Month: February 2015

Franz Marc

Franz Marc, “Playing Dogs”, 1912, Oil on Canvas, Busch Reisinger Museum, Boston, Massachusetts

Franz Marc was born on February 8, 1880, in Munich. The son of a landscape painter, he decided to become an artist after a year of military service interrupted his plans to study philology. From 1900 to 1902 Marc studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich with historical painter and teacher Gabriel Hackl and Wilhelm von Diez, a painter and illustrator of the Munich School.

In 1903 during a visit to France, Franz Marc was introduced to Japanese woodcuts and the work of the Impressionists in Paris. After suffering through three years of depression, Marc traveled again to Paris in 1907, where he responded enthusiastically to the work of Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, the Cubists, and the Expressionists. He was also  impressed by the 1910 Henri Matisse exhibition he viewed in Munich.

In 1910 Marc’s first solo show was held at Kunsthandlung Brackl in Munich. At that  time he met expressionist painter August Macke and the collector Bernhard Koehler. Marc was formally welcomed into the Neue Künstlervereinigung München (NKVM) early in 1911, when he met Vasily Kandinsky. After internal dissension split the NKVM, Marc and Kandinsky formed ‘Der Blaue Reiter’ (The Blue Rider) whose first exhibition took place in December 1911 at Heinrich Thannhauser’s Moderne Galerie in Munich.

Marc invited members of the Berlin Brücke group to participate in the second ‘Der Blaue Reiter ‘ show two months later at the Galerie Hans Goltz in Munich. When First World War broke out in August 1914, Marc immediately enlisted: during the war, he produced his “Sketchbook from the Field”, a collection of thirty-six small pencil drawings. Just a few months later, Franz Marc died on March 4, 1916, in Braquis, near Verdun-sur-Meuse, France.

Franz Marc’s “Playing Dogs” was painted in 1912 when he was thirty-two years of age. This painting is an example of Franz Marc’s use of color and his move towards Cubism. A meeting with the artist Robert Delaunay that year had inspired Marc about the use of color in his work. He used bold colors in this painting such as blue, green, red and yellow throughout the background, coloring the playing dogs in contrast to accentuate them.

Jackson Pollock

Jackson Pollock, “Number 8”, 1949 Drip Period, Enamel and Oil on Canvas, Neuburger Museum, State University of New York at Purchase

In the 1949 painting “Number 8”, Jackson Pollock’s line of paint has the capacity to be everywhere at once, to serve the ends of both illusion and substance. The paint line functioned supremely well as the vehicle of a speed of light all-overness, creating the impression that Pollock’s large poured all-over paintings arrived at their structure both internally and immediately. Pollock’s delicate crusts, which achieved an infinitesimal layer of relief, had profound affinities with two related modernist achievements, the Analytic Cubism of Picasso and the late wall-sized Impressionism of Claude Monet.

Pollock’s encrusted, puddled, labyrinthine, and weblike surfaces are physically and erotically present, enticing the viewer into a relation in which his body, and not just his eyesight, directly confronts the abstract field. This relation, which is at least as close to the experience of architecture as it is to the tradition of seeing through or “into” an illusionistic painting, can be deceptive. By means of his interlaced trickles and spatters, Pollock created a fluctuating movement between a clearly definite surface and an illusion of indeterminate, but somehow, definitely shallow depth.  This effect reminds viewers of what Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque arrived at with the facet-planes of their Analytical Cubist paintings.

Olaf Stapledon: “Man Himself, At the Very Least, Is Music”

Photographer Unknown, (Hands Clasped)

“Man himself, at the very least, is music, a brave theme that makes music also of its vast accompaniment, its matrix of storms and stars. Man himself in his degree is eternally a beauty in the eternal form of things. It is very good to have been man. And so we may go forward together with laughter in our hearts, and peace, thankful for the past, and for our own courage. For we shall make after all a fair conclusion to this brief music that is man.”
― Olaf Stapledon, Last and First Men: A Story of the Near and Far Future

Diego Rivera

Diego Rivera, “Avila Morning (The Ambles Valley)”, 1908, Oil on Canvas, Museo Nacional de Arte, Mexico City

In Spain from 1907 to 1909, Diego Rivera took an enthusiastic interest in the works of portrait and historical painter Joaquín Sorolla and Ignacio Zuloaga, a Basque figurative painter. In search of new subjects, Rivera and painter Eduardo Chicharro set out on a journey around Spain, visiting various regions including the Amblés Valley.

In Rivera’s “Avila Morning”, the broad view of the Amblés valley, very near the city of Avila, clearly reflects the innovatory techniques learned by Rivera on his travels around Spain. In the background are the Ávila mountains which blend in with a masterfully executed sky. At the foot of the mountains, the rolling plains are superimposed on each other in the manner of José María Velasco, Rivera’s teacher at the National Fine Arts School.

The River Adaja flows diagonally across the scene, dividing the painting into two sections. On the right, typical of this hybrid region, we see a high tree with sparse foliage. The vaporous surface, which the artist achieves by means of gentle variations in tone, invites the viewer to enter the composition, while at the same time giving an effect of desolation.

“Avia Morning (The Ambles Valley0” entered the Museo National de Arte, as part of the latter’s founding endowment, in 1982.

Assassination of Empress Elisabeth

Artist Unknown, “The Assassination of Empress Elisabeth of Austria in Geneva by Luigi Lacheni”, 1898, Le Petit Jounal, Issued September, 25, 1898

On September 10th of 1898, anarchist Luigi Lacheni used a tapered file to fatally stab Empress Elisabeth of Austria during her visit to Geneva. She and her lady-in-waiting countess Sztáray had departed their hotel on Lake Geneva to ride a paddle steamer to Montreux at the foot of the Alps. Since Elisabeth disdained royal processions, they walked without any attendants.

On the docks in the early afternoon, Lucheni approached and stabbed Empress Elisabeth below her left breast with a wooden-handled, four-inch file, a work tool used to file the eyes of industrial needles. Badly wounded, the Empress nevertheless continued walking, supported by two other people, a distance of one hundred yards to board the departing steamer. 

Aboard the steamer, Contess Sztáray noticed Elisabeth’s bleeding and notified the captain of the steamer, who ordered its return to shore. Upon landing, the Empress was carried back to the hotel on a makeshift stretcher. Two doctors pronounced Empress Elisabeth dead with an hour of the attack.

The assassin Luigi Lucheni was apprehended upon fleeing the scene; and his weapon was found the next day. Lucheni told the authorities that he was an anarchist who came to Geneva with the intention of killing any sovereign as an example for others. He was tried in October and received life imprisonment, the death penalty having been abolished in Switzweland.

Jackson Pollock

Jackson Pollock, “The She-Wolf”, 1943, Museum of Modern Art, New York City

In the early 1940s, Jackson Pollock, like many of his peers, explored primeval or mythological themes in his work. The wolf in the 1943 painting “The She-Wolf” may allude to the animal in the myth of Rome’s birth that suckled the twin founders of Rome, Romulus and Remus.

However, “She-Wolf”came into existence because I had to paint it,” Pollock said in 1944. In an attitude typical of his generation, Jackson Pollock added, “Any attempt on my part to say something about it, to attempt explanation of the inexplicable, could only destroy it.”

“The She-Wolf” was featured in Pollock’s first solo exhibition, at the Art of This Century gallery in New York in 1943. The Museum of Modern Art acquired the painting the following year, making it the first work by Jackson Pollock to enter a museum collection.