Photo By Gail
Swiss artist Miriam Cahn’s enigmatic painting The Beautiful Blue (Das Schone Blau, 2008 – 17) depicts two figures sinking underwater. The figures are painted loosely, blending with the tones of the water and evoking the vulnerability of the body.
Continue reading Modern Art Monday Presents: Miriam Cahn, The Beautiful Blue
Photo By Gail
With an expressive composition of interwoven shapes in black, red and orange, Carmen Herrera’s Iberic (1949) oscillates between the geometric and the organic. Herrera painted this work during a formative period in Paris between 1948 and 1954, when she experimented with different modes of abstraction informed by the European avant-gardes, from Suprematism to the Bauhaus. Continue reading Modern Art Monday Presents: Carmen Herrera, Iberic
Photos By Gail
Ad Reinhardt (1913 – 1967) studied both Eastern and Western art history at the undergraduate and graduate levels. He deepened his understanding of Buddhism and other Eastern philosophies by attending the lectures of Zen teacher Daisetz Suzuki at Columbia University. Number 22 (1949) shows Reinhardt fusing Eastern and Western traditions by using calligraphic brushwork inspired by Chinese and Japanese calligraphy in a gridded composition influenced by those of de Stijl cofounder Piet Mondrian.
Number 22, Detail
In classical East Asian painting, the fragility of paper wet with ink limits the artist’s ability to rework the composition. The sturdier canvas support and slower-drying oil paints used throughout much of the history of Western painting allows artists to highlight various revision and layering techniques. Although he worked in oil on canvas, Reinhardt chose to restrain himself and not rework his painting’s surface, in keeping with Asian calligraphic traditions. The result is a far more controlled manner of gestural painting than those of the Abstract Expressionists.
Photographed in the Guggenheim Museum in NYC.
Marilyn Monroe Red Velvet Series By Tom Kelley, 1949 (All Post Photos By Gail)
There would probably be little argument that Marilyn Monroe is the most legendary and iconic Hollywood Movie Star to have ever lived. Countless contemporary artists — from Andy Warhol to Ron English, Ad Infinitum — have captured and re-appropriated her likeness into their own works, and her image still turns heads wherever it appears. While she did not have a long life, she certainly has achieved immortality in a sense. Limited Runs, a company that specializes in Classic Hollywood and other Fine Art Photography has just released the Marilyn Monroe Red Velvet Collection, which features her famous nude shots circa 1949 that originally appeared on promotional calendars. Now you can all own prints of these gorgeous photographs that were at one time so controversial, they had to be “dressed” in superimposed lingerie in order to be sent through the mail. Continue reading Limited Runs Presents the Marilyn Monroe Red Velvet Collection
Dire Straits’ singer/guitarist Mark Knopfler was born on this date, August 12th, in 1949. Gee whiz, what an amazing guitarist he is. Favorite Dire Straits’ Songs: “Lady Writer” or “Skateaway.”