Dear Kitty. Some blog

This video is called Edvard Munch.

By Mike Marqusee in Britain, originally from The Hindu in India:

Munch’s very real phantoms

In celebration of the return of “The Scream” to museums, Mike Marqusee recounts the painting’s remarkable life, and that of its creator, Edvard Munch.

July 3, 2008

FOUR YEARS after it was stolen by masked gunmen in broad daylight, and two years after it was recovered in still undisclosed circumstances, “The Scream” has gone back on display at the Munch Museum in Oslo. …

Part of Munch’s genius lies in his evocation of isolation; but though mentally embattled from an early age, he was not an entirely isolated genius. As a young man he was drawn into Oslo’s bohemian counter-culture, where he was exposed to anarchist and revolutionary ideas.

He enjoyed friendships with a wide range of contemporary Scandinavian and European artists and writers, who saw Munch’s work as part of a broader avant-garde challenge to a complacent establishment. An establishment that reacted accordingly, condemning the subject, tone and technique of Munch’s groundbreaking paintings of the 1890s. He was not accepted as the master he obviously was until he was past 40.

In 1937, the Nazis condemned Munch’s work as “degenerate” and sold off the scores of Munch paintings held in German museums. When they occupied Norway in 1940, Munch refused to have anything to do with them. He confessed to a friend that the “phantoms” that had haunted him for years had been put in the shade by the giant “phantom” at loose in the real world.

This video is about the pyramids of Giza in Egypt (including Menkaure’s pyramid).

From Egyptology News:

An underwater robot will be used to search for the sarcophagus of ancient Egyptian Pharaoh Menkaure of more than 4,500 years ago off the Spanish coasts, the Egyptian MENA news agency reported on Saturday.

Egyptian and Spanish archeologists will launch the search in the historical city of Cartagena at the depths of the sea with the help of the hi-tech equipped robot, Egyptian Secretary General of Egyptian Supreme Council for Antiquities, Zahi Hawwas, was quoted by MENA as saying.

The merchant ship Beatrice carrying the sarcophagus of the ancient Egyptian king along with other antiquities sank off Cartagena in the early 19th century en route from Egypt to Britain, where some scientific studies were supposed to be conducted on them, Hawwas said.

Egypt and Spain will cooperate in a joint venture to locate the sarcophagus of Menkaure, the 5th king of the 4th Dynasty of Egypt who ruled from 2,551 BC to 2,523 BC.

This is a BBC video from Britain, about ancient Greek sculpture.

The antiquities museum says about one of its present non permanent exhibitions, Models of beauty. Masterpieces in plaster:

13 June through 16 November 2008

This exhibition shows beautiful 17th, 18th and 19th century plaster casts of the finest sculptures of Antiquity. The timeless beauty of classical sculpture is the focal point of this exhibition. Further attention is paid to the role played by plaster casts in science, art criticism and art education in the past four hundred years.

He started with talking about Rome, as in that city, in the sixteenth century, were the origins of copying sculptures from antiquity. When, early in that century, visitors came to Rome, they might know from writings that during antiquity, there had been many sculptures in public places. However, when they visited the city, they saw only a few sculptures said to have survived from the Roman empire or earlier: the she-wolf of Capitol hill; the Marcus Aurelius statue; Trajan’s Column.

When, while building churches or other buildings in medieval Rome, sculptures or parts of them from antiquity had been found, they had been recycled as building material. After 1500, however, people found out that discoveries like these might add to knowledge about antique art. In this way, new sculptures which became famous, were found, like the Laocoön group and the Apollo of the Belvedere. They attracted many artists and other visitors from many European countries to Rome.

The popes and other elite people from the papal state sometimes, as a favour, started giving plaster copies of antique sculptures to princes in other countries. One example was Trajan’s column, a copy of which was given to King Louis XIV of France. In 1824, these plaster copies were found in a windmill in Leiden. the Netherlands. It is not known how they had ended up there. As, since the seventeenth century, in the open air of Rome, the original Trajan’s column has suffered much from pollution, these plaster copies are today valuable, as they show details which are no longer clear in the original.

In the exhibition are also cork models of ancient Roman buildings, which used to be sold to tourists. And reproductions of idealized paintings of ancient Roman remains, by the neo-classicist Giovanni Paolo Panini (1692 - 1765).

During the eighteenth century, drawing academies, based on neo-classicist views, arose in many countries. First, the students had to learn to draw skeletons and muscles for human anatomy. Then, they had to make drawings of Greek and Roman sculptures, considered as models of perfect human bodies. Only after that did they draw nude human models, with bodies not as perfect as antique sculptures.

Among the plaster copies often found in drawing academies were the Venus of Arles. And the “Borghese gladiator” which does not really depicts a gladiator, as gladiators did not fight while naked. The nude statue probably depicts a hero.

The Venus of Arles was considered the ideal female form, until 1820, when the Venus de Milo was discovered in Greece.

One of the drawings, depicting a statue of the Greek god Apollo, at the exhibition, is by nineteenth century drawing academy student, later famous painter, George Hendrik Breitner.

When female students had to draw plaster copies of statues, fig leaves were attached to prevent the women from seeing male genitalia.

Certainly since the 1960s in the Netherlands, neo-classicist ideas in art education became weaker. For the plaster copies, that often meant they were hidden away or even destroyed.

In the sixteenth century, mainly Roman sculpture and Roman copies of Greek sculpture had become known in western Europe. In the early nineteenth century, for the first time, classical Greek sculpture became widely known. Eg, after the Parthenon marbles arrived in London. People had difficulty in getting used to them. The poet John Keats was one of not very many people admiring the Marbles right from the start. While fellow poet Lord Byron attacked Lord Elgin for taking the sculpture from Athens.

When sculpture from the Aegina temple, still older than the Parthenon, became first known in Germany, famous author Goethe did not like it, as it did not conform to his preconceived ideas of what Greek art should be.

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This video (after, first, an advertisement) is about Egyptian animal mummies.

Today, to the museum of antiquities, where there is an animal mummies exhibition.

In ancient Egypt, various animals played a role in people’s lives, including in religion.

Just after leaving for the museum, I see a non mummified, still very much alive animal: a holly blue butterfly.

The museum has not only the animal mummy special exhibition, but also animals depicted in paint, sculpture, amulets, etc. in its permanent collection. I decide to look at these today and to come back for the mummy exhibition on some later day.

The first room in the permanent Egyptian exhibition is about prehistoric and early dynastic times.

One of the objects there is a Neolithic pot, with ostriches painted on it. That is special, according to the museum, as ostriches disappeared from Egypt about 5,000 years ago.

In the next room, about the Old Kingdom, many animals are depicted in the mastaba of Hetepherachet there.

Also from Old Kingdom times, a coiled snake, as a board for the mehen game.

After the Old Kingdom and the Middle Kingdom, the Asian Hyksos invaders ruled Egypt. From their epoch, fish-shaped and goose-shaped vases.

The Hyksos brought horses to Egypt for the first time. These were depicted in the tomb for General Horemheb. The Egyptian sculptors still were not really used to depicting these new animals then.

From the times of Pharaoh Tutankhamen, animal pictures from the tomb of Paatenemheb.

From a bit earlier New Kingdom times, the grave of the offiicial Merymery, also with many animal pictures.

In this cartoon video from the USA:

Vice President Cheney responds to the notion that Blackwater might be barred from Iraq.

An Independent Line is a new book and exhibition at the Political Cartoon Gallery in London featuring cartoons by the Independent newspaper’s three editorial cartoonists – Dave Brown, Peter Schrank and Tim Sanders, whose work also graces this paper.

The exhibition covers the past 12 years and it’s striking how the earlier cartoons seem to come from a completely different era. Much of the humour concerns Bill Clinton’s sexual peccadillos, or former Tory leader William Hague’s bald head.

But 9/11 and the subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq transform the tone of the exhibition. It also brings out the best in the cartoonists, as their outrage turns to focus on the lies, murder and torture doled out by George Bush and Tony Blair.

“The Iraq war is the overwhelming event of the century,” says Tim Sanders. “The world has become darker since then and cartoonists – who tend to be dark and twisted people – come into their own.

“Cartoons act as a wonderful historical record – you can look at them to see the world expressed in ink and bile on paper. It’s in black and white, a stark and violent expression appropriate to violent times.”

The theme of the war figures prominently. The cover of the book displays cartoons by all three artists of prominent figures in the “war on terror” such as Condoleezza Rice, Gordon Brown and Osama bin Laden – all with blood on their hands.

Part of the reason for this was the decision by the Independent to play a campaigning role against the Iraq war in 2003. Since then it has kept up its critical coverage of the “war on terror” with reports from journalists such as Patrick Cockburn and Robert Fisk.

The Imperialist Right Threatens Obama on Iraq: here.

Washington’s new alibi for a criminal war: the “surge has worked”: here.

This video says about itself:

Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo

Italian divisionist painter (1868-1907)

music: André Gagnon - L’Amour rêve.

A living torrent

(Monday 23 June 2008)

EXHIBITION: Radical Light: Italy’s Divisionist Painters 1891-1910
National Gallery, London WC2

CHRISTINE LINDEY looks at a style of painting that caused shock waves throughout the Italian establishment at the end of the 19th century.

Fascinated by the analysis of colour and optics by scientists Chevreul and Rood, the French artist Seurat applied their theories to painting in the 1880s.

Small dots of colour juxtaposed onto a white surface would mix in the eye of the viewer when seen from a certain distance, so retaining the luminosity of natural or artificial light.

Differences of tone to convey the solidity of objects were created by adding dots of complementary colour. For example, yellow and red dots merge into orange, while adding blue dots created a darker orange without darkening the overall tonality of the painting. He called this method “divisionism,” but critics derided it as “pointillism” and the name stuck in France.

These ideas soon spread. They were brought to Italy by the dealer-critic-painter Grubicy. There, divisionists tended to prefer using threads or dashes of divided colour rather than dots. Never an organised movement, the Italian divisionists’ concerns lay within the opposing ideologies of socialism and mysticism.

The political situation in 1890s Italy was highly charged as the growth of the electoral franchise, literacy and industrialisation raised class consciousness. Challenging rural poverty and exploitation, the recently formed labour movement called for land redistribution and higher wages.

Those peasants who escaped the countryside to find building and domestic work in the fast-growing cities, notably Milan, found themselves poorly housed and underpaid. The ensuing well-supported strikes and demonstrations were broken up with fierce police and army brutality.

Socialist artists including Pellizza, Nomellini and Balla equated divisionism’s scientific, rational basis with a modernism which matched their political beliefs. Their paintings would be radical in form and subject.

When working on the Living Torrent (1895-6), Pellizza wrote: “I am attempting a social painting … a crowd of people, workers of the soil, who are intelligent, strong, robust, united, advance like a torrent, overwhelming every obstacle in its path, thirsty for justice.”

A massive painting, its life-size peasants march resolutely towards the viewer, the central figure suffused with light in a powerful representation of the might of organised political struggle.

Longoni’s The Orator of the Strike (1890-1) depicts an impassioned mason speaking high above the rally from a builder’s scaffolding. In the background, the army charges fleeing protesters with fixed bayonets.

Longini was at this outlawed May Day protest in Milan in 1890. The exhibition at which the painting was first shown opened on the following May Day, when another protest, also outlawed, took place.

The left-wing press reproduced and discussed such works, spreading their power beyond the walls of art museums and galleries. Some argued that they were over-didactic, others defended them as effective calls to arms.

Such fiercely topical works were seen as a threat by the authorities. Longini was put under police surveillance. So harsh was state repression that he and Pellizza later retreated into a vague symbolism.

Other divisionists exposed social injustice. Morbelli’s For Eighty Cents! (1893-5) shows a line of peasant women ankle-deep in the foetid water and stinking heat of rice fields. The title scoffs at their derisory pay. …

For the symbolists, divisionism was a means of conveying states of mind rather than a positivist engagement with realism. Previati’s and Segantini’s quasi-mystical paeans to the sanctity of motherhood belong to a conservative Catholic tradition which resisted political and social change.

Segantini’s well-fed, tranquil peasants are far removed from Pellizza’s angry, hungry living torrent. Portraying peasant life as reassuringly idyllic and unchanging, his works conveyed a conservative ideal.

Grubicy’s idealised landscapes, influenced by Japanese prints, represent the city dweller’s rose-coloured longing for nature unsullied by human habitation or intervention.

Divisionism was the first aesthetically radical manner to be widely known in Italy. Within a culturally provincial climate, its adoption symbolised the rejection of tradition in favour of modernity. As some divisionists were also socialists, aesthetic radicalism became associated with political radicalism in the public mind and the manner became doubly synonymous with all that was outrageous.

This has masked the fact that, by the 1890s, appreciating and collecting esoteric avant garde art signified sophistication and social superiority for a section of the haute bourgeoisie. …

However, the following generation of Italian divisionists boldly capitalised on the legacy of the pioneers. Balla’s, Boccioni’s and Carra’s paintings exploded into an uncompromising riot of modernist colour and expressive brush marks so genuinely radical that they had an international impact. They soon aligned themselves with Marinetti’s futurists which inherited and perpetuated the twinned antagonistic ideological roots of Italian divisionism.

This exhibition gives a clear account of these divergent tendencies and influences. It is a pleasure to see the socialist works of Balla, Nomellini, Pellizza and Longini. Arguably the most stunning room is the last one, in which we can see icons of modernism such as Boccioni’s The City Rises (1910) and Balla’s spectacular Street Light (1910-11).

However, be prepared for the many works which were anything but radical too.

Exhibition shows until September 7 and costs £8 or £4 on Tuesday afternoons and Wednesdays 6-9 pm. Concessions £7-£4.

Right now, there is an open air exhibition of work by Zimbabwean sculptor Dominic Benhura in the botanical garden.

61 sculptures by this artist are on show.

Humans in various, mostly stylized, forms are the main subject.

However, Dominic Benhura also uses animals and plants as subjects.

They include a crab in springstone.

And a beetle; its body in springstone, and the six spots on its back in cobalt stone.

The sculpture Paired for life shows two cranes.

Another sculpture shows a spitting cobra.

Sculptures showing fish stand close to ponds.

The sculptures Sisal and Flowering are about plants.

This is a German video about Gerd Arntz.

From ART FOR A CHANGE blog in the USA:

The Cologne Progressives

Some years ago, while visiting the German city of Cologne, I discovered the works of the Cologne Progressive Artists Group (Gruppe Progressiver Künstler Köln), a bloc of artists that represented the radical outer fringe of the Expressionist movement of the Weimar Republic (1918-1933). Fortunately for enthusiasts of art from the Weimar years the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, Germany, has mounted an exhibition titled Progressive Cologne: 1920-33, Seiwert - Hoerle - Arntz. Running from March 15 to June 15, 2008, the exhibit is accompanied by a richly illustrated catalog book, Painting as a Weapon - a definitive text on the Progressives that is sure to please both historians and aficionados of German Expressionism. …

The exhibition focuses on three core members of the Cologne Progressives, Franz Wilhelm Seiwert, Heinrich Hoerle, and Gerd Arntz, with the exhibit presenting over fifty paintings and ninety prints by the artists. The Progressives were interested in the creation of a formal proletarian aesthetic, an innovative art of and for the working class. While the Cologne Progressives were in part inspired by the Soviet Constructivists, they did not adopt the severe geometric abstractions of their Soviet counterparts. …

Gerd Arntz collaborated with the Marxist Viennese social scientist Otto Neurath on creating what they called the International System of Typographic Picture Education, or Isotype. The idea was to provide the working class with a universal visual language of symbols and pictograms that would assist them in understanding complex ideas concerning politics, economics, industry, and society in general. Neurath hired Arntz as a designer for the Isotype project in 1928, and over the years the artist designed some 4000 pictograms. While Isotype was based upon a radical political vision, the very concept for the pictographic road signs and other governmental pictograms we see everywhere today can be traced back directly to the collaborative work of Neurath and Arntz.

This is a video about Rembrandt.

From the Rembrandthuis museum in Amsterdam, the Netherlands:

A surprising discovery. New Italian documents about Rembrandt

The art historian Professor Lauro Magnani from Genoa has found, in the archive of an ancient family from Genoa, unknown, really interesting data about Rembrandt.

The descriptions are about what happened in 1666/67, not long before Rembrandts died; they also contain interesting information about international appreciation of Rembrandt’s art. The documents also show us how some (surprised) foreigners saw Rembrandt as a person. This discovery has become the stimulus for a small symposium on Friday afternoon 13 June, organized by the Nederlands Instituut in Rome, the Rembrandt Research Project and Museum Het Rembrandthuis.

It turns out that [Rembrandt] three years before he died in 1669 got a third, so far unknown, commission from Italy.

This commission was for making three meter high altar pieces [which he did not get commissions for in the Netherlands] for the family church of the Genoese Sauli family. Rembrandt negotiated a lot about the price.

Rembrandt made sketches for the altar pieces and had them shipped to Genoa. It is unclear whether they have arrived; the sketches are lost. The altar pieces themselves have never been made.

Rembrandt and McCain: here.

This video from Scotland is called Aberlemno Church Pictish Stone.

From The Shetland Times in Scotland:

06 June 2008

Pictish stone found by gravedigger most significant in decade – expert

Heather Baillache

A PICTISH stone found in Cunningsburgh has been described as the most important archaeological discovery in Shetland for 10 years.

It was found in Mail cemetery by gravedigger Malcolm Smith, his second such find in 16 years.

The sculptured stone is inscribed with mysterious symbols and dates back to the dark ages.

It is the ninth stone of its kind to be discovered in the same area in the last 130 years.

Its significance has been high­lighted by Dr Ian Tait, collections curator at the Shetland Museum and Archives.

“It is extremely exciting because it is a single find which was not associated with an archaeological dig. It was just found by a man in the course of his work.

“It had probably not see the light of day for a couple of centuries, but we suspect it dates back to around 700AD.”