Archive for February, 2010

In case you needed reminding, today is Valentine’s Day. Originally dedicated to one or more early Christian martyrs, the festival was established in the 5th century. Valentine’s came to be associated with romantic love in the Middle Ages, in the circle of the English author Geoffrey Chaucer, when the tradition of courtly love (nobly and chivalrously expressing admiration) first flourished.

So today’s the day to celebrate loved ones. Hearts on everything have been running rampant in shops for weeks and restaurants will be jammed tonight, with couples table-to-table, gazing into each others’ eyes. Flowers are presented, candies are consumed and cards, cuddles and kisses exchanged. I can think of no artist at the NGA better-suited to the fuss and froth of Valentine’s Day than the French painter Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732 – 1806). His work represents the final, magnificent flourish of the Rococo style in France. Rococo emerged in 1700 and dominated Europe during the 18th century, emphasizing elegance and decorative charm. Fragonard’s first show at the Salon had been of a history painting, but he rejected a potential career as an ‘academic’ artist in favor of making pretty, sensual paintings for parlors and boudoirs, not public display.

Love as Folly (c. 1773/1776) is the perfect picture if you’re into the lighter, sillier side of Valentine’s Day, showing Fragonard in full and frivolous flow. The little figure springing into the air with limbs outstretched is Love, all padded plump flesh and bouncing curls. There’s a delicate feel for color in the flush on the baby’s cheeks and the furled roses below. Look for the lightness of touch in the spread of the cotton clouds behind. As the title suggests, this is packed with things for Valentine’s fans to go gaga for. Love looks a lot like Cupid, son of Venus, who can make people fall in love with a shot of an arrow. The torch in his tiny fist is an emblem of burning desire. See the doves, painted in pairs, symbols of fidelity since they mate for life. And that smattering of roses down on the ground calls to mind the staggering fact that, in the US alone, 110 million are bought and delivered for this one day!

Now, if all of this is making you queasy, and you take a more cynical stance on Valentine’s Day, then let’s turn to an antidote: Love as Sentinel (c. 1773/76) is a pendant to the first picture. Here’s Cupid shushing us, finger held to his lips. His gold-tipped quiver lies on the ground, calling to mind the 34 million metric tons of waste that result from sales of gold jewelry in America in the two week period leading up to today. And what’s happening in the sky, looking unnaturally colored in parts? It could be the effects of pollution from the importation of all those roses from around the world. And as for Cupid’s pudgy tummy: was the $1,000 million spent on Valentine’s candies really so well spent?

At the height of Rococo, Fragonard’s pictures were fashionable, popular and everywhere, with even the king’s mistress commissioning works. But by the 1770s (when our two were made), French tastes were changing and a new style (Neoclassical) was coming in. So if you’re someone who eats up the all the sweetness, romance and love-y stuff, I’d say indulge in today to your heart’s content. But if, on the other hand, you avoid all the Valentine’s hype and pressure, then remember one thing: just like Rococo, today will end, and it’ll be business as usual from tomorrow. (Until next year, that is).

African rhythms are all the rage right now, with Western artists exploring African music more than at any time in the past few decades. Take Vampire Weekend, the American indie-rock band from New York City, who cite their salient influences as African popular music and Western classical. The fourth single from their eponymous first album was called Cape Code Kwassa Kwassa and referenced Congolese soukous music. Their second album Contra scored No. 1 on the Billboard chart. Then there’s FELA!, the new musical on Broadway that’s based around the life of Fela Kuti, the Nigerian musician, composer and political activist. The show tells the life story of the man through Afrobeat music and energetic choreography. There’s also Africa Express, the collective of African and Western musicians who put on huge musical events and who are bringing African music to a much wider audience with their album Africa Express Presents.

For an injection of jazz, funk and rhythm harmonies at the NGA we turn to the African American artist and art educator Alma Woodsey Thomas (1891 – 1978) and her Red Rose Cantata of 1973. Born and raised in Columbus, Georgia, Thomas moved to Washington, D.C. with her family in 1907. In 1924 she was the first graduate of the city’s Howard University art department and 10 years later she became the first African American woman to earn a Master of Fine Arts degree from Columbia University. Thomas’s solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art  in New York in 1972 was the first for an African American woman.

Despite these impressive accolades, Thomas actually came into the professional art world late in life, after teaching art for 35 years in D.C. public schools. Nonetheless, her age didn’t prevent her from gaining recognition as an artist. Her earliest works were realistic, but she delved more into abstraction under the influence of her painting professors. Her Red Rose Cantata is a late piece, made at the age of 82. It shows the degree to which Thomas was influenced by Expressionism (that is, art in which the artist’s subjective reactions and emotions take precedence over observed reality, with color and form often exaggerated and distorted). This large canvas (175cm x 127cm), filled with an irregular, brightly colored pattern is in the style of her best-known work.

Here unevenly spaced, stabbing brushstrokes strike a staccato rhythm on the canvas. The red paint interacts with the white board behind to form a sort of musical composition (cantata is a musical term, meaning literally “sung” and deriving from the Italian verb cantare). The structure of this work, it’s linear composition and vibrant color-play have been compared with mosaics and pointillism (a technique of painting with dots of pure color that appear to merge together when viewed from a distance). Mostly though, these effects in Thomas derive from her interest in music, which was a key influence in a lot of her work.

A work by Thomas called Watusi (Hard Edge) of 1963 was for a while intended to hang in the East Wing of the White House, where Michelle Obama has her offices. But the painting, which shows a jumble of geometric shapes in bright reds, blues and greens has since been returned to the Hirshhorn Museum. Even if a Thomas painting isn’t striking a chord in the Presidential residence right now, her work continues to vibrate with a kind of visual sound. So whether it’s through art or through your stereo, tap into an unstoppable new beat today.

Today marks the start of a sports spectacular, the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver. An event like this is exhilarating, combining spirited nationalism with human endeavor and skills, all set against a bright white backdrop of snow and ice. We’ll be transfixed for weeks as the skiers slice the slopes, the boarders turn tricks and the figure skaters spin gracefully. In fact, it might be that this year we’ll be more hooked than ever, since it seems that sports are changing for all of us.

Gone is the appeal of the sanitized gym environment as people head outside for more fun and nature as part of their exercise. Hockey out in the elements is coming back, with teams of players heading to frozen ponds and lakes where possible. Hikers are less content to stick to a well-beaten path and are veering off to make tracks in the wild. In the UK, swimmers have broken free from indoor pools to take the plunge in lakes and rivers, however cold and weed-ridden they may be.

Cheering on this fresh enthusiasm for outdoor pursuits is today’s painting, The Skater, by the American Gilbert Stuart (1755 – 1828). We looked at Stuart on Jan 5: his portrait of George Washington there was just one of an extensive series of pictures of high-profile sitters he depicted in the federal era. But before he got to all that, he had to hone his craft, which he did in England. It was the Anglo-American painter Benjamin West (1738 – 1820) who welcomed Stuart off the boat in 1775, took him into his home and trained him up as an artist. Stuart stayed in London for almost 20 years, returning to the States in 1793.

The Skater (1782) marks the end of Stuart’s apprenticeship to West. It was the artist’s first stab at full-length portraiture and brought him notice and acclaim. It shows William Grant, a Scotsman from outside Edinburgh. Stuart’s skill is evident in the fluent brushwork around the man’s face, working in his flyaway hair and the dewy flesh tones of his face. There’s a strong sense of character too, in the focussed gaze and the wry smile (West praised Stuart’s ability to “nail a face to the canvas”).

The thing that is most energizing about this picture is the skating – unorthodox in this sort of image at the time. Indeed, it was almost unheard of to paint any sort of vigorous movement in the British tradition of life-size society portraiture. Stuart writes that when Grant arrived at his studio he wasn’t keen to sit: “on account of the excessive coldness of the weather … the day was better suited for skating.” So painter and subject went off for some sport on the Serpentine River in Hyde Park. It was only later that Stuart hit on the idea of actually painting Grant in action, with Westminster Abbey in the distance.

So now, we have the startling fact of a life-size Grant sliding towards us on the ice. He’s got his arms crossed over his chest in typical 18th century skating form. The pose is balanced and looks physical and spontaneous, giving Grant an accessible and likable down-to-earth (or ice!) naturalness. The atmosphere is enhanced by the leafless tree and that thick whiteness of the sky, recognizably loaded with an imminent snow-fall. And don’t miss the small figures further back on the ice, twirling and gliding in high delight: seems the benefits of physical exercise outdoors are not lost on any of them either.

Sunday is Valentine’s Day, so it’s time to buy heart-shaped chocolate, soppy cuddly toys and that all-important card. We tend to connect our Feb 14 celebration with a man from ancient Roman times – St Valentine – and it’s tempting to believe that he wrote the first Valentine’s card. According to one story Valentine, jailed for marrying Christian couples in secret against the Emperor’s decree, fell in love with a girl who visited him in his cell. He wrote her a letter before his death and signed it ‘From Your Valentine.’

There might not be quite as much riding on your missive, but it’s still nice to get it right. There are tons of options out there, so surely it’s possible to find a card that expresses the way we feel? You can go for something sweet (‘Who needs wings when I’ve got you?’) or a little more sickly (‘Our love is like an enchanting, magical, dreamy fairytale’). Try something cautionary, perhaps (‘The feelings I have for you my love/ Give pleasure to my heart/ I pray that we will always be/ And never drift apart’) or more animal-inspired (‘Whoof whoof whoof/ Don’t be so aloof/ Hear my anxious whine/ Be my Valentine’).

If you’ve yet to find the perfect message, why not follow the old adage that a picture is worth 1,000 words? A work like View from Vaekero, near Christiania (1827) by Johan Christian Dahl (1788 – 1857) says a lot, with no words at all. Dahl was Norwegian and studied in Copenhagen, where he became interested in Dutch landscape painters like Jacob Ruisdael (who we looked at on Jan 9). From 1818 he settled in Dresden, Germany.

His painting here was inspired by a trip to Christiania (present-day Oslo) and reveals Dahl’s interest in Romanticism, the artistic, literary and intellectual movement that originated in Europe in the second half of the 18th century. Romanticism reacted against the Industrial Revolution and resisted the aristocratic social and political norms of the Age of Enlightenment. Romantic artists were keen to promote emotion as a source of aesthetic experience. So here, Dahl saturates the scene with feelings: there’s a tinge of melancholy (lugubrious setting, cool colors) and a twinge of fear (the couple appear all alone here). Mostly though there’s a strong sense of awe at a stunning natural site. This brings us to another key feature of Romantic art: celebrating the sublimity of untamed nature. Despite being painted from memory, Dahl’s painting projects fresh immediacy. Light radiates in the distance, causing the clouds to shake and shimmer and the water to turn glassy. The night-time mood and other elements in the painting (the cloud-covered moon, rocky inlet and misty hills) capture something of the unknowable, unmeasurable wonder of the place.

Dahl’s style of painting owes much to another artist, a German Romantic painter called Caspar David Friedrich (1774 – 1840). These two actually lived together in Dresden. Dahl owned a work by Friedrich (Two Men Contemplating the Moon, 1819 – 20), which exerted considerable influence on him. Sure enough, Friedrich’s work sticks to the Romantic ideals of emotion prompted by natural surroundings. The most interesting similarity, however, is that in both pictures, the pairs of people are shown from behind. With their backs towards us, they become generalized everyman figures, standing for all of us, looking at the horizon for some sort of meaning. It was this image that got me thinking about a new, more meaningful Valentine’s text, from the French writer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: ‘Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.’

This week President Obama announced a healthcare summit to hasten the passage of healthcare reform legislation. Despite recent election setbacks for the Democrats, it appears that Obama won’t be walking away from his commitment to making healthcare affordable and universal in the States. Having been well cared for by the National Health Service (NHS) in the UK for most of my life, I can’t understand why anyone would want to oppose this sort of accessible system.

In honor of the President’s call for beneficial changes to America’s healthcare system, today’s painting from the NGA is The Attentive Nurse (1747) by Jean Siméon Chardin. Other than some informal training from a couple of history painters, Chardin (1699 – 1779) was largely self-taught. His early preference and skill in painting lay in still-life pictures in the Dutch tradition (along the lines of Adrian Coorte’s Still Life with Asparagus and Red Currants in Monday’s post). But Chardin gained even greater plaudits when he turned his attention to pictures of people from the 1730s.

The Attentive Nurse is typical of the kind of sober image that Chardin came to excel at. It’s a genre scene, meaning a snapshot of everyday life. The nurse shown here is caught carrying out part of her habitual work routine of preparing a meal for a patient. She’s standing with a cloth slung over her arm and a boiling pan balanced between her body and the table. I think she’s tapping or peeling an egg as we watch. There’s a sort of mini still-life on the table: the jug, glass, loaf and egg here are harmonious in hue yet diversified in shape and texture, with each object brushed into palpable presence. Denis Diderot, the French philosopher, art critic and writer, commented on Chardin’s ability to make things look real: “it is not … pigment that you mix on your palette, it is the very substance of objects.”

Of course let’s not overlook the real point of this painting, the nurse and what she stands for. Chardin shines a light on otherwise unseen actions of care and concern, making us aware of the dignity and beauty in everyday life, however hard and mundane. The nurse’s concentration on her work fills the picture with focus and feeling. Humble and modest subjects such as this by Chardin were popular with all classes of society, including the aristocracy. In part, their appeal rested on the precision of the artist’s brush and the well-observed details Chardin picks out in a scene. It’s also his colors, often soft and balanced and working together (as is the case here). But the thing that audiences find most alluring is the sense of order that Chardin’s works radiate, an austere arrangement and assembling of forms that somehow suggests that everything is just where it should be, in its proper place.

In his State of the Union address two weeks ago today, Obama hammered home his point about healthcare with some cautionary words: “… by the time I’m finished speaking tonight, more Americans will have lost their health insurance. Millions will lose it this year.” In this work, Chardin makes a visual case for the importance of quality care for people in need. It’s a message the artist painted from a place of profound empathy, having lost his young wife and a child to illness. As he alone brings our attention to this attentive nurse and her invaluable work, he seems to be saying: “I will not walk away…”

I’ve just started watching Mad Men and don’t know why it took me so long to cotton onto this sexy, stylish drama. For those who haven’t seen the series, it’s set in 1960s New York and revolves around an advertising agency (Sterling Cooper) and the professional and private lives of the people who work there. The characters are provocative and flawed and it’s fascinating to see how very different the roles of men and women were not so many years ago. The sets are authentic and the costumes delicious, especially those of Joan and Betty, who are always decked out in the elegant, feminine clothes of the era.

Since it’s set in the 60s, I was hoping for some mention of the art of the time, and it came midway through Season 2. Word gets around that Mr Cooper, senior partner at the agency, has bought a new painting. Unable to restrain themselves, some of the younger staff sneak into his office when he’s left for the day. As they approach the huge red-colored canvas on the wall, one of the men says simply, “it’s a Rothko.”

They’re talking about Mark Rothko (1903 – 1970), one of the pre-eminent artists of his generation and a leading figure of Abstract Expressionism (a movement that flowered in New York in the 1940s and 50s). Born Marcus Rothkowitz in Russia, Rothko emigrated to the US when he was 10. He lived in Oregon before studying liberal arts at Yale and then settling in New York for work.

The painting in Cooper’s office resembles some of the Rothko works at the NGA, such as Orange and Tan (1954) and Untitled (1957). Rothko painted as an Expressionist in the 1930s and a Surrealist in the 1940s before hitting on his Color Field approach by 1950. This style, which sees him covering large canvases with broad expanses of solid color, is the thing he’s most known for to this day. Both Orange and Tan and Untitled (1957) follow Rothko’s familiar format. These are big surfaces each showing vertically aligned rectangular forms, set within a colored area, or field. See how he softens the edges of the rectangles, to make it look as if they’re hovering above the canvas. The impression we get is of a shallow pictorial space. Rothko is a master of color, it’s the thing that helps him create his astonishing range of moods. The orange and tan are luminous and joy-filled, while the reds of the untitled work are more somber and insistent.

In the show, Cooper is asked what he thinks about his Rothko, and retorts angrily that his opinions are beside the point, all he knows is that the work will double in value in a matter of years. True enough: Rothko’s Color Field paintings were a huge hit and earned him international acclaim. He was asked to create a suite of just such paintings for the Four Seasons restaurant in New York in 1958. But the ad man’s money-centric take on Rothko’s work is far off the mark. Cooper sees nothing of the emotional resonance that Rothko’s paintings reveal, the alternately dark and radiant atmospheres that can crawl off his canvases. He’s blind to the nuances of the colors, the modulations from dark to lighter patches, the careful combinations of tones. You see, in his works, Rothko was looking to plumb the depths of human drama, to search for some truth in it all. How oddly fitting for a show like Mad Men, filled as it is with conflicted souls each seeking meaning in their own lives.

Super Foods are creating the latest buzz in eating theory. The antioxidant nutrients found in this category of comestibles are apparently the key to offsetting the damage that time and lifestyle inflict on our bodies and minds. In humans, the entire aging process depends on oxidation, damaging free radicals wearing down our DNA. But research reveals that we can slow down this aging in most of the systems of our body, simply by eating antioxidant nutrients. So super are super foods, that studies by the US government’s anti-aging research department show that the amount of antioxidants we maintain in our bodies is directly proportional to how long we’ll live.

So how to boost our vital intake? Five daily portions of fruit and vegetables is a good start, though the 8 – 10 recommended by the World Health Organisation is even better. Also, pick your produce with care, for the most powerful nutritional punch. Antioxidant level in food is measured by its oxygen radical absorbency capacity (ORAC score): the oldest-living people consume at least 6,000 ORACs a day, say nutritionists. On the super foods list are things like apples, asparagus, blueberries, beans (kidney) and plums. Surprising supers are mustard and dried oregano; tempting ones are dark chocolate and red wine. Consume one portion of any three of these a day and you’ll look 10 years younger.

The Dutch still life painter Adrian Coorte (active c. 1683 – 1707) must have been ahead of his time in terms of nutrition: he made his plain-old asparagus look super (natural, beautiful and delicious) in his still-life Asparagus and Red Currants (1696). Despite research, little is known about Coorte: his dates are uncertain, though his signed, dated paintings (100 of them) indicate his period of activity. We think he worked in Middelburg, the capital of Zeeland, a province in the south of the Netherlands. It seems there was another Adrian Coorte there (possibly his father), and the younger Coorte’s works were collected by people in the area.

This little masterpiece (it measures 34cm x 25cm) is understated, yet original. Coorte does what he usually does and sets a couple of ordinary objects on a table top (wood in this case, occasionally it’s stone). He creates his composition from there. The elements are sparse but somehow amount to a feeling of grandeur and dignity in this arrangement. There’s a subtle balance between the diagonal line of the asparagus and that of the largest twig on the berries. As is typical of 17th century Dutch still-life art, Coorte works in subdued tonal harmonies, his palette comprising soft purples, reds, greens, whites and browns. He also concentrates on texture (again typical of his time and genre), rendering the sheen of the berries as distinct from the woody cut-off stems of the spears.

It was not until the 1950s that Coorte was rediscovered by the Dutch art historian L. J. Bol. It’s hard to believe that the artist was lost from view for quite so long: his work in the NGA is shot-through with an arresting brand of beauty. Coorte is gifted at deceiving the eye, making his objects look uncannily real. He’s also able to tap a deeper, more disturbing vein, hinting at the transience of life by focussing on these seasonal, ultimately perishable wonders. How fitting to be talking of the transience of life in the presence of a big bundle of asparagus spears. Coorte seems convinced of some super quality and that’s good enough for me: so pass us some more and let’s tuck in!