Dear Kitty. Some blog

From the New York Times in the USA:

David Levine, a painter and illustrator whose macro-headed, somberly expressive, astringently probing and hardly ever flattering caricatures of intellectuals and athletes, politicians and potentates were the visual trademark of The New York Review of Books for nearly half a century, died Tuesday morning in Manhattan. He was 83 and lived in Brooklyn.

By Paul Mitchell in England:

Grayson Perry’s “The Walthamstow Tapestry”: A sensitive depiction of the journey though life

29 December 2009

The huge 3-by-15-metre “The Walthamstow Tapestry,” created by ceramic artist Grayson Perry, is a sensitive depiction of the journey through life. The tapestry was the highlight of a brief exhibition at the Victoria Miro Gallery in London last month, which also saw the display of Perry’s hallmark ceramics for which he won the Turner Prize in 2003.

Because of the biting political, social and sexual criticism he employs, Perry has been likened to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century caricaturists such as William Hogarth, whom he admires because “there’s something about the warm working class element of his work,” and twentieth-century Expressionists Otto Dix and George Grosz.

Though his work is highly autobiographical, Perry is also an observer of social reality. As he explains in his recent autobiography, “there’s branding and class; religion and folklore; sex and gender, war and politics; aesthetics and pottery; the art world and psychotherapy and inner worlds and these are the things that still interest me.” But he is then quick to point out in a telling aside, “I don’t always aspire to great narrative, or to intellectual, social or political heights; sometimes I just make something in pretty colours.”

“The Walthamstow Tapestry” is dominated by a river of blood linking a graphic childbirth scene, through the seven ages of man to eventual death. Small images are strewn across the tapestry, surrounded by phrases sewn into the fabric such as a “ship of fools” and the names of failed firms and banks (Enron, Merrill Lynch, and Northern Rock). In the centre is what Perry calls the “Madonna of the Chanel handbag,” an icon of consumerism. Fashion he adds is “inveigling into our minds” like “a voracious monster that chomps its way through youthful creativity.”

The tapestry was inspired by Perry’s interest in Sumatran batik designs and makes reference to the Bayeux Tapestry, the tale of the eleventh-century Norman Conquest of England, and to Walthamstow where the socialist and artist William Morris was born. Morris, according to Perry, “had this dilemma in that he wanted things to be beautiful and handmade and yet that immediately made them so expensive that only the rich could afford them.” He hopes that this dilemma will be overcome by Internet and digital technology delivery systems that “will free the individual maker craftsman-artist from the need to have a factory or a huge infrastructure.” “The Walthamstow Tapestry” was woven by a huge computerised loom in Belgium to Perry’s design.

From The Sunday Times in London:

December 27, 2009

Found: the clue to van Gogh’s ear

Richard Brooks, Arts Editor

The mystery behind the most famous mutilation in art history may finally have been solved.

A scholar has found evidence that a distraught Vincent van Gogh slashed his ear after learning that his brother, Theo, on whom he depended financially and emotionally, was about to get married.

Martin Bailey, who has written a book on van Gogh and curated two exhibitions of his work, devised his theory after meticulous detective work on a letter in a painting that the artist completed soon after he injured himself.

Bailey concludes that this letter was written by Theo from Paris in December 1888 and contained news of his engagement. This, he believes, tipped Vincent, who was already psychologically disturbed, into self-harm.

“Vincent was fearful that he might lose his brother’s emotional and financial support,” writes Bailey in the January edition of The Art Newspaper.

For years disputes have raged over what really happened to van Gogh’s ear just before Christmas 1888. Some have blamed his mental illness, others have said he was driven mad by lead in his paints. The breakdown of his friendship with Paul Gauguin, his fellow artist, has also been cited, although it is claimed that Gauguin made up this story himself.

Academics at Hamburg University argued recently that Gauguin, with whom van Gogh shared a house at Arles in the south of France, cut the ear in a quarrel over a prostitute called Rachel.

This theory was dismissed by the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam and by Bailey.

Van Gogh gave ample evidence of his mental instability when, 19 months after the ear was cut, he shot himself in the chest and died from his wounds two days later.

Bailey assembled his evidence partly from close study of van Gogh’s Still Life: Drawing Board with Onions. The work was completed at the beginning of 1889, just a month after his injury. It will be the star painting at a new exhibition opening in January at the Royal Academy around the theme of van Gogh and his letters.

It includes an envelope on a table. Bailey examined it microscopically and found the number 67 inside a circle. This was the official mark of a post office in Place des Abbesses, close to the apartment in Montmartre occupied by Theo, an art dealer who regularly provided money for Vincent.

From British daily The Guardian:

Spanish quest to identify black soldier who fought against fascism in civil war

• US volunteer in picture killed in civil war battle
• Authorities plan to present image to Obama next year

* Giles Tremlett in Barcelona
* Sunday 20 December 2009 16.50 GMT

As a volunteer in the International Brigades that fought in Spain’s civil war, the unidentified black soldier in the photograph was one of the first Americans to die fighting fascism.

Now Spanish authorities want to put a name to him so they can present his picture to President Barack Obama when he visits Spain next year.

The black and white picture of the African American volunteer forms part of an extraordinary collection of civil war photographs that was bought recently by the Spanish state.

“All we know is that he arrived with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade of American volunteers and that he died in the battle at Brunete [in July 1937],” said Sergi Centelles, whose father, Agustí, took the picture.

The soldier is one of more than 90 African-Americans who volunteered to defend Spain’s elected Republican government from a 1936 rightwing military uprising that sparked a three-year civil war.

Germany’s Adolf Hitler and Italy’s Benito Mussolini sent troops to back the rebel army of future dictator General Francisco Franco. Leftwing and anti-fascist volunteers from around the world joined Russians sent by Stalin to help defend the Republic.

Obama defended the concept of waging a “just war” in his Nobel peace prize speech this month.

The New York-based Abraham Lincoln Brigades Association and New York University’s Tamiment library have scoured their civil war archives to see if they could identify the man in the photograph, which was probably taken in February 1937. Two possible candidates have emerged: Milton Herndon, whose brother Angelo won a famous supreme court case against a sentence for “incitement to insurrection”, and aviator Paul Williams.

“It is one of eight or nine photographs my father took of the Americans marching through Barcelona,” said Agustí Centelles.

The photograph remained hidden for four decades after Agustí Centelles, known as the “Spanish Robert Capa”, fled Spain as Franco’s forces looked set to win the civil war in 1939.

“My father took his photographs with him in a suitcase because he was scared they would be used to identify people and carry out reprisals,” said Sergi Centelles.

The photographer used the suitcase as a pillow in a French refugee camp to prevent it from being stolen. He later moved in with a French family in Carcassonne, in southern France, but had to flee again after the second world war broke out and the occupying Germans heard that he was using his camera to take photographs for false passports.

“The Gestapo were chasing him, so he walked back across the Pyrenees into Spain,” said Sergi Centelles. “He left the suitcase behind, telling the French family not to hand it over to anyone but him.

“It was passed down from the grandfather, when he died, to his son and then, when he also died, to the grandson.”

Agustí Centelles sent the French family a present every Christmas as a sign that he was still alive.

Spain did not give the photographer a passport until 1962, when the family travelled to Carcasonne to check the suitcase was still there. It was only in 1976, a year after Franco died, that he dared pick up the suitcase and bring it home.

It contained hundreds of civil war photographs, including one of writer George Orwell with a group of fellow international volunteers.

The mix of races in the International Brigades saw attempts made to observe a degree of racial equality otherwise unseen in western armies in the 1930s.

“We know there were quite a few African American volunteers and that many were treated badly when they went home, as people thought they were communists,” said Sergi Centelles.

“We have four or five names of possible candidates, but what we really want to do is to find their family.”

• If you know who the man in the main photograph is, or can provide any information that might help identify him, please contact giles.tremlett@guardian.co.uk

From Duke University in the USA:

Mystery of golden ratio explained

DURHAM, N.C. — The Egyptians supposedly used it to guide the construction [of] the Pyramids. The architecture of ancient Athens is thought to have been based on it. Fictional Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon tried to unravel its mysteries in the novel The Da Vinci Code.

“It” is the golden ratio, a geometric proportion that has been theorized to be the most aesthetically pleasing to the eye and has been the root of countless mysteries over the centuries. Now, a Duke University engineer has found it to be a compelling springboard to unify vision, thought and movement under a single law of nature’s design.

Also know the divine proportion, the golden ratio describes a rectangle with a length roughly one and a half times its width. Many artists and architects have fashioned their works around this proportion. For example, the Parthenon in Athens and Leonardo da Vinci’s painting Mona Lisa are commonly cited examples of the ratio.

Adrian Bejan, professor of mechanical engineering at Duke’s Pratt School of Engineering, thinks he knows why the golden ratio pops up everywhere: the eyes scan an image the fastest when it is shaped as a golden-ratio rectangle.

The natural design that connects vision and cognition is a theory that flowing systems — from airways in the lungs to the formation of river deltas — evolve in time so that they flow more and more easily. Bejan termed this the constructal law in 1996, and its latest application appears early online in the International Journal of Design & Nature and Ecodynamics.

“When you look atwhat so many people have been drawing and building, you see these proportions everywhere,” Bejan said. “It is well known that the eyes take in information more efficiently when they scan side-to-side, as opposed to up and down.”

Bejan argues that the world – whether it is a human looking at a painting or a gazelle on the open plain scanning the horizon – is basically oriented on the horizontal. For the gazelle, danger primarily comes from the sides or from behind, not from above or below, so their scope of vision evolved to go side-to-side. As vision developed, he argues, the animals got “smarter” by seeing better and moving faster and more safely.

“As animals developed organs for vision, they minimized the danger from ahead and the sides,” Bejan said. “This has made the overall flow of animals on earth safer and more efficient. The flow of animal mass develops for itself flow channels that are efficient and conducive to survival – straighter, with fewer obstacles and predators.”

For Bejan, vision and cognition evolved together and are one and the same design as locomotion.The increased efficiency of information flowing from the world through the eyes to the brain corresponds with the transmission of this information through the branching architecture of nerves and the brain.

“Cognition is the name of the constructal evolution of the brain’s architecture, every minute and every moment,” Bejan said. “This is the phenomenon of thinking, knowing, and then thinking again more efficiently. Getting smarter is the constructal law in action.”

While the golden ratio provided a conceptual entryway into this view of nature’s design, Bejan sees something even broader.

“It is the oneness of vision, cognition and locomotion as the design of the movement of all animals on earth,” he said. “The phenomenon of the golden ratio contributes to this understanding the idea that pattern and diversity coexist as integral and necessary features of the evolutionary design of nature.”

In numerous papers and books over past decade, Bejan has demonstrated that the constructal law (www.constructal.org) predicts a wide range of flow system designs seen in nature, from biology and geophysics to social dynamics and technology evolution.

This video is called Copenhagen Climate Demonstration - Combo of Street Interviews.

The UN-sponsored global climate summit in Copenhagen staggered toward a finish Friday night, with representatives of the major world powers hoping to salvage a brief statement of principles, without a single binding commitment, before bringing the two-week conference to an end: here.

Low targets, goals dropped: Copenhagen ends in failure: here.

Copenhagen: `Imperial’ climate deal rejected by poor-country delegates: here.

Greenpeace: Copenhagen a cop-out.

ALBA and G77 Denounce Copenhagen Sham: here.

New Scientist on this: here.

See also here.

Evo Morales: Trillions for war, peanuts to save the planet: here.

Artists and the Copenhagen conference: here.

Greenpeace: Copenhagen, Denmark — Four of our activists face the prospect of Christmas in jail this year over charges relating to our crashing of the Head of State dinner at the Copenhagen climate summit, while the leaders who did practically nothing about the greatest threat to our planet got away scott free: here. And here.

Environmentalists have denounced the results of the two-week climate conference in Copenhagen as “toothless” and “half-baked”: here.

Hugo Chávez writes on `The battle of Copenhagen’: here.

Godfather of global warming deniers US Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) and Copenhagen: here.

Conservatives Continue Their Assault on Climate Science — And Reason: here.

Despite the urgency of finding a solution to global warming, the representatives of 193 states at the world climate conference in Copenhagen last week were utterly incapable of agreeing on any effective steps to reduce global levels of greenhouse gases: here.

U.S.-Led Copenhagen Accord Decried as Flawed, Undemocratic: here.

CLIMATE CHANGE AND SINOPHOBIA: here.

BirdLife comments on Copenhagen: here.

Developing countries and unions globally have branded the Copenhagen climate summit as a “farce” and insisted that the threat posed by global warming required rich states to commit to binding emissions reductions: here.

Dr. Helen Caldicott, the pioneering Australian antinuclear activist and pediatrician who spearheaded the global nuclear freeze movement of the 1980s and co-founded Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR), has joined with left-leaning environmental groups here in an uphill fight to halt nuclear power as a “solution” to the global warming crisis: here.

This video says about itself:

Jimmy van der Lak [from Suriname] had no trouble finding work when he arrived in Amsterdam in 1925. He was a celebrated tap dancer and bar tender. He briefly made a name for himself as a boxer using the name Jimmy Lacky.

In addition, he worked as an extra in feature films and as a model at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten.

In 1930 Nola Hatterman painted a portrait of Jimmy in an outdoor café. Hatterman uses several motives symbolizing Jimmys occupations at the time. The clenched fist represents the boxer Lacky. The performances in the newspaper represent the artist Lucky and the glass of beer, the bartender Lucky.

Artists like Nola Hatterman (1899-1984) also had political and social reasons for painting black people. In the 1920s and 1930s many artists were communists, who viewed black people as the main victims of capitalism.

The artist Nola Henderika Petronella Hatterman was born in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, on 12 August 1899. She died in Paramaribo 8 May 1984.

This afternoon, there was a lecture about her in Amsterdam, by the author of her biography, Ellen de Vries. The lecture was part of the goodbye for Surinamese-Dutch psychologist Nel Jessurun, leaving fulltime work at the Transcultural Therapists’ Collective in Amsterdam.

Nola Hatterman had already been much interested in drawing as a small girl. However, she did not go to art school, but to acting school. She considered then that as an actress she might do more for women’s rights than as a painter. She acted in various plays, including by Herman Heijermans; and in 1920s Dutch films. She met her first husband, an actor, during her work.

Later, she found out that she prefered visual arts to acting; and prefered communist carpenter plus aspiring visual artist Arie Jansma as love interest to actor Maurits de Vries.

During the 1930s she met Leftist Surinamese exiles in the Netherlands Otto Huiswoud and Anton de Kom. De Kom wrote Wij, slaven van Suriname; a history of slavery and resistance to it in Suriname. Nola Hatterman promised De Kom that she would make paintings inspired by his book. She would honor that promise during the last years of her life, while living in the interior of Suriname.

After the second world war, Nola met the new generation of Surinamese coming to the Netherlands: including people like Jules Sedney, later Prime Minister of Suriname; and Eddy Bruma, later pro independence MP. She supported Bruma’s aim of independence for Suriname from Dutch colonialism. She wrote poetry in Surinamese. In 1953, she emigrated to Paramaribo, the capital of Suriname.

She became the pioneer of art education in Suriname. Not everybody always agreed with her preference for realist against abstract art.

She went to Brokopondo in the interior. She painted subjects, especially from eighteenth century Surinamese history, like maroons (runaway slaves) attacking plantations to free the slaves there; and a woman running away from slavery; and Boekoe fortress, a rebel stronghold in the jungle which was very hard to find for the pro slavery Dutch army.

The Boekoe painting today is owned by politician Desi Bouterse, army commander during the military regime of the 1980s. Bouterse claims that Nola Hatterman sold it to him. Ellen de Vries is skeptical about this, as Ms Hatterman wanted her work to be in museums, accessible to the public, and not in private ownership.

In 1984, Nola Hatterman went to Paramaribo to see the first showing there of a film about her life. She would never see the film. She was killed in an accident before the show.

Descendants of African slaves have called on US Virgin Islands MPs to require corporations doing business in the territory to research their histories and disclose whether they had profited from the trans-Atlantic slave trade: here.

From British daily The Independent:

Permanent memorial to Menezes agreed

By Chris Greenwood, PA

Thursday, 10 December 2009

A memorial to Jean Charles de Menezes will be erected permanently at the London Underground station where he was shot dead by police.

Relatives said Transport for London (TfL) has agreed to allow a colourful mosaic picture of the Brazilian to remain at Stockwell Tube station.

The move ends several years of arguing between the two parties about an enduring monument to his death on July 22, 2005.

The mosaic, created by local artist Mary Edwards, will replace an improvised pavement shrine of flowers, candles, pictures and newspaper articles.

Vivian Figueiredo, a cousin of Mr Menezes who lived with him before his death, said she was pleased at the decision.

She said: “The pain of never achieving justice for Jean’s killing continues to haunt us every day.

“But knowing his memory will be kept alive in the local community through this memorial is a tribute we could not have dreamed of.

“We thank all the members of the public who have supported us from the bottom of our hearts.”

Mr Menezes, 27, was shot dead by counter-terrorist officers hunting for would-be suicide bomber Hussain Osman on the day after the failed July 21 attacks.

The shooting provoked a series of wide-ranging inquiries which hauled police tactics, supervision and individual decisions over the coals.

Coroner Sir Michael Wright recorded an open verdict at the end of a multimillion-pound inquest last year after a jury rejected the police account of the shooting.

The family accepted a six-figure compensation deal from the Metropolitan Police last month.

From Dutch news agency ANP:

HAARLEM - The Frans Hals Museum in Haarlem has discovered a new painting by the Haarlem painter Judith Leyster (1609-1660). Leyster is the most famous female painter from the Dutch Golden Age. The Frans Hals Museum hopes to be able to exhibit the painting soon, but the work is very damaged.

According to an employee of the museum this is a very recent discovery. She did not want to give details yet. The museum will soon release more information about the newly discovered work by the painter.

This Saturday, in the museum a small exhibition of her work will start, in collaboration with the National Gallery of Art in Washington [in the USA], to mark the four hundredth birthday of Judith Leyster.

See also here.

This video says about itself:

Named after a common brand of French stationary, Claire Fontaine is a ready-made artist, exemplifying an empty, standardized identity produced by contemporary capitalism. Her works include neon signs, sculptures, videos, light-boxes, and texts, and while her message is often militant and radical, she more closely resembles subjectivity-on-strike, compromising our ability to define it and institutionalize it.

The title of her exhibition in The Front Room is They Hate Us for Our Freedom and includes a new sculpture, a wall text made with the burnt remains of lit matches, and a poster of Jackson and Dave, Dick Cheney’s two dogs. They hate us for our freedom is a seminal sentence of George Bush’s speech after September 11 and states an ideological and economical distance with the eastern world supposed to justify the wars to come.

Claire Fontaine’s exhibition raises the question of the meaning of freedom in liberal societies, and discretely shows the violence and the lack of independence that comes from the simple fact of being governed.

From The Art Newspaper, about the USA:

Anti-capitalist work of art proves “too political”

Work was ­removed from its site one day before Art Basel Miami Beach was due to open

By Anny Shaw | From Art Basel Miami Beach daily edition, 4 Dec 09

“Capitalism Kills Love” is a pretty punchy statement, but Paris-based art duo Claire Fontaine (James Thornhill and Fulvia Carnevale) were nonetheless shocked to discover that their work had been ­removed from its site one day before Art Basel Miami Beach (ABMB) was due to open.

The sign, Capitalism Kills Love (Red, White, Blue), 2009, was intended to hang on the side of a building on the corner of 21st Street and Collins Avenue as part of ABMB’s Art Projects, but the slogan proved a bit too political for one of the two owners of the building. According to Paola Guadagnino, co-director of the Naples gallery T293 (D25) which represents the artist duo, the disgruntled owner objected as soon as the sign had gone up.

“He was pretty shocked,” says Fulvia Carnevale. “He thought the meaning was too political for him. This can happen with people who are outside of the art world.” With help from Art Projects curator Patrick Charpenel, the sign was reinstalled on the side of another building on Meridian Avenue in under 24 hours.

But even in its new location, it seems the artistic statement was greeted with comments and criticisms. According to the artists, a passing Miami Beach policeman asked the art installers working on site what the sign said. When they told him, “Capitalism Kills Love”, Carnevale says the officer said they should “Go back to Europe”.

In theory, the police should sustain the law, and freedom of speech and artistic expression; not an economic system, like capitalism. Remember, the United States constitution does not say there should be capitalism. However, in practice, police are sometimes different …