3 Cutting-Edge Artists!
School of Beauty, School of Culture, 2012
Kerry James Marshall
Could This Be Love, 1992
Kerry James Marshall
Kerry James Marshall
For his large-scale, exuberant paintings, 61-year-old African American artist Kerry James Marshall paints only black people.
The paintings are emotional, bursting with everyday life in riotous colors and love. Even the most staid museum visitors have been seen to kiss in front of them!
Not all his works are of happiness, though — there are funerals, killers, lost boys, anger and grief — but always depicted in bright, bold colors and powerful shapes…and always filled with vibrant spirit!
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Gone: An Historical Romance of a Civil War…, 1994
Kara Walker
Kara Walker
Black contemporary artist Kara Walker shatters any romantic notion of the South, Civil War or slavery. Walker cuts out huge life-size silhouettes in black paper…nightmarish images of slavery in the Antebellum South.
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in Pursuit of Venus [infected], 2015
Still of panoramic video by Lisa Reihana
Lisa Reihana
Art and history make an explosive and exciting combination! Lisa Reihana, a Māori artist in Auckland, New Zealand, has produced a panoramic video that is irresistible in its storytelling of the encounters between the Polynesians and British Captain James Cook in 1770.
A major installation, sculpture, and video artwork is being featured at the 2017 Venice Biennale, the world’s largest art fair, depicting the profoundly beautiful and cultured Polynesians.
Watch this 1-minute video of Reihana’s work! Look for Captain Cook!
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Research assistance by Alex Cordier, writer based in Auckland, New Zealand working in a variety of sales roles within the tourism and hospitality sectors. Alex is a passionate writer, with a particular focus on travel, lifestyle, and contemporary art.
The REAL Vincent van Gogh
Self Portrait with Bandaged Ear, 1989
Vincent van Gogh, (1853-1890)
Myth: Van Gogh was a manic, possibly slightly deranged man who just spontaneously threw paint at the canvas.
Truth: He was a very experienced artist (he made 900 paintings in ten years) and doggedly honed his skills. He created very deliberate compositions.
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Red Vineyard at Arles, 1888
Vincent van Gogh
Myth: Van Gogh never sold a painting in his lifetime.
Truth: Van Gogh sold ONE painting during his lifetime, Red Vineyard at Arles, to a Russian collector, Sergei Shchukin. This painting now resides at the Pushkin Museum in Moscow.
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Vincent’s Bedroom in Arles, 1888
Digital version shows what may be the original violet walls.
Myth: In Van Gogh’s beloved painting of his bedroom in Arles, France, the walls were painted blue.
Truth: New high-tech research shatters Van Gogh myth! Van Gogh originally painted the walls of his bedroom a pale lilac, not blue! The reason…purple (lilac) is the complementary color of yellow. He experimented with new pigments. These new pigments, particularly the color red, proved to be unstable and the red pigment disappeared after a short time changing to blue.
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Don’t miss this video! Watch as Vincent van Gogh’s masterpieces come alive!
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Great Art in 90 Seconds
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Image: Joy of Life, Henri Matisse
Film by Kirby Kendrick
Animation by Simon Christopher, Light-Matter Media
Once in a Lifetime Art Exhibition!
The Red Room, 1908
Henri Matisse
The Hermitage Museum, Paris
You may feel a surge of joy when you see the ORIGINAL Matisse “The Red Room.” You may be brought to tears. You will certainly be stopped in your tracks.
Perhaps you think you know “The Red Room” from a thousand dorm room posters, but no reproduction can capture the depth of the vermillion wallpaper streaking down right onto the table, the cobalt blue of the sky from the window, the yellows…oh, oh, oh…
Pastorales Tahitiennes, 1892
Paul Gauguin
The Hermitage Museum, Russia
The artworks of the finest impressionists — Matisse, Gauguin, Picasso, Monet and many others — are on display until mid-February 2017, at the new Fondation Louis Vuitton Museum in Paris.
Fondation Louis Vuitton Museum, Paris
Frank Gehry, Architect
Temporary installation: Observatory of Light by Daniel Buren
One hundred thirty works of art have been allowed to leave the major museums of Russia, the Hermitage and the Pushkin, for the first time. Odds are we will never see these works together again in our lifetime.
The study in Sergei Shchukin’s house.
Photograph: Heritage Images/Getty Images
The collection was put together in the late 1800’s by Sergei Shchukin, a wealthy textile industrialist from Moscow. Twenty years later, after the Bolshevik revolution, Stalin and Lenin “nationalized” the collection, branding the paintings “degenerate” and dispersing them throughout Russia, some even exiled to Siberia!
Today, 100 years later, the collection is for the first time reunited in Paris, the blockbuster of all blockbusters…”Icons of Modern Art.”
Bonjour Paris!
America How Great Thou ART!
Flag, 1967
Jasper Johns
The Broad Museum, Los Angeles
Jasper Johns was an acclaimed artist known for his paintings of flags, targets, and other ordinary objects in the mid 20th century. He helped usher in the Pop Art era.
Jasper Johns:
“In Savannah, Georgia, in a park, there is a statue of Sergeant William Jasper. Once I was walking through this park with my father, and he said that we were named for him. Whether or not that is in fact true or not, I don’t know. Sergeant Jasper lost his life raising the American flag over a fort [Fort Moultrie, American Revolutionary War].”
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Morning Day on the Farm, 1951
Grandma Moses
Anna Mary Robertson Moses, nicknamed Grandma Moses, began painting at 78 and lived to 101. Art historians say her work portrays homely American farm life and rural countryside. But Grandma Moses had a different way to describe her subjects: “I like old-timey things—something real pretty,” she said. “Most of them are daydreams.”
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American Gothic, 1930
Grant Wood
Art Institute of Chicago
With the onset of the Great Depression, the painting, American Gothic, came to be seen as a depiction of steadfast American pioneer spirit.