What We Do for Love!
Posted on 1 February 2012 | By Richard Friswell
There are so few occasions in life when you can truly say that, ‘you did it for love’. The experience of falling in love with an original work of art, together with those other moments when Cupid’s arrow strikes home, for most of us, can be counted on one hand. Wives, children, automobiles, jewelry, beautiful homes and exotic vacation spots can all evoke rapid heart palpitations, and deservedly so. But surely, few of these earthly pleasures endure without a commitment from each of us to carry them close to the core of our being. And none certainly compares to a loving family and the life partner who made that all possible with you. Children too, are a perpetual blessing that evoke emotions that often exceed our wildest expectations (sometimes in ways we hadn’t counted on!). artes fine arts magazine Read more
Of the Pathetic* and the Sublime**
Posted on 3 January 2012 | By Richard Friswell
Thomas Gainsborough, Landscape with Cattle and Drover (c. 1770)
Literature’s influence on painting in early 19th c. England: One in a series of articles examining the relationship between literature and the visual arts.
William Wordsworth’s 1802, Preface to Lyrical Ballads proclaimed, “the worthy purpose [of poetry] is the spontaneous overflow or powerful feelings… [taking] its origins from emotion recollected in tranquility.” From this perspective, Wordsworth strived to capture the character and emotions of the common man and to metaphorically link self-realization with one’s natural surroundings. In defense of poetry’s more lasting effects on the reader, when compared to prose in matters of, “passion, manners or characters”, he also points out that, of the two (poetry and prose), “the one..in verse…will be read a hundred times where the prose is read once.” artes fine arts magazine Read more
A Gift from the Holy Land: For ARTES Publisher, Art and Politics Combine in Unexpected Way
Posted on 14 December 2011 | By Richard Friswell
Republican presidential candidate, Newt Gingrich, recently referred to the Palentinians as an “invented people.” Don’t tell that to a certain cab drive in New York City, in a nation with an equally legitimate claim to ‘being invented.’
I step from the cool marble lobby of a mid-town office building into the blazing sunlight of a New York City summer afternoon. Glancing left and right in the glare, I accommodate my eyes and my will to the next event on my schedule. In the distance the heat rises from the streets and sidewalks of 5th Avenue in visible waves. A maze of stoplights and brake lights blink back at me. My next meeting is in Queens, across the East River, in a large warehouse, turned artist’s studio. Today, I had planned to go subterranean, taking the ‘4’ down to Grand Central, then transferring to the ’7’ train to Queens. But, the heat and the extra weight in my backpack of a large book given to me at my last meeting prove too much. I step to the curb and raise my hand in that casual pointing-to-the-sky way that New Yorkers do to hail a cab.
Within seconds, a yellow Checker pulls up, just missing my toes. I open the back door, throw my pack onto the seat and crawl in. I lean forward and give the driver the address of my destination. He presses a button or two on his meter and we are off! artes fine arts magazine Read more
Rekindled Emotions: Two Essays in Reply to Nov.’s Feature: ‘Examining Social Responsibility of Museums in Changing World’
Posted on 1 December 2011 | By Stephen Kobasa
Enola Gay, restored & ready for exhibition (2004)
Editor’s Note: Occasionally, an article published in ARTES evokes a profoundly personal and instructive reply by a reader. On very rare occasions, that response is crafted by a fellow writer and regular contributor to the magazine. Recently (November, 2011), we ran a feature-length article by curator and consultant, Ken Yellis, as an expanded article originally appearing in Curator Magazine (2009). Then, as now, he reflects on the social responsibility of collection-based and historical-oriented institutions to accurately represent our cultural and natural history in authentic and illuminating ways—even if it touches the ‘third rail’ of painful or controversial facets of our collective consciousness. The myths we construct for ourselves—repeated with such frequency that they become our shared reality—are often at odds with the factual record. The nexus of these two world—fact and fable—serves as fertile ground for dialogue, debate, and even open conflict. artes fine arts magazine Read more
Japonisme! Ancient East Meets 19th C. France in Fusion of Styles
Posted on 1 November 2011 | By Richard Friswell
The Dramatic Influence of Japanese Ukiyo-e Prints on Impressionist Painting
Japanese portrayal of Commodore Matthew Perry’s gunship in Edo Harbor, 1853, block print, artist unknown
From the word orient, we take our meaning, ‘to establish a direction or a path based on the points of the compass’. Navigators over centuries faced east to trace the path of the rising sun to its apex for the noon sextant sighting—toward the Orient—the land of mystery somewhere over the horizon. That this archipelago of exotic lands lost in a vast sea, with its towering mountain ranges walling off enormous swaths of snow-choked plains, rain-drenched jungles, powerful emperors and marauding armies, rising and falling from power somewhere in the veiled mists of time, could elude Western eyes for so many centuries, was no accident. For more than a thousand years, with few exceptions and under very limited conditions, the empires of the East enacted a moratorium on European exploration and trade along their shores. artes fine arts magazine Read more
One in Series of Articles Exploring Relationship between Art & Music
Posted on 23 October 2011 | By Richard Friswell
Picasso and the Guitar: Memory and Metaphor
Inspired by, ‘Picasso: Guitars (1912-14)’- At the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, 2011
Pablo Picasso, Self Portrait (1906). Coll. MoMA, NY
Though living in France most of his life, Picasso was a Spaniard, through-and-through, remaining proud of his birthright, cultural heritage and sun-drenched memories of childhood, over his lifetime. Any retrospective of his work as a painter and sculptor reveals that he was continually informed by the iconic images of Spain, at both conscious and unconscious levels: the raven-haired, large-eyed female figures, matadors and bull-fighting motifs, the open-balcony studio settings of his imagination, replete with palm-strewn vistas of warm seas, mythic creatures from Greco-Roman legend and seductive naked sylphs, all belie his enduring visceral attachment to las cosas de españa. artes fine arts magazine Read more
The Art of Making Art
Posted on 28 September 2011 | By Richard Friswell
Paris Photographs: World Fair Exhibition, 1900
What follows is a wonderful historical record of how a particular artist resolved the issues of a particular subject, to yield a masterpiece of art. It was written by Blaise Cendrars in 1924, about his friend, the painter Robert Delaunay, and the creation of his painting, Champs de Mars: The Red Tower (1911).*
The Eiffel Tower
-dedicated to Madame Sonia Dulauney
“…In the years 1910, 1911, Robert Delaunay and I were perhaps the only ones in Paris talking about machines and art and with a vague awareness of the great transformation of the modern world.
At that time, I was working in Chartres, with B…, on the perfecting of his plane with various angles of incidence, and Robert, who had worked for a time as a journeyman mechanic, in some artisan locksmith shop, was prowling, in a blue coat, around the Eiffel Tower. artes fine arts magazine Read more
Can We Say, ‘Primitive?’
Posted on 21 September 2011 | By Richard Friswell
Prehistoric Lascaux cave paintings, France
In the 1990s, I recall watching Sister Wendy Beckett, the demuring celebrity spokesperson for a popular PBS series on art appreciation. This sequestered nun, who for decades had lived under a vow of silence, had gained notoriety for her views on famous works of art and now stood in her nun’s habit waxing vociferously before the prehistoric Lascaux cave paintings. Self-taught and passionate about the history of art, she gestured at the figures of stampeding bison and elk behind her and said, “These images are 15,000 years old. In the millennia that followed, art didn’t get any better than this, just different.”
In a few words, she summed up the argument for why we should not apply the word, ‘primitive’ to any artistic or material object from cultures far removed from our own tastes and values, simply because we do not understand them. Read more
Analyzing the ‘Strange Art of Today’…Vintage 1948, New York City
Posted on 13 September 2011 | By Richard Friswell
September 12, 2011
Pablo Picasso, Girl before a Mirror (1932). Collection MOMA
In late summer of 1948, a strange gathering took place on the top floor of New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Distinguished men (all men) from the fields of arts, letters, academia and the publishing world were invited by LIFE Magazine to discuss and debate the then-current state of the “modern painting” movement. The Round Table—part of a magazine-sponsored series on the post-war American lifestyle—consisted of such notables as Brave New World author, Aldous Huxley; Clement Greenberg, avant-garde critic; Francis Henry Taylor, director of the Met; Sir Leigh Ashton, director of London’s Victoria & Albert; Meyer Shapiro, professor of fine arts at Columbia University; Alfred Frankfurter, editor and publisher of Art News; Charles Sawyer, of Yale’s art department and James Thrall Soby, chairman MOMA’s painting and sculpture department, among others. Read more
It’s Not Easy Being Green
Posted on 1 May 2011 | By Richard Friswell
Green is the color of life returning. As the earth’s annual cosmic orbit once again swings our northern climes into the direct and warming rays of the sun, nature’s life-blood, chlorophyll, begins to flow through the budding leaves and plants around us. We associate this awakening with physical and emotional viability—our own and that of the other living things that we share space with in our world.
Green is easy on the eyes. Its place on the light spectrum is smack-dab in the middle and the many shades of green, from yellow-green to forest, register primally on the brain in ways that conveys calm and the certitude of life-renewed. As a result, green is used worldwide to represent safety. Read more
