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May 5th, 2009
01:55 pm - Humayun's Tomb
Humayun (1508-1556) was the second mughul emperor in India. The word “Mughul” comes from “Mongol”, Humayun’s father, the first Mughul emperor, was a descendant of Genghis Kahn. He became emperor in 1530 after his father died; his reign lasted for 26 years. Humayun’s tomb, located in Delhi, is the first example of Mughul architecture in India. His widow ordered it to be built in 1562, it took 8 years to complete.
He was in the habit of falling to his knees upon hearing the call to prayer. When he died it was because he was walking down stairs, heard the call to prayer, fell to his knees and tumbled down the stairs, hitting his head at the bottom.
We know quite a bit about Humayun’s life because his sister, Gulbadan, wrote a biography about him after he died. She wrote the account of the life of her brother in simple Persian, unlike the scholars of the day who used lofty language and embellished upon the facts.
He is reported as being very lenient and forgiving. Even toward acts deliberately intended to anger him. His grasp on his commonwealth was insecure because of other rulers trying to overthrow his power. Three of the rulers scrambling for power against Humayun were his three brothers Hindal, Kamran and Askari. It was not common in India for land inheritance to be divided amongst children. It was common in central Asia and since Humayun’s father was descended from Genghis Kahn, he followed in this tradition and divided the land amongst his four boys, Humayun receiving Delhi. This caused many acts of betrayal amongst the brothers.
Humayun was deeply superstitious and interested in astrology and the occult. He planned everything from policies down to what he wore every day in accordance with the movements of the planets.
In 1540 Humayun was over thrown and he fled Delhi for 15 years. In this time he fell in love with a 13 year old girl living in a Harem. Her name was Hamida Banu and at first she resisted Humayun. She later consented to marry him and two years later bore him a son, Akbar, the most famous of the Moghul rulers.
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March 2nd, 2008
08:18 pm - Miwa Yanagi
Right now at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston there is an exhibit by Japanese photographer Miwa Yanagi that is absolutely stunning.
These reproductions don't come anywhere near doing the images justice. They are all very large and the colors are so rich and brilliant, aside from the harmony of the visuals and the verses, they are just exciting to look at.
They remind me a bit of post secret with the accompanying phrases and also a bit of girlsarepretty with the strangeness.
Three different projects of hers are being shown: fairy tales, my grandmothers, and elevator girls.
The two pieces here are from My Grandmothers.
She asked her subjects to picture their lives 50 years in the future and created photographs based on what they envisioned.
AI
2004
Malicious gossip spreads behind my back that I'm a fake children's
fortuneteller. My purpose is neither their pocket money nor to waste time.
I wait for just one customer; my successor. I wait wait only for the day she,
who is indifferent to the past and future, passes casually through these nearly
collapsing doors. After I have entrusted everything to her I'll live quietly in
this world empty of hope or regret.
But until then, how many more boring lives must I speak about. How
these children's futures are so dull. Just like their mothers, a
repetitious monotony of dissatisfied every day lives. I can't believe
they come here just to confirm that. Their childlike secrets, erratic hopes,
cheap dreams... I'm fed up by all this. Only five more today and I'll be done.
There is no use to cry, sweetheart.
Geisha
2002
-One must daily devote oneself to accomplishments in art
-One must respect the tastefully refined
-One must never discriminate between chance customers and regular customers
-To entertain a customer, one must treasure every meeting, for it will never recur.
-One must never preach to a customer
-One must decide one's own age on a daily basis
-If one's life is devoted to the pursuit of individual faith, that shall prevent the unworthiness of aging in flamboyance and disgrace
-Ease shall be embraced if ease arrives, as by means of ease one's own health shall be preserved
The aforementioned disciplines must be mutually obeyed and conducted with respect to harmony
Current Mood: inspired
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January 3rd, 2008
01:47 pm - Miro
Joan Miró
Carnival of Harlequin, 1924,
"How did I think up my drawings and my ideas for painting? Well I'd come home to my Paris studio in Rue Blomet at night, I'd go to bed, and sometimes I hadn't any supper. I saw things, and I jotted them down in a notebook. I saw shapes on the ceiling..."
The sky was of great importance to Miró, as were the birds and heavenly bodies to be seen in it. "I'm overwhelmed," he once said, "when I see the crescent of the moon or the sun in an immense sky. In my paintings, as a matter of fact there are tiny shapes in great empty spaces. Empty spaces, empty horizons, empty plains - everything stripped down has always made a great impression on me."
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October 11th, 2007
09:39 am - Stieglitz and O'keeffe
Alfred Stieglitz was an extremely influential photographer in the early 1900's.
He was married to Giorgia O'keeffe and made a series of photographs of her.
The one's focusing on her hands remind me of dutch renaissance art.
Rogier Vanderweyden, Francesco D'este, 1460
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June 14th, 2007
03:59 pm - now one of my favorite paintings
Titian
The Lovers
The Queens Gallery, London
1510
This arrangement of figures in art often depicts a courtesan or faithless wife in the arms of her young lover with elderly and rich husband in the background. The woman here does not wear the elaborate clothes or jewellery of a courtesan and there is no sense of treachery in the scene. Though x-rays have shown that in an earlier version of the painting she was more elaborately dressed and the hand on her shoulder was not there. In the nineteenth-century the painting was called ‘a sick Lady, her Husband and a physician’.
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April 24th, 2007
12:25 pm - on how the Greeks affected my major part 2!
Another classically inspired painting belonging to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and a particular favorite of mine, is Camille Corot’s painting, Orpheus Leading Eurydice from the Underworld, painted in 1861. This tragic tale of Orpheus and Eurydice begins when Eurydice, wife of Orpheus, had been running through a forest, attempting to escape from the shepherd Aristaeus, a son of Apollo. As she was running, she inadvertently stepped on a snake and died. Orpheus was so distraught that he went down to the underworld and begged the king and the queen to allow him to have his wife back. The queen agreed to allow this on the condition that when he led her out of the underworld, he didn’t look behind him.
This painting depicts the very moment in which he disregards the given condition and turns around to make sure she is there. As evidenced in this painting, Corot was commonly a landscape painter yet by including the traditional Greek figures, he has
turned this piece into a history painting.
Another depiction of Orpheus resides, since 1971, in the court yard of the fine arts building on the University of Houston campus. This sculpture focuses on Orpheus’ talent as a musician. His instrument was a lyre, as seen in the Corot painting. In a more modern depiction, Orpheus is here seen playing a violin. Gerhard Marcks, the artist of this piece, was Jewish and during WWII, his art was censored by the Nazi’s and labeled degenerate. The pensive nature and stance of this Orpheus is a keen reflection of the turmoil and pain that Marcks had to endure around the time of the war. While the figure is classically dressed in a toga-like shift, his violin and the style in which he has been cast are modern.
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April 17th, 2007
04:10 pm - from a paper on how the Greeks affected my major
Angelica Kauffman
Ariadne Abandoned by Theseus
1864
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
Ariadne Abandoned by Theseus, painted in 1774 by Angelica Kauffman, depicts the well known story of how Ariadne came to Naxos and became wedded to Dionysus. After having helped Theseus in the labyrinth of Crete by giving him a sword
with which to kill the Minotaur who lived in the labyrinth, and a ball of yarn so that he would be able to find his way out again, he ungraciously dumped her on the island of Naxos while on his way back home to Athens. There Ariadne meets Dionysus who falls in love with her and she stays on the island with the god.
In this extremely dramatic representation, Kauffman shows Ariadne lamenting her abandonment by Theseus, prior to her meeting with Dionysus. Though a Swiss born painter, she became a popular member of the Royal academy and a close friend of its leader, Sir Joshua Reynolds, she felt it her duty to revive the concept of history painting and break away from the popular and highly sought after but less prestigious landscapes and portraiture of 1800’s England.
Titian
Bacchus and Ariadne
1523
national gallery, London
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March 2nd, 2007
12:28 pm - cezanne
cezanne
self portrait, 1875
In a letter of 1885 Gaugin described Cezanne: "A man of the south, he spends days on the mountain tops reading Virgil and gazing at the sky."
Cezanne wanted to paint human figures from life but was embarrased by the nude female models.
"I paint still lifes. Women models frighten me. The sluts are always watching to catch you off your guard. You've got to be on the defensive all the time and the motif vanishes."
That being said, notice how, when he did paint nudes, they were very abstract in comparison to his other works.
Les grandes baigneuses, 1900
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January 10th, 2007
07:59 pm - Klimt
Gustav Klimt
Goldfish (to my critics)
1901-1902
Swiss Institute for Art Research, Zurich, Switzerland
Klimt was the leader of the Secession, a group whos intention was to fight against academic authority and the cultural isolation of Vienna. They fought for the right to artistic creativity and started Art Nouveau in order to counter the Viennese bourgeois conservatism.
While Klimt still painted portraits of wealthy Viennese patrons, his non-portraits were becoming more erotic, which was not well recieved.
One of his three paintings for the Great Hall of the University, Medicine, was an allegory featuring the image of the goddess Hygieia -- the goddess of health. This painting was met with shock and disdain by the critics.
Klimt painted a response to the critics of his work with a painting called Goldfish (its original title was To My Critics )
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January 2nd, 2007
12:33 pm - andy warhol is so wise
For hanukkah I got "Andy Warhol: The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (from A to B and back again)" and I kind of love it a lot.
"I always think of what it means to wear eyeglasses. When you get used to glasses you don't know how far you could really see. I think about all the people before eye glasses were invented. It must have been weird because everyone was seeing in different ways acording to how bad their eyes were. Now, eyeglasses standardize everyone's vision to 20-20. That's an example of everyone becoming more alike. Everyone could be seeing at different levels if it weren't for glasses.
Weight isnt important the way the magazines make you think it is. I know a girl who just looks at her face in the medicine cabinet mirror and never looks below her shoulders, and she's four or five hundred pounds but she doesnt see all that, she just sees a beautiful face and therefore she thinks she's a beauty. And therefore I think she's a beauty, too, because I usually accept people on the basis of their self-images, because their self-images have more to do with the way they think than their objective-images do. Maybe she's six hundred pounds, who knows. If she doesn't care, I don't."
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November 11th, 2006
03:31 am - Art in Houston II
Richard Pousette-Dart
Primordial Moment
1939
Richard Pousette-Dart (1916-1992) was the youngest of the abstract expressionists. His mother was a poet/photographer/musician and his father a painter and writer. This painting was made early in his career when he was 23. His early paintings are characterized by totemic figures and mimic African and Native American art, but also have the automatic shapes of the surrealists. 'Automatic shapes' is the same idea as automatic writing; writing material that does not come from the conscious thoughts of the writer. The writer's hand forms the message, and the person is unaware of what will be written. This was common of surrealist art which begat abstract expressionism.
Richard Pousette-Dart was influenced by rock formations and how they countlessly layer over themselves, built up over time like images burying themselves into the collective unconsious of our culture. Always there even though their influence is buried.
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November 7th, 2006
07:12 pm - some quotes very quickly
"What’s great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it."
-Andy Warhol
From the piss and sex exhibit
"Andy said that who said that the vitamin B that Ronnie took made a prettier color when the acid in the urine turned the copper green… Did Andy ever use his own urine? My diary shows that when he first began the series, in December 1977, he did… and there were many others: boys who'd come to lunch and drink too much wine, and find it funny or even flattering to be asked to help Andy 'paint.'"- from Holy Terror - Andy Warhol Close Up
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October 24th, 2006
04:35 pm - romanesque to gothic styles
The most noticeable difference between romanesque and gothic architecture is the shape of the arches.
The romanesque arch is rounded and the gothic is pointed at the top.
 
Gothic architecture showed up around 1140 in France, started by the Abbott Suger.
He believed that there needed to be more lavish embellishment of the churches. Through the material, we could gain an understanding of what the divine was like (comes from the Byzantine Icon concept that everything on earth is a less perfect copy of everything in heaven). He also began the adding of a gigantic rose window.
This was because he believed that when light passed through the stained glass into the church it became "holy light".
example of holy light:
In romanesque churches, the apse (the top part of the cross, where the altar is located) had little chapels surrounding it in which there were windows. However this made the church darker and so in gothic architecture, there are no chapels around the apse. This allows for the rose window and thus more light.
Romanesque,
gothic
and here are the results of each plan:
St Radegunde-romanesque
St Denis-gothic
Current Location: in the library at UH
Current Mood: ![[mood icon]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/classic/sad.gif) cold
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October 19th, 2006
04:05 pm - art in Houston
Saint Anthony Shunning the Mass of Gold
fra angelico
c. 1435—40
museum of fine arts Houston
St. Anthony, often called Anthony of Egypt lived around 251-356.
Once while wandering through caves in the desert, he found a silver dish and thought to himself that had it fallen out of a travellers pack, it was so large that it would have been noticed. He came to the conclusion that it was the devil who had put it there to try to tempt him. With that the plate vanished and a mass of real gold was left in its place, which soon went up in flames.
When the roman emperor Magnus Maximus was putting christians to death, Anthony went, hoping to receive the "honor of martyrdom" yet was turned away despite his best efforts.
He reportedly died of old age at 105.
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September 18th, 2006
06:04 pm - crazy cathols
Saint Luke, the patron saint of artists, was said to have painted the Madonna and child from life, thus creating the prototype for later icons of Mary holding Jesus.
Saint Luke Painting the Virgin
Martin de Vos
1602
That was why it was the goal of Byzantine artists to duplicate the prototype as faithfully as possible, to do otherwise would dilute the true image.
 
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September 13th, 2006
05:46 pm - making believe
The Mask of Agamemnon
discovered at Mycenae in 1876 by Heinrich Schliemann. Its a gold funeral mask, and was found over the face of a body located in a burial shaft. Schliemann believed that he had discovered the body of the legendary Greek leader Agamemnon, and from this the mask gets its name.
Heinrich Schliermann (1822-1890) discovered the "mask of Agamemnon".
As a child his father disgraced the family by having an affair and the family broke up and Heinrich was sent to live with relatives. When he was older, he tried to change his fortune by taking a ship from Amsterdam to go to S. America but his ship sank and he was one of the few survivors. Back in Amsterdam he was taken in by a wealthy merchant who discovered that Schliermann had a natural talent at learning languages. He learned 18 languages and was sent to St. Petersburg to run a business over there where he also ended up getting married.
In 1849 he went to California to set up arrangements for his brothers funeral and got caught up in the gold rush and became very rich. At 42 he retired and decided to travel the world.
He had never been to school or college and was easy to believe things. When he was in the middle east he met a merchant who sold him a salt shaker which was said to contain Lots' wife.
In 1869 he divorced his wife and wrote to a friend saying he was looking for a Greek wife and one of the credentials is that she had to love Homeric epics. They had two children, Andromache and Agamemnon Schliemann; he reluctantly allowed them to be baptised, but only solemnized the ceremony by placing a copy of The Iliad on the children's heads and reciting a hundred hexameters.
the way he SAYS he learned Greek is that he went to Greek Orthodox services every Sunday, memorized the service, then went home and looked it up. In 6 weeks he had mastered Greek.
When he was a young boy he asked a preacher about the epic "The Illiad" and he was told it was just a story and from that point on it was a dream of his to find Troy and prove the story was true.
So thats what he decided to do. He excavated a hill called Hissarlik in the Ottoman Empire, and every artifact he found was named a posession of a character from the Illiad, "Priams Treasure" or "Helens Jewels".
He recieved a lot of criticism for this and decided to then go excavate Mycenae. Everyone already knew where this place was but they didnt think that there was anything there from the bronze age, which is when the events of the Illiad were presumed to have taken place. There he discovered a shaft of graves, one with a gold mask on which he named "the mask of Agamemnon".
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August 19th, 2006
10:50 pm - manet sandwhich
Manet
Boy with Cherries
1858
This boys name was Alexandre and he was 15.
He cleaned Manet's brushes and palletes and sometimes sat as a model.
He was depressed. He hung himself in Manet's studio.
Manet went in search of another studio and one place he saw had a large protruding nail coming from the wall and Manet jokingly asked "who hung himself here?"
"how did you know?!" was the answer he received and he immediately left, not choosing the space as his new studio.
( This painting inspired Baudelaire's 'la corde' )
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June 9th, 2006
07:07 pm - rococo
going through my links and cleaning them out. I think this study of hands by Largeilliere is pretty neat.
Largeilliere was around during the monarchy transition from louis the IX to the X
Heres what his work usually looked like.
Largillierre, family portrait, early 1700's
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May 30th, 2006
05:11 pm - baroque and renaissance
Fra Angelico
Annunciation
after 1450
Federico Barocci
rest on the flight to egypt
1570-73
The Wolfflin principles for distinguishing between baroque and renaissance art.
Renaissance:
More of an emphasis on line and draftsmanship. The line limits the figures to having a clearly defined defined shape, they are solid and self-contained. Each part is independent within the whole, it could stand alone. It has a controlled feeling and harmonious balance. Space is established with a stage like area from which the figures dont seem to go beyond and do not extend out to the viewer. The lighting is undramatic.
Baroque:
very painterly, the edges of the figures are blurred to create a feeling of movement. The paint is used for its own sake. Dramatic depths and diagonals are created. The composition is projected out towards the viewer. Spatial relationships are obscured. The parts of the composition are subordinated to the overall effect, they are dependent on each other and would be relatively meaningless when considered alone. Dramatic shadows and brilliant spot-lighting.
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April 29th, 2006
09:17 pm - best cakes ever
speaking of good ideas...
van gogh cakes:
and a monet cake:
let them eat cake!
marie antoinette in cake
not just your run of the mill "air brushed picture" cakes.
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