OLD NEWS

BORN ON THIS DAY IN 1834, IN PARIS, EDGAR DEGAS.
Painter, sculptor, & printmaker
with a great eye and intelligence.
Here by himself in 1862.
Quite the dandy!
<https://tinyurl.com/nsp5rhbh>
Degas with his friend Evariste de Valernes in 1865
<https://tinyurl.com/4tppeh8c>
The Bellelli Family by Edgar Degas, c. 1862.
Brilliant portrayal of family dysfunction.
They were Degas's cousins so he knew!
<https://tinyurl.com/mry8s7ch>
Fabulous study of Giulia Bellelli for her family portrait,
by her cousin Edgar Degas
<https://tinyurl.com/2yw6zba2>
Three women.
Just hanging out, in 1884
<<https://tinyurl.com/3c7aw25m>>
Two laundresses, 1877, by Edgar Degas.
He is so excellent w/ compositions
that defy traditional balance,
here emphasizing how women struggle
to counter the weight of their burdens.
<https://tinyurl.com/fv5dxbrb>
Another, unexpected family portrait of sorts by Edgar Degas:
The Cotton Exchange in New Orleans, 1873, f
eaturing his uncle & 2 brothers.
Fantastic.
Especially that shutter at upper left -- oooh!
<https://tinyurl.com/mt67ve6t>
Dancers at the barre, 1877.
Fantastic composition, as always f
rom the great master Edgar Degas.
<https://tinyurl.com/fp6yab25>
Two other dancers.
Stretching.
Waiting.
<https://tinyurl.com/2npem8p6>
Dancer adjusting her shoe.
Magnificent composition!
Degas, you are awesome.
<https://tinyurl.com/2c563rby>
Summer’s day on the beach in 1869
<https://tinyurl.com/mpu4hvrh>
Summer in the meadows:
two young women resting,
captured in pastels
<https://tinyurl.com/hs7ajux2>
Viscount Lepic & his daughters
crossing Place de la Concorde.
With dog.
Another brilliantly composed
yet unbalanced family portrait
<https://tinyurl.com/2bjdkdej>
Edgar Degas could do unbalanced portraits
even of individuals!
Here a woman, possibly Madame Paul Valpinçon,
shoved to side of canvas
by a massive collection of flowers in 1865.
<https://tinyurl.com/mryst85w>
Absinthe drinker:
the loneliness of addiction, 1876.
Modeled by Ellen Andrée and Marcellin Desboutin
<https://tinyurl.com/2tzpjuwd>
As evening falls on Degas' birthday,
his brilliant pastel of prostitutes in a Paris cafe.
The columns are just blank paper.
<https://tinyurl.com/bdeszn45>
The milliner's shop, 1882.
Mirror repeats customer (to herself)
while totally effacing the salesgirl.
Another A+ composition
<https://tinyurl.com/ytjatnyd>
The coiffeur.
Shocking in all its redness and luxuriation,
by Edgar Degas in 1896.
<https://tinyurl.com/ynctx552>
The tub, 1886:
one more genius composition by Edgar Degas
<https://tinyurl.com/mr3aw853>
In a forest of hanging garments,
a woman irons 1880.
<https://tinyurl.com/3jxshkjp>
At the racetrack in 1887.
Horse at left is frightened by
train going by in the distance.
Another genius composition
<https://tinyurl.com/3yy35htb>
Fallen jockey, 1896,
No words.
<https://tinyurl.com/3amn8c45> _Dr.PeterPaulRubens

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CAN HIS MENTAL ILLNESS HELP EXPLAIN THESE ARRESTING, BIZARRE IMAGES? by Jonathan Jones
<https://tinyurl.com/mprmfc3j>
The young man in the garden must be one of Richard Dadd’s fellow patients in Bedlam, you think. His unkempt hair and ruffled clothes are sure indications of a distracted mind as he sits, half his face in shadow, hands nervously clasped, on a fabulously twisted wooden bench surrounded by greenery that’s almost too lush for comfort. Yet the subject of Dadd’s 1853 Portrait of a Young Man is probably the superintendent of Bethlem Hospital, Dr Charles Hood. The painter sees reflections of his own mental state in this frail-seeming young clinician. Patient and doctor are not so different, he suggests. There is the finest of lines between “sanity” and “madness”.
Dadd crossed that line when he murdered his father whom he thought was the devil, then tried to kill a stranger while fleeing to Paris. He was quickly caught and would spend the rest of his life in Bedlam and Broadmoor. But how much does his mental illness explain his arresting, bizarre, sometimes unforgettable images? Is he a kind of Victorian acid casualty whose visions of fairies are the peculiar fruit of his psychosis?
<https://tinyurl.com/3n7skerw>
The Royal Academy’s smallish Dadd survey is called Beyond Bedlam and urges us to see him as more than just a “mad” artist. Yes, he spent more than 40 years in psychiatric hospitals where he was judged incurable and where he painted his masterpiece The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke, that monstrously magnified corner of an English country garden. But he was already a remarkable artist, with fairies as his hit theme.
These are not cute Disneyfied fairies but the original mysterious beings from British folklore, sinister and destructive, as portrayed by Shakespeare. Dadd’s early painting of Puck has the mischievous sprite personified as a giant baby irradiated by lunar light. In Titania Sleeping, <https://tinyurl.com/5e7acmew> we glimpse, through a parted curtain of bats, nude female fairies. It’s an uneasy adult fairyland. So too is The Haunt of the Fairies <https://tinyurl.com/4ffu4r6r> in which a female fairy – or is it just a naked woman? – gazes at us against trees silhouetted in the red twilight of a very British landscape.
Then Dadd went on an epic trip to the Middle East, filling his sketchbook with mosques, markets, Egyptian ruins, but what should have been a stimulating escape tipped him into severe paranoia and murder. This was when a promising life cracked open.
When the fairies return to him in Bedlam they are brutally different. His early work is imaginative but visibly influenced by Romantic artists like Fuseli <https://tinyurl.com/3dpyw5z5> and Runge <https://tinyurl.com/2a2x9jj6> . But there’s no precedent that helps to understand The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke. Painted over a nine-year period, it disobeys the pictorial rules in which Dadd had been educated. When you try to fathom it, your eyes have to pick their way between tall dark strands of grass, daisies, dock leaves that block your view and clog and cramp the picture surface. Only through this tangle can you make out a detailed portrayal of fairy society. The tiny folk are gathered in awe and trepidation to watch the strongest fairy raise his axe to “fell” a horse chestnut to repair Queen Mab’s coach. These fairies are not beautiful or seductive. Two have outsized legs bulging from their pleated skirts. One has a vast bald blueish head.
<https://tinyurl.com/3mjvfbc3>
It’s a picture full of conviction and not in any way an entertainment or conscious fantasy. This is what the fairies really look like, says Dadd, showing them to us like natural history specimens observed through a microscope.
Perhaps he offered to show Dr Hood such fairies in a neglected recess of the garden of Bedlam.
You can’t get away from it. Dadd was an interesting artist before Bedlam but became a great one in it – and a modern artist at that. In his own lonely way he overthrows the rules of art, reaching for unsettling new truths akin to those Manet and Whistler were probing, out in the “sane” world. What’s stranger is that within the confines of the asylum he sees nature afresh. Freed from artistic convention, he paints flowers, fruits, weeds with the savageness of their reality. In Bacchanalian Scene <https://tinyurl.com/yrtevx2v> , ecstatic, flushed faces are seen through an eerie morass of vegetation.
The RA pointlessly insists on showing some duller works, as if to prove that not everything he did in Bedlam was charged with “mad” genius. But when he was moved to the new Broadmoor hospital his passion for nature was unleashed again. From fantastic fruits to an imaginary mountainous harbour that he designed for the hospital theatre’s drop curtain, these late watercolours have an ethereal, profoundly sad beauty.
You can’t escape the tragedy of a gifted artist who spent so much of his life locked up, albeit in more liberal conditions than our stereotype of Victorian asylums might lead you to expect. But Dadd can’t be turned as art historians long to into a mainstream artist who just happened to be in Bedlam and Broadmoor. Thank Titania. For pitiable and painful as his life was, he cut through the weeds to see what others couldn’t: monstrous tiny creatures in the grass, ecstatic revels in the evening fields. Shine on, you crazy Victorian. _GuardianUK

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AUDREY AMISS, WHOSE PROMISING CAREER WAS DERAILED BY MENTAL ILLNESS
<https://tinyurl.com/2yvyz6xy>
“At the end of a life, all we have is stuff,” wrote the Wellcome Collection’s archivist Elena Carter, as she sifted through the bushels of material donated by the family of Audrey Amiss after her death in 2013. This “stuff”—sketches, posters, notebooks, scrapbooks filled with food packaging—came out of the flat in Clapham, London, where Amiss lived for many years. But Amiss, a selection of whose work is going on display at the Wellcome Collection, was more than simply a hoarder, or even what we might call an “outsider artist”, secret and unheralded. She had in fact once been a promising student at the Royal Academy Schools in the late 1950s but her career was derailed by mental illness, resulting in numerous detentions in psychiatric institutions.
Audrey Amiss: The Surviving Exhibitions is selected from the 350-plus paintings, prints and drawings she left behind, as well as around 50,000 sketches and 230 scrapbooks. Referring to the process as “challenging”, the curator Madeleine Kennedy says that the focus has been “on trying to ascertain her wishes for how she would have wanted her artworks displayed, had she been here to guide that”. Amiss spent most of her life chronicling her activities in incredible detail, recording interactions, noting down food intake (and keeping the wrappings), and continually sketching the places and people she encountered.
‘Freedom for Lunatics’
Added to this, Amiss clearly resented her interactions with psychiatrists; arguably her most striking creations are the signs she made for a 2002 protest against the draft Mental Health Bill of that year, bearing slogans such as “Freedom for Lunatics” and “Psychiatry. Harming in the Name of Healthcare”. Amiss, despite her mental health crises, did regularly exhibit her work—sometimes in small solo shows, and sometimes as part of bigger artists’ society exhibitions. “This was a really important realisation,” Kennedy says, “helping us navigate a key question in the development of the exhibition: how to understand her wishes whilst respecting her privacy.”
<https://tinyurl.com/3kbx2535>
One of the more remarkable elements is that, while Amiss’s art remained largely unknown, her story was told in the 2022 film Typist Artist Pirate King, directed by Carol Morley. The movie title is how Amiss described her occupation in her passport. Morley discovered Amiss’s work archive after being given a Wellcome Trust Screenwriting Fellowship in 2015. She says she was immediately connected to Amiss’s work: “Audrey had a unique way of drawing our eyes to the world we inhabit. She was drawn to the everyday and brought with it an artist’s eye that for me is entirely appealing.”
Morley is so taken with Amiss’s work that she is publishing a book later this year (called Typist Artist Pirate King: The Life and Times of Audrey Amiss as Told by Those Who Knew Her and Those Who Didn’t). She is clear about the value of Amiss’s work. “I think an artist discloses something about the world, their world—and Audrey certainly did. I think she gives us all the opportunity to stop, breathe and look.”
_Andrew Pulver _ArtNewspaper

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THE FACE by Edward Lucie Smith
From 1994: Edward Lucie Smith on Andy Warhol, the glitterati’s favourite image maker
Andy Warhol is in the process of being forgiven by people who ought to know better. I remember the first occasion when this realisation came home to me. I was sitting in on a seminar about art criticism held at the Contemporary Art Centre in New Orleans. Three panel members had already tried to state a view on criticism – the word, with its judgmental overtones, clearly made them unhappy. Why couldn’t we avoid the issue, and accept all artistic efforts as equally worthy? It was the effort that counted, not the result.
A fourth and final member was more abrasive. He rose to his feet and pronounced that the two greatest American artists of the late 20th century were undoubtedly Andy Warhol and Bobby (sic) Mapplethorpe. Criticism was really very simple – all contemporary achievement should be measured against theirs.
I wonder how anyone could say this without being challenged – but all around me the heads were nodding sagely in agreement. Andy Warhol rules OK. How can anyone think ill of a contemporary artist whose estate was valued at $220 million?
It is easy to list the things which appear to be wrong with Warhol’s art. He began as a fashion faggot, a twee illustrator who was a success in the advertising world and a wow with the glossy magazines. By 1952 he was, according to his biographer, Victor Bockris, “the most sought-after illustrator of women’s accessories in New York”. As Calvin Tomkins put it: “The childish hearts and flowers and the androgynous pink cherubs that he used were not quite what they seemed to be, there was a slight suggestiveness about them that people in the business recognised and approved. He could kid the product so subtly that he made the client feel witty.”
Just because of his success as a commercial artist, Warhol found it hard to break into the ‘serious’ art world, then still besotted with Abstract Expressionist Sturm und Drang. Even when Pop arrived he was initially out of luck. Leo Castelli refused to take him on because his paintings of cartoon characters were too much like those of another new Castelli artist, Roy Lichtenstein.
Despite this initial setback, Andy eventually triumphed – sort of. He became an established Pop painter, turning out stacks of Soup Cans, Marilyns, Jackies and Electric Chairs.
He was the central figure in The Factory, the most celebrated bohemian hangout in New York. He made scores of unwatchable underground movies, and created a galaxy of tacky ‘superstars’, pale reflections of his own glory. He invented Interview magazine – a kind of Hello! – as a means of currying favour with people even more famous than himself. In the late 70s he was a fixture at Studio 54, then the most celebrated night-club in New York, and bosom buddies with Halston, America’s most celebrated dress-designer. During this final period he did a brisk trade in society portraits, generated from Polaroids. To sitters, he offered discounts for quantity – the more portraits you ordered, the less they cost.
Does it sound at all like the lives and careers of Rembrandt or Michelangelo?
Even though it is currently a deeply unfashionable thing to do, one can try putting the personality to one side and looking at the work itself. The more there were variations. Sometimes the stringent defenders of Warhol’s art are generally agreed that the period which really counts is relatively brief. It stretches from the cartoon images of the 1960s to the big and little Maos of 1972–3. Almost throughout this epoch Warhol used an absolutely standard technique. First he applied paint to the canvas in dayglo hues – in the case of Marilyn Monroe, for example, he would outline the shape of her head and shoulders, then fill in the background and add, rather broadly, details such as her eyeshadow and the outline of her lips. He would then apply a silk-screen image generated from a blown up photograph, and go over it rapidly with a squeegee. Hey presto! Another Warhol Marilyn! Of course, there were variations. Sometimes the chosen image appears in multiples, as in Marilyn x 100 (1962).
The technique was so simple that it was extensively faked even in Warhol’s own lifetime. Some of his assistants apparently succumbed to the temptation to manufacture ‘Warhols’ in the artist’s absence. Even when Warhol was present, for some form of laying on of hands, his artworks were not made without help. Eyewitnesses tell us that for him running up a new batch of paintings was a boring, unnecessary task, to be accomplished as rapidly and painlessly as possible, with the assistance of anybody, trained or untrained, who happened to be around.
None of these facts are in dispute, but Warhol’s intellectual admirers get around them by putting forward elaborate justifications based on Warhol’s supposed affinity to Duchamp. According to them, he is the man who took Duchamp’s invention, the Readymade, and democratised it, establishing it in the very heart of popular culture. In addition, they celebrate him as a moralist. There is no evidence that Andy, though he went to church fairly regularly in his later years, made any such claim for himself.
The claim is based, not on the Marilyns and the Soup Cans, but on the Disaster paintings – the Race-Riots and Car Crashes. Here scenes of mayhem, taken from tabloids or from police archives, are once again silkscreened onto canvases as repeated images, generally against a background of cheerfully incongruous hue. The idea put forward by commentators is that these paintings accurately reflect the dulling of sensibilities, the compassion fatigue, induced by the contemporary urban world. Yet it can also be said that they offer additional evidence (for which there is plenty of anecdotal support) for Warhol’s emotional coldness and voyeurism.
In the end, however, we do have to look simply at the artefacts themselves. Deliberately repetitive, garish in hue, slipshod in detail, they are precisely what the artist wanted them to be. This doesn’t make them ‘good’ in any meaningful sense of the word, though it may make them seem important, as tokens of a time when taste reached a nadir, and congratulated itself on having fallen so far. Generations yet to come are lucky. Because most Warhols are made, physically, of such poor materials, they are going to degenerate inexorably, despite the tender care of museum conservation departments and obsessive collectors. In 100 years they will be almost invisible shadows, rotted wrecks, sad trails of acrylic running down tattered canvases. And in a hundred years people will therefore be able to enjoy all the baroque curlicues of the Warhol legend without having to look at the pictures. Andy the saint will tickle their fancy even more than Andy the genius. The process of canonisation started immediately after Andy’s decease.
How about this, for example, taken from an eulogy penned by John Richardson, the biographer of Picasso? “Andy even managed to give a slogan like Jesus Saves an uncanny ring of urgency. And how awesomely prophetic is the painting, one of his very last paintings, which simply announced HEAVEN AND HELL ARE JUST ONE BREATH AWAY. In his impregnable innocence and humility Andy always struck me as a wrodso, one of those saintly simpletons who haunt Slavic literature and Slavic villages such as Mikova in Ruthenia from which the Warhols stem.”
“If you believe that”, I find myself murmuring, “you’ll believe anything.”
Confronted with both Warhol’s art and the facts of his life, my mind turns to another artist of somewhat doubtful personal character, who also loomed very large in his day – Jacques-Louis David (1748–1825). David’s biographers agree that he behaved despicably at the fall of Robespierre, his patron and friend during the period of the Terror. And few people now admire the character of Marat, the ‘tribune of the people’ whose death David commemorated in the magnificent Marat Assassiné, now in Brussels. Yet most lovers of painting recognise that the Marat, the artistic tribute paid by a coward and dupe to a mean-spirited demagogue, is a masterpiece.
In Warhol’s oeuvre masterpieces are hard to find, and it is no real defence to say that, by his time, the whole concept of the masterpiece had become irrelevant. Running through my head, whenever I think of Warhol, are some lines by W.H. Auden:
‘Time, that with this strange excuse,
Pardons Kipling and his views,
And will pardon Paul Claudell,
Pardons him for writing well.’
Sorry, Andy, you won’t get through St. Peter’s gate if that framework of judgement has anything to do with it. But why shouldn’t idiots worship you, if they must? _ArtReview

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ANTONIO LÓPEZ GARCÍA - THE QUINCE TREE - 1961
<https://tinyurl.com/58rkvwnc>
Lucian Freud - Still Life (Quince) - 1982
<https://tinyurl.com/mwr8aw23>
Rudolf Ribarz (Austria, 1848-1904) Quince branch
<https://tinyurl.com/45cd4mnx>
Quince blossom in snow, lithograph print, Meiji era Japan
<https://tinyurl.com/3sp82bjr>
Shundei Nakamura, Flowering Quince and Meadow Bunting
<https://tinyurl.com/33466ybs>
"Study of Japan Quince" by Madeline Flory
<https://tinyurl.com/mwnxtdhz>
Vincent van Gogh, Still Life with Quinces, 1888 - 1889
<https://tinyurl.com/3zd65zd9>
Francisco de Zurbarán - Still Life with Dish of Quince - ca.1633
<https://tinyurl.com/ruvc25kz>
Juan Sánchez Cotán - Still Life with Quince, Cabbage, Melon, and Cucumber - ca.1602
<https://tinyurl.com/5cadbphk>
Giovanna Garzoni (1600-1670), Quince with Lizard
<https://tinyurl.com/2yxamw2a>
Morris Graves Winter Bouquet, Flowering Quince, Rosehaws, Narcissus + Winter Rose, 1977
<https://tinyurl.com/ywy6b8sy>
Evgenia Antipova Quince (1968)
<https://tinyurl.com/2ujmm4pc>
Aimee Erickson Quince & Cornish Pitcher (2019)
<https://tinyurl.com/mwxepzhz>
Jeannie Vodden, Flowering Quince, 2011
<https://tinyurl.com/mwbs6pst>
Hans Frank (1884 - 1948) - Quince Flowers and Butterflies [olej na desce]
<https://tinyurl.com/uxt93a38>
Paul Cézanne, 'Still Life with Quince, Apples, and Pears'
<https://tinyurl.com/cjj9m5zd>
And one of my all time favorite paintings
Antonio López García, El Membrillero (quince), 1992
<https://tinyurl.com/39zazw6v> _RabihAlameddine