ArtCorner

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.

One of the most beautiful things about art is that every individual can interpret the meaning of a piece in his or her own way. The same work of art could mean a million different things to a million different people. Many people who grow to greatly appreciate art do so because of the personal connections formed and derived from their own individual interpretations, regardless of the artist’s original intent.

That being said, an individuals appreciation for a particular piece can also grow upon learning the original intent and messaging the artist was trying to convey. One of the most effective ways of deciphering this original intent is by looking at the symbolism used within the painting itself. There are many commonly used symbols that go beyond the paint, symbols used to convey a deeper set of ideas, meanings or principles.

To help you make sense of such symbolisms, here is a short guide to help decipher some of the most commonly used symbols in art.

Heart pierced by an arrow: Symbolized how love is both pleasurable and painful.

Heart: Stems from the old belief that the heart is the spiritual center of our emotions, love in particular. A heart symbol is used to replace the word love.

Red: Red is often used to carry meanings of love and passion.

Honeysuckle: A symbol of love and generosity.

Black Birds: (Crows, Ravens, Etc. ) These birds typically symbolize death and destruction.

Scythe: A scythe (more commonly known as a sickle) is a curved, sharp blade at the end of a long handle. It represents death as it originates from pagan harvest ceremonies where living crops were cut down using it.

Cypress Tree: Commonly used as a graveyard planter as it is believed to preserve bodies.
Daisy: A white daisy is a symbol of innocence.

Clover leaf: Three leafed clovers typically represent the Holy Trinity (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit). Four leafed clovers represent luck.

Sunflowers: As a flower which blindly follows the sun, sunflowers have become a symbol of infatuation or foolish passion.

Bamboo: Bamboo is a symbol for longevity as it always has green shoots. It also symbolizes strength and grace, for it bends but does not break easily.

Carnation: A symbol of engagement or intimate relationship.

Juniper: Juniper has multiple forms of symbolism. One, it symbolizes chastity because juniper berries are protected by thorny leaves. Two, it symbolizes Christ (crown of thorns), and Three…it symbolizes eternity for juniper wood is rarely attacked by bugs & worms.

Lotus: The lotus symbolizes birth and rebirth. It is also a symbol for creation, fertility and purity. The long stem symbolizes our connection to our origins, while the flower represents aspirations toward enlightenment.

Violet: Symbolizes humility, faithfulness and chastity.

Orchid: A symbol of perfection.

Poppy: A symbol of death.

While this guide provides you with the many common forms of symbolism, there exist many thousands. These may start you on your path toward gaining the artist’s intent, but an accurate understanding can only be found by taking in the entire work as a whole…and even then…often times artists will purposely leave some components up for audience interpretation. For this, we should be thankful. Sometimes it’s best to let our imaginations run toward infinite, when each view opens the door toward new possibilities.

The best selling author, Malcom Gladwell wrote a great article in his New Yorker Column. The article is called Late Bloomers – it attempts to explain the differences between prodigy type geniuses and acquired greatness over time. In the article he uses many examples, one such example is a comparison between the life works Pablo Picasso and Paul Cézanne:

As an art lover, I know Picasso and Cézanne’s stories well. Picasso was the incandescent prodigy. His career as a serious artist began with a masterpiece, “Evocation: The Burial of Casagemas,” produced at age twenty. In short order, he painted many of the greatest works of his career, including “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,” early on at the young age of twenty-six.

Picasso fits our usual conceptual ideas about geniuses, Cézanne is a different story. If you go to the Cézanne room at the Musée d’Orsay, in Paris-the finest collection of Cézannes in the world, the array of masterpieces you’ll find along the back wall were all painted at the end of his career.

Through a simple economic analysis, tabulating the prices paid at auction for paintings by Picasso and Cézanne with the ages at which they created those works. A painting done by Picasso in his mid-twenties is worth, an average of four times as much as a painting done in his sixties. For Cézanne, the opposite is true. The paintings he created in his mid-sixties were valued fifteen times as highly as the paintings he created as a young man.

The freshness, exuberance, and energy of youth did little for Cézanne. He was a late bloomer – and for some reason in our accounting of genius and creativity we have forgotten to make sense of the Cézannes of the world.

Prodigies like Picasso rarely engage in an open-ended exploration. They tend to be “conceptual”, in the sense that they start with a clear idea of where they want to go, and then they execute it. “I can hardly understand the importance given to the word ‘research’,” Picasso once said in an interview with the artist Marius de Zayas. “In my opinion, to search means nothing in painting. To find is the thing.” He continued, “The several manners I have used in my art must not be considered as an evolution or as steps toward an unknown ideal of painting….I have never made trials or experiments.”
But late bloomers tend to work the other way around. Their goal is imprecise and experimental, so their procedure is tentative and incremental.

Where Picasso wanted to find, not search, Cézanne said the opposite: “I seek in painting.” That’s how that kind of mind figures out what it wants to do. When Cézanne was painting a portrait of the critic Gustave Geffroy, he made him endure eighty sittings, over three months, before announcing the project a failure. (The result is one of those string-masterpieces in the Musée Orsay.) When Cézanne painted his dealer, Ambrose Vollard, he made Vollard arrive at eight in the morning and sit on a rickety platform until eleven-thirty, without a break, on a hundred and fifty occasions—before abandoning the portrait. He would paint a scene, then repaint it, then paint it again. He was notorious for slashing his canvases to pieces in fits of frustration.

The idea that creativity can be divided into these types: conceptual and experimental – has a number of important implications. For example, we sometimes think of late bloomers as late starters. They don’t realize they’re good at something until they’re fifty, so of course they achieve late in life. But that’s not quite right. Cézanne was painting almost as early as Picasso was. We also sometimes think of them as artists who are discovered late; the world is just slow to appreciate their gifts. In both cases, the assumption is that the prodigy and the late bloomer are fundamentally the same, and that late blooming is simply genius under conditions of market failure. However, the argument could be made that late bloomers bloom late because they simply aren’t much good until late in their careers.

“All these qualities of his inner vision were continually hampered and obstructed by Cézanne’s incapacity to give sufficient verisimilitude to the personae of his drama,” the great English art critic Roger Fry wrote of the early Cézanne. “With all his rare endowments, he happened to lack the comparatively common gift of illustration, the gift that any draughtsman for the illustrated papers learns in a school of commercial art; whereas, to realize such visions as Cézanne’s required this gift in high degree.” In other words, the young Cézanne couldn’t draw. Of “The Banquet,” which Cézanne painted at thirty-one, Fry writes, “It is no use to deny that Cézanne has made a very poor job of it.” Fry goes on, “More happily endowed and more integral personalities have been able to express themselves harmoniously from the very first. But such rich, complex, and conflicting natures as Cézanne’s require a long period of fermentation.” Cézanne was trying something so elusive that he couldn’t master it until he’d spent decades practicing.

The marketplace works only for people like Picasso, whose art emerges, fully realized, at the beginning of their career. Picasso, whose talent was so blindingly obvious that an art dealer offered him a hundred-and-fifty-franc-a-month stipend the minute he got to Paris, at age twenty. If you are the type of creative mind that starts without a plan, and has to experiment and learn by doing, you need someone to see you through the long and difficult time it takes for your art to reach its true level.

This is what is so instructive about any biography of Cézanne. Accounts of his life start out being about Cézanne, and then quickly turn into the story of Cézanne’s circle. First and foremost is always his best friend from childhood, the writer Émile Zola, who convinces the awkward misfit from the provinces to come to Paris, and who serves as his guardian and protector and coach through the long, lean years.

Camille Pissarro was the next critical figure in Cézanne’s life. It was Pissarro who took Cézanne under his wing and taught him how to be a painter. For years, there would be periods in which they went off into the country and worked side by side.
Then there was Ambrose Vollard, the sponsor of Cézanne’s first one-man show, at the age of fifty-six. At the urging of Pissarro, Renoir, Degas, and Monet, Vollard hunted down Cézanne in Aix. He spotted a still-life in a tree, where it had been flung by Cézanne in disgust. He poked around the town, putting the word out that he was in the market for Cézanne’s canvases.

Finally, there was Cézanne’s father, the banker Louis-Auguste. From the time Cézanne first left Aix, at the age of twenty-two, Louis-Auguste paid his bills, even when Cézanne gave every indication of being nothing more than a failed dilettante. But for Zola, Cézanne would have remained an unhappy banker’s son in Provence; but for Pissarro, he would never have learned how to paint; but for Vollard (at the urging of Pissarro, Renoir, Degas, and Monet), his canvases would have rotted away in some attic; and, but for his father, Cézanne’s long apprenticeship would have been a financial impossibility. That is an extraordinary list of patrons. The first three—Zola, Pissarro, and Vollard—would have been famous even if Cézanne never existed, and the fourth was an unusually gifted entrepreneur who left Cézanne four hundred thousand francs when he died. Cézanne didn’t just have help. He had a dream team in his corner.

Late bloomers’ stories are invariably love stories, and this may be why we have such difficulty with them. We’d like to think that mundane matters like loyalty, steadfastness, and the willingness to keep writing checks to support what looks like failure have nothing to do with something as rarefied as genius. But sometimes genius is anything but rarefied; sometimes it’s just the thing that emerges after twenty years of painting at your kitchen table.

Edward Hopper’s classic works captured the authenticity of urban and rural American life with emotions and beauty that have placed them among the lasting and popular images of the American 20th century landscape.

Edward Hopper was born July 22, 1882, 25 miles north of New York City. After a short stretch in the Commercial Art school in New York City, Hopper transferred to the New York School of Art, founded a few years back by the American Impressionist William Merritt Chase. Hopper continued to study illustration but also learned to paint from the most influential teachers of that time, including Chase, Robert Henri and Kenneth Hayes Miller.

Hopper was eager to keep learning the trade and traveled to Paris so he could get inspired by the Impressionist movement that took Paris by storm. He visited Europe three times from 1906 to 1910. After returning to the United States in 1910, Hopper never visited Europe again. He was set on finding his own way as an American artist, and the transition toward an individual style can be detected in the works that followed like Room in New York, painted in 1932.

Painting didn’t come easy for Edward Hopper. Each canvas represented a long, painful conception spent in solitude. There were no sweeping brushstrokes from a fevered mind, no electrifying “Van Gogh like” stroke of genius. He painstakingly considered, added and took out ideas for months before he squeezed even a drop of oil onto his palette.

Despite his extensive consideration, Hopper created more than 800 known paintings, watercolors and prints. His best works are of purified yet eerie scenes in remote New England towns and Off-Broadway New York City scenes and architectures. His bleak yet warm interpretation of early 20th century American life, are melodramas submerged with vigor.

Hopper is arguably the best and most admired American realist of the 20th century, encapsulating a generation’s memories so vividly that we can hardly look at a toppled house, or gas-station near a deserted road except through his eyes. His ability to relate to both rural America and to the wild urban scene of New York City in the same stroke of solitude and vitality unites us all under Hopper’s palette.

Though considered by many as a Surrealist, René Magritte was in essence a highbrow painter; his artworks served as vessels for the transformation of abstract thought into visual expression. Magritte was obsessive in redoing his previous oil paintings, ever changing and attempting to portray thoughts through the introduction of subtle compositional changes. Such thoughts were abundant, and Magritte was and still is considered an extraordinary painter, creating more than a thousand oil paintings over the course of five decades.

Magritte was born in 1898, in Belgium, the dull landscape and gloomy skies may well have influenced his flat, moody creations. He began to paint at the age of twelve, and studied art at the Academy in Brussels from 1916 to 1918. In 1926, while earning a living designing advertisements and posters, Magritte joined several friends in the formation of the Belgian Surrealist group. Magritte and his associates showed contempt to the misuse of Freudian theories in art. The group wanted to expand conscious understanding of reality by displaying utterly improbable scenes. The fantastic compositions that resulted were made even more absurd by Magritte’s witty charm.

Rather than paint the conscious world, Magritte created an inverse world, carrying us with him through the looking glass in search of bizarre settings, weird objects of absurd scale, and distortions of the laws of time and matter. He reveled in making the ordinary appear strange, tearing objects from their usual contexts and planting them into utterly inappropriate settings. His legacy is apparent mostly in the works of later contemporary Pop artists like Andy Warhol, who borrowed familiar images and icons from the mass cultural landscape and presented them in a new context, thereby injecting them with new meaning. Magritte painted in the abyss between our visions and the physical world, between our attempts to rationalize every phenomenon, and the absurdity that continues to encompass life despite all efforts to suppress it.

Magritte’s most famous work, Son of Man, is actually a self portrait of Magritte. The painting portrays a man in a suit and a bowler hat (a reacurring motif in Magritte’s creation) standing in-front of a small brick wall. In the horizon is an ocean and cloudy skies. The man’s face is largely covered by a hovering green apple. The painting depicts the biblical story of Adam and Eve, and how the modern businessman is faced with the same temptation Adam faced soon after the creation. About the painting Magritte said, “Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see, but it is impossible. Humans hide their secrets too well…”

A lost Van Gogh has been found this month, Wild Vegetation, hidden under another painting. It was discovered in an x-ray of The Ravine, which Van Gogh painted on the same canvas four months later. The Van Gogh Museum said that the painting underneath the Ravine matches an actual drawing that they had from Van Gogh at the time.

This is a trailer of the “Impressoinists,” a BBC original series about the life and work of the early Impressionists. The story is narrated through the eyes of old Claude Monet during the 1920’s as he reflects back on the early days of the Impressionist movement.

This promo shows great moments in the life of Monet, Manet, Degas and Cezanne.

Finally a TV series about the life of the impressionist, if you get a chance, try and locate this series, it is really fun to watch and you can learn a lot about the era and what these artists went through in order to change the face of Traditional Art. It is an opportunity to see what inspired these artists and how there art propelled them to greatness.

Come celebrate the most important art movement of Modern times with the “Impressionists.”

This summer the Tate Museum in London is hosting the Dali and Film exhibition. The show articulates the effect of Salvador Dali’s film had on his early Surrealist creation.

By showing the film in a gallery setting next to his Surrealist oil paintings it is apparent the influence film had on Salvador Dali, and how he shifted images and themes from the big screen to the canvas.

It is easy to associate images of masturbation, castration and bodily corruption that you find in Dali’s films from that era with the early Surrealist works such as The First Days of Spring, The Great Masturbator, Illumined Pleasures and The Accommodations of Desire – all painted in the year his 1929 silent film, Un Chien andalou, was made.

Dali continued to make films all the way through 1946. He collaborated with greats such Hitchcock and Disney. I find his later films hard to view and lack the impact of his early works. The same is true for his Surrealist works on canvas.

I found an interesting study about the paintings of Paul Gauguin. It turns out, Paul Gauguin used to embed faces inside his paintings.

In an artist’s study, it turns out that “There is always a face on the edge of the canvas watching from the background. Obvious faces, partial faces and impressionistic faces.”

This video is a never before seen exhibition of the hidden faces of Paul Gauguin:

A banker by profession, Paul Gauguin became one of the giants of impressionism by the end of the 19th century. Gauguin was a friend to many of the great artists of his time like Pissaro and Van Gogh. His art influenced many of the artists that followed like Matisse and Picasso.

This is a great interview of George Shackelford, from the Museum of Fine Art Boston about the life of Paul Gauguin. It is especially interesting to learn about one of his most important paintings – “Who are we? Where are we going?”

This video was done as an introduction to an important exhibition of the Boston and Paris Museums combining their Gauguin collections. The exhibition, which opened in Paris in 2003 commemorated the centennial year of Gauguin’s death.