J.M.W. Turner

Where has Jan van Eyck been all my life?

March 7: This day in history

From Eine Kleine Blog

The wonderful wife and I spent a lovely day at the National Gallery: Gaugin, Canaletto, a surprisingly good buffet lunch, and then the Chester Dale Collection:

• Gaugin. I don't get it. I don't find the pictures -- most of them, anyway -- at all interesting, and the colors seem washed out. A few of the early pieces are nice, but the Tahiti pictures? Please!
• Canaletto. Technically well done, but interesting? Not so much. If I understand correctly, his goal was to provide wealthy tourists with mementos of their visit to Venice -- big, high-priced, one-of-a-kind . . . um . . . er . . . postcards. If we hadn't been to Venice, the exhibit wouldn't have meant anything to us; as it was, it was pretty cool. The coolest item was a map drawn almost 300 years ago; we came within a couple blocks of finding the hotel we stayed at a two years ago.
  
• Lunch. Italian themed to tie in to the Canaletto exhibit: pasta, carpaccio of beef, parmesan, salad, seafood soup, eggplant something or other. I passed on the eggplant; the rest was really quite good -- including the $9 glass of wine.
• Chester Dale. A fabulous collection -- Picasso, Monet, Cassat, Renoir, Matisse, etc. Too bad you missed it.

Someday I'm going to have to tell you about . . .

. . . recent gallery visits with Abby (who just happens to be the best gallery companion you can imagine).

• Yesterday we investigated the Norman Rockwell show at the Smithsonian American Art Museum -- which I'm convinced should be called the Smithsonian Museum of American Art. We agreed that the best picture in the very disappointing show was "The Connoisseur" and that the best thing about it was the Jackson Pollock-like spatter painting that the hoity-toity connoisseur is standing in front of. Which means, since Pollock was the anti-Rockwell, that the best thing in the show was the least "Rockwell" of them all. (When I mentioned to a friend that the show was disappointing, she wondered "How can anyone be disappointed in a Rockwell show when there is so little doubt about what you should expect to see there?" Good question; I wish I had a good answer.)
  
• A couple weeks ago we had a great time at the National Gallery's Arcimboldo exhibit. The paintings are fascinating. It's easy to imagine this guy painting 50 years ago in New York or Madrid. Much harder to think that he actually painted almost 500 years ago in the court of the Hapsburg emperor. The works are absolutely surreal! Abby loved them. Several of the paintings -- ostensibly renderings of salads or vase of flowers or pot of pork -- can be turned upside down to reveal human portraits. The gallery -- reluctant to let people flip their valuable art work around -- attached them to the wall firmly but placed a mirror in front of them to show the upside-down view. Abby was thrilled with them, but wondered why the mirror was needed. "Look, Pop Pop, all you have to do is come out into the middle of the room and stand on your head, like this!"
• From Arcimboldo, we walked across the hall to glom some prints by Edvard Munch. After seeing about 20 of them, Abby tugged on my sleeve and whispered, "Did he do 'The Scream'?" I was surprised that she had even heard of "The Scream," and I was absolutely flabbergasted that somehow she recognized some similarity in style or technique or something in both "The Scream" and the prints we were viewing.
• On the way out of the gallery that day -- after hot dogs and sodas -- we walked past a lot of late 19th and early 20th century art. She casually identified the Picassos as we walked past. At least twice I had to say, "I don't know, Abby, I don't recognize that one; let me just go over and check the card . . . Um, er, yeah, Abby, you're right. That is another Picasso."

. . . our "Autumn in New York" adventure. Our very touristy "Autumn in New York" adventure, also known as "Darby and Joan visit the Big Apple":

• Our bus carried us from Key Bridge to Penn Station on Monday, the 15th, whence a 15 minute walk took us to our hotel, the AKA Times Square. (Thanks, Zarguna!) After checking in: lunch at a deli across the street, a half-mile or so stroll up Broadway and then over to 6th Ave. and back to the hotel to plan the evening. (Monday night is not the easiest time to find something to do in New York.) We settled on Katherine Jenkins performing at City Winery (no, we'd never heard of her either, but some YouTube videos convinced us she might be worth listening to) . She was OK, nothing more, and we left at intermission, but the evening was still a grand success because sitting at the bar, nursing a "Chivas with a little ice", I felt for all the world like Peter Gunn listening to Lola Albright perform all those years ago. (The link in this paragraph shows the beginning of a performance Ms. Jenkins gave in Dusseldorf; ours began exactly the same way.)
• Tuesday: Bryant Park with its ice-skating pond and then Grand Central Terminal, in both of which, colorful holiday art/craft/gift shows were being held, then the United Nations building, lunch at a greasy spoon, and back to the hotel to relax a bit and make plans for the evening before heading out for our afternoon explorations. As for the evening, we decided on "The Divine Sister" at the SoHo Playhouse; the show had received a good review in the Times and Times readers had given it 4 1/2 out of 5 stars. In fact the play was awful. Make that AWFUL! Fart jokes, for God's sake! Remarkably, although the play was AWFUL, it didn't put us in a foul mood, and I thought it might be fun to wander around a little looking for a neighborhood bar where we could listen to some music, but when we came out of the theater, the skies had opened up, so we just headed back to the hotel and drank a little wine. But I've gotten ahead of myself. After relaxing at the hotel and buying tickets for that AWFUL play, we walked to the Empire State Building and elevatored to the 86th floor observation deck. Neither of us had been there since we were kids. I came away with a strengthened belief that tall things are much more impressive when viewed from the bottom looking up than they are from the top looking down. But I'm still ahead of myself: On our way to the ESB, we took a little time to walk through the NY Public Library building on 5th Avenue; very cool.
• Wednesday: Subway to Lincoln Center (we'd never seen it), walk across Central Park, spend several hours wandering through the Metropolitan Museum, take an exciting taxi ride back to the hotel, and stroll back down to Penn Station for the ride home.
• Summary: A lovely three days!
• PS I'm coming more and more to the opinion that traveling in the off-season is the only way to travel. The weather be damned, I just want to avoid crowds. And we had no line -- none -- at the ESB; in Paris a couple years ago (also off-season) we found almost no line at the Louvre. The Metropolitan Museum did have a good number of people in it, but the information desk told us that it was not nearly as crowded as during tourist season.

. . . why you should never pay extra for expedited shipping.

• I ordered a new keyboard and mouse from Buy.com and chose "budget shipping" (free, but delivery would take 7 - 9 days) instead of "standard shipping" ($7, with delivery in 4 - 5 days). The keyboard arrived at our front door the very next day.

Tufte would approve

"How you can dilute the media impact of a massacre by killing a few people each day for 6 years."

http://www.flickr.com/photos/melkaone/5121285002/

Dora Carrington

Dora Carrington?

She was Lytton Strachey's wife or mistress or something. Also a pretty good artist, I say. Here's Strachey:


And here's E.M. Forster:
The Grove Dictionary of Art says:

She is aligned more with her Slade contemporaries than with Bloomsbury. The example of French art did not loosen her touch, and her obsession with her subject denied a more abstract perception of form. Often she is more Pre-Raphaelite than Post-Impressionist. The ‘preternatural acuteness’ that Julia Strachey observed in her view of others sharpens the fun in her letters and can give a startling intensity to her portraits and landscapes.

I'm not sure whether that means she is good or bad. Regardless, I like these portraits. I'll have to ask Abby what she thinks of them.

An art outing

One night a couple weeks ago, Abby phoned: "Poppop, would you take me to the art gallery tomorrow?" Would I ever! I had been planning to suggest a gallery outing to her the next time I saw her.

She is a wonderful gallery companion. She's interested in everything -- paintings and sculpture, figurative art and nonrepresentational, classical and modern. She can explain why she likes some pieces and not others. She's very knowledgeable -- how many 8 year olds do you know who can explain Picasso's blue period and tell you who the model was for his cubist portraits? And she's fun: In each room, we scanned all the works and then met in the middle of the room; on the count of 3, we each walked to our favorite piece. It was a simple game but we laughed a lot.

A special treat: I thought we would spend most of our time in the East Building, looking at modern art. On our way there, however, we got sidetracked in the West Building by the Chester Dale collection -- 60 or 80 paintings from, say, 1850 to 1920, or something like that. You know, lots of Monets, Manets, Picassos, Cassatts, van Goghs, Modiglianis, Renoirs. Fabulous stuff. So we didn't have as much time in the East Building as I had planned. I'm hoping we get back there soon.

Grilled cheese, deluxe

A couple days ago I told you to go read Maira Kalman. You need more reason? How about this:

Click the picture for a larger image.

Very Hopper-esque, no? No? How about now?

Click the picture for a larger image.

Coincidence?

Yesterday I posted a beautiful graph of wind speed. Last night Wikipedia chose a graph as its "picture of the day." I have to admit theirs is a little better than mine. In fact it's spectacular.

Napoleon arrived in Lithuania with 422,000 men. Then came the Russian winter, and he wound up returning to France with only 10,000. It's all in "the best statistical graphic ever drawn":

You really should click for a larger view.

Great photography

Well, of course, "Father's Day" below. But almost as great, check out http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/

Thank you, Andrew

Today in 1941, the National Gallery of Art opened in Washington, D.C., thanks to the funding and support of collector Andrew W. Mellon. Mellon was the U.S. Secretary of the Treasury and ambassador to Britain. He sponsored the construction of the National Gallery and donated his impressive personal art collection — hundreds of paintings, which included artists such as Botticelli, Rembrandt, and Raphael.

Writer's Almanac

Botticelli, Rembrandt, and Raphael! And he gave them away!

Thank you, Andrew. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

How come . . .

If a supermarket can figure out how to stay open 24/7, why can't museums at least be open until midnight three nights a weekend?

Mark Kleiman
The Realtiy-Based Community

Heck, I'd be happy if they'd stay open until 9 p.m. one night a week.

David

In an earlier post, I expressed an interest in seeing Michangelo's David during our visit to Florence. I just learned of another David that I'm much more eager to see. This one is by Donatello and is at least "R" rated if not "NC-17." Pretty clearly, if this David defeated Goliath, he(?) must have had supernatural help.

NGA

Mary Ellen and I went down to the National Gallery this morning to see the Edward Hopper and JMW Turner shows. I had been there with Abby early last week (for Hopper, not Turner) and went down again by myself a couple days later (to see both).

Hopper did, basically, two paintings:

• a watercolor of a big old Victorian house with peaks and porches or (almost the same thing) a big old lighthouse, and
• an oil of a lonely, alienated, marginalized person (or two or three).

Two paintings isn't much, but it's two more than most artists are ever able to create.

I don't care much for the watercolors. They're very nice pictures that I would give my soul to be able to paint, but, in the end, they're really just very nice pictures of buildings -- pictures that might look outstanding at the annual Vienna Art Society show, but hardly world class ART! I can't imagine anyone walking past them and being stopped short.

The "only-the-lonely" pictures are a different animal altogether. It's hard to imagine anyone walking past one and not saying "Whoa, there! Let me stop and take a look at this for a minute." I don't have any idea what Against Interpretation says, but I imagine it's this: You don't find a wonderful picture by analyzing it. You find a wonderful picture by walking by and saying 'Whoa, there! Let me stop and take a look at this for a minute.' And then you start analyzing.

It's hard not to be struck by the contrast in many of these paintings between the bright light and sometimes almost lurid colors, which would seem appropriate maybe for a carnival or a parade, and the lonely, alienated, marginalized person(s) in the painting. How does he make it work? I don't pretend to know, but I did notice today that in most of what strike me as his most successful pictures, he pushes the person down and off to the side -- literally marginalizing him (or, more frequently, her). More precisely, the person is below one of the principal diagonals. (In pictures with several people who appear to be estranged, one will be below the diagonal and the other above.)

All that notwithstanding, two of my favorite pictures have no people and the diagonal played no obvious role in their composition. Enjoy.

Click on an image for a larger view.

So much (not nearly enough) for Hopper. Turner, painting around 1800, was very strange. Most of his works were those giant dark oils of Important Events in (usually, military) HISTORY. But he also did some wonderful watercolors that were virtually abstractions -- and this was a good 30 years before Manet and Monet and Sisley and Renoir came along (whose work, by the way, is almost photographic in clarity when compared to late Turner). I'd like to post a few of these watercolors for you, but I've searched the web for at least 30 second without success. I'll leave it at this. If you're near DC, go check out the Turner exhibit. Most of the wonderful watercolors are in the last couple rooms.

Late addition: After the art galleries and before heading home, we drove up North Capitol Street to Rock Creek Cemetery so I could show Mary Ellen one of my favorite pieces of sculpture (brief info here):

More art from Wikipedia

Mainly because I don't want to get out of the habit of putting things up here. (Also because this is a spectacular picture, especially in its detailed, 7+ megabyte, version.)

12th century Chinese art

An astounding painting at Wikipedia -- almost worth a trip to China to see the real thing. The image here is just a small detail. The full picture is enormous (37 feet wide) and it's file is 7.7 megabytes.