Who Cut Off Van Gogh's Ear?

Self-Portrait, Vincent Van Gogh

"Either Van Gogh cut off his ear, or Paul Gauguin did it for him; art historians can't decide."

"While we have a minute now, did you hear about Van Gogh’s ear? No, not the traditional story...the one put out by two German art historians. They argue that Van Gogh didn’t hack off his ear himself..." - Lisa Mullins, The World, PRI, May 12, 2009

Link Audio and Full Text, The World Web Site, Public Radio International (PRI)

Link Van Gogh Google Image Search Results

Interview with Lucian Freud

Art Critic Robert Hughes has called Lucian Freud the greatest living realist painter. In this 1988 five part video interview, Jake Auerbach talks to Lucian Freud.

Link Lucian Freud, Wikipedia

Link Lucian Freud Google Image Search Results

The Mirror Maze - Interactive Game by Markus Lerner

Link Markus Lerner Web Site

Landscape Into Art - Sir Kenneth Clark

Landscape, Rembrandt van Rijn, 1641, Etching and Drypoint, 13 x 32.2 cm

'WE ARE SURROUNDED with things which we have not made and which

have a life and structure different from our own; trees, flowers,

grasses, rivers, hills. For centuries they have inspired us with curiosity

and awe. They have been objects of delight. We have recreated them in

our imaginations to reflect our moods. And we have come to think

of them as contributing to an idea which we have called nature.'

Sir Kenneth Clark, in his work as Director of the National Gallery (U.K.) no

less than in his lectures and writings, has shown the belief that art is a

part of our general consciousness and gives a special value to all our

experiences. In this book, which is based on his first course of lectures

as Slade Professor at Oxford, he is concerned with man's relation to

nature as reflected in the history of landscape painting. - Jacket Copy

This book is a collection of Clark's lectures as Slade Professor of Art at Oxford. It was first published in 1949, and still offers the reader an intelligent and relevant approach to the serious study of the landscape.

Link Landscape Into Art, Sir Kenneth Clark, Internet Archive Web Site

"Our Earth as Art," Images from Space, USGS and NASA

The Yukon Delta, Images (and Text) courtesy of USGS National Center for EROS and NASA Landsat Project Science Office

"Welcome to the Earth as Art Gallery! Here you can view our planet through the beautiful images taken by the Landsat-7 satellite - and most recently, the Terra Satellite's Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER). This gallery of images uses the visceral avenue of art to convey the thrilling perspective of the Earth that satellites provide to the viewer...

...The Earth as Art on-line gallery premiered in July 2002 and has been hugely popular. We are so glad that the beautiful satellite imagery of our planet has made such a huge impact..." - Maggie Masetti , GSFC Laboratory for Terrestrial Physics

Link Our Earth as Art, USGS/NASA Web Site

Sister Wendy - In Conversation with Bill Moyers, 1997

"In 1991 Sister Wendy made her first appearance on the BBC in a documentary on the National Gallery. This was followed by Sister Wendy's Odyssey, six ten-minute films in which she discovered hidden art treasures around Britain. Her next series, Sister Wendy's Grand Tour, took her throughout Europe; along the way, Sister Wendy developed a loyal and enthusiastic following among British and European art lovers. That popularity soared to new heights in 1997 when Sister Wendy's Story of Painting introduced the engaging art historian to a whole new audience of American art enthusiasts and won praise from both television viewers and critics alike. Sister Wendy's art appreciation is not limited, however, to television. The author of more than fifteen books -- including Contemporary Women Artists and Art and the Sacred -- Sister Wendy continues to write for several art magazines." - PBS, 2001/02?

Link Sister Wendy Beckett, Wikipedia

August Rodin, Sculptor - The Gates of Hell

This video was produced by Canal Educatif. "CED is a philanthropic producer of free high-quality educational videos in the domains of arts, economics and science.

You can be part of this project by becoming the author of one of our screenplays, scientific advisor, cameraman of video editor. Visit: www.canal-educatif.fr."

Link August Rodin, The Gates of Hell - Wikipedia

Link CED Web Site

Link CED YouTube Channel

BMW - An Expression of Joy: Car and Canvas

T.J. Clark, The Andrew Mellon Lectures, National Gallery of Art, 2009

Photo by Anne Wagner, © National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, 2009

"T. J. Clark, renowned art historian and George C. and Helen N. Pardee Chair and professor of the history of art at University of California, Berkeley, will present the Fifty-Eighth A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts series, entitled Picasso and Truth, this spring at the National Gallery of Art in Washington...

...Tracing Picasso's path to the Reina Sofía's Guernica (1937), the lectures will center on a group of Picasso paintings from the 1920s, including Tate Modern's Three Dancers (1925), the Guggenheim Museum's Guitar and Mandolin on a Table (1924), and the Tehran Museum's astonishing Painter and Model (1927). According to Clark, the 1920s were a period when Picasso attempted to revive or exceed the terms of cubism, experimenting with new kinds of space...

...The A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts were established by the Board of Trustees of the National Gallery of Art in 1949, ' to bring to the people of the United States the results of the best contemporary thought and scholarship bearing upon the subject of the Fine Arts...' " - National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

Link Listen to the Lectures

Link TJ Clark, Wikipedia

Link NGA Lecture Abstracts Archive 2001 - 2008

Al Hirschfeld - Master Caricaturist

Self-Portrait, Al Hirschfeld

"(Al) Hirschfeld's art style is unique, and he is considered to be one of the most important figures in contemporary caricature, having influenced countless cartoonists. Hirschfeld's caricatures are almost always drawings of pure line with simple black ink on white paper with little to no shading or crosshatching. His drawings always manage to capture a likeness using the minimum number of lines." - Wikipedia

Caricature is an ancient art and of great value to visual artists. The caricaturist must keenly observe and understand the unique visual characteristics of an individual. To do it well, one must thoughtfully and skillfully simplify, emphasize, contextualize, and exaggerate these characteristics to create content.

Link Al Hirschfeld, Wikipedia

Link History of Caricature, Wikipedia

Link The Art of Caricaturing - A 'how-to' digitized book, Mitchell Smith, 1941, Internet Archive

Matisse - The Dance, Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia

The Dance, Matisse, Oil/Canvas, 260 cm × 391 cm (100 in × 150 in), 1909/1910

The Dance by Matisse is considered by scholars to be a defining moment for Matisse and modern art. There are two versions. The preliminary version hangs in the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, USA. The final version hangs in the Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia.

"The pair of panels known as 'The Dance and Music' (also in the Hermitage) are amongst Matisse's most important - and most famous - works of the period 1908 to 1913. They were commissioned in 1910 by one of the leading Russian collectors of French late 19th and early 20th-century art, Sergey Shchukin. Until the Revolution of 1917, they hung on the staircase of his Moscow mansion." - Hermitage Museum

Link The Dance, Full Commentary, Hermitage Museum

Link The Dance (Preliminary Version), Commentary, MoMa

Link Hermitage Museum Web Site

Link MoMa Web Site

Daniel Rozin, Interactive Art Web Site

Paint-Cam 2003 by Daniel Rozin (web shot)

"Paint-Cam 2003 is a Shockwave tool that lets you paint collages using content from many live Web-Cams around the world. When the page is loaded it receives a list of about 80 Web-Cams and loads their current image into "paint cans" . The images are then constantly refreshed as frequently as possible. The artist (you) can select any of the "paint cans" as your source, and create a collage of many places in the world by painting in the frame above." - Daniel Rozin Web Site

Link Paint-Cam 2003, Daniel Rozin

Link Daniel Rozin Web Site

Wayne Thiebaud - Painter

"Wayne Thiebaud (born November 15, 1920) is an American painter whose most famous works are of cakes, pastries, boots, toilets, toys and lipsticks. His last name is pronounced "Tee-bo." He is associated with the Pop art movement because of his interest in objects of mass culture, although his works, executed during the fifties and sixties, slightly predate the works of the classic pop artists. Thiebaud uses heavy pigment and exaggerated colors to depict his subjects, and the well-defined shadows characteristic of advertisements are almost always included in his work." - Wikipedia

Link Wayne Thiebaud, Wikipedia

Lawrence Hutton Collection of Life and Death Masks - Princeton

Beethoven Life Mask by F.Klein

The Princeton University Library contains the Laurence Hutton Collection of Life and Death Masks which includes masks of Beethoven, Lincoln, Robert E. Lee, Woodrow Wilson, and many other notable people. - Museum of Online Museums

Link Hutton Collection, Princeton University Library

Link Museum of Online Musuems

Sean Scully: Wall of Light, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Sean Scully, Wall of Light: Desert Night, 1999

"This exhibition features recent work by abstract artist Sean Scully (American, b. Ireland, 1945), specifically his Wall of Light series of paintings, watercolors, pastels, and aquatints. Inspired by the artist's first visits to Mexico in the early 1980s, where he observed the play of light and shadow on ancient stone walls, this ongoing and distinctive body of work focuses on an exploration of abstract forms affected by light, evoking a range of emotional and narrative themes."

Link Sean Scully, Metropolitan Museum, Special Exhibitions with podcast/audio interview

Nefertiti Bust May Be 100 Years Old, Not 3,000: Martin Gayford

Herbert Knosowski/AP Photo via Bloomberg News, Kulturforum/Berlin

Updated, May 11, 2009, Bloomberg.com

On Bloomberg.com, Martin Gayford writes about two scholars doubting the authenticity of the world famous Nefertiti Bust. If it is not authentic, does this information make it a "bad" work of art? If we found out tomorrow the Mona Lisa was a fake, would it diminish the aesthetic quality of the piece? What is the role of the viewer?

"...Queen Nefertiti (c.1370 B.C.-1330 B.C.) is one of the most famous figures of the ancient world, and all because of a single work of art: a limestone bust owned by the museums of Berlin. Hers is one of the best-known faces in art, enjoying almost Mona Lisa status. Last week it was reported that two separate authors, the Swiss historian Henri Stierlin and Berlin-based Erdogan Ercivan, believe it is an early-20th-century work..."

Link Full Article, Bloomberg.com

Matisse - Color and Meaning

Henri Matisse

Michael Brenson reviews the monograph, Matisse, by Pierre Schneider, for the NY Times.

"...Mr. Schneider emphasizes Matisse's lifelong commitment both to the duality of human experience and to the need for synthesis. Like most other great modernists, Matisse wanted ''to do two things at once,'' ''to reconcile the irreconcilable.'' Almost from the beginning, he went in artistic search of a Golden Age - a time and place of joy and pleasure that would not be susceptible to the vicissitudes of history. At the same time, he always remained firmly rooted in the most immediate world around him...

...The textures of the everyday world were both his protection and the medium through which the fire (Color as a forceful pictorial presence of energy and expression.) entered his hands. Mr. Schneider believes that Matisse's work marks the decisive shift from art as mimesis (imitation) to art as methexis (participation). Matisse was convinced that by identifying himself with the objects he would touch ''the deep gravity which persists in every human being'' and arrive at the threshold of what was infinite and unknown..."

Link Full Text

Andy Goldsworthy - Sculptor

"At its most successful, my 'touch' looks into the heart of nature; most days I don't even get close. These things are all part of a transient process that I cannot understand unless my touch is also transient; only in this way can the cycle remain unbroken and the process be complete." - Andy Goldsworthy

Andy Goldsworthy (born 26 July 1956) is a British sculptor, photographer and environmentalist living in Scotland who produces site-specific sculpture and land art situated in natural and urban settings. His art involves the use of natural and found objects, to create both temporary and permanent sculptures which draw out the character of their environment. - Wikipedia

Link Wikipedia

Link Website

Tribute to Art Historian, Konrad Oberhuber, by Sean Scully

Tribute

Konrad the Seer (Konrad Oberhuber, 1935 - 2007)

by Sean Scully

"This personal recollection of former director of the Albertina in Vienna and Raphael expert Konrad Oberhuber is extracted from Scully's contribution to a volume devoted to Oberhuber's memory forthcoming from ARTIBUS ET HISTORIAE, Vienna. Oberhuber organized an retrospective of Scully's prints with Victoria Martino at the Albertina in 1999." - artcritical.com, April 2009

"Konrad Oberhuber, it was clear, was in possession of a tremendous intellect. I have met some eminent art historians before, and although they are sympathetically inclined towards an understanding of contemporary art, they labor to achieve it. Konrad spoke beautifully on Raphael and why he was important, but he was a person with an agile capacity to leap centuries with obvious ease..."

Link Full text, artcritical.com

Link Sean Scully, American Painter, Wikipedia

The Louvre - Kaleidoscope

Michelangelo, 1505-06

The Louvre Museum, arguably the finest of its kind in the world, provides significant online resources for visual artists. By presenting rotating thumbnail views, Kaleidoscope allows the visitor to quickly scan and click select from its vast collection in terms of visual themes, such as: action, daily life, landscape, the nude, etc. The selected images are accompanied by detailed descriptions and historical information.

Link The Louvre - Kaleidoscope

'DNA origami' creates map of the Americas

"A map of the Americas measuring just a few hundred nanometres across has been created out of meticulously folded strands of DNA, using a new technique for manipulating molecules dubbed "DNA origami".

The nanoscale map, which sketches out both North and South America at a staggering 200-trillionths of their actual size, aims to demonstrate the precision and complexity with which DNA can be manipulated using the approach.

According to the map's creator, Paul Rothemund at Caltech in Pasadena, US, DNA origami could prove hugely important for building future nano-devices including molecular machines and quantum computer components... "

18:23 15 March 2006 by Duncan Graham-Rowe, New Scientist

Link Full Text, newscientist.com

Color Chart - Reinventing Color, 1950 to Today, MOMA

'This (MOMA) exhibition takes as its point of departure the commercial color chart, an item that openly declares the status of color as mass-produced and standardized. Midway through the twentieth century, long-held convictions regarding the spiritual or emotional power of particular colors gave way to the embrace of color as an ordinary commodity...the...quest for personal expression...instead became Andy Warhol's "I want to be a machine." The artistry of mixing pigments was eclipsed by Frank Stella's "Straight out of the can; it can't get better than that." This exhibition features the work of forty-four artists who take a position in which art and life mingle rather than remain separate, and where beauty is found in the everyday rather than in the ideal.'

Ann Temkin, The Blanchette Hooker Rockefeller Curator of Painting and Sculpture

Link Online Interactive Exhibit, MOMA

Webby Award Nominee, 2009

Philip Guston - The National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

"Philip Guston (June 27, 1913 – June 7, 1980) was a notable painter and printmaker in the New York School, which included many of the Abstract Expressionists, such as Jackson Pollock and Willem De Kooning. In the late 1960s Guston helped to lead a transition from Abstract expressionism to Neo-expressionism in painting, abandoning the so-called "pure abstraction" of abstract expressionism in favor of more cartoonish renderings of various personal symbols and objects." - Wikipedia

Link Full Text, Wikipedia

Link NGA, Washington DC

Create Your "Jackson Pollock" by Miltos Manetas. Orginial Design by Stamen.

Want to create your "Jackson Pollock"? This YouTube clip helps explain the experience. Click on the link below to start and click on your mouse to change colors - People's Choice Webby Award Winner, 2009

Link

82 Optical Illusions and Visual Phenomena by Michael Bach

'These pages demonstrate visual phenomena, and »optical« or »visual illusions«. The latter is more appropriate, because most effects have their basis in the visual pathway, not in the optics of the eye. When I find the time I will expand the explanations, to the degree that these phenomena are really understood; any nice and thoughtful comment welcome." - Michael Bach ©

Link Michael Bach Website

ARTS: What does it take to be an artist?

"There's a moment in the Tom Stoppard play Travesties, where an English consular official starts ranting about the role of the artist in society, complaining, "When I was at school, on certain afternoons we all had to do what was called labour - weeding, sweeping, sawing logs for the boiler-room, that kind of thing; but if you had a chit from matron you were let off to spend the afternoon messing about in the art room. Labour or art. And you've got a chit for life." A chit for life. Is that what it is to be an artist? A cushy side-stepping of the grit and slog of the ordinary mortal? A "real-life" exemption certificate?

In Private Views: Artists Working Today, practitioners from across the artistic spectrum, from their 20s to their 80s - painters, photographers, poets, composers, sculptors, playwrights, film- makers, novelists and installation artists - are interviewed to find out what characterises life as an artist in Britain today." Judith Palmer, The (London) Independent

Link Full Article

Kenneth Clark - Civilisation

Kenneth McKenzie Clark, Baron Clark, OM, CH, KCB, FBA (13 July 1903 – 21 May 1983) was a British author, museum director, broadcaster, and one of the best-known art historians of his generation. In 1969, he achieved an international presence as the writer, producer, and presenter of the BBC Television series, Civilisation. - Wikipedia

Link Kenneth Clark, Wikipedia

Link Civilisation, Wikipedia

John Berger - Ways of Seeing

John Berger's groundbreaking TV documentary exploring how meaning is shaped by different ways of seeing.

Link John Berger Wikipedia
Link Notes on The Gaze by Daniel Chandler

Zen Master, Shozo Sato - Caligraphy Demonstration

Link Wiki

Rudolf Arnheim - The Psychology of Art

" All perceiving is also thinking, all reasoning is also intuition, all observation is also invention."

Rudolf Arnheim (July 15, 1904 – June 9, 2007) was a German-born author, art and film theorist and perceptual psychologist. He himself said that his major books are Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye (1954), Visual Thinking (1969), and The Power of the Center: A Study of Composition in the Visual Arts (1982), but it is Art and Visual Perception for which he was most widely known. Revised, enlarged and published as a New Version in 1974, it has been translated into 14 languages, and is very likely one of the most widely read and influential art books of the twentieth century.

Link Wiki

Link Website, Life and Work

Link Interview: Cabinet Magazine Online - The Intelligence of Vision, Uta Grundmann, 2001