Tag Archive | Metropolitan Museum Of Art

Modern Art Monday Presents: Morning, Interior By Maximilien Luce

Jul17

Morning Interior
Photo By Gail

This intimate scene, Morning, Interior (1890) depicts artist Maximilien Luce’s close friend, fellow painter, Neo-Impressionist Gustave Perrot getting up and dressing as morning light streams through a garret window. Luce enlivened the traditional subject of an artist in his humble living quarters with a vivid palette of red, orange, yellow and blue, applied in stippled brushstrokes, in keeping with the newly minted technique of pointillism. Little is known about Perrot, aside from the fact that he died young. In 1892, his brief career was remembered in a fifteen-work tribute held at Salon de Independants in Paris.

Morning Interior Detail
Morning, Interior, Detail

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Modern Art Monday Presents: Bouquet of Flowers in a Vase By Vincent Van Gogh

Jul10

Bouquet of Flowers in a Vase
Photo By Gail

This still life, Bouquet of Flowers in a Vase (1890) is not mentioned in Vincent Van Gogh’s letters and has puzzled scholars as to its place in his artistic production. The subject enjoys a certain rapport with the mixed bouquet of summer flowers he made in Paris; the quasi-abstract floral wallpaper design in Berceuse of Arles , and the white porcelain vase in the Irises of Saint-Remy (both paintings also on exhibit at The Met). However, the palette and style of this painting, especially its distinctive blues and ochers and graphic, brick-shape hatchings, link it firmly with the landscapes made just prior to his death in Auvers on July 29, 1890.

Photographed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC.

Modern Art Monday Presents: Georges Braque, Woman Seated at an Easel

Jul3

Woman Seated at an Easle
Photo By Gail

Georges Braque’s painting, Woman Seated at an Easel (1936) is marked by the sand-laced pigment and curvilinear forms of Braque’s later work, and presents a seated female artist with palette and brush in hand. Set in the artists own Varengeville studio on the Normandy coast, it is one of about ten paintings that depicts figures engaging in artistic or musical activities.

Photographed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC.

Modern Art Monday Presents: Stuart Davis, Percolator

Jun26

Percolator
Photo By Gail

Influenced by the Cubist language of flat, overlapping planes and wedges, Stuart Davis (1892 – 1964) used geometric shapes in related colors to create this still life, Percolator (1927). Here, he deconstructs the cylindrical forms of a mass-produced, percolator coffeepot and renders the everyday object both abstract and undefinable. By choosing an industrially produced consumer product as his subject, Davis put a new spin on the spatial innovations of the previous decade’s European avant-garde art movements.

Photographed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC.

Modern Art Monday Presents: Let My People Go By Aaron Douglas

Jun19

Let My People Go
Photos By Gail

Kansas-born Aaron Douglas (1899 – 1979) was the leading visual artist of the Harlem Renaissance, the great flowering of the arts in the 1920s and 1930s in New York’s predominantly African American neighborhood. Rendered in Douglas’s flat silhouetted style and with lavender and yellow-gold hues, this work, Let My People Go (1935-39), depicts the Old Testament story about God’s order to Moses to lead the Israelites out of captivity in Egypt.

Ministers, abolitionists , and politicians from the nineteenth-century through the Civil Rights era have related this story to the oppression of African Americans. Light Symbolizing God’s command radiates down and envelops the kneeling figure of Moses. Douglas derived this composition from a design he created in 1927 for God’s Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse, a collaboration with author and activist James Weldon Johnson.

Photographed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC.

Eye On Design: Dressing Table and Mirror By Norman Bel Geddes

Jun7

Dressing Table and Mirror Norman Bel Geddes
Photo By Gail

This Vanity (1928) stands as a harbinger in the evolution of an American modern style. Norman Bel Geddes (1893 -1988) conceived of it only a year after founding the first industrial design firm in the United States. His prior experience on theater and film sets lent a dramatic flair to his consumer products, including  this dressing table and mirror, made of enameled and chrome-plated steel, which was part of a larger suite of metal bedroom furniture.

Designed a the height of the Roaring Twenties, it echoes the sleek modernity of Manhattan skyscrapers, a favored motif among Art Deco designers, with its sequence of setbacks from drawers to mirror top. The industrial materials emphasize the design’s mechanical production, while the polished enamel and elegant trim and drawer pulls suggest something of the luxurious finishes found in handmade Art Deco furniture.

Seen in the Mirror: A reflection of the painting, I Saw The Figure Five in Gold By Charles Demuth.

Photographed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC.

Modern Art Monday Presents: Paul Signac, Notre-Dame-de-la-Garde (La Bonne-Mere) Marseilles

Jun5

Notre Dame De La Garde
All Photos By Gail

After visiting Marseilles in late 1905, Paul Signac proceeded to paint two canvases in his studio: one showing the entrance to the port, and this view, facing the hill surmounted by Notre-Dame-de-la-Garde, the church nicknamed the Good Mother by seamen. Bright and boldly colored, the composition reflects Signac’s contact with the artists Henri-Edmond Cross and Matisse at Saint Tropez in the summer of 1904. The rectangular strokes of unmixed pigment, arranged like tesserae (an individual tile, usually formed in the shape of a cube) in a mosaic, are Signac’s variation on the innovative painting method pioneered by Georges Seurat.

Notre Dame De La Garde Detail
Painting Detail

Photographed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC.