This weekend I unearthed an internet treasure. It’s a music video by a band called Hold Your Horses, for their song 70 Million. In it, the band-members mimic a whole series of famous paintings, starting off with Da Vinci’s Last Supper before taking on everything from Botticelli’s Birth of Venus to Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring. Featuring Magritte, Michelangelo, Mondrian, Munch and many more, it’s a raucous, rollicking romp of an art history lesson.

This video got me thinking about the long-standing link-ups between art and music, and more specifically the contributions of artists to album covers. In 1967 Andy Warhol came up with a (peel-able) banana for a record by The Velvet Underground. In the same year, British Pop artist Peter Blake made the colorful sleeve for the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Guns and Roses featured a figure from Raphael’s School of Athens on their Use Your Illusion artwork and Coldplay took Delacroix’s Liberty Guiding the People as the basis for the cover of their most recent album.

There’s an artist at the NGA behind one of the most subtle and unusual album covers out there. Gerhard Richter’s photo-painting Kerze (Candle) adorned Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation of 1988 and became one of the most famous covers in pop history (the original canvas sold for £7.1 million at Sotheby’s in 2008). There’s one painting by Richter at the NGA -- called Abstract Painting 780-1 (1992) -  that hangs in the mezzanine terrace of the East Building. Richter’s a German artist (b. 1932) who trained in the former East Germany, where painters had to produce realist art to support propaganda requirements of the state. When he move to the Federal Republic in the West in 1960, he started working from photographs and developed a style that was neither realistic nor abstract.

As well as his photographic art (the Kerze album cover was such a work), Richter made abstract pictures like the one at the NGA. Abstract Painting 780-1 reveals the way the artist builds up cumulative layers of paint, applying colors wet-on-wet. He blurs certain sections and scrapes across others to expose prior layers of pigment.

This is a non-representational painting: though there’s some sense of dim images spied through a smeared window, the physical work drags your eyes and mind back to the paint all the time. The medium seems to have will and whimsy of its own, showing Richter’s method of working in stages, responding naturally to the painting’s progress. It’s an incidental and intuitive approach, not a million miles away from Pollock’s automatism (which we looked at yesterday), in which a work becomes an accumulation of spontaneous, reactive gestures of adding, moving and subtracting paint. Sheets of vibrant color emerge, patterns pop up and the artist’s tools leave little snail-trails on the surface.

One of the most magic effects that crops up out of Richter’s random painting process is the illusion of space and a logical recession. When looking at Abstract Painting 780-1 it’s almost impossible not to imagine and remember images in our real-life lives. Richter would be pleased: he’s known for saying that “art has to do with life” and sees it as the most valuable type of thing to believe in. And oddly enough, even though this work isn’t on any album covers as far as I know, when I see it in person it makes me think of music.

Here’s the Hold Your Horses video. Free copy of their album for the first reader to correctly identify all the artists and works featured. Please submit your answers via comments.

A week ago today, an 80 year-old lady named Ruth Kligman passed away. A painter and artists’ muse all her life, Kligman will forever be remembered in the history of art as the sole survivor of the 1956 car crash that killed Jackson Pollock, her lover at the time.

Kligman was 26 when she first met Pollock in 1956 (he was 44, estranged from his wife and losing his battle with alcoholism). Kligman recalled in her book Love Affair: A Memoir of Jackson Pollock, that he looked “tired out, sad … his body seemed as though it couldn’t stand up on its own.” Only a few months later Kligman was riding with Pollock when he, intoxicated, ran the car off the road and flipped it. The crash killed Edith Metzger (a friend of Kligman’s) and himself. Kligman was thrown clear of the car and seriously injured.

Kligman’s passing brings back Pollock’s own demise and sudden death, which have added a harsh mystique to his status over the years. Born in the rural west, Pollock (1912 – 1956) studied art in New York and became a leading Abstract Expressionist. It was in 1947  that he started making the drip paintings that made his name and revolutionized the way a painting was supposed to be made. Ditching the easel, Pollock tacked unprimed canvases to the floor in a barn at his East Hampton home. Using enamel house paints (oils weren’t fluid enough), he literally poured them from the can, or dripped them with sticks or hardened brushes.

Pollock had been painting in this drip style for three years when he made Number 1, 1950 (Lavender Mist). It represents a high point of what came to be called his Action Painting. It’s huge (221 x 300 cm) and shows how Pollock overturned the idea of composition. In making this, he’d move around and over the canvas, flicking his wrist and arm, shaking his whole body in free gesture. Every inch of the canvas becomes a record of a physical encounter. Long, curved lines, tick-like flicks and bleeding splats lead the eye. Some areas suggest chaos and chance while others indicate order and design. This “all-over” style – where no part of the picture is more significant that any other – creates a mass of restless, eddying energy that engulfs the spectator. Here, it looks like Pollock applied the black paint first, a sticking-out skeleton over which he added subsequent shades. The intricately woven webs of white, grey and peach evoke great banks of lavender wafting in the sun.

Pollock wanted to find a technique for his age and was taken by the idea of automatism – that is, abandoning conscious control of a picture. He said: “when I am in my painting, I am not aware of what I am doing.” It seems that this free and unrestrained aspect of his art came to be reflected in his wild and reckless life (excessive drinking, high-speed driving). In the short time Pollock worked on Action Paintings (he abruptly abandoned the drip style in 1951), he diverted the path of painting forever. And yet despite his fame (he was dubbed Jack the Dripper by Time magazine, and Life magazine suggested he was “the greatest living painter in the United States”), he seems never to have found peace or happiness for himself. At least it seems that his young lover Ruth Kligman would have been able to empathize: she always maintained that she knew better than most how truly hard the life of an artist is.

Tonight is the Oscars and the stage is set for the 82nd Academy Awards. Held at the Kodak Theater in LA, this is of course billed as the year’s largest, most lavish movie event. In the past, I’ve attempted to follow the awards from London, willing proceedings to get underway before I (inevitably) dropped off on the sofa. So I’m excited this year to see the ceremony in real American time for the first time, and plan to be there for the films, the fashion and everything in between.

French Theater (c. 1856) is chosen for its special audience atmosphere. It shows a theater crowd, but also brings to mind modern-day cinema, or perhaps viewers at a ceremony of sorts. It’s by a French artist called Honoré Daumier (1808 – 1879) whose career is one of the most unusual in 19th-century art. Born into a family of artists in Marseille, Daumier’s father moved the family to Paris in 1816 in pursuit of a literary career. When these plans fell through, the young Honoré had to find work fast. After a number of menial jobs, he learned lithography, aged 14: some time with a commercial printer then fine-tuned the techniques he needed. Lithography is a printing process on a flat piece of stone or a metal plate: the hard surface is etched with acid to form a design that selectively transfers ink to paper. From 1829 on, Daumier produced lithographic caricatures of his own and embarked on a 40-year career as a comic artist to the weekly press.

Daumier was better known in his lifetime for his satirical cartoons and caricatures than he ever was for his ‘proper’ art. And yet, as a painter, he was admired by fellow artists like Corot, Degas and Delacroix. Daumier’s choice of subject-matter mostly placed him in the Realist tradition, a mid-19th century French movement that emerged as a reaction against the outdated strictures of academic art. Realist works tended to be large-scale, showing rural peasants or the city working class, and focussed on an unidealized account of reality. While French Theater doesn’t strictly fall into the Realist category (it’s small and shows a more up-scale crowd), it does reveal the engaging honesty of Daumier’s eye and exactly how good he could be, despite never having had a proper art training. My delight is in the true-to-life details: spot the double chins, hair-growth patterns and noses of varying size.

What’s also brilliant here is the well-observed body language, brought to life with spontaneous brushwork that anticipates the expressive oil of the Impressionists. The spectators are all angled in their own way towards the stage. Shoulders are shifted, heads are turned and hands are held quietly in lap. There’s real spontaneity in the group’s zig-zag, forward-back of bodies as people lean to catch the show. Body language is one of the best ways for an artist to tell a story, and the gestures here pull us quickly into a theater environment. The darkened color palette (which still allows for a studied handling of light) adds to the mood.

The sheer vastness of Daumier’s lithographic output and the unsurpassed brilliance of his printing style still to this day tend to overshadow his achievements as a painter. In a work like this though, Daumier’s day job, which called for a candid interpretation of real-life events, actually served to make the snapshot all-the-more gripping. I wonder how he’d picture all of us, glued to our screens once the Oscars get underway. Just make sure there aren’t any popcorn kernels stuck in your teeth, I’d say.

Are you a clutter bug, a pack rat, or some other creature of horrendous hoarding habits? Are you met in each room you enter by a nerve-inducing jumble of unopened letters, leaking pens, piles of books, old magazines, empty plant pots, ground-bound picture frames, cables for goodness-knows-what and clothes you bought ages ago but still haven’t managed to hang up?

If so, you’re far from alone. The recession hasn’t stemmed our product purchasing, since the thrill of shopping is still there. If anything, the tough financial time has increased our inclination to clutter (according to charity shop organizations in the UK and US), with people now less able to let anything go. Serious amounts of stuff start to control us, ruining our lives instead of enhancing them. “The compulsive state of buying things and holding on to them … is a form of addiction,” says Annie Bennett, a psychotherapist and author in the UK. And it gets worse. According to Romaine Lowery (who founded the Clutter Clinic in the England), “people get to the point where they are desperate … Clutter is bad for your health and very stressful … I’ve seen a link between clutter and depression.”

The order and organization we’re after is here, in the distinctive work of Piet Mondrian (1872 – 1944), an artist who searched a long time for his personal abstract style. Born in Holland, he trained at Amsterdam’s Academy of Fine Arts, and worked in a naturalistic Dutch style, an Impressionist and van Gogh-influenced style, and a Cubist style before hitting on his own brand of clear lines and clean spaces in 1920.

This painting is called Tableau No. IV; Lozenge Composition with Red, Gray, Blue, Yellow, and Black (c. 1924 – 1925). It shows the areas of solid color (limited to white, grey and the primaries) and the black vertical and horizontal lines that we associate with Mondrian. The linear elements of the composition, intersecting at right angles, are assiduously aligned for a balanced asymmetry. The resulting rectangles are filled in with color, a sort of exploration of mass. Note how the colors are placed at the peripheries. It was in 1918 that Mondrian started turning his square canvases 45 degrees (without rotating the lines in the composition) to rest “on point”. He said his lozenge compositions were about cutting. Indeed, the sense of cropping is emphatic: the forms feel incomplete, sliced off at the edges, with the implication being that things continue beyond the canvas.

In 1917 Mondrian had been instrumental in founding De Stijl (The Style), a Dutch artistic movement that also gave its name to a journal propagating the group’s theories. The core concept of De Stijl is known as neoplasticism (new plastic art). Mondrian explained what this meant for him in an essay called Neo-Plasticism in Pictorial Art:  “… this new plastic idea will ignore the particulars of appearance, that is to say, natural form and color. On the contrary, it should find its expression in the abstraction of form and color, that is to say, in the straight line and the clearly defined primary color.”

Mondrian’s reduction to the essentials of form and color carve out a visual simplicity that’s ultimately intended to suggest spiritual harmony and order. What better prompt could there be for us to de-clutter our homes and clear up our lives? If cleansing and organizing will lead to peace, serenity and a sense of inner calm, then sign me up for an instant home overhaul. Just hang on one minute while I try to locate my dustpan and brush…

Have you ever clicked “send” and thought, seconds later, hang on, what did I just do? Most email users could probably own up to a couple small online slip-ups. Like, sending a message to the “wrong John”, replying to the entire department instead of just one co-worker, attaching the wrong document or forwarding something with just a little too much information. The thing is, in the big scheme of things, these minor blunders will mostly blow over quite quickly and quietly.

Check out my second video blog. And special thanks to Baked & Wired coffeeshop in Georgetown.

Today is World Book Day, as celebrated in the UK and Ireland. Other countries mark the day at different times of the year, usually in April. Whenever it takes place, World Book Day is intended as a global celebration of books and reading. It was designated by UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) to heighten awareness of the importance of literature for a fulfilling life.

Never before have we needed to read so much. At a time when people are worrying more than ever about the permanence of their work or the stretchability of their wealth, just six minutes with your nose in a book can reduce stress levels by 68%. But in case you’re not one to crack open an old tome, then fret not: the 21st century is giving books a whole new look to ease-up and improve reading experiences. It’s hardly surprising I suppose that books haven’t escaped unscathed from technology’s ruthless march. In the last couple of years alone, we’ve said hello to the Sony e-reader, Amazon’s Kindle and lately the Apple iPad. In December 2008 Nintendo launched their Classic Books Collection (CBC) in Europe (it’s set for release in North America in this June), a computer program made for the Nintendo DS that includes 100 works of classic literature. In the UK, take-up has been overwhelming, turning the CBC into a top-selling product, as suddenly square-eyed kids and teens have started trawling their way through Oliver Twist and the like.

Whichever way you get your lit fix, there’s a painting at the NGA that shows the story of a reader’s absorption. It’s called A Young Girl Reading (c. 1770) and is by the French artist Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732 – 1806). From the town of Grasse in southeastern France, Fragonard was a rapid, spontaneous painter. His whipping brush and gorgeous colors well embody the ebullient Rococo aesthetic that prevailed in France at his time.

This picture just glows. The girl seems to be sitting before a window (light illuminates her face and body and casts a faint shadow on the wall). Thick, weaving brushstrokes create the shaded contours of her yolk-yellow dress, concentrating on her sleeve, causing it to bloom over the armrest. The fat, cushy pillow propped against the wall is sketched in with a looser hand, its sinkable-in shape moulded to the body of the girl and showing a shimmering blend of mauve and lilac thread. These striking colors are picked up in the crinkling hair ribbon and the flutter of bows on the girl’s bosom. The flush on her cheek stands out against the white collar, sharp-edged with the handle of the painter’s brush.

As well as all this surface charm, there’s a sure solidity underpinning the picture. Look for the vertical of the yellow-brown wall and the horizontal line of armrest in the foreground, creating a visual frame that squares off the scene. It’s Fragonard’s way of focussing our eye on an intimate moment, watching this young girl escape into a book. With his confident colors and bravura brushwork, Fragonard seems to be celebrating the act of reading, in his own particular way. There’s genuine sensitivity in his rendering of her face, attentive and coming alive with the words on the page. This is what’s worth remembering as people pursue the “next big thing” in reading gadgetry. After all’s said and done, it’s just the story that matters. A great yarn, well told, will jump off the page no matter what. Just ask Mr Dickens, last seen on your kid’s Nintendo.

Lately, I’ve been watching a lot of Supernanny, a TV show that follows families getting help with their tricky kids. The woman who comes to call is 38 year-old Brit Jo Frost, a sort of modern-day Mary Poppins. I kid you not, no matter how extreme or mundane the problem, Jo has a kind yet no-nonsense approach that’s as refreshing as a hot, sweet cup of tea.

The show debuted in the UK in 2004 and was snapped up by ABC in the States not long after, becoming an instant ratings hit. Each episode starts with Jo observing a family, before rolling up her sleeves to set house rules, establish discipline and build an all-important routine. A lot of her focus goes onto the kids, getting their behavior up to scratch. But parents are also pulled up on shortcomings, especially if they’re lazy or not keen to get their hands dirty with poster paints. Once a family’s approaches are corrected, results often seem to come thick and fast, with relief and elation all round.

The shots of calm, smiling and well-behaved kids that flit across the screen at the close of each episode made me think of The Westwood Children (c. 1807) at the NGA. This unusual and endearing portrait is by an American artist called Joshua Johnson (c. 1763 – 1832), who was the son of a white father and black mother. Joshua was born into slavery and freed in 1782. Having received minimal training in art (perhaps he was self-trained, we’re not sure), he practiced as a portraitist, advertising in Baltimore’s city directories. Johnson was the first African American artist to make his living by painting and roughly 80 portraits are now attributed to him.

In this portrait, Johnson depicts the male children of Margaret and John Westwood, who was a successful Baltimore stagecoach manufacturer. I’d say the tender relationship between the boys is a main focus of the picture. At the center of the image is John, the oldest son, reaching his arm around his younger brothers. The two smaller boys clump together, clasping hands, perhaps uncomfortable with having to pose. The boys are in their Sunday best, buttoned into the high-waisted trouser suits that were fashionable at the time. With the three figures arranged neatly off to the left, Johnson introduces the window to design a balanced the composition.

The Westwoods have oval faces, thin lips, large, penetrating blue eyes and fine, sandy hair. Their features look sweet and their lace collars delicate, owing to Johnson’s practice of applying paint in thin layers. There’s little use of light and shade on the bodies of the children to bring out their roundness, though they do cast light shadows across the floor.

What makes Supernanny so compulsive is the footage of kiddie mayhem. There are massive meltdowns at the supermarket and total tantrums at tea-time. It’s quite something, to see a two year-old get out of bed 108 times in the course of an evening. None of it’s too much for Jo though (perhaps that’s why she got a roaring mention in the House of Commons not long ago in a discussion about preventing the causes of anti-social behavior). She’d approve of the Westwood children, that’s for sure, all suited and booted and on their best behavior. With flowers in hand and a flush on their cheeks (suggesting they’ve just come in from outside), she’d say they’re doing exactly what kids should. And that little pup with a bird in his mouth? Well someone had to do something naughty!