attention to it again, as well as to some of Van Eyck’s other works. From what I’ve read, hardly an exhaustive list, opinions about this painting can be fairly consistent on some levels, but quite different on others.

But I’ve always had a hunch about the woman in this painting - that she was Van Eyck’s muse, and that perhaps the artist even introduced her to Arnolfini after Arnolfini’s first wife Costanza died in 1433. There’s no record of her name, so I’ll refer to her as Muse. This would make the morganatic aspect of the Arnolfini painting make sense; Arnolfini may not have had heirs by Costanza, but he could have assigned them by then, so the left-handed marriage sealed as an official document by the painting would have prevented Muse’s children from inheriting the merchant’s/banker’s fortune. The theories put forth by some historians that Arnolfini was a shrewd, cunning businessman who didn’t want to share his wealth don’t seem reasonable to me; if he were that miserly, why would Muse be dressed so well? with fine jewelry? and statuary to see to her safe delivery of children?

Another theory I’ve read postulates that this is a posthumous portrait of Costanza. But look at the painting for a good, long while and notice how Van Eyck paints. It’s not a chandelier, it’s that surface of that exact chandelier. It’s not a leaded glass window, it’s that surface of that exact one, and on and on. When you look at what you see in this painting-and all of his other paintings- it’s clear that Van Eyck worked from what was actually there. He painted a living woman.

Besides, I think Muse appears at least twice in Van Eyck paintings as the Virgin Mary. Maybe an art historian has written about Muse in Van Eyck’s other paintings- if you’ve read about it, please point it out in the comments. I know some think Van Eyck’s wife modeled for the Lucca Virgin, but my opinion differs on that, as you’ll see.

Here’s Muse is a little more than a year later as The Virgin of Chancellor Rolin. She’s holding a baby…go figure.
You can look at this painting on the Louvre’s website by clicking here.

Let’s take a closer look at Muse in Rolin and the Arnolfini portrait - there are some differences, but the similarities outweigh them in my opinion. The way the head is posed in both paintings is similar, but Muse tilts her head down demurely with Arnolfini, and her head is a bit more in profile than in Rolin. The fleshiness to the right of Muse’s right eye in Rolin tells me she sat multiple times for this painting, and had her head positioned more frontally at one point. Look at her dimply chin and delicate upper lip, that curve right under her lower lip, and the curve of her brow from her nose. And Muse’s beautiful, actual nose is there with Arnolfini, but I think Van Eyck idealized it for Rolin - he was painting her as the Virgin Mary after all. What strikes me as so odd about Muse’s nose in the Rolin painting is that it looks like Van Eyck just didn’t bother to paint in a nostril at all. The hole is there, but it’s like her nose comes right out of her cheek - like Muse was sitting for the portrait, but Van Eyck ignored that part of her that wasn’t perfect, and thought it best to just leave the nostril out of the picture rather than make one up.

Even though the faces don’t show the same exact 3/4 view, what if I rotate the Virgin and superimpose her on the Arnolfini painting? I’ve lined up the corners of the eyes, and haven’t changed the proportions on the images at all:
Rolin at 25% opacity on Arnolfini
Rolin at 50% opacity on Arnolfini
Rolin at 75% opacity on Arnolfini

Note the corners of eyes, brows, brow curvature and, nose length/nostril hole placement, lip width, width and corners of mouth, rounded, convex chin and dimple, flesh under chin - they all line up. All of these proportions are the same, and I don’t think that’s coincidence; I think it’s the same model, Muse, who lent her graceful proportions and distinctive facial characteristics to this painting by sitting for the portrait with her baby.

But the thing that clinches it for me is Muse’s ear. You know how in a passport photo you need to have one of your ears showing, because it’s such a distinguishing feature? Let’s look at Muse’s ear in both the Arnolfini and the Rolin. A note- when you superimpose Muse’s face in Rolin and as a bride (above), her ears don’t line up exactly- but remember we noticed the extra fleshiness to the right of her right eye which indicates her head was posed slightly differently on different days of sitting -and likewise I think the lack of perfect alignment on her ear placement happened for the same reason. Van Eyck painted her ear where he saw it on the day he worked on it. A painter as interested in surface detail as he was would naturally paint that way.

As a bride, Muse’s ear is partially covered, but you can see the bump between her cheek and the ear canal, the way the lobe curves, and the shape and ascent in the upper part of her ear:

Here’s Muse’s ear as painted in Rolin:

And here they are, superimposed, 50% opacity. They match up virtually identically:

Muse’s features line up in another painting very well, The Lucca Virgin from 1436. Looks like the same baby to me too- long torso, light curly locks, and compared to the size of Muse’s hand in Rolin, a tad bigger, even like he might be walking — his legs aren’t quite so chubby. You can see the whole Lucca Virgin painting here, but here’s a detail:

One line of thinking puts Van Eyck’s wife Margarite in the role of the model for Lucca, and I’ll grant that the proportions of Margarite’s eye width:length of nose: space between nose and chin seem to be equal to Lucca’s when the images are superimposed, except there are some important differences that lead me to believe it’s not Margarite.

Let’s look at Margarite from a detail of Van Eyck’s painting of her:
Looking above at Van Eyck’s portrait of Margarite, note the width of her mouth and how there’s no dimpling by the corners of her mouth to her cheeks, see how the corner of her mouth sags down a bit and her upper lip is quite narrow, and look at how her cheeks appear flat rather than round. Margarite’s chin is too flat, her jawline absent, and in general, she has a longer, narrower face than the Lucca Virgin. I’m sure Margarite was a lovely human being, but Van Eyck’s portrait of her represented the surface details of her face, as was his style, and the fact remains that she was plain. Muse isn’t, and neither is Lucca or the Virgin of Rolin.

When Margarite is superimposed (60% Margarite) on Lucca, note how differently her brow line is from Lucca’s, and how much narrower her face:

And again we have the ears - to me, Margarite’s ear and Lucca’s are so different they can’t be modeled on the same person. Margarite is missing the little flap in front of the ear canal, but it’s present on Muse’s three appearances in Van Eyck’s paintings. The cartilage in Margarite’s ear also seems to protrude a bit toward the back, and the way her ear ascends and folds over on the top is more angular than Lucca’s.

Instead, Let’s put Lucca on Muse Arnolfini (50% opacity):
Notice the curve of the brow, and also how the curve near the temple from the corner of the left eye to the end of the left eyebrow are identical to Muse’s in Arnolfini, and how her nose, mouth, and rounder chin with dimple also match up in the same places. This wasn’t Margarite’s face. And the two ears? Not only are they in exactly the same place on the head - the structure looks like exactly the same ear.

Finally, you might be interested to see Muse all three times, superimposed at 33% opacity, with Arnolfini, in Rolin, and as Lucca.
Someday I may be able to see all these paintings in person and take high resolution photographs to really put my theory to the test. Until then, I remain grateful that the web gives us such a good peek at paintings from around the world.

Perfect Balance: Hayne de Bruxelles version of the Notre-Dame de Grace

In the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City MO, there’s a small panel of a Virgin and Child painted about 1455 by Hayne de Bruxelles. The Nelson-Atkins has kindly allowed me to reproduce the painting on my blog so I can share with you the qualities that mesmerize me. I first saw the painting in a book they published in 2005 called “German and Netherlandish Paintings 1450-1600” by Burton L. Dunbar (here’s a link to the book on Amazon) but I haven’t found it reproduced anywhere on the web. Here it is:

Hayne de Bruxelles, French or Flemish (active 1450s). Virgin and Child, ca. 1454-1455. Oil on wood panel, 24 9/16 × 14 ¼ inches (62.4 × 36.2 cm). The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri. Purchase: William Rockhill Nelson Trust, 32-149.

The source image for this panel is this lovely and celebrated 14th century painting ‘Notre Dame de Grace’ which can be found at the cathedral at Cambrai, France; here’s their web page and a small reproduction of the source:

Before I launch into my discussion about the Hayne, could you step to the side with me for a second and indulge in the realism of the gesture in the Notre Dame de Grace, where the infant grabs onto a fistful of chin and another of robe and squeezes, as all infants do? I adore that. And both paintings also show a wonderful nearness of noses, and any mom can relate to breathing the sweet breath of her baby in that way. It’s so adorable.

Loads of variations on the Notre Dame de Grace have been made by numerous artists throughout history, and it’s been established that Hayne was specifically commissioned to reproduce it. He made at least two copies, and that act in itself brings up all sorts of interesting points about painting as it relates to multiple originals and as they relate to prints and printmaking, especially when you note that the printing press -and the wider understanding of making exact duplicates - only made its way onto the human scene 20 years before Hayne painted his copies. FYI, one copy is in Kansas City and the whereabouts of the other are unknown.

But it’s not the copying, or the multiples, or the ideas about dissemination of imagery that are compelling to me; that’s simply background information. As with any work, it’s the image rather than the process that keeps me engaged, and notably Hayne’s ‘Virgin and Child’ has been reinterpreted, or edited, with changes to the source that reveal a great understanding of the visual tools of imagemaking.

Here’s what transfixes me in particular: the form, weight, and tilt of the Virgin’s head as it balances perfectly upon the Child’s carefully proportioned hand and arm. I could stare at it for hours, moving along a line from the open hand to the jawline, around the head, and back again to that impossibly small arm, which is somehow exactly the right size; not so small as to be comical, but not proportioned correctly to be realistic. Instead the arm has that doughy chubbiness that infants have, and if you’d care to relate the form to the content more pointedly, you could say the arm and hand succeed in emphasizing strength and weakness at once. Sacred or secular, I’ve rarely found 2-d forms so perfectly or compellingly balanced that also appear free to move (an example will come in a later post).

Here’s a drawing I made of the forms in question to make clear to you the balance I’m so keen on, and I hope the value scale helps you see this more clearly. First, note the overall shapes and forms of the head and the arm/hand, here:

 

Then look at how it seems you could keep stacking layers of two-dimensional weight onto that teeny hand/arm, beginning with just the face:

Then add the first head covering:

and then the outer robe, that encapsulates the full weight of the head:

That little thumb is so strong to have such weight set upon it, and the fingers too; it’s as though her neck were hardly required to do any work.

Then note how smoothly the lines move from the open palm to the chin and jaw, in that tender gesture. I’ll limit my observations on movement and lines of composition to this one jpg:

 

Amazing - somehow perfectly balanced. It just slays me.

But I’ve been hard pressed to find much writing about this panel at all, save for the book I mentioned above, so now you have my two cents. You’re welcome to add your comments too.

Two mouths: Picasso's Woman with Helmet of Hair, Blue Period

This drawing was recently on exhibit at the Art Institute of Chicago in a wonderful exhibition that coincided with the opening of their new wing. Here’s a link to their page with the entire work pictured.

I’m drawn to how the features are seen from different viewpoints, in proto-cubist fashion, as though he needed to dishevel her features in order for you to think the same of her hair.

You see her and she sees you straight on with her right eye, even though her left eye looks to her distant right; the right side of her nose is drawn straight on though the left side is done in 3/4 profile:

There are several other tweaks to point out, but my absolute favorite one is that he drew her mouth twice, at once. It’s a lovely mouth, made so perfectly freaky by the multiple viewpoint.

Notice it here:

and then again here:

Twitter journal

This is where I’ll post more info about the tweets that don’t already refer to other pages on the web. I’m hoping to tweet about contemporary/historical art (mostly other artists), music (mostly classical), and other news/items that strike my odd sensibilities. Thanks for following.

My twitter image, Pauperse, is a favorite from my eBay series. It’s a financial insecurity painting. The clamshell coin purse, heavily fortified with extra kiss closures to provide security against loss, was incorrectly manufactured and cannot be closed, so any money placed within it escapes. It stands, remains…empty.