Demuth was perhaps a wee bit (!) in thrall of Lionel Feininger, no?....the Demuth was 1930, Feininger 1924. Good painting though. Lionel Feininger, Gaberndorf II, 1924.
John Frederick Peto (American) who died in 1907 should be much better known than he is....he took as his starting point the Dutch still life painters of the 17th century but then produced several works that anticipated the "Pittura Metafisica" works of Carlo Carra and Giorgio Morandi in their stillness, mystery and simplification of form (like the lovely one that you posted). The Italian artists were, however, almost certainly unaware of his work and had come to their own pictorial solutions via the quite different work of their countryman Giorgio de Chirico. Carlo Carra, The Drunken Gentleman, 1916 Giorgio Morandi, Narura morta, 1919
And there's a story to it... http://fridaynightboys300.blogspot.co.uk/2014/01/the-anthony-van-dyke-show.html
I'm a fan of Van Gogh and this one is probably my favourite Wheat Field With Crows And of course Starry Night recently made famous by the great Don McLean song
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikiped...brand_or_The_Meeting_on_the_Turret_Stairs.jpg One of my favourites that I finally got to see a few weeks ago. A watercolour no less!
I adore the painters of the Hudson River School, the romantic landscape artists of the nineteenth century, especially Albert Bierstadt and Frederic Edwin Church. Ten years or so ago the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts had a show called "American Sublime," which was devoted to these works in nineteenth-century American landscape painting. For some reason I missed the exhibition, but got the catalogue, the cover of which is Church's truly sublime "Cotopaxi," shown below, in a teeny tiny image that doesn't do it justice. At the end of last summer I stopped in to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC and as it happened it was the last day of the showing there of "The Civil War and American Art," which had previously been in Washington, DC. It was a great exhibition. I was lucky my failure to plan hadn't tripped me up this time. And, right at the start, there it was, "Cotopaxi," on loan from the Detroit Institute of Arts (where its fate I would imagine is still uncertain, no?). I stood in front of it for two different lengths of time, trying to scan it all over (it is immense) and remember as much as I could. Here's the page on the DIA Web site: http://www.dia.org/object-info/baeac490-f496-4a17-b917-dd0216d11492.aspx?position=1
It is so rich, in vividness and detail, and expressive. If you get a chance to see it, don't pass it up. I got very lucky and stumbled into a second chance!
Last year there was a Church show in nearby Edinburgh... http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/whats-on/exhibitions/frederic-church and http://artdaily.com/news/62534/Thro...sketch-opens-at-the-Scottish-National-Gallery, very good it was too. This, "Niagara Falls, from the American Side" from 1867 is in the permanent collection of the Scottish National Gallery in Edinburgh.
Been there, done it. When I was at the Tate Museum in London, wanting to see The Metamorphosis of Narcissus by Dali, it was in Washington D.C., if I recall correctly, and when I was in Washington D.C. a month later, the painting was en route to London.
There is also something about the natural light in these places that adds to the magic. Although the Hudson River School was not literally confined to the Hudson Valley, the light there can be magical. So too, in Constable country in England, and the region of Southern France where Van Gogh famously painted. (I also love the Hudson River paintings).
I saw this - to be honest, I was hoping there would be more of his works, but I enjoyed seeing what was there, especially the large scale Niagara Falls painting above.
Absolutely, and I think in many of these paintings it's the artist's pursuit of a particular moment created by the play and color of natural light that is the key to the beauty, and that feeling of the "sublime" (a term I've never felt I understood properly).
Interesting article on the influence of poetry on David Hockney's work: http://fridaynightboys300.blogspot.co.uk/2014/01/david-hockney-and-poetry.html
This is not my favorite to look at, but the ability to produce it is stunning. Giovanni Arnolfini and his Bride by Jan van Eyck (1434) Notice the incredible detail in the conclave mirror. The size of the entire portrait is only 32.4 x 23.6 inches.
This is almost an impossible task. But Jackson Pollock's Convergence is the painting that I spend the most time in front of at the Albright Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo.
Can't print the whole thing because, well, lots of folks here would consider it obscene, but Keith Haring's Once Upon A Time, which was a mural he did in the bathroom of the Lesbian and Gay Community Center in NYC is one of the most amazing things I've ever seen. A celebration of the way things used to be in gay culture, drawn on the bathroom tiles in 1989, it's a landmark work.
