paul

Diego Velázquez, Las Hilanderas ( The Spinners ), oil on canvas, H: 220 cm (86.6 in) x W: 289 cm (113.8 in) The Prado, Madrid ( Not for beginning art students; I was not able to understand or interpret this painting at all until teaching a class in Mythology. )  The study of myths in all cultures, like the study of art, may seem obscure but it can illuminate some truths about humanity.  Around the world, the beauty of weaving has some association with magic. So we look to Diego Velázquez's Las Hilanderas ( also called The Spinners, The Tapestry Weavers or The Fable of Arachne) which focuses on the weaving contest between Pallas Minerva and Arachne described in Ovid's Metamorphoses .  The foreground scene is about a competition which includes spinning and carding, preparations that come before the weaving of tapestries. The final outcome of the story is implied, not shown. Velázquez used a complex composition of diagonals to weave a tale,  a fable that lovers of ...

Rosamond Purcell, Field of the Cloth of Gold , 2010 A group of pictures in the Folger Shakespeare Library’s exhibition this past fall, Very Like A Whale, fooled me.   I thought artist Rosamond Purcell’s medium was some inventive watercolor, ink or acrylic technique.   Was the room too dark, or are my eyes are going bad?   To my surprise these pictures were photographs! It was an imaginative way to portray Shakespeare, and artist whose myriads of visions who give us such a breadth of humanity.   Very Like a Whale took its exhibition name from a quote in Hamlet showing the human ability of interpreting single objects in multiple ways.   (Hamlet and Polonius saw different images in the same cloud.) Purcell curated the show, along with Shakespeare scholar and Folger Director Michael Witmore. This pair also collaborated on a book , Landscapes of the Passing Strange , using her photographic images with evocative quotations from Shakespeare. This great review is b...

One of the first 'pastoral ' paintings(not in the exhibition) was The Pastoral Concert, 1509, by Titian and/or  Giorgione, originator of  the pastoral, where landscape is on par with figures. Shepherds and musicians are frequent in this theme. Good things always end, including summer and a chance to see how the greatest modern artists painted themes of leisure as Arcadian Visions: Gauguin, Cezanne, Matisse , ends Labor Day. The exhibition highlights 3 large paintings:  Gauguin's frieze-like Where do We Come From?...,  1898, Cézanne's  Large Bathers , 1898-1905 and Matisse's  Bathers by a River , 1907-17. Each painting was crucial to the goals of the artists, and crucial to the transitioning from the art and life of the past into the 20th century. These  modernist visions actually are part of a much older theme descended from Greece and written about in Virgil's  Eclogues.  Nineteenth-century masters were very familiar with this tradition from...