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Rodin: Monument to Balzac
5 ♥
2044 ♥
Jules Olitski: Tin Lizzie Green, 1964 Olitski was a major figure in the Color Field movement of the ’60s, using the staining technique popularized by contemporary Helen Frankenthaler. He was critic Clement Greenberg’s poster child, eliminating illusion from his art and focusing on the inherent qualities of his medium. His paintings are so subtle and beautiful, I think the staining technique makes for lovely work.
5 ♥

It is the artist who is truthful and it is photography which lies, for in reality time does not stop.

— Auguste Rodin
4 ♥
Subodh Gupta: Et tu, Duchamp?, 2009-10 A double reference to da Vinci and Duchamp! I don’t think it’s quite as bold a statement as Duchamp’s L.H.O.O.Q. postcard, but I still appreciate this concept. I generally love art that comments on art. iheartmyart: Visitors to Piccadilly’s Southwood Gardens will encounter Mona Lisa, though not as they know her. The most famous and enigmatic personality in the history of Western art has undergone a double makeover: Da Vinci’s muse wears a moustache and goatee — courtesy of Marcel Duchamp’s infamous ‘L.H.O.O.Q.’ of 1919 — and she has increased in scale, becoming a larger-than-life sized sculpture realised in black bronze. This transformation is the work of Indian artist Subodh Gupta and is both a homage, as well as the beginning of a dialogue, inserting Gupta into an imaginary conversation between the heavyweights of art history. An appropriation of an appropriation, ‘Et tu, Duchamp?’ speaks of Gupta’s excitement in first encountering Conceptual art and comprehending its power. ‘When I saw Duchamp’s drawing of the moustache on the Mona Lisa postcard,’ he has commented, ‘I was thrilled by this simple thing … Duchamp is a distant figure, but his art is out there in the world, and many artists have reacted to his work’. The sculpture takes Duchamp’s irreverent gesture and monumentalises it – the size, material and solidity of Gupta’s version referencing the artistic qualities that Duchamp did so much to dispel. In making the icon his own, Gupta has taken possession of the language of conceptual art and laid claim to its inheritance.
31 ♥
I wish more than ANYTHING I could have seen this in New York. Such an important landmark in art and film history. saatchionline: Jerry Saltz on the Best Movie You Can See in New York (for One More Day) My nominee for Best Picture of the year — maybe the best picture ever, because it’s essentially made up of and is an ecstatic love letter to all other movies — is Christian Marclay’s endlessly enticing must-see masterpiece The Clock. This elliptically simple, spectacularly dazzling 24-hour film is made up of thousands of scenes and snippets from films, all marking the passage of time, minute by minute, sometimes second by second, on clocks and sundials and people speaking the time and, in one case, a child drawing a timepiece on his arm. It’s all synchronized so that whatever time it is onscreen is the actual time in New York, and it has played to packed audiences at the Paula Cooper Gallery since January 21. A metaphysical tour de force of untethered meaning and involuting interlocking contrapuntal rhythms, The Clock is more than a movie or even a work of art. It is so strange and other-ish that it becomes a stream-of-consciousness algorithm unto itself — something almost inhuman.
9 ♥
Apollonios son of Nestor: Belvedere Torso, 1st century B.C.
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The Limbourg Brothers: The Garden of Eden from Les Très Riches Heures du duc de Berry, 1410s
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One of the weaknesses of much abstract painting is the attempt to substitute the inventions of the intellect for a pristine imaginative conception. The inner life of a human being is a vast and varied realm and does not concern itself alone with stimulating arrangements of color, form and design. The term ‘life’ as used in art is something not to be held in contempt, for it applies all of its existence, and the province of art is to react to it and not to shun it. Painting will have to deal more fully and less obliquely with life and nature’s phenomena before it can again be great.

— Edward Hopper | saatchionline
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Gustave Caillebotte: Portraits à la Campagne, 1876. | Wikipedia Caillebotte’s style belongs to the School of Realism but was strongly influenced by his Impressionist associates. In common with his precursors, Jean-Francois Millet and Gustave Courbet, as well his contemporary Degas, Caillebotte aimed to paint reality as it existed and as he saw it, hoping to reduce painting’s inherent theatricality. Perhaps because of his close relationship with so many of his peers, his style and technique varies considerably among his works, as if “borrowing” and experimenting, but not really sticking to any one style. At times, he seems very much in the Degas camp of rich-colored realism (especially his interior scenes) and at other times, he shares the Impressionists’ commitment to “optical truth” and employs an impressionistic pastel-softness and loose brush strokes most similar to Renoir and Pissarro, though with a less vibrant palette.
2 ♥
Gustave Caillebotte: Paris Street, Rainy Day, 1877. | Wikipedia A personal favorite. Caillebotte is best known for his paintings of urban Paris, such as The Bridge ‘De l’Europe’ (Le pont de l’Europe) (1876), and Paris Street; Rainy Day (Rue de Paris; temps de pluie, also known as La Place de l’Europe, temps de pluie) (1877). The latter is almost unique among his works for its particularly flat colors and photo-realistic effect which gives the painting its distinctive and modern look, almost akin to American Realists such as Edward Hopper.[11] Many of his urban paintings were quite controversial due to their exaggerated, plunging perspective.
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