Art History

Your clues this week are:

• The artist is referred to as German, but was born in the Moravian town where Wenceslaus III of Bohemia died under mysterious circumstances in 1306.
• If the artist ever painted anything but still lifes, no one knows about it.
• While living in Frankfurt, the artist trained Jakob Marrel -- whose name may be unfamiliar. However, Marrel was the stepfather of Maria Sibylla Merian (German, 1647-1717) who he trained despite her mother's objections. Maria Sibylla went on to become a scientific illustrator and entomologist of great repute, and trained her two daughters in turn.
  
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• This table scene seems perfect for Fat Tuesday, the day before Ash Wednesday/the first day of Lent. Note that we see Christian symbols in the bread and wine, and earthly pleasures in the candied treats. Barely visible, towards the lower right hand corner, is another Christian symbol: a single Marienkäfer has come to look at the spread. Can you tell me what a Marienkäfer is, and why it was associated with Christianity?

Please email me your guesses over the coming week. I'll post the winner and correct answer with next week's guessing game. Good luck!

Last Week's Answer:

John, who is a Russian art enthusiast, emailed the correct answer first. The artist was Boris Kustodiyev (1878-1927), who originally hailed from Astrakhan, near the Caspian Sea. The model for the portrait Shalyapin (1921) was the singer Feodor Chaliapin (1873-1938), and his son, Feodor Chaliapin, Jr. (1905-1992) was an actor who worked beginning with the silent movie era and played the grandfather in Moonstruck many decades later. Thanks for playing, John!

When a review of Infinite Jest - Caricature and Satire from Leonardo to Levine (on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art until March 4, 2012) begins with, "A particularly apt choice of subject for a museum special exhibition as we begin a presidential election year ..." I'm already anticipating the pleasure of a good, cleansing laugh. (Seriously. Hasn't it mostly seemed like caricature and satire so far? I keep checking the headlines to make sure they don't say, "From the Staff of The Onion.") Well, Gail S. Myhre does not disappoint. She walks us from the entrance at Gallery 691 to the exit at 693, pointing out those artists -- known and unknown -- who gleefully kicked the pedestals out from under the high and pompous. Look at the image above, for example. It's the pants-less, 1777 version of, "All hat and no cattle."

If you have the chance and a sense of humor, don't hesitate to visit this show while it lasts. If that proves impossible, you're sure to enjoy Gail's review of Infinite Jest in place of a trip.

Image Credit:

Anonymous, British
Top and Tail, 1777
Etching, hand colored
Plate: 12 3/4 x 7 7/8 in. (32.3 x 19.9 cm)
The Elisha Whittlesey Collection, The Elisha Whittlesey Fund, 1959
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Your clues this week are:

• The artist was Russian, and studied painting under the great Ilya Repin (1844-1930) at the Imperial Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg -- while concurrently studying sculpture and etching with two other masters.
• Although obviously a skilled portraitist, the artist had more fun designing stage sets and made more money as a book illustrator.
• For a brief time, the artist was a contributor to a journal called "Hell's Mail." I visualized "Hell's Mail" as a gigantic stack of bills due, but was incorrect.
  
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• In honor of Valentine's Day, a clue about the model, the dapper gent in the fur coat. He was an operatic bass who performed around the world, and whose best friend was Sergei Rachmaninoff. One of the singer's sons became an actor who did a lot of work in Hollywood although he lived in Italy. You may remember him from the 1987 love story Moonstruck, in which he exhorted the pack of dogs he was walking to look at the sky: "La bella luna! The moon brings the woman to the man. Capice?" For bonus bragging rights, who were these two entertaining men?

Please email me your guesses over the coming week. I'll post the winner and correct answer with next week's guessing game. Good luck!

Last Week's Answer:

Our born-in-Canada artist was Henrietta Shore (1880-1963), and we were looking at her California Data (ca. 1925). Incidentally, she and Edward Weston were indeed good friends, and only that (Weston was notorious for his extramarital affairs). Kudos to Lin, who emailed the correct answer first!

Your clues this week are:

• The artist was not born in the US, but became a citizen in 1920.
• The Art Students League in New York, with instructors William Merritt Chase and Robert Henri, and Heatherly's Art School in London were where the artist was trained.
• The photographer Edward Weston (1886-1958) was a great friend of the artist's. They were both fascinated by capturing the art-nature connection, and wound up living near one another in the flora and fauna surrounding Carmel, California.
  
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• Some well-intentioned -- but criminally stupid -- friends had the artist committed to a mental institution after noticing the artist's studio was messy. (As if tidy artists' studios are the norm!) The friends then apparently forgot what they had done, because the artist languished there, forgotten, until death provided an escape. This incident may or may not have given rise to the expression, "With friends like that, who needs enemies?"

Please email me your guesses over the coming week. I'll post the winner and correct answer with next week's guessing game. Good luck!

Last Week's Answer:

Who knew how many of you are fans of Gaetano Previati (Italian, 1852 -1920)? I obviously did not, but quickly learned. Paola pounced on the correct answer in record time, well before Ms. Six-Time-Zones-Earlier-than-Rome could even drag herself out of bed. Very well done, Paola. After my brain finally woke up, it registered great admiration for your art-historic knowledge base!

Thanks to the recent exhibition René Magritte: The Pleasure Principle, and the unforgivable fact that there was no Magritte biography written (!), I spent a few weeks getting cozy with the gentleman in the bowler hat. (Well, as cozy as one can get buried in a stack of books while keeping 20+ tabs of interviews and articles open in one's browser.) Do I understand René Magritte now? Probably as well as I ever will. He is a classic hard "read," and whenever he tried to explain ... pretty much anything ... it only served to muddy my water. He probably would have been one of those visual artists that write incomprehensible artists' statements. Well, you could read a few quotes by René Magritte and see what you think. Oh, by the way -- if anything about him makes perfect sense to you, please feel free to leave your thoughts in comment form. I'll be grateful for your input.

Image Credit:

René Magritte (Belgian, 1898-1967)
Man with a Newspaper, 1928
Oil on canvas
115.6 x 81.3 cm (45 1/2 x 32 in.)
Tate Collection
© Charly Herscovici, Brussels - 2011© VBK Vienna, 2011

Did you miss the Show of Shows at London's National Gallery? Oh, it's not over yet -- not until this Sunday -- but we hear that all hope of getting a ticket between now and then is a lost cause. (Unless you know a scalper and are prepared to part with mega-bucks, of course.) Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan has been such a roaring success that "they" are calling it the exhibition of the year, the decade, and even the century. The last declaration seems a bit premature to me, but one thing is certain: we are not likely to see this many Leonardo paintings under one roof ever again.

Now, assuming that you and I are two of the billions of people who couldn't attend in person, we do have quite a few of the works here in an image gallery ... including the "new" painting, Salvator Mundi, both versions of Virgin of the Rocks, and a boatload of studies for the paintings Leonardo made while in Milan. And even more good news: starting just over two weeks from now (on February 16), Leonardo Live -- a movie of the exhibition -- will be broadcast to theaters around the world. Keep your eyes peeled for your own virtual private tour, filmed the evening before the show opened.

Image Credit:

Leonardo da Vinci (Italian, 1452-1519)
The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne and Saint John the Baptist ('The Burlington House Cartoon'), ca. 1499-1500
Charcoal (and wash?) heightened with white chalk on paper, mounted on canvas
141.5 x 104.6 cm (55 11/16 x 41 3/16 in.)
Purchased with a special grant and contributions from The Art Fund, the Pilgrim Trust, and through a public appeal organized by The Art Fund, 1962
NG6337
© The National Gallery, London

Your clues this week are:

• The artist was Italian, and the second child of a master baker from Ferrara. (Hey, quit giggling. I said "baker.")
• Best known for a vast output of religious paintings, the artist executed three versions of the Via Crucis (Stations of the Cross). The Vatican Museums own one of them.
• The artist died on the Italian Riviera southeast of Genoa, about 100 miles (as the crow flies) NNW from the island of Giglio -- scene of the recent Costa Concordia shipwreck.
  
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• In addition to being at the forefront of two Modernist movements in Italy, the artist also illustrated two books: The Betrothed (1827) by Alessandro Manzoni, and a private, Italian edition of Edgar Allen Poe's Tales. Poe had a major influence on this artist, who read Tales over and over again in its original English.

Please email me your guesses over the coming week. I'll post the winner and correct answer with next week's guessing game. Good luck!

Last Week's Answer:

I asked more than one question, and Super Reader Val answered them all. First, the artist was Cincinnati native Elizabeth Nourse (American, 1859-1938) whose 1888 canvas La Mère (Mother and Child) was last week's "Guess the Artist" image. Second, her English immigrant, widower, designer in-law was Benn Pitman (1822-1910), who took Elizabeth's twin sister Adelaide (1859-1893) as his second wife in 1881. Benn was a minor celebrity in his own right for acting in the capacity of stenographer throughout the 1865 trials of the Lincoln assassination conspirators. And, finally, Benn knew how to be a stenographer due to having helped his brother, Isaac, refine Pitman shorthand. (If you ever took shorthand, whether Pitman or Gregg, now you know who to either praise or blame.) Val, you put Nancy Drew to shame!

Your clues this week are:

• The artist was American, but moved to Europe at age 27 and, with the exception of one brief return trip to the US, lived as an expatriate for 51 years.
• The artist attended the Académie Julian in Paris for only three months because Gustave Boulanger (French, 1824-1888), a professor there, advised that nothing remained to be taught or learned in the artist's training.
• The artist was born a twin. While the twin married and had children, the artist (a devout Roman Catholic) remained single and celibate, and lived with another sibling who did the same.
  
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• The artist had an in-law who was (1) a leader and teacher in the Cincinnati Art-Carved Furniture Movement, and (2) originally immigrated to the US from England not to create furniture, but to promote a phonographic writing system developed by his brother. Can you identify the furniture designer and his brother?

Please email me your guesses over the coming week. I'll post the winner and correct answer with next week's guessing game. Good luck!

Last Week's Answer:

Lin sent the short and sweet email, "Seurat" for the win last week. Yes, it was our guy Georges' 1881 drawing The Harvester ... although it did resemble both van Gogh and Millet (so don't feel chagrined if you sent either of those gents' names; many readers did). Congratulations, Lin!

Your clues this week are:

• Though this is a drawing and the artist is best known for painting, the first formal art instruction this French artist received was in sculpture.
• More than anyone had before, the artist studied color theory and optical effects by reading chemical and mathematical treatises.
• A major influence on the artist was the 1827 book Essay on the Unmistakable Signs of Art by the author -- and I am not making this up -- Humbert de Superville.
  
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• The medium (Conté crayon) and support (Michallet paper) seen above are important clues. Michallet paper has two sides: smooth and ribbed, with a heavy "tooth." The artist always used the toothy side.

Please email me your guesses over the coming week. I'll post the winner and correct answer with next week's guessing game. Good luck!

Last Week's Answer:

Tui was the first person to email the correct answer: Jean-Étienne Liotard (1702-1789). By the way, last week's picture was actually a trompe l'oeil painting. Kudos, Tui!

Your clues this week are:

• The artist was a French Huguenot, born and raised in Switzerland following the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes.
• The artist was famous for portraiture ... a long time ago. Today the artist's name is fairly obscure.
• An inveterate traveler, the artist spent four years in Constantinople and wore Turkish clothing (including a fez) forever afterwards.
  
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• Among the artist's many sitters were: Pope Clement XII; Bonnie Prince Charlie; the Empress Maria Theresa; Madame de Pompadour; Augusta, Princess of Wales; the Earls of Sandwich and Bessborough; the French royal family; and the House of Orange.

Please email me your guesses over the coming week. I'll post the winner and correct answer with next week's guessing game. Good luck!

Last Week's Answer:

Last week's winning answer came courtesy of Jeanne, who knew that the artist's name was Jan Gossaert (Flemish, ca. 1472-1532), also known as Mabuse. His painting The Three Children of Christian II of Denmark (1526) depicts exactly that. The youngest child was Christina of Denmark (1521-1590), who actually had two marriages: first, by proxy, to Francesco II Sforza, Duke of Milan (1495-1535), who died before the couple even met, and second to Francis I, Duke of Lorraine (1517-1545). Well done, Jeanne!