retnoop

Paul Gauguin, NAFAE faaipoipo  (When Will You Marry?) 1892  Rudolph Staechelin Collection The Phillips Collection's latest loan exhibition, "Gauguin to Picasso: Masterworks from Switzerland," draws upon a pair of collections assembled by two prominent but very different Swiss art collectors. To me, the theme of dualism, pairs and split identities stands out strongly.  The exhibition highlights one of Gauguin's most famous paintings, When are You to be Married ? -- a painting that recently was sold.  (The Staechelin and Im Oberstag collections of modern art are normally on display at the Basel Kunstmuseum. Here's an article for background on the collectors why the paintings are traveling .)  Like so many other paintings by Gauguin, the two women in this infamous painting express two realities, which could represent the split identities within Tahitian society. He painted it during his first stay in Tahiti in 1892. The woman in front is natural, organic, rel...

One of the first 'pastoral ' paintings(not in the exhibition) was The Pastoral Concert, 1509, by Titian and/or  Giorgione, originator of  the pastoral, where landscape is on par with figures. Shepherds and musicians are frequent in this theme. Good things always end, including summer and a chance to see how the greatest modern artists painted themes of leisure as Arcadian Visions: Gauguin, Cezanne, Matisse , ends Labor Day. The exhibition highlights 3 large paintings:  Gauguin's frieze-like Where do We Come From?...,  1898, Cézanne's  Large Bathers , 1898-1905 and Matisse's  Bathers by a River , 1907-17. Each painting was crucial to the goals of the artists, and crucial to the transitioning from the art and life of the past into the 20th century. These  modernist visions actually are part of a much older theme descended from Greece and written about in Virgil's  Eclogues.  Nineteenth-century masters were very familiar with this tradition from...

P aul Gauguin was impressed with the sincere, unspoiled piety of women from Brittany, where he painted in 1887. He placed the Yellow Christ , 1889, in a Breton landscape. Paul Gauguin, an early modern rebel against western culture, is influenced by religious culture like his French forebears who painted for kings and churches 400 years earlier. After seeing the Art Institute of Chicago's exhibition of Early Renaissance Art in France , I saw the Gauguin exhibition at the National Gallery. Many of Gauguin's subjects also had religious themes. He put the Crucifixion in a setting of yellow and ocher pigments, and blended it into the landscape of Brittany, a region he respected for its piety and cultural backwardness at that time. The standing woman in Delectable Waters , above, has the shame of Eve being expelled from the garden of Paradise. We don't know her relationship to the other women, although they also seem to live in a lush tropical place, much like a Garden of Eden Ma...