OLD NEWS

TODAY'S ARTIST WITHOUT A KNOWN BIRTHDAY: CIMABUE.
Here, his Maestà di Santa Trinità, c. 1280,
to bring some gold into your life.
<https://tinyurl.com/y3xe4rey>
A pair of prophets just hanging out
at the bottom of Cimabue's golden Maesta
<https://tinyurl.com/3cjpn24f>
The amazing lower Church of St. Francis in Assisi,
including a frescoed Maesta by Cimabue at the right.
<https://tinyurl.com/rccprfwp>
Cimabue's Madonna with angels
and, lurking at the right,
a super-early portrait of Saint Francis himself,
only 50 years after his death!
From the lower basilica at Assisi, 1279,
<https://tinyurl.com/bdzfer7d>
From which we also learn
that Saint Francis had sticky-outy ears.
Yay Francis!
<https://tinyurl.com/3uckdkuk>
Cimabue spots shepherd Giotto drawing in the dirt,
recognizes his genius, & takes him on as a pupil.
Didn’t really happen!
But made a great story, here
by Clemens von Zimmerman in 1841.
<https://tinyurl.com/y54sbfsz>
More great Giotto legends from the 19th century:
Cimabue watches Giotto paint a portrait of Dante,
as imagined by Dante Gabriel Rossetti in 1852.
<https://tinyurl.com/ah3ea4u8>
Cimabue’s great Crucifix
for the church of Santa Croce, Florence, 1280s.
All the mysteries are here.
<https://tinyurl.com/58c3pus2>
Cimabue’s great Florence Crucifix
after the terrible flood of 1966.
Lots of what you see today is inpainting.
Sad! (Really truly sad).
<https://tinyurl.com/m69s24x6>
Madonna & Child, 1280s.
Baby J not at all satisfied with his current situation.
Don’t worry, the Renaissance is coming!
Be patient.
<https://tinyurl.com/4kx2c4sm>
Glowing in the darkness of the church,
Maesta of Santa Maria dei Servi,
<https://tinyurl.com/eeu6fxf2>
Fantastic cities in Italy
<https://tinyurl.com/35ujja3r>
& Judea
<https://tinyurl.com/4ndwx4mt>
Birth of John the Baptist.
Midwives: see what a cute baby?
Let's call him Clive!
Dad no it's John or Sylvester, take your pick.
Florentine baptistry mosaic by Cimabue,
<https://tinyurl.com/2bunxv3u>
River water strangely matches
John the Baptist’s fur outfit
in this mosaic designed by Cimabue.
<https://tinyurl.com/3np9ffh7>
Lovely little Madonna & Child, c. 1290,
by Cimabue of Florence.
He was all the rage
before Giotto came along (sez Dante)
<https://tinyurl.com/5n7547jf>
All the gold of heaven:
Madonna & Child, with angels, 1280.
<https://tinyurl.com/yc58722h>
Madonna and Child enthroned, c. 1290,
<https://tinyurl.com/5n8baew5>
See it & weep for sorrow & for beauty:
the great Arezzo Crucifix, 1270.
Some seasonal art from Cimabue,
<https://tinyurl.com/35v556yb>
Cimabue’s Crucifix,
as it hangs high in the church of San Domenico.
Amazing object.
<https://tinyurl.com/4awhu8rh>
And the grieving Mary,
from the arm of the crucifix.
<https://tinyurl.com/2p9uukac>
Christ mosaic in the apse of Pisa's cathedral.
Designed by Cimabue,
his last work, in 1302.
<https://tinyurl.com/3crfeapw> _Dr.PeterPaulRubens

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MICHAELINA WAUTIER’S WORK WAS LOST, HIDDEN OR MISATTRIBUTED TO MEN
<https://tinyurl.com/3x7naxe2>
In 1993, a chance encounter in the stores of Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum between the Flemish art expert Katlijne Van der Stighelen and a huge painting depicting a Bacchanalian scene was the first step in the rediscovery of the forgotten female Baroque painter Michaelina Wautier (around 1614-89).
The incident set in motion a search for more paintings by the 17th-century artist, which eventually culminated in the first major exhibition of her work at the Museum aan de Stroom in Antwerp in 2018. But that achievement was just the beginning of the story. Van der Stighelen told The Art Newspaper at the time that “given the fact that [Wautier] had a very long life, I am sure that from now on, many more works will pop up”.
She was right. In the intervening years, several Wautier works have been unearthed, including the masterly suite of paintings titled The Five Senses (1650), known previously only by a black-and-white illustration in a 1975 auction catalogue, as well as Flower Garland with a Butterfly (1652). These will be among the 25 works by Wautier going on show at the Royal Academy of Arts (RA) in London this month, introducing UK audiences to one of the most important artists of the Baroque period, who until the 21st century was barely an art historical footnote.
<https://tinyurl.com/479uf4n6>
Little is known about the life of Michaelina Wautier though. She is thought to have been born in Mons around 1614 and later lived in Brussels. She had an older brother, Charles, who was also an artist and he is recorded as having trained abroad, possibly in Italy. It may be, therefore, that Wautier too trained abroad, and it is most likely she worked alongside Charles in his studio.
So little is known about Wautier’s training and development as an artist that it is as though her first history painting appears in 1649 “seemingly out of nowhere”, writes Van der Stighelen in the catalogue. Furthermore, Wautier was unique among known female artists of the period in that she painted all the main genres, from portraits to still-lifes, history paintings to genre scenes.
During her lifetime Wautier seems to have had some success though. For example, Archduke Leopold Wilhelm of Austria owned four of her works. But as the centuries passed following her death in Brussels in 1689, she began to be forgotten. Like other artists of the 17th century, “it seems that her works go out of fashion in the 18th century”, Domercq says. Furthermore, “her works end up being attributed to a whole swathe of male painters”, he adds, even when, on at least one occasion, her name was inscribed on the work.
<https://tinyurl.com/45tw63ba>
The Triumph of Bacchus (around 1655-59)—the painting that first sparked Stighelen’s interest in Wautier—is a case in point. Over the years Wautier’s 3.5m-wide painting has variously been said to be by the School of Rubens, a copy after Rubens, by Luca Giordano or by Cornelis Schut. In the early 20th century, the curator of Flemish painting at the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Gustav Glück, said: “even in our age of female emancipation, one would hardly wish to ascribe this picture, which shows a highly vigorous, almost coarse conception, to a woman’s hand.”
Because of the lack of archival material, analysis of Wautier’s painting technique has been especially revealing. For example, a detailed study of The Five Senses showed the presence of a very limited number of pigments in the paintings (which tallies with the colours on Wautier’s palette in Self-portrait, around 1650). Notably, there is no colour blue present, which was expensive at the time, and yet the scarf of the boy playing the flute appears to be painted from that very colour. It was instead achieved “by creating an optical illusion,” Domercq says. “By using contrasting colours around [the scarf] she is able to make a grey look blue.”
<https://tinyurl.com/24av92hs>
Wautier’s skill and handling of paint is what makes her stand out amongst her peers. “What defines her from a lot of other people [of the period], including her brother, is a real virtuosic way of painting,” Domercq says. Wautier had “a very free, very assured way—like Rubens, like Van Dyck —of painting something very quickly but the brushwork is just right, it expresses things very clearly”. _ArtNewspaper

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‘FOR CATURDAY,
selections from Andy Warhol's "25 Cats Name(d) Sam and one Blue Pussy," c. 1954.
The ornate cursive lettering is by Andy's mother, Julia Warhola,
who added text to many of her son's commercial
<https://tinyurl.com/yu7wyxcw>
Another cat name(d) Sam by Andy Warhol, from c. 1954
<https://tinyurl.com/3j6rcb9j>
Andy Warhol, "One Blue Pussy," c. 1954
<https://tinyurl.com/2v8y7v62> _MichaelLobel

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WHAT EGON SCHIELE SAW AT THE HOSPITAL
<https://tinyurl.com/y5zf7vma>
How did Egon Schiele arrive at his particular vision of the human body? This has always puzzled me. If you go back and review his influences, such as Gustav Klimt and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, or survey the ambient intellectual milieu of fin-de-siècle Vienna—from Freud to the anatomist Josef Hyrtl—Schiele’s wiry creatures, all bone and sinew, still seem to come out of nowhere. In drawings and paintings, he disfigured men, women, and children. Flesh often seems bruised. Limbs are weirdly bent or over-rotated. Faces have a regurgitated aspect. Sometimes Schiele randomly lopped off part of a leg, or used bloody coloring to imply a flayed corpse. All of this occurred to him before the carnage of the First World War and continued mostly unabated until he died, in 1918, at the age of twenty-eight.
A new show at the Neue Galerie points to one possible source for Schiele’s bodies. The centerpiece is a 1910 portrait of Dr. Erwin von Graff, a physician at a women’s clinic in Vienna, who gave Schiele direct access to patients: newborns, pregnant women, and the infirm. Although Schiele is remembered as a sort of high-art pornographer, his paintings an endless parade of genitals and splayed legs, the results are rarely pornographic. Perverse, unsettling, and morally suspect, yes—but erotic, not so much. There is a clinical quality that interferes. Schiele’s favorite trick was to surgically carve his subjects out of their environment and lay them on a blank page. Without the context of a studio or a bourgeois interior, there are only people made to look etherized, agitated, or ill, suspended in some empty and sterile place between life and death. You could argue that the closest thing to an implied setting is a hospital.
<https://tinyurl.com/bdeyzwr5>
Before meeting Graff and his patients, Schiele made art that was largely derivative. He had studied at Vienna’s Academy of Fine Arts with mixed results, and landed a few pieces at a major international exhibition in 1909, but his style was still Klimtian and Jugendstil, full of decorative froth and languorous, dreamy bodies. Fast-forward a year, and everything had changed. His work was suddenly a rogues’ gallery of ghoulish figures with keyed-up colors and unnaturally shrunken or engorged body parts. Even Schiele knew it: “I went through Klimt until March,” he wrote in a letter. “Today I believe I am someone completely different.”
The cocktail of influences piped into Schiele’s brain around 1910 had a few key elements. He was repeatedly exposed to the looser brushwork of Max Oppenheimer and Oskar Kokoschka; newly enthusiastic about Javanese shadow puppets; and charmed by a wacky friend, Erwin Osen, a mime, an artist, and a cabaret performer, who drew Schiele’s attention to the body language of the mentally ill. There was also a flock of patrons around to puff up his confidence and provide some income. Heinrich Benesch, a railroad inspector, was so obsessed with Schiele that he begged him never to discard or burn any sketches, but to hand them over. “Please,” Benesch said, “write the following equation in crayon on your stove: ‘stove=Benesch.’ ” Schiele’s work was too crude for aristocratic tastes, unlike Klimt’s, but was well suited to a particular slice of the educated middle class with a penchant for bodily oddity: doctors. One of Schiele’s most devoted supporters was a physician named Oskar Reichel. Another was Erwin von Graff.
<https://tinyurl.com/59xxrmdx>
In the portrait from 1910, Graff looks like a nervous chimney sweep. His face and arms are mysteriously darkened, as if powdered with soot, but somehow—and this is the first of a dozen quirks in the painting—his white shirt is in near-mint condition. The exhibition catalogue puts forward the idea of radiodermatitis, suggesting that Graff’s frequent use of X-rays damaged his skin, which is plausible for his hands but might not explain what’s happened to his head: a swirl of black, sienna, and green, with white slits for eyes and teeth. The peculiar way he holds his arms, as if he’s about to sing the national anthem, is supposedly a surgeon’s hygienic pose. But there are too many stray details that cut against the grain of his professionalism, giving the painting an almost comic air. The most obvious is the little bandage wedged on his fingertip, like a pat of butter. Then there’s the shy pinky tucked behind his forearm, the torched eyebrows, and the crooked smile. Graff seems to be returning from Hell and having a chuckle about it.
Schiele could have placed Graff next to an operating table, like Rembrandt’s Dr. Nicolaes Tulp or Eakins’s Dr. Samuel Gross. He could have given him the dignity of Goya’s Dr. Arrieta, or made him look dashing, like Sargent’s Dr. Pozzi, with his crimson robe and Turkish slippers. Instead, Schiele strips Graff of a stethoscope and examination room, and reduces the background to platelets of white. Who would know that Graff was a talented doctor, or a hearty and athletic man who liked the outdoors and played the cello, or that he had two divorces on the horizon? His body, with its mottled face and hands, is the only wisp of narrative.
Doctors and painters both study the human body, but one does so with an eye to improving its condition, while the other turns it into an image. This inspires more jealousy than you would think. The choice of Goya and Eakins to put themselves in their paintings of doctors—regardless of how matter-of-factly or admiringly the doctors are rendered—is telling. The artist is there to remind you that, like the doctor, he has the power to give life and to take it away. But my guess is that Schiele wasn’t all that fussed about proving his social worth. Whether or not a painter had the importance of a physician, he could still exert his will on the world of appearances.
When Graff and Schiele met, in early 1910, the doctor was thirty-one and the artist was nineteen. How exactly Graff provided access to pregnant women and newborns, we don’t know. It’s possible that he recommended his patients to Schiele, and paid them a small fee, or that Schiele cosplayed as a doctor, following Graff on his rounds. There’s also a passing chance that Graff turned Schiele on to journals—produced at the Salpêtrière hospital, in Paris, originally under the guidance of the neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot—that featured photographs of patients with all manner of pathologies, from hysteria to macrodactyly, a condition that involves enlarged fingers and toes. Schiele painted the picture of Graff as repayment, after the doctor treated a love interest, Liliana Amon. It’s a bizarre thank-you gift, less a professional portrait than an impersonal experiment. Schiele doesn’t seem to want to flatter or injure Graff; he just wants to please himself.
<https://tinyurl.com/2vnxj3w7>
To call Schiele an Austrian Expressionist, like Kokoschka and Richard Gerstl, is to imply that his art moves from inside to outside: a molten core of angst and psychological tension canalized through the limbs, into a brush, and then released onto the canvas. This squares nicely with the Freudian world view of repressed thoughts welling up, in dreams or in slips of the tongue. But what makes the relationship with Graff a clever lens is that it reverses this reading. The Schiele of the hospital starts with surfaces. Once he’s put a subject on the blank page, he can turn the exterior of the body into an arena for all kinds of play, psychological and somatic. In one self-portrait, he gives himself blue hair; in another, he disappears his penis. There’s even one piece in the show where Schiele presents himself thrice: as snarling enfant terrible, in a caftan; as smiley angelic bystander; and as tight-lipped bureaucrat. He always seems to be palpating his sense of self, testing its variety with a little smirk—not bursting onto the page with emotion.
The exhibition has about thirty paintings, watercolors, and drawings, many of them from 1910; the curators, Renée Price and Janis Staggs, have smartly dilated this moment in Schiele’s development. Once the hospital entered his work, it never left. In “Seated Female Nude with Black Stockings” (1910), the sitter spreads her legs and tries to cover her naked torso with a bony, oversized left hand. Her pose seems adopted from a gynecological exam, but we know the person depicting her isn’t a licensed physician. In the reddish and purple “Newborn Baby” (1910), crinkly as the paper it’s drawn on, the flesh is bruised and raw, with no ounce of cherubic sweetness. It’s quite like a fresh newborn, in fact. We don’t think of Schiele as a realist, but his attention to skin that was inflamed, racy, or visually taboo is more honest than what most realists will show you. His work isn’t just uncensored but unflinching, aesthetically and emotionally. He cut everything close to the bone.
As Schiele was dying, from influenza, Graff gave him a final injection to ease his pain. The Neue has a photo of Schiele on his deathbed, along with a plaster death mask. It’s likely at this moment in the show—all of which is squeezed into a single room—that you’ll notice a certain analogy at work, which is that this room, like that of Schiele’s paintings, like that of a hospital, contains birth and life, sickness and death. It’s a room we all know, and generally want to avoid. Schiele gives us a few perverse reasons to stick around.
_Zachary Fine _NewYorkerMag

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PRELUDE 1 ORANGE
<https://tinyurl.com/4d5cek9u> _ON&ON / Jeff Weiss

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R – RICHARDSONIAN ROMANESQUE
<https://tinyurl.com/24krkjyu>
Very few architectural styles are named for a single practitioner, but Richardsonian Romanesque is just as much Henry Hobson Richardson as it is Romanesque. While the rest of his fellow 19th-century eclecticists, especially those in Europe, were obsessed with combining various spindly Gothic articulations ranging in origin from France to Byzantium, Richardson narrowly avoided this fate in pursuit of something decidedly rawer and less defined. Still, these European influences can be seen in his early work, such as the Trinity Church in Boston, whose ground floor and mezzanine long for Venice, while its third story is an almost parodic little Neuschwanstein. But after thankfully abandoning this juvenile Ruskinian tendency to hodgepodge, Richardson found a new vision for eclectic architecture by dipping into an earlier architectural canon, substituting the towering light of the High Gothic for the brooding shadow of the Romanesque.
The result is a style that is distinctly American in its amalgamation of European precedents. At a time when, during the Gilded Age, the United States was being settled rapidly, Richardson and his followers created work of decisive solidity, fanatically stereotomic and heavy. This chunkiness and the sense of (immigrant) labor involved is a large part of what makes Richardsonian still so visually compelling. Over the decades, it expanded from east to west, beginning in Boston in the 1970s and appearing in Osage County, Oklahoma, during the early 20th-century oil boom. Walls of rough-hewn, artificially rusticated stone are punctured, sometimes seemingly by knifepoint, with large single-pane windows newly made possible by 19th-century manufacturing. The stone, often brownstone or granite, and the overscale of the stonework itself, is the defining characteristic of the Richardsonian look. Roofs range from the gingerbread to the crenellated. The ornament—impossibly thick Diocletian arches, squat columns with palmette capitals supporting seemingly unbearable weight—becomes an integral part of the massing itself. Under such a heavy hand, the worst churches in the style look like fortresses, its worse houses like firmaments. But at its best, it can do what no other style could, at least prior to Brutalism—combine the fantasy of form with the acknowledged heft of structure. In short, Richardson’s was a medievalism devised not by princes nor clerics but by generals. —Kate Wagner _ArtInAmerica

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GEORGE TOOKER SELF-PORTRAIT, 1947
<https://tinyurl.com/5n8ptebm>
Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Self-Portrait as a Photographer, 1924.
<https://tinyurl.com/mr4dmreu>
Alex Gardner, Self portrait, 2017.
<https://tinyurl.com/49mbzsxu>
Kerry James Marshall. A Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self. 1980.
<https://tinyurl.com/ww3h9fbd>
Zinaida Serebriakova, 'At the Dressing-Table (Self-Portrait)', 1909
<https://tinyurl.com/2jecmc6e>
Gustave Courbet, The Desperate Man (Self-Portrait), 1845
<https://tinyurl.com/y4k2afyc>
Amrita Sher-Gil, Self portrait in green, 1934
<https://tinyurl.com/pjvv7dtd>
Portrait of a Young Man by Raphael. It's often thought to be a self-portrait. During World War II the Nazis stole the painting from Poland. Many historians regard it as the most important painting missing since WW II. No color photo of the painting was made before it disappeared.
<https://tinyurl.com/3fwj8z7m>
Horace Pippin, Self-Portrait II, 1944.
<https://tinyurl.com/95dnbhpt>
Lucian Freud, Self-portrait with a black eye. 1978
<https://tinyurl.com/3pea5zpz>
Egon Schiele. Self-portrait with hands on chest. 1910
<https://tinyurl.com/3b99brp5>
Parmigianino, Self-portrait in a Convex Mirror, 1524
<https://tinyurl.com/22xy4mrw>
Rembrandt, Self Portrait at the Age of 63, 1669
<https://tinyurl.com/4btavrp7> _RabihAlameddine