Tag Archives: Painter

Arts and Culture

Modern Art Monday Presents: Fernand Leger, Mechanical Elements

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Mechanical Elements
Photo By Gail

Fernand Leger arranged impersonal elements of a new machine age like a cheerful assembly of children’s building blocks in Mechanical Elements (1920). Initially, his infatuation with modern technology did not go over well with collectors. As the artist later recalled, “For two years, Leonce Rosenberg, my dealer at the time, could not sell any of the work from my ‘mechanical period,’ while the mandolins of the Cubists moved briskly.”

Photographed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC.

Arts and Culture

Modern Art Monday Presents: Morning, Interior By Maximilien Luce

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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

Arts and Culture

Modern Art Monday Presents: Gustav Klimt, Adele Bloch-Bauer II

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Adele Bloch Bauer
Photo By Gail

This painting  is one of two formal portraits that Klimt made of Adele Bloch-Bauer, one of the artists most important patrons.  The wife of the successful industrialist, Bloch-Bauer  was a prominent member of the Vienna’s  cultural elite, serving as a key supporter of the arts and the founder of a salon for artists and writers. Klimt’s  composition, completed when Bloch-Bauer was about 30 years old, emphasizes her social station: her towering figure, in opulent dress,  extends to the vertical limits of the canvas and confronts the viewer head-on from its center.  She poses against a jewel-toned backdrop of nearly abstract pattern blocks that suggest a richly decorated domestic interior.

In 1938,  the Nazi government took possession of this portrait along with other works of art from the Bloch-Bauer family collection (including Adele Bloch-Bauer I, now in the collection of the Neue Gallerie  in New York). In 2006, after years of legal negotiations, the works were returned to the Bloch-Bauer heirs and subsequently sold to other collections. The Museum of Modern Art presents Adele Bloch-Bauer II (1912) as a generous loan from its current owner.

Arts and Culture

Modern Art Monday Presents: E.E. Cummings, Noise Number 13

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Noise Number 13
Photo By Gail

E.E.Cummings (1894 – 1962) is best known as a poet, but he also worked as a painter, referring to the visual and literary arts as his “twin obsessions.” In a series of abstractions made between 1919 and 1925 — titled either Sound or Noise followed by a number — Cummings explored sensory crossover between aural and visual forms. In Noise Number 13, spiraling and conical shapes seem to expand and contract; each overlapping color (or noise) vie to stand out from the others.

Cummings’ painterly vision is also reflected in his poems, particularly those composed with complicated line breaks and non-traditional spacing on the page. Those poems must be looked at to be heard — and the converse might be said of experiencing Noise Number 13, whose throbbing configurations we can imagine hearing.

Photographed in the Whitney Museum of America Art in NYC.

Arts and Culture

Modern Art Monday Presents: Piet Mondrian’s Composition in Oval with Color Planes I

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Mondrian Composition in Oval
Photo By Gail

Although he painted in both realist and abstract styles during his career, Dutch painter Piet Mondrian is best known for his grid paintings of vertical and horizontal black lines with the three primary colors. Composition in Oval With Color Planes I (1914) follows a grid pattern but is somewhat unique in that Mondrian used a pastel color palette.
Continue reading Modern Art Monday Presents: Piet Mondrian’s Composition in Oval with Color Planes I →