All Photos by Gail
I must admit that I had a good laugh when I passed this very familiar-looking sculpture while walking on the High Line recently. Maybe you have a similar dental Retainer (albeit on a much smaller scale) in your medicine cabinet right now. I know I do.
Photos By Gail
“Singularly bold, somewhat imperious, and active of mind.” This is how the radical philosopher William Godwin described his daughter, the Romantic novelist Mary Shelley, who achieved fame and infamy for her groundbreaking Gothic fiction Frankenstein (1818), written at the remarkable age of twenty-one. Here, the Italian neoclassicist Camillo Pistrucci uses the imposing genre of the white marble portrait bust (1843) to present Shelley in the grand manner of a virtuoso. Balancing the rhythmic forms of the face and drapery with the dazzling details of her sweeping Victorian hairstyle, Pistrucci achieves a precision and finesse that betrays the influence of his father, Benedetto Pistrucci, the unrivaled cameo carver. The artist carved the bust in Rome in the year of Shelley’s Italian sojourn.
Mary Shelley (1797 – 1851)
Photographed in the British Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC.
Photo By Gail
In his later years, Jean Arp produced three-dimensional sculptures that he modeled in plaster and translated into stone and bronze. Plaster enabled Arp to experiments with new, unique forms, such as the amoeba-like shapes in Configuration in Serpentine Movements (1950). Referring to his biomorphic art as “l’art concret” (concrete art), Arp emphasized how this style evoked natural forms without imitation or specific definition, as if the sculpture had been created by natural forces rather than his own hand.
Photographed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC.
Photo By Gail
You can be sure that we all did a double-take when we passed this statue at The Met this past weekend, because, seriously, doesn’t it look like this marble statue is checking her Instagram feed or catching up on Tweets? That’s what we thought as well, but if you are standing nearby and look really closely, you can see she has a small Crucifix nestled in her palm, which makes much more sense considering the name of this piece is Indian Girl, or The Dawn of Christianity, rather than something like Girl, Distracted by iPhone, Forgets to Put on a Top.
Created by Erastus Dow Palmer in 1856, this sculpture marked the artist’s first attempt to model a full-length, female figure. He did a pretty great job, don’t you think?
Photo By Gail
You can’t tell until you get right up on it that this fancy Armchair — which you’d swear to God is made of solid, rock hard Marble — is in fact upholstered in a satin-like textile which has been digitally screen-printed to resemble marble. Oh, the cleverness.
Louis XV Goes to Sparta, as it is called, is designed by Maurizio Galante and Tal Lancman for Cerruti Baleri. We spotted it at Kasher / Potamkin Boutique in the Chelsea Gallery District. Get more information and see more photos of this fabulous chair from the company that made it and other custom upholstery in Orange County!