“The 600-years-old butt song from hell”

Hieronymus Bosch Garden of Delights (detail) 1500

Hieronymus Bosch
Garden of Delights (detail)
1503- 1504

In the category of “why did this take so long?,” an entrepreneurial student named Amelia from Oklahoma Christian University has recorded the music written on the backside of one of the damned in Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Delights. [Actually 500 years old, but that’s not important.]

The music file can be found on the Chaos Controlled 123 website.

A choral version chanted with lyrics (“butt song from hell, This is the butt song from hell…”) can be found on Well Manicured Man’s website.

Visit while you can before their servers crash.

Behind the Most Abstract Matisse

Henri Matisse, French Window at Collioure, 1914

Henri Matisse
French Window at Collioure, 1914

French Window at Collioure is the closest Henri Matisse ever got to painting a totally abstract work. Without the title, the painting is hard to see as more than three simple bands of color framing a large black center. The mood is somber and calm.  But what is behind this picture?

The subject is one that Matisse had already painted many times.  For nearly a decade, when Paris became cold and wet, he had returned to his rented studio in Collioure, a town near the Spanish border in the south of France. Its window looked out on the town’s harbor.

Open Window, 1905
Matisse, Open Window, 1905

The most famous version is perhaps the first — 1905’s Open Window, which became the iconic image of Fauvism. It conveys the visual excitement Matisse felt that summer when he first discovered the town and the light of the South of France. The light triggered a new movement that became known as The Fauves (‘the wild beasts’). He and his colleagues, André Derain and Maurice de Vlaminck, reacted with violent colors that went beyond what even their beloved van Gogh had used in Provence. [Vlaminck said he loved van Gogh more than his father.]  Matisse described the colors they applied unmixed in raw fashion on the canvases as ‘explosives.’ His ‘co-conspirator’ Derain said their paintbrushes were like sticks of dynamite.

After this period of Fauvist fireworks, Matisse’s approach evolved.  He told the Futurist artist Gino Severini that he believed in an art stripped down to its essentials, simplifying an image “like you might prune a tree.”  Still, 1914’s French Window is so different a view from the one of 1905 that it is hard to believe it is the same window.  Why is that and why is it so unique in Matisse’s career?

Window at Collioure

Window of Matisse’s studio in Collioure
c. 1942

The picture’s date is an essential clue.  The window had not changed, but the world had.

France was now at war. The Great World War had begun with great confidence but by the time the picture was painted it was a hard time to be hopeful.   From the start, the French suffered great losses.  News from the front was difficult to find but rumors told of millions of French soldiers killed.  Matisse’s home town in the north of France was one of the first overrun by the German army.  His elderly mother was in ill health and trapped behind enemy lines; his brother a prisoner of war.  Matisse had to leave his own house in the suburbs of Paris after it was commandeered by French officers as a military headquarters.  His fellow Fauvists, Derain and Vlaminck were drafted.  Matisse, though he tried to enlist several times, was rejected because he was already in his mid-forties.

Henri Matisse, c. 1913

Henri Matisse,
c. 1913

In Collioure, Matisse opened his house to refugee artists like the Spanish Cubist, Juan Gris.  The young Gris’s poverty (his dealer could no longer provide his small stipend) reminded Matisse of his own early days as an artist.  Matisse was also without the support of his gallery, so he went to his friend, the American patroness, Gertrude Stein.  Happily, she agreed to help Gris out with some income.  When the funds never arrived and there was no explanation, it was the end of Matisse’s friendship with her.

Rather than a colorful harbor of swaying sailboats, The French Window of 1914 opens onto blackness.  Matisse’s search for “an art of balance, of purity and serenity” is fruitless here.  There is some balance, but it is not firm, only tentative. The sketchy marks of the window shutter at left reflect anxiety, the painful uncertainty of wartime.  His colors are muddied with grays, uncharacteristically subdued.

What is arguably the most radical painting Matisse ever painted never saw the light of day during his lifetime.  When it was finally exhibited in the U.S. in 1966, it was already well after the American Abstract Expressionists had created their even more radical abstract revolution. The art world was well prepared to greet  French Window at Collioure with some surprise perhaps, but mostly admiration.

The painting, however, expands our understanding of one of the great masters of the twentieth century.  Matisse’s reputation is as a painter whose modernist vision resulted in largely comfortable, colorful pictures of bourgeois or exotic interiors, cut off from the concerns of politics and current events.  Yet, the French Window of 1914 is an existential statement by an artist caught in a world blackened by war.  It is Matisse’s Guernica, painted a generation and world war earlier than Picasso’s.

How to paint your own Vermeer

Tim's Vermeer posterWhat if you could paint your own Vermeer?  Teller (as in the famous magicians Penn and Teller) has directed a new documentary called Tim’s Vermeer.  It was shown at the recent Telluride and Toronto Film Festivals and is receiving great reviews.  It follows the investigation of an inventor, Tim Jenison, into the painting methods of Jan Vermeer.  Jenison is best known to those in Digital Media as the founder of NewTek and the mastermind behind the revolutionary Video Toaster (along with Dana Carvey’s brother Brad) back in the 1980s.

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Lead paint and Suffering Artists

Goya being treated by his doctor, 1820

Goya being treated by his doctor during his near-fatal illness in 1819.

 

The ‘suffering artist‘ became a theme almost simultaneously with artists becoming famous in the Renaissance.  Benvenuto Cellini’s 16th century autobiography contains in equal measures declarations of his achieving the impossible as an artist and collapses in his health when his work became “more than he could stand.” These would result in him throwing himself onto his supposed deathbed because of his trials and tribulations.  One can only sympathize with his poor housekeeper who had to withstand his cries of “I shall not be alive tomorrow” and “I feel I am dying!” while he ordered her about.

In this month’s issue of the Atlantic, Olga Khazan discusses a new journal article by Julio Montes-Santiago, a doctor from Spain, in her article called “How Important Is Lead Poisoning to Becoming a Legendary Artist?” While I usually am suspicious of articles in non-art oriented journals that pretend to ‘discover’ why an artist painted a certain way, there is no question that lead is a poison.  That’s why, even though it creates a warm, beautiful white, lead pigment is not used by commercial paint manufacturers anymore.  Dr. Montes-Santiago traces the history of ‘painters madness’ and the many famous artists and composers who may have suffered from it.  For example, he believes that one reason Michelangelo suffered from terrible kidney stones in his old age was his use of lead white paint.

Detail of Saturn Devouring his Son by Goya, 1819 - 1823
Saturn Devouring his Son (detail) by Goya, 1819 – 1823

Others have written of the impact the terrible illnesses that 19th century Romantic painter Francisco Goya suffered during his lifetime had on his career and the possibility that lead paint contributed to them (Goya was reputed to use enormous quantities of lead white in both his priming and paint).  Goya’s near deafness came after a  bout of illness in the 1790s and eventually forced him to leave his position as a teacher in the Academy (he couldn’t hear the students’ questions any longer).   Ultimately, he left the Spanish court as well and and retreated to what he called his “Deaf Man’s House” in the countryside, where he painted the famous Black Paintings, like “Saturn Devouring his Son.” Saturnism, ironically, is another word for ‘lead poisoning.’

Khazan’s article in the Atlantic discusses other writings on the subject of lead poisoning from the past as well and is an interesting discussion of how health issues may have haunted our favorite artists.  It’s well worth a look.

 

 

Degenerate and Stolen Art lost in WWII, finally found

Degenerate Art exhibition, 1937

Adolf Hitler and Adolf Ziegler visit the Degenerate Art exhibition, 1937.

A search of a Munich home, owned by the son of Adolf Hitler’s favorite art dealer, has turned up 1,500 works of art stolen by the Nazis, believed to be worth over $1 billion. These works include paintings by Picasso, Matisse, Klee, and Chagall.  Most of the art is by artists whose work was displayed at the infamous “Degenerate Art” exhibition created at the direction of Hitler.  It is being called “the largest single find of looted art in post war history.”

Blue Dress by Matisse

‘Blue Dress in a Yellow Arm Chair,’ by Henri Matisse, circa 1936 (illustrative image: AP/Oystein Thorvaldsen, Henie-Onstad Art Center)

More information can be found online at the BBC.

No, no, we’re art historians.

lasmeninasAfter spending nearly 7 hours today at the Prado in Madrid and seeing many incredibly great and famous masterpieces, our first moment inside remains my favorite.  Just as Susan and I were leaving the security scanner, a woman with a badge approached us.  What follows is the actual dialog:

Woman (in heavily accented English): Do you want a guided tour to see the most important sites of the Prado in one hour?

Us: No, no, we’re art historians.

Woman: Toilets.  Right downstairs.

How to pronounce artist names

Berthe Morisot signatureAndrew M. Goldstein of Artspace.com has put together a useful collection of modern and contemporary artist names for anyone who has wondered if they were wrong.  Boy, I could have used this when I first started teaching. Not that I still don’t need this.  I’ll be sneaking a peak at this list for years to come. Don’t forget the link at the bottom with page two and more help.

 

The most famous punch of the Renaissance

 

Designed by Johannes Stradanus "Lorenzo de’ Medici in the Sculpture Garden," 1571 Tapestry, 425 x 455 cm (167 5/16 x 179 1/8 in.) Museo Nazionnale di San Marco, Pisa Soprintendenza alle Gallerie, Florence

Designed by Johannes Stradanus
“Lorenzo de’ Medici in the Sculpture Garden,” 1571 [detail]
Tapestry, 167 5/16 x 179 1/8 in.
Museo Nazionnale di San Marco, Pisa

When he was only fifteen, Michelangelo was invited by the ruler of Florence, Lorenzo de’Medici, il Magnifico himself, to live in his palace and be trained in a school that he had established to foster the next generation of Florentine master sculptors.  The sculptors were taught by an old man, Bertoldi di Giovanni, the last living student of the great Renaissance sculptor, Donatello.  When Michelangelo arrived, the school’s star pupil was Pietro Torrigiani, a talented artist three years older than he was.

According to the Renaissance biographer Vasari, the day Michelangelo first visited Lorenzo de’Medici’s garden he noticed Torrigiani making small clay figures.  Michelangelo thought he could do better, found some clay, and preceded to do just that.  Torrigiani learned quickly that he was now facing a formidable rival.  Soon his fellow students were studying the new arrival’s drawings, not his.  At the dinners in the Medici Palace, he couldn’t help noticing that Michelangelo was often found sitting next to Lorenzo de’Medici himself — closer than il Magnifico’s own children.

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