ArtCorner

She was a rare blend, born to an Hungarian Jewish immigrant and a Mexican woman of Spanish and Indian decent. Her short life was full of turmoil and artistic creation.

Only years after her death when the Movie “Frida” staring Salma Hayek came out did the story of Frida Khalo’s tumultuous life was brought to the attention of the public and over night she became an iconic female figure of the art world in the 20th century.

Her agony was drowned many a times with her favorite drink the Tequila. In honor of her life and her passion, the Khalo family has started a Tequila brewery that bares the Khalo name and Frida’s own portrait on the label.

Fridah Khalo bottled as fine Mexican Tequila

Her cousin Izevelda Khalo who published a book in 2004 commemorating the 50th anniversary of Frida Khalo’s death, was also the person behind the Khalo Tequila endeavor. In a statement to the Mexican press she said:

Tequila was her favorite drink, it was apart of Frida’s life in good times and in bad times…

The Kiss has become one of the most popular paintings in the world and is Austrian artist Gustav Klimt’s most famous painting. The Kiss Painting shows off Klimt’s best known style of gold shades and symbolic additions, and it is this that has made his work so popular with modern art lovers who prefer something uplifting to add to their homes.

The glowing themes of The Kiss painting by Klimt showed lovers intertwined into one being, symbolizing the strength of this bond. Some art traditionalists rejected this for its use of eroticism, but others found it refreshing.
Gustav Klimt’s popularity and appeal across Europe with more modern-thinking art lovers helped him to sway the seas of discontent that erupted from the erotic nature of many of his paintings. His prominent role in the Viennese Society and links to several galleries and museums across Austria helped him to continue his style. Klimt fans loved his use of golden backgrounds, intensive colors & ornamental layouts.
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In 1937 During the Spanish Civil War; the Fascists devastated the peaceful town of Guernica with aerial bombings executed by the Natzi Luftwaffe.

Picasso’s painting the Guernica, was his reaction to the tragedy.

The following is an amazingly detailed 3D representation of the painting, an amazing work by Lena Gieseke:

I had the pleasure of visiting the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid this summer, the home of the Guernica. It was one of the most amazing and heartfelt encounters I have ever had with a piece of art. The massive scale and the vivid terror the painting entrenches over you are hard to describe.

The popular online art gallery, overstockArt.com, revealed today the annual Top 10 Oil Paintings rankings for 2009. Topping the list is Vincent van Gogh’s irrefutable magnum opus, Starry Night.

Van Gogh’s Starry Night reclaims its title as the world’s most popular oil painting a year after Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss snatched the title away. According to overstockArt.com’s statistics, van Gogh has the top two most popular oil paintings in the world, with Starry Night in first place and Café Terrace at Night in second. “Van Gogh consistently remains the most popular artist in the world, his total sales numbers have left everyone well behind,” said David Sasson, CEO of overstockArt.com.

The top oil paintings sold online according to overstockArt.com are:

TOP SELLING OIL PAINTINGS Most popular art on the plannet:   courtesy of overstockArt.com © 2009 All Rights Reserved

RANK ARTIST MASTERPIECE #1 Vincent Van Gogh Starry Nightt #2 Vincent Van Gogh Cafe Terrace at Night #3 Gustav Klimt The Kiss #4 Claude Monet Poppy Field at Argenteuil #5 Pierre Auguste Renoir Luncheon of the Boating Party #6 Claude Monet Garden Path at Giverny #7 Pablo Picasso The Rest #8 Georgia O'Keeffe Red Cannas #9 Wassily Kandinsky Farbstudie Quadrate (Color Study of Squares) #10 Pablo Picasso The Dream

According to Sasson, the Top 10 list is released annually due to popular demand. “A lot of people want to know what’s selling best because it helps them stay up to speed with the latest trends and allows them to know which paintings are the hippest and most desirable on the market.”

“In the business world especially, where image is everything, many companies strive to keep up with the latest interior décor trends to maintain a modern appeal that will impress customers and clients,” said Sasson.

Van Gogh’s masterpiece, Starry Night, was created in 1889. To celebrate the 120th anniversary of the creation, overstockArt.com developed a special rendition of the masterpiece in deep oil paint. This special version of Starry Night was created by overstockArt.com over the course of a year, it took seven months to dry and weighs over 18 pounds. This distinctive one-of-a-kind 36″ X 48″ reproduction of Starry Night is available to purchase for $2,458. The conventional 20″ X 24″ reproduction is $119.

In 2009 overstockArt.com sold more than 45,000 oil paintings. They are one of the Web’s most successful distributors of wall décor items with over 10,000 daily visitors and 100,000 loyal customers.

The Reina Sofia Museum, as I covered last time, is the home of Spain’s Modern Art masterpieces. The experience at the Reina Sofia is a majestic walk through the great works of the Spanish Modernist — from Salvador Dali to Juan Miro. As you marvel at the illuminating creations you cannot avoid the glaring evidence of the massive effect of the Spanish masters on the modern art movement.

With that said, there is one Spanish artist who has set the tone for 20th century evolution of Modern Art, you guessed it… that artist is Pablo Picasso.

Even though Pablo Picasso is a Spanish native, his works were banned from the country throughout the rain of Generalisimo Franco. The artists’ public rejection of Franco made him unwelcomed by the tyrant in his own native country.

This prelude makes the story of the Guernica oil painting at the Sofia, Madrid an extra special one.

The Guernica is probably Picassos’ most famous creation. Not an easy task as his works of art have been grasping the highest average dollar value for the past 20 years.

Guernica is a depiction of the bombing of Guernica, Spain, by German and Italian warplanes at the height of the Spanish Civil War on April 26, 1937. My mother used to call it the grand rehearsal to the Second World War.

The Spanish Republican government commissioned Pablo Picasso to create a large mural for the Spanish display at the 1937 World’s Fair in Paris. Guernica shows the tragedies of war and the suffering it inflicts upon individuals, particularly innocent civilians.

As you walk through the Reyna Sofia, just as you are about to enter the Guernica hall, you get the feeling that you are about to encounter greatness… similar to the feeling you get as you enter the Sistine chapel, there are only a handful of artistic creations that inspire the same emotions. The Guernica at the Rheina Sofia is one such display.
When you set yourself in front of the display it takes many minutes to stare at it. You can probably spend an hour just staring at it and probably an entire semester analyzing this masterpiece in an art or history class.

The Sofia holds a room adjacent to the Guernica that holds famous paintings and sculptures relating to the Spanish Civil War including preliminary sketches of various parts of the Guernica.

This huge oil painting which was originally inspired by a newspaper clip, has gained a monumental status, becoming a perpetual reminder of the tragedies of war, an anti-war symbol, and an embodiment of peace. The symbolism is abundant in every stroke and it is an important engagement I recommend to any Madrid visitor.

In conclusion, the Guernica will forever remain Picasso’s greatest work. As the years go by the importance of the message it delivers to the world just gets more and more important and relevant.

Just over 100 years ago, Rene Magritte was born in Belgium. By 1922 at the age of 28, he sold his first painting. Even though the Magritte family were personally acquainted with Salvidor Dali and his family in Spain; it would be another four years until Rene begins to experiment with surrealism.

He contributes to the final issue of “Révolution Surréaliste” by painting the first version of his famous work “The treachery of Images”. One of his most famous is a painting of a pipe which in fact, looks like an advertisement. Below are the words “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” (This is not a pipe).

By 1943, just as WW2 was coming to a close, Magritte began exploring his “Renoir” or “Solar” style which he continues until 1947. This is the style we have come to know Magritte by. In all of Magritte’s paintings, he forces the viewer to really look at what he is seeing. He takes everyday objects and turns the ordinary into the exra-ordinary.

The image of a man in a bowler hat is one of his most recognizable and represents the common man. The first version, “The Son of Man” was actually a self portrait, painted in 1964. It has remained a remarkably iconic image even to this day. When Rene was asked about the man’s obscured face, he commented that “There is an interest in that which is hidden and which the visible does not show us. This interest can take the form of a quite intense feeling, a sort of conflict, one might say, between the visible that is hidden and the visible that is present”.

Another of his images is the giant green apple, called “The Listening Room”, 1952. In this painting, we see a massive green apple out of context in a room with a glass window, wood flooring and white trim. In 1958, a second version was painted with near identical apples but in a room with gray brick flooring and an open-arched window. Juxtaposing size and context was one of Rene’s recurring ideas and is what makes his paintings so intellectually engaging.

Cézanne seems to have first visited the fishing village of L’Estaque in the mid-1860s. During the Franco-Prussian War (1870–71), he sought refuge in this picturesque, sheltered port, lodged between the mountains and the sea near Marseilles. Upon his return there in the summer of 1876, he enthused to Pissarro: “It is like a playing card. Red roofs over the blue sea. . . . The sun is so terrific here that it seems to me as if the objects were silhouetted not only in black and white, but in blue, red, brown, and violet.” Cézanne painted some twenty canvases of L’Estaque over the next decade, a dozen of them facing toward or across the gulf of Marseilles. In the distance of this painting, atop the hill to the right of the jetty, the towers of Notre-Dame-de-la-Garde stand watch over the city of Marseilles.

I wanted to share with you this amazing video of Mark Rothko, narrated by Simon Schama, part of “The Power of Art” BBC show, depicting Schama’s impression of Mark Rothko’s Secret paintings at the Tate Modern Museum:

It’s a wonderful tribute to such an influential artist. Rothko’s passionate yet simple creations transcend above the canvas and transport us to a place that only art can take us…

I love how Simon Schama remarks upon viewing the Rothko’s:

Can anything be less cool then this room in the heart of Tate Modern?
Further away from the razzle dazzle of contemporary art, and the Frantic hustle of now?

This isn’t about now, this is about forever. This is a place where you come to sit in the low lights and feel the ions rolling by to be taken towards the gates that open upon the threshold of eternity, to feel the poignancy of our comings and our goings, our entrances and our exists, our births and our deaths, womb tomb and everything in between.

Can Art ever be more complete, more powerful? I don’t think so…

Georgia Totto O’Keeffe, like most artists, had a life that was to say at the very least interesting.

Georgia O’Keeffe was a poor Midwest farm girl who became the first woman allowed to have one-woman art shows by major museums. When creating her works she liked to undress, get down on her knees and sketch onto sheets of paper that lay on the floor. She would then hang her work around the room to evaluate each one. Georgia tore up every page because she thought the work mimicked other artists. At a young age she would start over and over again hoping to find her own style of imagery

O’Keeffe worked as a commercial artist for 2 years helping her family through her father’s failed business before entering summer art classes where she excelled with natural talent. When she moved to Amarillo, Texas she became a drawing teacher for another 2 years wearing black tailored outfits and her hair pulled tightly back behind her. The townies found her odd from her clothes and the long walks she would take alone.

From Texas she moved to Columbia, South Carolina instructing art at a teachers college. Still struggling to find her personal style in abstract shapes O’Keeffe mailed these drawings to her friend Anita Pollitzer who showed them to Alfred Stieglitz. Stieglitz exhibited 10 of these drawings in his gallery without O’Keeffe’s permission who confronted him and demanded that the exhibition be closed. The event would not be shut down and the viewing public was shocked over her sexually charged forms. Georgia would forever deny intentionally creating the sexually charged visuals that people saw in her work.

Georgia, young enough to be Stieglitz’s daughter, became involved while he was still married to his wife. They married after his divorce became final and were together until his death. In addition to being together they would also see other people. Stieglitz would sleep around with other women and O’Keeffe would sleep around with both men and women. On one or more occasion Georgia and Alfred were lovers to the same woman.

Georgia found sexual comfort with same sex and mixed couples. One of her crushes was on Margery Latimer and Blanche Matthias. Matthias continuously asked Stieglitz to introduce O’Keeffe to his wife. The couples became great friends hanging out at all night parties.

Spite O’Keeffe’s extra curricular activities she wished to settle down in peace and quiet, not fond of traveling, art exhibitions or dealing with selling her art. She shunned the spotlight unlike other artists, but she did like that other people admired her work.

O’Keeffe would settle in New Mexico calling her home Ghost Ranch and enjoy the view of nature. O’Keeffe would continue to win many awards and show in galleries through the yeas that followed, but started to loose her eye site starting at age 84. This would not slow her creative speed however. She continued to work with the help of an assistant, Juan Hamilton, painting and working in clay.

Georgia received the Medal of Freedom from President Ford in 1977 and the National Medal of Arts from President Reagan in 1985. O’Keeffe died at age 98 leaving most of her estate to her assistant Juan causing a legal suit from her family. Hamilton eventually turned over more than 2/3 of his inheritance to the museums and institutions in her original will.

This ten minute clip is drawn from the famous 1950s game show, “What’s My Line?”

It’s so cool to see this beloved artist try and explain with yes and no answers what exactly does he do…

How would you describe Salvador Dali? An artist first and foremost, but also a performer, writer, designer, animator, architect, creator… a prolific artist that to this day touches us all.

I envy his genius and audacity in a time where “strange” was such a cruel word. We must encourage the Dali’s and Picasso’s of the world, without them progress would be boring…