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Pop Culture, Toys and Collectibles

MoMA and LEGO Collaborate to Release New Starry Night Set

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starry night lego set
All Images Courtesy of MoMA

The Museum of Modern Art is set to launch a new LEGO® Ideas set inspired by one of the most iconic works in MoMA’s collection, Vincent van Gogh’s The Starry Night (1889). The three-dimensional set reimagines the renowned painting — which has been in MoMA’s collection since 1935 — in LEGO form, emphasizing the artist’s striking brush strokes and color choices. The set will be available on June 1st for the general public at store.moma.org, at MoMA Design Stores in New York, and at LEGO locations globally.
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Arts and Culture

Modern Art Monday Presents: Vincent Van Gogh, The Drinkers

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The Drinkers
Photo By Gail

The Drinkers (1890) was painted during Vincent Van Gogh’s time in the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum in Saint-Remy-de-Provence, a small town in the south of France. Van Gogh was highly productive during this time, but he struggled to maintain confidence in his own abilities as  painter. To retrain himself, he made a number of copies after the works of artists he admired, which freed him from having to produce original compositions and allowed him to concentrate instead on interpretation. Van Gogh borrowed this composition from a black and white print after Honore-Victorin Daumier, but the vibrant colors were his own invention. The greenish palette may be an allusion to the notorious alcoholic drink, Absinthe.

Photographed in The Art Institute Chicago.

Arts and Culture

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

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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.

Arts and Culture

New Plate Paintings By Julian Schnabel at Pace Gallery

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Rose Painting Near Van Goghs Grave
Rose Painting Near Van Gogh’s Grave By Julian Schnabel (All Photos By Gail)

Confession: Julian Schnabel is not an artist whose work I particularly admire. To me, his stuff almost always seems uninspired, phoned in, and, well, just plain ugly.  I do not think that I’m alone in that opinion. Schnabel’s latest exhibit,  New Plate Paintings, which is his first solo show at Pace Gallery since leaving Gagosian, is a collection of nearly-identical variations on a  theme: paintings depicting pink roses on a bed of greenery, which is notable for being painted on a relief of broken dishes mounted on the canvas.

Continue reading New Plate Paintings By Julian Schnabel at Pace Gallery →

Arts and Culture

Modern Art Monday Presents: Vincent Van Gogh, Mountains at Saint Remy

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Mountains at Saint Remy
Photo By Gail

While recovering from a mental breakdown at a hospital in Saint-Remy, Vincent Van Gogh created this depiction of the Alpilles, a low mountain range in the southern French town. Van Gogh‘s characteristic heavy impasto and bold, broad brushstrokes activate the terrain and sky. In his letters, the artist wrote: “I rather like the ‘Entrance to a Quarry’ — I was doing it when I felt this attack coming on — because to my mind the somber greens go well with the ocher tones; there is something sad in it which is healthy, and that is why is does not bore me. Perhaps that is true of the ‘Mountain’ too. They will tell me that mountains are not like that and that there are black outlines of a finger’s width. But after all it seemed to me it expressed that passage in [Edouard] Rod’s book [Le sens de la vie, 1889] . . .  about a desolate country of somber mountains, among which are some dark goatherds’ huts where sunflowers are blooming.”

Photographed in the Thannhauser Collection Galleries at the Guggenheim Museum in NYC

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