Posted by admin on Aug 19, 2010 in
Fashion,
Forteana I love hidden art treasure stories.
William Blake etching with his handwritten caption, 'Everything is an attempt/To be human,' at Tate Britain in London. Photograph: Ray Tang/Rex Features
'Everything is an attempt to be human.' One of the lost etchings by William Blake, now on display at Tate Britain
Tate Britain makes room for William Blake art found in railway timetable
Mark Brown | August 11, 2010 | www.guardian.co.uk
Curator says of eight tiny, hand-coloured works tackling big themes: ‘It’s probably best not to get into too much detail’
When viewing the tiny, hand-coloured etchings of figures being burned alive and hair being washed in blood it is fine, the curators say, to be bemused and baffled. “They are strange,” said Philippa Simpson. “Impenetrable, really, even for scholars.”
The eight hand-coloured works by William Blake, an artist as bizarrely eccentric as he was visionary, are also remarkable. Today they went on display at Tate Britain in London as part of a rehang which sees nine rooms and 170 works devoted to the Romantics.
The Blakes are being displayed as part of the national collection for the first time after being acquired for the nation last year, and their history is almost as eye-catching as their content. For years their whereabouts were unknown until someone bought a box of secondhand books at a north London sale and discovered the etchings in the leaves of an old railway timetable.
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Tags: art
Posted by on Jul 17, 2009 in
Forteana Please note not all the “cracks” in this ancient piece of ivory are there because of age.
The Venus of Hohle Fells is the oldest known example of figurative female art (Image: H.Jensen/University of Tubingen/Nature)
Further views of the Venus (Image: H.Jensen/University of Tubingen/Nature)
Further views of the Venus (Image: H.Jensen/University of Tubingen/Nature)
Ivory ‘Venus’ is first depiction of a woman
www.newscientist.com | May 2009 by Andy Coghlan
With its outsize bulbous breasts and hugely exaggerated genitalia, a statuette of a woman has pushed back the history of female figurative art by 5000 years, to at least 35,000 years ago.
Anthropologists are staggered by the find, which also shows that even this long ago, our brains and their ability to think in abstract ways were probably as sophisticated as they are now.
Discovered in the Hohle Fels Caves of south-western Germany, the “Venus” figurine carved from mammoth ivory is remarkably well-preserved, with only the left arm and shoulder missing. “It’s perhaps the earliest example of figurative art worldwide,” says Nicholas Conard of the University of Tübingen in Germany.
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Tags: Archaeology, art
Posted by on May 24, 2009 in
Foolery,
Forteana Whoops!
From left, Rev. Steven Olson talks about the newly discovered painting, "Christ the Comforter," with MIA curator Patrick Noon, conservator David Marquis and framer Kurt Nordwall.
“Christus Consolator” Joel Koyama, Star Tribune
An important 19th-century French painting buried in a church janitor’s closet gets new life at the Institute of Arts.
MARY ABBE, Star Tribune | March 31, 2009 – 11:52 PM | www.startribune.com
The Minneapolis Institute of Arts’ newest painting isn’t the proverbial Rembrandt discovered at a garage sale, but it is a 19th-century treasure unearthed in the janitor’s closet of a Lutheran church in Dassel, Minn (pop. 1,233).
Museum director Kaywin Feldman calls the painting’s rediscovery “our own version of ‘Antiques Roadshow.’”
The 1851 work by Ary Scheffer, a Dutch-born, French-trained painter, is an “extremely important historical and aesthetic object,” said MIA painting curator Patrick Noon. The Dassel church has given the painting to the Minneapolis museum, which had it cleaned and restored.
“Oh my, I can’t believe it. It makes me teary eyed,” said Irene Bender, dabbing her eyes Tuesday as she gazed at the picture in a third-floor gallery of the museum. A member of the donating church, Gethsemane Lutheran, Bender helped trace the picture’s history through church records.
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Tags: art
Posted by on Jan 25, 2009 in
Farewell,
Fashion I adore these works and until I read this obit never realized what an integral role she played in their construction. What a lovely, strong, smart woman.
Coosje van Bruggen dies at 66; art historian made sculptures with husband Claes Oldenburg
By Suzanne Muchnic | January 13, 2009 | www.latimes.com
Coosje van Bruggen was a respected art historian, writer and curator known for her almost scientific approach to looking at an artist’s oeuvre. She collaborated with her husband, artist Claes Oldenburg, to build startlingly large sculptures of ordinary objects.
Works include a dropped ice cream cone in Germany; a bow and arrow in San Francisco; a broom and dustpan in Denver, ‘Toppling Ladder with Spilling Paint’ in downtown L.A. and binoculars in Venice.
Coosje van Bruggen — an art historian, writer and curator whose professional partnership with her husband, artist Claes Oldenburg, turned ordinary objects into startling monuments around the world — died Saturday at her Los Angeles residence. She was 66 and was battling metastatic breast cancer.
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Tags: art
