Hope You are Having a Wonderful Holiday Season!

Love the animated holiday cards that the Met Museum has sent out  the past few years. Museums are such an important part of my life. In that spirit, I hope you will visit your local museum many times in the new year. In yesterday's Washington Post, Sebastian Smee wrote,"Here’s a holiday gift idea: Take someone you love to an art museum."

Please read more at - "The no-pressure holiday gift you won’t even have to wrap" .

American Stories at LACMA

by Gregg Chadwick


John Singer Sargent
(American, 1856–1925)
A Street in Venice
29 5/8 x 20 5/8 in. (75.1 x 52.4 cm) oil on canvas ca. 1880–82
Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts
© Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts


“American Stories: Paintings of Everyday Life, 1765–1915” is currently on view at LACMA and unfortunately closes today. The exhibition includes more than eighty paintings which range in date from the Revolutionary War era to just before World War I. The stories are myriad and the paintings are narrative heavy and engaging.The museum is open till 7 pm and if you haven't seen the exhibition already, rush on down today.

Barbara Weinberg curated the exhibition “American Stories" at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The website that the Metropolitan Museum put together for the exhibit is rich in detail and I enjoyed the audio elements with Barbara Weinberg and guests. The podcast with painter Eric Fischl discusses John Singer Sargent's "An Interior in Venice" and "A Street in Venice". Eric Fischl admits right out that he has not studied the history of the works in depth and so allows himself the imaginative freedom to wander into the paintings and describe what he finds in the artworks themselves.

Sargent is a painter's painter so I am not surprised that Eric Fischl would provide fresh insights into Sargent's work.

Eric Fischl describes Sargent's technique:
"Sargent is someone who has such extraordinary bravura, the kind of slapdash quality of the paint combined with his acute observations. It’s incredibly reductive in that he can see so accurately the essentials for what describes an ornate, gold Venetian table or what it takes to capture the quality of the material of the dress or something like that. I mean, it’s so luscious, so direct, and so perfectly observed. At the same time, it’s so fast and facile. It’s pretty amazing."

John Singer Sargent's "A Street Scene in Venice" seems to depict a chance meeting between the viewer wandering through the maze of Venetian alleys and a man and woman engaged in conversation outside a wine shop. The woman seems to stop mid sentence to gaze at us as we arrive on the scene. Eric Fischl sees the man as caught up in a flirtation or rendezvous:

"The other thing that strikes me in this painting is the way he’s painted her dress, which looks like a bonfire. If this painting’s about sex, about desire, about lust, whatever, then, you know, she’s absolutely the object of that desire and she’s on fire. And fire is something that is also being consumed by the huge, vast emptiness of that blackness that it reaches up into .... I think it’s more like the feeling of you’re moving through your life and you come on this scene. You interrupt something. You have the chance to pass by it, but for that brief moment it stops you and you take it in and then you go past, you know, you go into the light."

Much more at:
American Stories Exhibition Website at the Metropolitan Museum, New York
American Stories at LACMA

What Does Loss Look Like? (World AIDS Day 2009)

Lift up your faces, you have a piercing need
For this bright morning dawning for you.
History, despite its wrenching pain,
Cannot be unlived, and if faced with courage,
Need not be lived again.
Lift up your eyes upon
The day breaking for you.
Give birth again
To the dream.
-Maya Angelou

Twenty years ago on December 1, 1989 the first Day Without Art was held to spark dialogue and create a day of action concerning the AIDS crisis. At least 800 museums and galleries across the United States closed their doors, shrouded artworks or removed them from view as symbols of mourning and loss. The goal was to show that AIDS can touch everyone. And it worked.



Today on December 1, 2009 museums are again engaged in remembrance for those lost to AIDS and are actively marking the gains that have been made so far. In 1997 the day became known as A Day With(out) Art to reflect the force art can bring to the cause.



Today, A Day With(out) Art has grown into a international collaborative project in which nearly 8,000 museums, galleries, art centers, libraries, high schools and colleges mark the day.



The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has removed from view sixteen artworks to mark World AIDS Day. The artists range from Duccio to Dali. And the subjects range from the young man Eutyches to Andrew Jackson. I have posted a few fragments of the hidden Metropolitan Museum of Art artworks as well as the Getty Museum's draped Maillol sculpture and, in memory of my friend Thom who died of AIDS, an evocative corner from a Buddha monotype I created.







More at:
World AIDS Day
MTV Staying Alive


Courtesy the Getty Museum

Thanks to Bill Roedy for reminding me of Maya Angelou's powerful poem:
Bill Roedy:Despite Huge Successes In HIV Prevention And Treatment, We Must Not Rest On Our Laurels

*Images courtesy the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Getty Museum, Los Angeles and the LOOK Gallery, Los Angeles

Metropolitan Museum of Art Discovers A New Velázquez In Its Own Collection: Is the Painting a Self Portrait?

Portrait of A Man (Self Portrait?)
Velázquez
oil on canvas circa 1634-35
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
photo by Angel Franco/ New York Times


Portrait of A Man (Self Portrait?) detail
Velázquez
oil on canvas circa 1634-35
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
photo: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Years of discolored varnish and overpainting have a revealed a fresh new face in the Metropolitan Museum of Art's 17th Century Spanish Collection. Carol Vogel has an informative article in today's New York Times: An Old Master Emerges From Grime
Vogel interviewed Keith Christiansen, the Met’s newly appointed chairman of European paintings:“It’s bugged me for 25 years. The quality has always been there. And I had a hard time believing that a work of quality was the product of a generic workshop.”

Keith Christiansen had Velázquez expert Jonathan Brown look at the restored painting. Vogel reports his response: "“One glance was all it took,” Mr. Brown said, adding later, “The picture had been under my nose all my life. It’s a fantastic discovery. It suddenly emerges Cinderella-like.”

Who is this man who has emerged from the smudges and grime of centuries? Is it a long lost self portrait of the master himself? Look at the images and you decide. Update: Tyler Green from Modern Art Notes has provided a twtpoll. Vote here: Is the Metropolitan Museum of Art's 'new' Velazquez a self-portrait?


Velázquez
The Surrender of Breda (Las Lanzas) detail
1634-35
Oil on canvas, 307 x 367 cm
Museo del Prado, Madrid


Velázquez
Las Meninas or The Family of Philip IV (detail)
1656-57
Oil on canvas, 318 x 276 cm
Museo del Prado, Madrid
From the Prado's site:"On the left in the painting, dark and calm, the painter himself can be seen standing with brush and palette in front of a tall canvas."


The Metropolitan Displays Restorers Tools
photo: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

More at:
Met Press Room: Painting in Metropolitan Museum's Collection Reattributed to Spanish Master Velázquez
An Old Master Emerges From Grime
Self Portraits From the Uffizi
Velazquez: The Technique of Genius by Jonathan Brown

A fun read:
The Forgery of Venus by Michael Gruber