the jazz age

turn of the century

fairytales

cold war kids

I'm supposed to be writing an essay on abstract expressionism and post-painterly abstraction in the postwar United States. An impossible topic to fully discuss, but the hilarious images I find and can pass off as research makes it totally worthwhile.
Check out Time Online for more on art during the Cold War.

snazzy

Well here's some really fucking cool art. I saw this article on the BBC this morning and was impressed, but after the following works we've really been there, done that Ms Lancashire.

1. Axel Peemoeller takes advantage of perspective rules (Piero della Francesca is impressed... the Duke of Urbino's nose is not) with his car park signs that seem to float from the correct distance.

2. Artists Dan Havel and Dean Ruck created this installation of an inverted house.

3. Don't worry, those of you who worship cars and shoes and other ridiculous things, your brain didn't just implode. Benedict Radcliffe created this wire-frame car that (if you will) effectively dissolves virtual and reality.

Happy studying.

modern art meets modern hipster

Real talk: the Hipster 'stache has caught on with the flamboyantly gay population in Central Square.
Chuck Close approves.

clouds

Clouds have put me in a weird mood; I'm glad they're not the drab kind you find in England but are luminous and nice for branchgazing. In any case, pastels seemed appropriate for today.

Garment graffiti.

art history meets street style

Bosom of Abraham Trinity
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Facehunter

art history nerdz

I was pretty convinced that Lost's Jorge Garcia's blog was the most hilariously disturbing thing in the world (second only to Michael K) but then I found the truly fabulous pumpkin he'd carved of Goya's Saturn Devouring His Children. This gets a hearty thumbs up from me. Sadly, the art history cake we decorated did not turn out as well. Personally, I thought it was great, but we lost out to Girl With A Pearl Earring (wtf) and only won a prize for "least appetizing." Whateva. They clearly don't know what great art is.

P.S. The BBC series "The Private Life of a Masterpiece" is turning out to be pretty great and I highly recommend the episode on Goya's 3rd of May, 1808. Tonight we watched Le Moulin de la Galette (Renoir), Sunflowers (Van Gogh), and La Grande Jatte (Seuart). They were all quite good, though I completely disagree that Sunflowers the the "most well known painting in Britain" and I was also disappointed they didn't show the scene from Ferris Bueller!

count orgaz returns

Art history band names:
Count Orgaz
Arnolfini and His Bride
Theodora and Her Attendants
Kritos Boy / feat. Lady of Auxerre
The Pendentives & Squinches
The Radiating Chapels
High Cross of Muirdach
The Ebbo Gospels
The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood

quel oeuvre 3/28

John Everett Millais, Ophelia
The Tate Britain, London

quel oeuvre 3/27

Aphrodite ("The Bartlett Head"), ca. 330–300 B.C.
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

quel oeuvre 3/26

John Singer Sargent, The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

This girl told me pretty explicitly that she didn't like this piece. I like it just to spite her. And anyway, I've never seen her like any of the 30,000 years of art we've studied so, here's a pretty explicit fuck you.

quel oeuvre 3/25

Bodhisattva
Gandharan, Kushana period, late 2nd century C.E.
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Today my sister told me that a significant fact about the New Zealand of the north aka Scotland is that they have the largest Buddhist temple in Western Europe. That's great. I mean, if you go any further west, you hit the useless block of ice known as Greenland and I doubt there are many Buddhists there, excepting religious polar bears. Anyway, here's a Bodhisattva.

quel oeuvre 3/22

Thutmose, Bust of Nefertiti

I felt like channeling my inner Egyptian today.
Gah, I've just started up the second season of Rome and Cleopatra is a major bitch. I love her.

quel oeuvre 3/20

Frans Hals, The Laughing Cavalier

If this smug asshole makes you want to slap him with a fish, just keep in mind that it's only a month until our favorite day of the year.

quel oeuvre 3/19

Theodora and her Attendants, San Vitale in Ravenna

quel oeuvre 3/18

Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun, Self portrait

i love the mfa

Titian, Death of Actaeon

This glowing review from the New York Times has just solidified the fact that I will be spending part of the next six months of no work wandering around at the MFA. (In fact, I will be giving an encore presentation there April 19th.)
The "Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese: Rivals in Venice" exhibition opens tomorrow (!!!) and it's an awesome synthesis of the collections at the MFA and the Louvre. I may have to convince Mme Tournier to take the class on a field trip as a part of our AP work or whatever.
For now, it has inspired today's work of art. (Compare to 2/28.)

quel oeuvre 3/10

Goya, Saturn Devouring His Children

Go to the ARTS BASH to see this in cake-form !!!!