All Photos By Gail
Man on Fire (1969–70), an early— and unmistakably iconic —sculpture by the late American artist Luis Jiménez, is a work of art that embodies raw power, cultural memory, and the turbulent politics of its time . Standing nearly seven-and-a-half feet tall and cast in brilliantly painted fiberglass, this blazing figure demands your attention. Continue reading Modern Art Monday Presents: Luis Jiménez, Man on Fire
We are currently in a state of rapid turbulence and a digital system where people wish to add a touch of creativity, mindfulness, and humanity to their lives. Nude drawing (also known as Life drawing) stands as one such additional whisper that captivates both artists and art lovers — it is the purest way of drawing the human body in all its complete actualities.
Continue reading Exploring the Human Form Through Artistic Expression
Photo By Gail
Artist Beauford Delaney (1907 – 1979) met writer and civil rights activist James Baldwin in 1940. Finding common ground on multiple fronts – intellectual, social, and artistic – the two gay men began a friendship that would last 38 years.
Continue reading Modern Art Monday Presents: Dark Rapture (James Baldwin) By Beauford Delaney
Photo By Gail
“The woman asleep on the couch is dreaming she has been transported to the forest, listening to the sounds from the instrument of the enchanter,” Henri Rousseau wrote of his enigmatic painting, The Dream (1910) . The setting for the musician and the reclining female nude – a moonlit jungle full of exotic foliage and wildlife – was inspired by his visits to Paris’s Jardin des Plantes, a combined botanical garden and zoo. “When I am in these hothouses and see the strange plants from exotic lands, it seems to me that I am entering a dream,“ he once said. Entirely self-taught, Rousseau worked a day job as a customs inspector until around 1885, when he retired on a tiny pension to pursue a full-time career as an artist.
Photographed in the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.
Photo By Gail
In Nude in a Wood (1906), which was made near the town of Collioure in the French Mediterranean, Henri Matisse uses broad patches of vivid pigment to integrate a figure of his wife in a lush landscape. Although his techniques were new, his subject matter – the female nude in, and acquainted with, nature – refers directly to the pastoral landscape tradition and it’s imagined worlds of timeless pleasure in harmony. This painting was included in the 1913 Armory Show, a groundbreaking exhibition that introduced US audiences to European modernism.
Photographed in The Brooklyn Museum.