Last updated January 25, 2025
Entrance to the "Paris 1874 - The Impresionist Moment" at the National Gallery of Art - click image to enlarge the photo
Ivan the Art Restorer
The doorways at the Freer Art Gallery - click image to enlarge
Alex Margo Arden: Safety Curtain review — recreating works targeted by protesters – UK The Times
Some of the assaulted artworks mentioned are:
- Vincent van Gogh’s The Sower splashed with pea soup at the Palazzo Bonaparte in Rome in 2022
- Leonardo da Vinci’s The Mona Lisa attacked with cream cake at the Louvre in Paris in 2022
- Claude Monet’s The Artist’s Garden at Giverny vandalised with red paint in Stockholm in 2023
What goes on behind the scenes at a museum? The forklifts, the cleanings, and more – The Art Newspaper
"The photographer Nicolas Krief has spent 13 years documenting these processes in the world's biggest institutions. In his recent book, Musée, you see the Mona Lisa alone in an empty room, attended by an impressive security detail, and Paul Richer's La Poursuite ou La Course under cellophane wrap. Nine sturdy men in jeans and sleeveless puffers hold up what must be an awfully heavy Bouguereau (Dante et Virgile, from 1850) in preparation for the Musée d'Orsay's 2013 exhibition, The Angel of the Odd: Dark Romanticism from Goya to Max Ernst. Their strained stances (the painting stands nearly 3m tall in a hefty gold frame) echo the dramatic lutte de muscles (muscular battle) they're trying not to drop. Krief's images are candid and funny and really poignant..."
Tamara de Lempicka "immaculate and artificial"
Story at Washington Post
Article at the Post half-praises and half-condemns the famed Deco era giant:
"Her visual style came to epitomize art deco (more a design movement that borrowed from art than an art movement). It drew most immediately on the salon cubists who had transformed the breakthroughs of Picasso, Georges Braque and Juan Gris into an innocuous, ingratiating manner suitable for domestic interiors. As neoclassicism came back into vogue in the 1920s — the so-called “return to order” — Lempicka blended the distilled, tubular forms of artists like Fernand Léger and Aristide Maillol with the trembling sensuousness of Modigliani and Ingres."
I believe the writer has misunderstood the breadth of art deco which represented a stylistic attempt to establish the point of its start as an exit from the past, shaping an image of modern industrial society as also a technological one. It was a way to cut the strings that still remained for agricultural and classical images as the defining foundation of life and replacing it with "technique." In this way the artifice of the movement wasn't meant to persist, though of course it certainly did so.
Lempicka's art style wasn't exclusive to her, but she was perhaps the best at using it. For the viewer, once the style is absorbed, a better sense of depth is available for inspection. Unfortunately, a superficial and placid surface has to be penetrated to find that depth, and the question becomes, has the viewer inserted meaning where there really isn't any? (and that's a question that can be delivered at the feet of just about any famed artist of the past).
"She definitely deserves a closer look. But I think she lost track of that “deeper thing” (if it was ever there). She let style override everything."
More art pages in the Archives