Month: June 2017

Ralph Eggleston

Ralph Eggleston, “For the Birds”

“For the Birds” is a 2000 animated short film produced by Pixar Animation Studios and directed by Ralph Eggleston. It won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film in 2001.

I saw this many years ago and just recently came across it on a journey down the internet rabbit hole. Funny little short film.

(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)

Raphael Sadeler II

Raphael Sadeler II , “Saint Michael the Archangel”, Engraving, 1604

The Sadeler family were  the largest, and probably the most successful of the dynasties of Flemish engravers that were dominant in Northern European printmaking in the later 16th and 17th centuries, as both artists and publishers. As with other dynasties such as the Wierixes and Van de Passe family, the style of family members is very similar, and their work often hard to tell apart in the absence of a signature or date, or evidence of location. Altogether at least ten Sadelers worked as engravers, in the Spanish Netherlands, Germany, Italy, Bohemia and Austria.

Marsden Hartley

Marsden Hartley, “The Warriors”, Oil on Canvas, 1913, Private Collection

Before Jasper Johns or Jackson Pollock, there was Marsden Hartley, America’s first great modern painter of the 20th century. He achieved this distinction in Paris and most of all in Berlin between early 1912 and late 1915. There he produced a stream of paintings that synthesized Cubism and other European modernisms, mixed in non-Western motifs and mysterious symbols and culminated in his lusty, elegiac German Officer paintings.

These canvases are memorials to Karl von Freyburg, the young German officer — possibly the great love of Hartley’s life — who was killed in the first weeks of World War I. Festooned with colorful patchworks of bright banners, checkerboards and bits of military regalia and insignia on black backgrounds, the paintings give Cubism a new legibility and emotionality, softening but also bulking up its fragile geometries into something more tactile and muscular.

A more complete biography of Marsden Hartley, along with other images of his work, can be found in the December 21, 2021 article of this site.

Anselm Kiefer

Anselm Kiefer, “Seven Heavenly Palaces”

Kiefer, born 1945 in Donaueschingen and long considered to be one of the most important German artists alive, gave each of the towers its own name: “Falling Stars,” “Sternenlager,” “Die Sefiroth,” “Tzim-Tzum,” “Shevirat Ha-Kelim,” “Tiqqun,” and “The Seven Heavenly Palaces.” For Kiefer, an important point of reference was the myth of creation in ancient Jewish mystical literature describing man’s part in God’s word.

Yet the artist has taken other points of reference into consideration in his work, as well, some of which are decidedly contemporary by comparison: in his usage of the material cement and his orientation along the customary dimensions of a shipping container, Kiefer establishes connections to present life marked more than ever before by globalization and possibility.

Kiefer, who has been living and working in Barjac, France since 1993, understands the universalism expressed in these works as an apt image of our time at the beginning of the 21st century. The cross-references and symbolism in “The Seven Heavenly Palaces,” which operates on several levels simultaneously, are numerous.

With the Sefiroth tower, for instance, the painter, sculptor, and installation artist takes recourse to the three mythological paths open to mankind for lending life order and meaning, according to ancient Jewish tradition: love, sympathy, and strength.