Category Archives: Art

Color in the Eye of the Beholder

15 September 2025 By in Art, Philosophy, Physics, Physiology, Science Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Ansel Adams (1902-1964), photographer of the majestic, was exceptionally elusive when it came to why he preferred black-and-white photographs over color, offering only a few comments on his medium of choice. He believed that black-and-white photography was a “departure from reality” which is true on many levels but that is also true of most artistic efforts and products. He also held the elementary belief that “one sees differently with color photography than black-and-white.” Some have even suggested that Adams said, “…when you photograph them in black and white, you photograph their souls,” but this seems apocryphal since most of his oeuvre was landscape photography.

Adams’s black-and-white photography framed the grandeur of the mountainous West in stark, unembellished terms. Yet without color, a coolness loiters, untouched by human sentiment or warmth. As an unabashed environmentalist, maybe that was his point, the majesty of the outdoors was diminished by human presence. In black-and-white, the wilderness remained unsullied and alone.

But to Claude Monet (1840-1926), founding French Impressionist, color and light, was everything in his eye. Color defined his paintings, professing that “Color is my day-long obsession, (my) joy…,” he confessed. Color was also a constant burden that he carried with him throughout the day and into the night, lamenting, “Colors pursue me like a constant worry. They even worry me in my sleep.” He lived his aphorism: “Paint what you really see, not what you think you ought to see…but the object enveloped in sunlight and atmosphere, with the blue dome of Heaven reflected in the shadows.” His reality was light and color with a human warming touch.

Adams and Monet’s genius were partially contained in their ability to use light to capture the essence of the landscape, but Monet brought the soul along in living color. Monet’s creed, “I want the unobtainable. Other artists paint a bridge, a house, a boat, and that’s the end…. I want to paint the air which surrounds the bridge, the house, the boat, the beauty of the air in which these objects are located…”

Color is a defining quality of humanity. Without color life would be as impersonal as Adam’s landscapes, beautiful, majestic even, but without passion or pulse. A sharp, stark visual with little nuance, no emotional gradations from torment to ecstasy, just shadows and form.

Understanding color was not just a technical revelation for 19th-century French artists, it was a revolutionary awakening, a new approach to how the eye viewed color and light. The Impressionists and Pointillists brought a new perception to their canvases. And the catalyst for this leap away from the tired styles of Academic Art and Realism was Michel Eugene Chevreul, a chemist whose insight into color harmony and contrast inspired the Monets and Seurats to pursue something radically different in the world of art. His chromatic studies inspired them to paint not for the viewer’s eye, but with it, transforming perception from passive witness into an active collaboration between painter, subject, and observer.

Chevreul’s breakthrough was deceivingly simple. Colors are not static blots on a canvas but relational objects that come alive when surrounded by other hues of the spectrum. A hue in isolation is perceived differently than when seen next to another. Red deepens next to green; blue pulsates with enthusiasm against orange. This principle, simultaneous contrast, revealed that the eye does not just passively accept what it sees but synthesizes it to a new reality.

Chevreul’s theories on complementary colors and optical mixing laid the foundation for painters to forsake rigid outlines, often rendered in the non-color of black, and embrace Impressionism: not merely an art style, but a promise of perception, a collaboration between painter and viewer. Rather than blending pigments on a palette, artists like Monet and Seurat placed discrete strokes side by side, allowing the viewer’s mind to complete the image.

This optical mixing is a product of the way the eye and the brain process the various wavelengths of white light. When complementary colors are adjacent to one another the brain amplifies the differences. Neurons in the eye are selfish. When a photoreceptor is stimulated by a color it suppresses adjacent receptors sharpening the boundaries and contrast. And the brain interprets what it sees based on context. Which is why sometimes we see what is not there or misinterpret what is there, such as faces on the surface of Mars or UFOs streaking through the sky. There is also a theory that the brain processes color in opposing pairs. When it sees red it suppresses green creating a vibrancy of complementary colors when placed together.

The Impressionists intensely debated Chevreul’s concepts then they brushed them to life with paint. They painted not concrete objects, but forms shaped by light and color. Haystacks and parasols within a changing mood of contrasting color. . Interpretation by the eye of the beholder.

Chevreul’s collected research, The Principles of Harmony and Contrast of Colors and Their Applications to the Arts, originally published in 1839, remains in print nearly two centuries later.

Source: The Principles of Harmony and Contrast of Colors and Their Applications to the Arts by Michel Eugène Chevreul, 1997 (English Translation). Graphic: Woman with a Parasol by Monet, 1875. National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. Public Domain.

A Revolution in Paint

6 September 2025 By in Art Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

“One must either be one of a thousand or all alone,” declared Edouard Manet (1832-1883). Critics and even some among the Impressionist circle believed Manet lacked the courage to be truly alone, both with his art and his essence. And they were half right. He was an extrovert, a social creature drawn to the vivacious pulse of Parisian life, its salons, cafes, and couture. He wanted to belong.

Through his art he sought recognition. He wanted not necessarily respect, but rather something simpler: acceptance. Yet they misunderstood his paintings. He was alone. His canvass spoke volumes to him, but the critics saw only muted, unfulfilled talent. Paintings adrift in a stylistic wilderness. The arbitrators of French taste, the Salon jury, repeatedly rejected him. In 1875 upon viewing The Laundress, one jury exploded: “That’s enough. We have given M. Manet ten years to amend himself. He hasn’t done so. On the contrary, he is sinking deeper.”

Manet longed for approval, and he could deliver what the critics wanted, but the moment he picked up his brush something else took over. He painted what he saw, but never fully controlled the production. His canvases resisted labels. A modern Romantic, a Naturalist with a Realist bent, urban but Impressionistic. A cypher to the critics but true to himself.

Like his friend Degas, he painted contemporary city life. The country landscapes of Monet, Renoir, and Pissarro couldn’t hold him. The color and light of the Impressionists intrigued him briefly, but stark lighting and unconventional perspective held him fast. He used broad quick solid brush strokes and flat, cutout forms.

Manet’s style was rebellion. The critics sensed it, and hated it, but they never understood it. He couldn’t digest academic art, so revered by the Salon. His mutiny was expressed through paint, not polemic. His only verbal defense was a cryptic comment that “anything containing the spark of humanity, containing the spirit of the age, is interesting.”

Nowhere is humanity, the spirit of the age, more hauntingly distilled than his masterpiece, his Chef-d’oeuvre: Berthe Morisot with a Bouquet of Violets. Dressed in black, her face half in shadow, Morisot peers questioningly at the viewer, asking what comes next. Manet paints what he sees. And he sees the mystery of femininity. Her green eyes painted black providing an opacity to her gaze, deepening the ambiguity: a comicality behind an expression of curiosity.

Critic Paul Valery wrote, “I do not rank anything in Manet’s work higher than a certain portrait of Berthe Morisot dated 1872.” He likened it to Vermeer, but with more spontaneity that makes this painting forever fresh. It is a timeless, loving portrait that transcends style.

Source: The World of Manet: 1832-1883 by Pierre Schneider, 1968. Graphic: Berthe Morisot with a Bouquet of Violets by Edouard Manet, 1872. Musee d’Orsay, Paris. Public Domain.

Windows into the Soul

4 August 2025 By in Art Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment

Francisco de Goya, court painter to the late 18th century Spanish royalty, was no great admirer nor groveling sycophant of his patrons. He portrayed them, literally and figuratively as pretentious hypocrites and regal bores. Somehow, he was able to convince the king and queen that his paintings embodied their imagined over-hyped majesty. They did, just not in the way the royal couple envisioned.  Goya sold the fiction ‘the king has no clothes but isn’t he marvelous’ with the aptness of Hans Christian Andersen, and it likely paid handsomely.

Modern portraitists of the rich and famous seem to follow a similar creed. A veiled contempt that comes through in their brushwork.  Faces frozen in contempt for the world beyond the palace, bodies wrapped in pop-art symbolism, palates of unmistakable gauche screeching, all undermining an uplifting narrative of benevolent power and grace. And, like Goya, they persuade their patrons that all is light and beauty, even though the cracks and shadows are front and center.

A portrait is not just posture, paint, and brushwork; it is an appointment with truth. Maybe just one minor truth, but truth none-the-less. The true artist illuminates the soul where he finds it. An artist’s symbolic performance can flourish in irrelevance of style, but the truth must come out.

Kehinde Wiley’s 2018 portrait of Barack Obama is a curious specimen. It goes beyond tradition into overt symbolism that lands in a duality of truth. It’s a disruptive panel bordering on cartoonish messaging. Botanical motifs of chrysanthemums and lilies in the background, engulfing Obama seated on a wooden chair with six fingers. A portrait not of a President but a topiary clipped into a pose of nonchalance and a distant soul focused on…nothing. The overall effect is one of mockery. Is Wiley mocking the President or is the President mocking his audience, maybe both. Wiley sold it as an informal symbol of a great man but maybe he was painting what he saw. A man whose legacy, much like the foliage behind him, now blooming with grandeur but fading to irreverence over time.

Compare this to Jonathan Yeo’s two portraits of King Charles III and Camilla. The former awash in crimson ambiguity, with vague lines of demarcation. Its symbolism is gaudy and obtuse: the lone butterfly, the seeping reds, the gaze misplaced: together, a haunting emergence from a bloody mess. A reliance on cryptic visual metaphors over soulful revelation. A painting wishing to express depth, and it does, but as a downward drift into circles of Dante rather than a royal crimson of empire. Yeo does not explain much of his trajectory of the portrait. He seems satisfied to leave the interpretation to others. Camilla says it captures him perfectly. But what it captures is not a dignified, confident king, but one who bartered his soul for the crown which Yeo captured impeccably, consciously or not.

Yeo’s 2014 portrait of Camilla, HRH The Duchess of Cornwall, compliments his painting of King Charles: another study of a lost soul. A picture of non-essence. A painting of emotional neglect. Blotches of earth tones for blood and straight lines of iron and fog for character and birthright. In the background vertical lines of changing width suggestive of a perspective view of Camilla sitting in the corner of a prison cell, trapped in a unwanted life, with sub-horizontal lines crossing her clothing like lines of filtered light originating from a broken, tilted structure of casements in disrepair. Windows into a soul without balance or integrity. A blotchy face, pressed lips and the piercing eyes of disgust are the caricature of woman who finds the world a bore and the artist gives wholehearted ascent to her wishes.

Yeo’s portraits of the royal dyad are of tragic symmetry. Charles as an entitled blood-soaked monarch, lost in a mythic realm of post over duty. Camilla is a shadow brought along for form without script, shadow without light.

Each of the three portraits in the triptych, at first blush, are merely lacking in technique or likeness and immensely soulless. With further exposure and examination, the artists have captured their subject’s essence. They are gauche and grotesque, but the painter’s truth is bleeding through. They portray their subjects as an antithesis to their public persona. Wiley’s Obama is lost in symbolic foliage, Yeo’s Charles stands embalmed in a crimson history of unrestrained desire, and Camilla appears accidentally sentenced to royalty by an artist barely able to contain his disdain.

Symbolism, when wielded well, lives in the background, like Botticelli’s Primavera, where flora guides the viewer through renewal without eclipsing the figures themselves. Art that elevates does so through integration, not ornamentation. Symbolism must serve beauty, and beauty must point toward goodness. But if the truth isn’t of beauty, what then?

True portraiture captures the soul and, if need be, is not afraid to offend. It does not flatter blindly, nor does it subtract without cause. It seeks something elemental. It lets the canvas speak, the brush guide, and the palate reverberate with reality. Great portraits are a reckoning of the soul, not decoration of form.

Graphics: President Obama by Kehinde Wiley, 2018. King Charles and Camilla by Jonathan Yeo, 2023 and 2014. All copyrighted. Used for purposes of critique.

Goya: Beauty Unmasked

16 July 2025 By in Art Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Francisco de Goya, a late 18th to early 19th century Spanish painter of the Romantic school, is a fascinating study in evolving style, a visual descent into deafness, isolation, and existential dread, though more philosophically, his lifelong disillusionment with civilization’s failure to embody the Enlightenment’s promised ideals of reason, justice, and human dignity. His art swung like a pendulum, from crisp detail to loose rendering to the raw emotion of a mind increasingly separated from reason.

As a court painter to the Spanish monarchy, Goya’s portraits became canvases for cynicism, derision, and paradox. He offered scathing critiques hidden beneath formal composition, and the court loved him for it. They mistook his precision for praise, even as he quietly dismantled their poise and splendor.

His colossal canvas Charles IV of Spain and His Family (110 × 132”) does not illustrate majesty or brilliance; it immerses the senses in familial estrangement and tedium. Awkward poses; lifeless gazes; a composition emotionally hollowed, drained of vitality and intent. These are not confident rulers but bored figures waiting for the dinner bell to summon a distraction: ceremonial chatter over fish soup and presentation of chocolates. In the background of the painting, Goya includes himself, brush in hand, an artist caught in the act of witnessing. It was a nod to Velázquez’s Las Meninas; Goya once said he “had only three masters: Nature, Velázquez, and Rembrandt”; but here, reverence turns to scorn. Goya didn’t flatter his subjects; he distorted the real, undermining not his own reverence for form, but theirs. His royal figures do not speak; they stare blankly, confirming that the emperor wears no clothes. He looked beneath the surface in search of beauty and instead found something far less attractive, an insignificant echo of a tired reality.

Goya’s notion of beauty, conventionally understood, remained intact. But in his subjects, he saw hypocrisy, a lie, elegantly draped, concealing the moral disfigurement beneath. This critique finds haunting expression in his etching Nadie se Conoce (“Nobody recognizes himself”), Plate No. 6 of Los Caprichos, where masked carnival patrons drift like phantoms of untruth. On the reverse of the plate, Goya inscribed his chilling reflection: “The world is a mask; the face, the costume, and the voice are all feigned. Everyone wants to appear what they are not, everyone deceives, and no one knows himself.”

Goya painted the existential. His late works: The Disasters of War, The Black Paintings, The Madhouse, Saturn Devouring His Son, reveal more of his suffering psyche than his technical ability. Anthony Cascardi argues in Francisco de Goya and the Art of Critique that Goya’s entire oeuvre is a sustained confrontation with Enlightenment ideals. Reason and beauty dissolve under his brush. Societal decay no longer whispers, it screams.

In style, Goya stands at the edge of the Impressionist movement, decades before its arrival. His gestural freedom, emotional brushwork, and psychological texture prefigure the rawness of Manet and even hint at Bacon’s existential grotesque. Paint becomes not just medium but mood, an extension of perception unraveling. Form overrides detail. But Goya moved to a darker rhythm, his brushwork shades where theirs shimmered. Where Monet dances with light, Goya wrestles with darkness. The Impressionists chose beauty over Goya’s emotional appeal, which ultimately served to mock his subjects’ feigned grace.

Unlike Picasso’s theatrical mockery, Goya’s assessment is surgical. He dispenses with pretense and seeks truth, not a truth easily embraced, but one rooted in the soul’s unpleasant, hidden recesses. Picasso once echoed a similar sentiment in a 1923 interview with The Arts: “Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand.” Art distorts to reveal what reality conceals, truth not always visible, but deeply felt. Superficial beauty without the soul is not art, it is a lie.

In contrast to today’s symbolic excess, where the subject is buried beneath concept and symbols, Goya’s portraits are revealing to the point of brutality. He doesn’t idealize; he removes the layers of deceit. The beast within becomes the subject. His cynicism is constant, his honesty sometimes absurd, but always truthful.

Goya takes a moral stance. His genius lies in the ability to paint the conscious with the unconscious, to render not just what he saw, but what he felt and feared, the form with the spiritual. His style matched his psyche. He painted the perceived rot beneath grandeur, the weariness behind powdered wigs, the absurdity beneath court spectacle.

Goya’s fame was built and balanced on a knife’s edge: he gave the rich what they wanted in form, while seeding beneath it a quiet, damning truth. That duality, beauty as lure, truth as blade, is Goya’s lasting contribution to art.

Graphic: Self-Portrait at 69 Years, by Goya, 1815. Museo del Prado-Madrid.

The Many Colors of Slavery

27 May 2025 By in Art, Novel, Philosophy, Philosophy Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

“Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves.”—Abraham Lincoln

“Whoever does not have two-thirds of his day for himself, is a slave, whatever he may be: a statesman, a businessman, an official, or a scholar.” — Friedrich Nietzsche

As the great continental glaciers receded at the end of the Pleistocene, fertile land emerged, allowing for the transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture. Farming was labor-intensive, and with the rise of permanent settlements came the demand for constrained and controlled labor. Slavery, likely with first roots in Mesopotamia, though independent manifestation by the Pharaohs in ancient Egypt and other early civilizations, made it ubiquitous, and it has never disappeared.

From the bonded laborers of the Pharaohs to the structured servitude in Greece and Rome, from the transatlantic trade that brutalized African populations to the modern exploitation of migrant workers in sweatshops and the sex trades, slavery has evolved rather than vanished. Each era refines its own form of servitude; forced labor, insurmountable debt, bureaucratic entrapment, or corporate exploitation. It is a practice as ancient as prostitution and taxation, deeply embedded in human society, yet constantly shifting into less visible but equally insidious forms. As long as slavery remains profitable its existence will continue to indelibly stain humanities’ collective soul.

Slavery, and its ultimate contrast, freedom, was a persistent theme in the works of sci-fi author Robert A. Heinlein. With a piercing social awareness, Heinlein, who, in his early years, was described by Isaac Asimov as a ‘flaming liberal’—picked up the theme and horrors of slavery with his 1957 juvenile novel “Citizen of the Galaxy”; bringing the many forms of servitude into the personal history of a precocious kidnapped boy named Thorby. Citizen of the Galaxy is a planet-hopping, spacefaring critique of oppression, class structure, and the nebulous concept of freedom. Heinlein crafts a future where contrasting societies across the galaxy reflect varying degrees of servitude and autonomy, if not necessarily total freedom. Man rarely allows himself complete independence.

Heinlein through the lens of Thorby explores the various shades of slavery, beginning with the brutal, controlling enslavement and continuing to more subtle forms that the individual may not even recognize as confinement. (Partial plot giveaways beyond this point.) Escaping his initial enslavement by the graces of a kindly, strict, but loveable old cripple named Baslim, Thorby moves into a hierarchical, structured existence of spacefaring traders then onto a self-imposed, due to a thirst for justice, straitjacket of a corporate bureaucracy on his birth planet of Terra. A life story of how control can be imposed by others or by ourselves.

As Heinlein’s social perspectives evolved, his libertarian leanings took greater prominence in Citizen of the Galaxy. Through Thorby’s life journey, Heinlein emphasizes personal autonomy, resistance to tyranny, and the moral duty to fight injustice. Baslim, Thorby’s first mentor, symbolizes the idea that one person can stand against oppression and make a difference, even if it takes many miles and years to materialize.

This theme runs through much of Heinlein’s work, but here, it’s especially poignant because Thorby is powerless for much of the novel, making his eventual triumph all the more meaningful. Heinlein’s novels, Farnham’s Freehold, Friday, and Time Enough for Love, explore slavery and control, reinforcing humanity’s inherent need for freedom, or at the very least, breathing space.

Source: Citizen of the Galaxy by Robert A. Heinlein, 1957. Graphic: Joseph Sold into Slavery by Friedrich Overbeck, 1816. Vanderbilt University. Public Domain.

Kinder Surrealism

21 May 2025 By in Art, Art Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

“I feel the need of attaining the maximum of intensity with the minimum of means. It is this which has led me to give my painting a character of even greater bareness.” Joan Miro.

Joan Miró (zhwahn mee-ROH, 1893–1983), a Catalan artist, began his career exploring Expressionism and Cubism before rejecting the rational world, which he found suffocating possibly depressing. He turned inward, merging an abstract dreamworld with Surrealism, ultimately evolving into a minimalist, conveying deep meaning through sparse, naïve brushstrokes and colors.

Symbolism became his hallmark; for Miró, the image was secondary to the message which was always open to interpretation. Initially inspired by Van Gogh and Cézanne, he later grew enamored with Picasso and Dalí, but it was Sigmund Freud who awakened his subconscious, plunging him into the mysteries of dreams and hallucinations. In pursuit of these visions, Miró intentionally induced states of hunger and exhaustion, risking madness to capture the fleeting essence of his dreamscapes. His dreams produced a primitive, childlike, whimsical innocence, with no explicit instructions for interpretation.

Miró’s early masterpiece, The Farm (1921–22), serves as a biographical snapshot of his life at 29, capturing the essence of his Spanish countryside upbringing and young adult life. This highly detailed precursor to his later Cubist and abstract works was purchased by Ernest Hemingway for 5,000 francs as gift to his wife.

By 2024, Miró’s works continue to command prices that place him among the top 25 most valuable artists worldwide. His Peinture (Étoile Bleue), or Painting (Blue Star), one of his best-known dreamscapes, sold for £23.6 million at a London Sotheby’s auction in 2012, equivalent to $37 million at the time, or approximately $31.5 million in today’s dollars.

Source: Miró by Gaston Diehl, 1979.  Graphic: The Farm (1921–1922), National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. (Public Domain)

Swollen Caricatures

8 April 2025 By in Art, Art, Biography Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Fernando Botero Angulo, 1932-2023, was a Columbian practitioner of figuraism in paint and sculpture, a style where reality is discernable but changed to reflect the artist’s interpretation of his or her world. His unique style has taken on a life of its own and has become known as Boterismo where he exaggerates reality by inflating his objects, mimicking a fat farm on a carbo diet, injecting, according to some, a humor inherent in his plus sized models but it all seems so melodramatic. A melancholic need to explore life’s downsides, forcing the viewer to share not the beauty of life but its complexities and vulnerabilities. There is no happiness in his paintings, just a humorless life.

His style, not far removed from Legar’s Tubism, was the artist’s attempt to find himself and to relieve the self-inflicted anxiety that came from his mode of outward expression not matching his inward vision. He states that “…the moment comes when the painter manages to master the technique and at the same time all of his ideas become clear: at that point his desire to transpose them faithfully onto the canvas becomes so clear and compelling that painting becomes joy itself.”

Botero’s 1999 painting, “The Death of Pablo Escobar”, a mafioso interpretation of Chagall’s “Fidler on the Roof”, was an attempt to capture the violence that the drug kingpin brought to Columbia and the world. Standing atop Columbian society, Escobar was laid low by his chosen swordian method of rule: bullets. The artist’s son Juan Carlos Botero states that his father wanted to reflect on the magnitude of the tragedy that Escobar’s actions meant for Columbia, but he also magnified the beast in the man, reminding the world that Columbia and Escobar were once synonymous. A cruel man ruling over a dysfunctional society that he created.

Source: Botero by Rudy Chiappini, 2015. Graphic: The Death of Pablo Escobar by Botero, 1999.

Paris in the Evening

31 March 2025 By in Art, Art Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, born in 1864, was a unique figure among French nobility and artists. Despite his diminutive stature and aristocratic lineage tracing back to Charlemagne, Lautrec defied conventional expectations with his eccentric, mischievous character, and individualistic style. While influenced by the Impressionists, exemplified by masters like Monet and Degas, he later embraced the Post-Impressionist movement alongside Gauguin and Cézanne, leaving a distinctive mark on the art world. Post-Impressionists diverged from their predecessors by infusing their work with deeper emotion, personal experiences, and greater individualism. Their bold brushwork, exaggerated colors, and unconventional techniques laid the groundwork for the future, anticipating Expressionism.

Parisian nightlife was a cornerstone of Lautrec’s art, and At the Moulin Rouge: The Dance stands as his most famous painting, portraying fashionable society and featuring many of his friends and family in a composition of overlapping planes with a perspective that subtly defies reality and logic. The artwork is divided into three distinct planes. The static background features figures such as Lautrec’s father, the poet Yeats, and Jane Avril, a renowned can-can dancer nicknamed “Crazy Jane,” who was both a close friend of Lautrec and a frequent model. In the center, the action unfolds as Valentin le Désossé, a gentleman in a top hat, instructs a cabaret dancer in new steps. The foreground is a detailed study of a contrasting passivity from the central swirl. The viewer’s eye swings between the galloping dancer in earthy tones accented by orange stockings and the quiet, introspective woman in pink.

Lautrec intentionally distorted the painting’s perspective, evident in the mismatched linear lines of the floorboards and fluid, swaying shadows that resemble a confused liquid more than lighting effects. These artistic choices enhance the surreal atmosphere of the scene, amplifying the contrast between the hyper-dynamic dancer and the passive, tranquil surroundings. Through At the Moulin Rouge: The Dance, Lautrec masterfully evokes the opposing vibrant activity and a ‘to be seen’ spirits of Parisian nightlife, providing a vivid outline while inviting viewers to interpret the finer details themselves.

Source: Toulouse-Lautrec by Doughlas Cooper, 1982. Graphic: At the Moulin Rouge: The Dance, Toulouse-Lautrec, 1890. Philadelphia Museum of Art. Public Domain.

Chagall and Expressionism

24 March 2025 By in Art, Art, Biography Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment

Art critic Raimond Cogniat described Marc Chagall as an artist of opposites, a painter who thrived in the interplay of form and color, color and meaning. Chagall infused his paintings with love and happiness, crafting worlds that felt both fantastical and deeply alive. He shaped reality from his feelings, “making it conform to his inner spiritual logic,” even if, as he once confessed, he wasn’t entirely conscious of his process.

Born Moishe Shagal in 1887 in Vitebsk (now Belarus), Chagall grew up in a Jewish enclave within the Russian Empire. He later embraced France as his adoptive home, blending his Eastern European roots with French artistic flair. Though he briefly explored Cubism during its peak in the early 20th century, he thankfully abandoned that style to carve his own path as an expressionist. Vivid, otherworldly colors, and exaggerated forms defined his style, while his Jewish heritage, evident in depictions of shtetl life, fiddlers, and biblical scenes, remained his anchor. His 1912–1913 painting The Fiddler is said to have inspired the title of the musical Fiddler on the Roof.

In a 1963 speech to an American audience, Chagall reflected on his philosophy: “Any moral crisis is a crisis of color, texture, blood and the elements, of speech, vibration, etc.—the materials with which art, like life, is constructed. Even when mountains of color are piled on a canvas, if one can discern no single object even through great sound and vibration, this will not necessarily give authenticity.” To Chagall, authenticity was more than paint; it demanded the infusion of human experience, blood, and the essence of nature.

Source: Chagall by Raimond Cogniat, translated by Ann Ross, 1977. Graphic: The Fiddler, Chagall, 1912-1913. Public Domain

Light, Color, Sisley

17 March 2025 By in Art, Art Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Great art is the interpretation of great beauty. Art without aesthetic is something rawer, more fleeting, an attempt to conjure emotions that challenge the intellect but not necessarily feed the soul. Picasso and Pollock jolted the mind, often with a visceral, nihilistic force. Alfred Sisley, though, honored the soul, developing and refining an impressionistic palette of light and color on landscapes that captured nature’s beauty and humanity’s place in it throughout his career.

Alfred Sisley was born in Paris in 1839 to a prosperous English expatriate family. At 20, in 1859, he left for London to study business, prepping to succeed his aging father, then 58. But over four years there, he skipped lectures, haunting museums instead, captivated by art. Back in Paris by 1862, his parents relented, letting him trade commerce for canvas. Soon after, he met Monet, Renoir, and Bazille, and together they took to painting ‘en plein air’, in the open air, chasing light, color, and atmosphere over precision. From these outings, Impressionism took root.

Sisley found inspiration and tranquility in the rural Seine Valley, just tens of miles from Paris, where he painted some of his most enduring landscapes. In The Terrace at Saint-Germain, Spring (1875), near his home, he bathes the valley in a tender, radiant light, blending nature and humanity into a soul-soothing vista. His works, unwavering in their beauty, stand as a testament to art’s power to nourish the spirit, a tribute to life’s grace.

Source: Sisley by Cogniat, translated by Sachs, 1979. Graphic: The Terrace at Saint-Germain, Spring by Sisley, 1875. Walters Art Museum, Baltimore.