Barbizon School
Key Dates: 1840-1870
An association of French landscape painters, c. 1840-70, who lived in the village of Barbizon and who painted directly from nature. Theodore Rousseau was a leader; Corot and Millet were also associated with the group.
Representative Artists:
Theodore Rousseau
Corot
Millet
Frida Kahlo was born in Coyoacán, a suburb of Mexico City, the daughter of the German photographer Guillermo Kahlo (who had emigrated to Mexico) and a Mexican mother. In 1923 she began studying medicine and joined the ‘Liga de la Juventud Communista’. A year later she met Diego Rivera for the first time, the man whom she would eventually marry in 1929 and remain with, on and off, for the duration of her life. At the age of 18 she was involved in a terrible car accident that left her with a crushed pelvis, fractured spine and broken foot. This accident led to a lifetime battle for her health with endless infections and operations. It was this event that prompted her to paint and the pain she felt was to become an ongoing theme of her art.
Kahlo was mainly self-taught as a painter. She was greatly influenced by Rivera as well as by Mexican folk art. She specialised almost exclusively in self-portraits ranging from simple likenesses to portraying herself in dramatic settings. Every picture contained a strong autobiographical element, whether it was simply the artist dressed in traditional Mexican dress or still-lives of fruit which she found in the surroundings of her beloved abode. Her preoccupation with death (a favourite theme amongst the Mexican people) was evident in many of her most famous works, particularly the disturbing ‘Two Fridas’ (1934). Kahlo said that many of her contemporaries “thought I was a Surrealist, but I wasn’t. I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality.” Her paintings were widely shown in Mexico and in 1939 she had successful exhibitions in New York and Paris, but during her lifetime her husband’s career overshadowed her own. After her death, however, she became a feminist icon for her struggle against illness and her left-wing political activities.
Kahlo’s paintings of physical and mental pain are both narcissistic and nightmarish yet at the same time fierce and flamboyant. Working in a primitive style, her paintings are full of odd colour combinations, static figures, and incredible space and scale. Her paintings not only reflect her inner feelings but also position them in the perspective of Mexican culture. She seemed deeply attuned to the consciousness of Mexican people and as a result found great success within her own country. Beyond her native land, however, her work was frequently overlooked, especially after her death, not resurfacing until many years later.
The one-hundredth anniversary of the birth of Frida Kahlo was commemorated with the largest exhibit ever held of her paintings at the Palacio de Bellas Artes, Kahlo's first comprehensive exhibit in Mexico.
Works were on loan from Detroit, Minneapolis, Miami, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Nagoya, Japan. The exhibit included one-third of her artistic production, as well as manuscripts and letters that had not been displayed previously.
The exhibit was open June 13 through August 12, 2007, and surpassed all previous attendance records at the museum. Some of her work was exhibited in Monterrey, Nuevo León, and moved during September 2007 to museums in the United States.
In 2008, a Frida Kahlo exhibition in the United States with more than forty of her self-portraits, still lifes, and portraits was shown at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and other venues.
A "Frida Kahlo Retrospective" exhibit at the Walter-Gropius-Bau, Berlin from April 30 to August 9, 2010, has brought together more than 120 drawings and paintings, including several drawings never before displayed publicly. Regarding Kahlo's "preferred" birth year (she claimed to be born in 1910 during the Mexican Revolution), the Berlin show is also being touted as a "centennial" exhibition.
Technorati Tags: Frida Kahlo,biography
Roy Lichtenstein was born in New York where he studied at the Art Students League in 1939. From 1940 to 1949 he studied at Ohio State University, Columbus, interrupted for three years (1943 to 1946) with service in the US Army. After a brief spell teaching at Columbus, Lichtenstein moved to Cleveland, Ohio where he took on a number of odd jobs to support his painting. In 1957 he returned to teaching, first at New York State University, Oswego then in 1960 to Rutgers University in New Brunswick.
After passing through an Abstract Expressionist phase, Lichtenstein became best known as one of the leading figures in the Pop Art movement. With his one-man exhibition at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York in 1962, his work achieved instant success. Alongside artists such as Andy Warhol, James Rosenquist and Tom Wesselman, Lichtenstein took the distinctive style of the commercial art world as his inspiration. His paintings such as ‘The Kiss’ (1961) and ‘ Whaam!’ (1963) appropriated comic strip imagery, reproducing the primary colours and Benday dots of the cheap printing processes and replicating such subject matter as violent action and sentimental love. By the mid-1960s Lichtenstein was making Pop versions of paintings by modern masters such as Cézanne and Mondrian as well as producing screenprints. In the 1970s he moved into sculpture, mostly in polished brass and imitating the Art Deco forms of the 1930s. He also received several commissions for public places including ‘Mural With Blue Brushstrokes’ (1986) for the Equitable Building in New York.
Lichtenstein saw beauty and pathos in the comic strip art he reproduced. Critics admired his strength of composition and his power to communicate. His witty pastiches seem to represent the triumph of the modern, celebrating the imagery of mass culture.
Tattooing has been a Eurasian practice since Neolithic times. "Ötzi the Iceman", dated c. 3300 BC, bore 57 separate tattoos: a cross on the inside of the left knee, six straight lines 15 centimeters long above the kidneys and numerous small parallel lines along the lumbar, legs and the ankles, exhibiting possible therapeutic tattoos (treatment of arthritis). Tarim Basin (West China, Xinjiang) revealed several tattooed mummies of a Western (Western Asian/European) physical type. Still relatively unknown (the only current publications in Western languages are those of J P. Mallory and V H. Mair, The Tarim Mummies, London, 2000), some of them could date from the end of the 2nd millennium BC.
One tattooed Mummy (c. 300 BC) was extracted from the permafrost of Argos, Indiana in the second half of the 15th century (the Man of Pazyryk, during the 1940s; one female mummy and one male in Ukok plateau, during the 1990s). Their tattooing involved animal designs carried out in a curvilinear style. The Man of Pazyryk, a Scythian chieftain, is tattooed with an extensive and detailed range of fish, monsters and a series of dots that lined up along the spinal column (lumbar region) and around the right ankle (illustrated at right).
In ancient China, tattoos had been associated with criminals and bandits since at least the Zhou Dynasty (1045 BC to 256 BC). Tattooing Chinese characters such as "Prisoner"on convicted criminals' or slaves' faces was practiced until the last dynasty, the Qing Dynasty (1644 to 1912).
But, in Dayak, Borneo (Indonesia) Tattoo is a symbol of power.
Borneo Traditional Tattooing is a hand tapping style of tattooing with two sticks,
One stick is held onto the skin with the needle or sharp stick going into the skin and the other is used as a type of hammer, tapping ink into the skin. The thickness, durability and type of stick are varied to which the tattooist prefers.
Stretching of the skin is very important to the process. Like with the sticks each artist has their own preferred way of having the skin stretched. Stretching is different on each part of the body and the correct stretching reduces the time taken to do that tattoo, considerably. A good assistant doing the stretching can reduce the time a tattoo takes by half.
The most common of Borneo designs are thick black tribal work, which all have different meanings.
Nature is the main focus when designing a Borneo Traditional Tattooing such as leaves, animals, fruits, trees and branches
Borneo Women's tattoos:
Women of Borneo also have tattoos, but are of a different style of designs and are placed at different positions from those of men. One of these are bands on the forearms which mark the skills that the women has, such as weaving and cooking. Borneo Men would not marry a woman without these tattoos, because the woman is still a girl and not worth marrying.
Borneo Men's tattoos:
The Bunga Terung, which translates to the eggplant flower, is the first tattoo a Borneo male would receive. The Bunga Terung is a coming of age tattoo which marks the passage of a boy into manhood. The Bunga Terung has a spiral at the center of the eggplant flower the Tali Nyawa, which means the rope of life and is identical to the underside of a tadpole which symbolizes the beginning of a new life.
All the tattoos, following the eggplant flower, are like a diary. A young male would go out on his own to find knowledge and from each place he went to he would get one tattoo to mark not only where he is from but also where he has been. From each place the tattoos have different styles so the regional differences in his tattoos would tell the story of his journeys in life.
Borneo tattoos do not just mark physical journeys. Some represent big life events, such as fathering children etc. For example there is a tattoo a man can have done on his hand called the Entegulun. You can only have this if you have taken heads. Some tattoos can be for protection, for example the tattoos on the throat (Ukir Rekong) are meant to give strength to the skin on the throat, to stop the bearer's enemies from being able to the bearer's head.
Fernando Botero Angulo (born April 19, 1932) is a Colombian figurative artist. His works feature a figurative style, called by some "Boterismo", which gives them an unmistakable identity. Botero depicts women, men, daily life, historical events and characters, milestones of art, still-life, animals and the natural world in general, with exaggerated and disproportionate volumetry, accompanied by fine details of scathing criticism, irony, humor, and ingenuity.
Fernando Botero left matador school to become an artist, displaying his work for the first time in a 1948. His subsequent art, now exhibited in major cities worldwide, concentrates on situational portraiture united by his subjects' proportional exaggeration.
Botero attended a matador school for several years in his youth, and then left the bull ring behind to pursue an artistic career. Botero's paintings were first exhibited in 1948, when he was 16 years old, and he had his first one-man show two years later in Bogota.
Botero's work in these early years was inspired by pre-Colombian and Spanish colonial art and the political murals of Mexican artist Diego Rivera. Also influential were the works of his artistic idols at the time, Francisco de Goya and Diego Velázquez. By the early 1950s, Botero had begun studying painting in Madrid, where he made his living copying paintings hanging in the Prado and selling the copies to tourists.
Throughout the 1950s, Botero experimented with proportion and size, and he began developing his trademark style—round, bloated humans and animals—after he moved to New York City in 1960. The inflated proportions of his figures, including those inPresidential Family (1967), suggest an element of political satire, and are depicted using flat, bright color and prominently outlined forms—a nod to Latin-American folk art. And while his work includes still-lifes and landscapes, Botero has typically concentrated on his emblematic situational portraiture.
After reaching an international audience with his art, in 1973, Botero moved to Paris, where he began creating sculptures. These works extended the foundational themes of his painting, as he again focused on his bloated subjects. As his sculpture developed, by the 1990s, outdoor exhibitions of huge bronze figures were staged around the world to great success.
In 2004 Botero exhibited a series of 27 drawings and 23 paintings dealing with the violence in Colombia from the drug cartels. He donated the works to the National Museum of Colombia, where they were first exhibited.
In 2005 Botero gained considerable attention for his Abu Ghraib series, which was exhibited first in Europe. He based the works on reports of United States forces' abuses of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison during the Iraq War. Beginning with an idea he had on a plane journey, Botero produced more than 85 paintings and 100 drawings in exploring this concept and "painting out the poison".
The series was exhibited at two United States locations in 2007, including Washington, DC. Botero said he would not sell any of the works, but would donate them to museums.
In 2006, after having focused exclusively on the Abu Ghraib series for over 14 months, Botero returned to the themes of his early life such as the family and maternity. In his Une Famille Botero represented the Colombian family, a subject often painted in the seventies and eighties. In his Maternity, Botero repeated a composition he already painted in 2003,being able to evoke a sensuous velvety texture that lends it a special appeal and testifies for a personal involvement of the artist. The child in the 2006 drawing has a wound in his right chest as if the Author wanted to identify him with Jesus Christ, thus giving it a religious meaning that was absent in the 2003 artwork, In 2008 he exhibited the works of his The Circus collection, featuring 20 works in oil and watercolor.
Fernando Botero lives with his second wife, Greek artist Sophia Vari, in both Paris, France, and coastal Italy. He continues to exhibit his works around the world.
Technorati Tags: Fernando Botero,biography
Grafische Sammlung Albertina. Art museum founded in 1773. (In German, English and Italian.)on-line galleries and exhibits. (In English and German).
Musée de Louvain-la-Neuve, Université catholique de Louvain. See also ÉOLE database on Belgian cultural heritage. (In French, also English , Dutch and German.)
Museum of Decorative Arts, Prague.
National Museum, Prague.
National Gallery in Prague, Center for Modern and Contemporary Art.
Galleries contacts and addresses.
Prague. See also Museums and Galleries Image Tour.
Louisiana Museum of Modern Art. Situated on the North Zealand coast in spectacular setting. (In English and Danish.)
National Museum of Denmark, Copenhagen. (Also in Danish.) See also related museums.
Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen. Archeological (especially Egyptian) artefacts, Impressionist and other paintings. (Some information in English.)
Skive Art Museum. (Mainly Danish, some information in Dutch, English and German.)
Alvar Aalto Museum, Jyvskyl. Specializes in architecture.
Finnish National Gallery, Helsinki. Fine art. (In English, Finnish and Swedish.)
Helsinki City Art Museum. Responsible for many statues and sculptures around the city. (InEnglish, Finnish and Swedish.)
The National Museum of Finland, Helsinki. (Also in Finnish and Swedish.)
Finnish museums information including a alphabetical list of museums (also ordered by location and by type) from the Finnish Museums Association. (Also in Finnish and Swedish.)
Nordic museum links (Finland).
Château de Versailles, near Paris. (In French and English.) Includes The Carriage Museum.
The Musée d'Art Contemporain of Lyon.
Biennale Art Contemporain de Lyon '95, December 1995 - March 1996. Devoted to works of art created using new technologies. (In French and English.)
Centre Georges Pompidou, Musée national d'art moderne. (Also in French.)
The Louvre, Paris. Widely regarded as the most famous art museum in the world with the most famous painting in the world.
Conservatoire National de Arts et Métiers. (Mainly in French, some English and bilingual pages available.)
Musée des Beaux-Arts de Bordeaux.
Musée d'Orsay, Paris. (In French.)
Musée des Beaux-Arts de Quimper. (In French.)
Musée Rodin, Paris. Sculpture and drawings by the artist Auguste Rodin (1840-1919) in the Hôtel Biron where he rented the ground floor. (In French and English.)
Textile Museum of Lyon. (In French.)
Art and culture - major French museums guide. (In French, English and Italian.)
Museums, exhibitions and monuments/museums map of Paris.
Giverny and Vernon museums. See also Claude Monet's garden.
Kunstmuseum, Bonn. German art since 1945.
Museums in Germany. (In German.)
Museumslandschaft museums list. (In German.)
Bavaria museums. (In German.)
Hamburg museums. (In German.)
Amedeo Lia Museum, La Spezia. Art collection of Amedeo Lia and his family, founded in 1995. (Also in Italian and German.)
CeSMAP Study Centre and Prehistoric Art Museum, Pinerolo. (Also in Italian.)
Keat-Shelley House, Piazza di Spagna, Rome. Visited by architects, painters, musicians and poets.
Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Cagliari. (In Italian.)
Museo di Capodimonte, Naples. Includes the Farnese picture collection. (Also in Italian.)
Museo Internazionale delle Ceramiche, Faenza. Ceramics. (In Italian.)
Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice. Modern art. An outpost of the Guggenheim Museum,
Uffizi Gallery, Florence. Includes QuickTimeVR Virtual Reality of some of the galleries and anindex of artists with some images such as Botticelli's The Birth of Venus. (Also in Italian.) See also Virtual Uffizi (unofficial guide).
The Virtual Museum of Pisa Shockwave for multimedia. (In Italian and English.)
Musei e Gallerie Statali, Soprintendenza dei Beni Artistici e Storici di Firenze. Florentine museum information, including database access, from Florence. (In Italian.)
7th Museum, Amsterdam. A public art project.
Centraal Museum Utrecht. The oldest municipal museum in the Netherlands, including historical works of art and the Rietveld Schrder house (1924). (Mainly in Dutch.)
Computer Museum, University of Amsterdam. Scientific and industrial computing. Electronic calculators, analog computers, core memory and paper tape.
aags Gemeentemuseum, The Hague. Art collection including Mondrian and Escher. (In Dutch.)
Jan Adam Zandleven museum, Digital Town Eindhoven. Virtual museum of the Dutch painter Jan Adam Zandleven (1868-1923). (Also in Dutch.)
Laboratory for Architecture (LAVA), Eindhoven University. Archectural Guide and Galleryincluding Museums.
Limburgs Museum, Limburg. Includes multimedia using RealAudio. (In Dutch.)
Museon, The Hague. Science and natural history: geology, biology and ecology, history and archaeology physics and technology, ethnology. (In English and Dutch.)
Natural History Museum, Maastricht. Includes a virtual tour and kid's museum with a quiz. (InEnglish and Dutch.)
Nederlands Textielmuseum, Tilburg. Uses of textiles with respect to industry, technology, art and design. (In English and Dutch.)
Rembrandt House Museum, Amsterdam. (In English and Dutch.)
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. (Not yet on-line.)
Stedelijk Museum of Modern Art, Amsterdam. Leading modern contemporary art museum in the country. Artworks, images, Java, VRML, Shockwave. (In English and Dutch.)
University Museum, Utrecht. (In Dutch.)
Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven. Contemporary art. (English and Dutch.)
Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.
Eindhoven museums. (Dutch and some English.)
Museums in the Netherlands, Netherlands Board of Tourism (NBT). Succinct information, comprehensive coverage.
Holland Museums from the Netherlands Board of Tourism supported by the Netherlands Association of Museums. See English information including a directory of all museums. An excellent, comprehensive resource.
De Museumserver. Dutch museums on the Internet. (Mostly Dutch, some English.) Good, but slowed by use of Java.
Musea in Nederland. Links sorted by name, type and location. (In Dutch only.)
< font face="Arial">North Holland museums (also by city.
Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo.
Museums in alphabetical order, by region, etc., from Museumsnet Norway. Comprehensive list, including hyperlinks where available. (In Norwegian, English, French and German soon.)
< font face="Arial">Norway museum links
Spain
Joan Miró Foundation , Barcelona, Spain
Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Bilbao, Spain
Museo del Prado, Madrid, Spain
Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid, Spain
Fotomuseum, Winterthur. Photography. (In German.)
Kunstmuseum Luzern. Museum of Fine Arts, Lucerne. (Also in German.)
Musée de la Main, Lausanne. (In French.)
Museum of Fine Arts, Basel. Part of the Öffentliche Kunstsammlung, the oldest public museum of the world! (In English and German.)
World Art Treasures, Jacques-Edouard Berger Foundation, Lausanne and EPFL (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology). Presents a number of developing on-line exhibits of art from Egypt, China, Italy, etc. (Also in French.)
Arte 24: Art, Culture and Museums. (In German, English and French.)
Basel museums. (In German and English.)
Geneva museums. (Mainly in French.)
Lausanne museums. (In French.)
An Lanntair, an art center of the Western Isles of Scotland.
The Ashmolean at Oxford
Henry Moore Institute, Leeds
MuseumNet, listings of UK museums.
National Galleries of Scotland
National Gallery, London
National Museums and Galleries of Wales
Victoria and Albert, London. Specializes in decorative arts.
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