"Modern Art" finally exposed to be the fraud that it is!

Art Renewal ^ | June 7 2001(2?) | by Fred Ross

[LarryLied]

So when are you going to restore your profile to its former glory?

[weegee]

Picasso had a better scam than that...

He reportedly would write cheap checks for all sorts of purchases ($3-10) with the general belief that those checks would never be cashed, some of the recipients would opt to keep the checks so that they would have a Picasso autograph.

[weegee]

Arthur Sarnoff, Norman Rockwell, and NC Wyeth all associated together. Wyeth is taken to be the "highest" artist of the bunch, some critics find Rockwell to be sappy and too commercial. Sarnoff worked everything from pulps and pinups to the Saturday Evening Post, to portraits (including one of JFK), to dog playing poker!

There are some real good books on illustration art of the late 19th century through the 20th century.

[weegee]

Here is Houston is a great free art museum, the Menil Collection. It houses possibly the largest private collections of Rene Magritte and Max Ernst (they bought directly from the artists, more suprising because initially they did not even like Ernst's work). Their collection is so extensive that it is never completely on display and a number of the works are loaned for touring shows.

Rene Magritte

Their collection extends into some areas though that just don't impress me. At the lowest ebb is the entire building dedicated to the work of Cy Twombly. It's a nice building but all it houses are chalk boards full of chalk scribbles!

Cy Twombly

They also have 2 churches established on their grounds. One houses a ceiling that was restored from a Byzentine church I believe, the other houses a series of black canvases painted by Mark Rothko. Some people swear that there are images in the underpaint of the Rothko paintings but maybe it's like those 3-D posters where you have to look at it just right.

[hellinahandcart]

When I finally knuckle down and hunt out a new free photo-hosting service. :D

[vannrox]

To all, I see points on both sides. Personally, I prefer anything that I find beautiful and which also provokes thought and emotion. By my own personal feelings this is art.


Here are some links to "Modern Art" is the museums have paid thousands and in some cases millions of dollars for. Apparently they feel that these works are comparable or even superior to the Classics.


Cold Mountain and (Bridge)


In the late 1980s Brice Marden began a series of large-scale paintings that featured sinuous webs of interconnected lines. This series, titled Cold Mountain, was a radical departure from the smaller canvases layered with waxy color that had defined the artist's work for more than two decades.

A book of Chinese poetry inspired the Cold Mountain paintings. Marden laid out the six paintings according to the graphic layout used in the poems. He then began to selectively rub out and repaint lines in order to enmesh the lines and have them recede into space. Although this painting looks very different from Marden's early work, his use of line calls attention to the importance of layering present in all phases of his work. Submerging and emerging lines record the interplay of layers that defines his painterly style.
No. 14, 1960
You might find the writing opinion rather interesting...

Mark Rothko's passion as an artist was to explore the intellectual and abstract potentials of painting. No. 14, 1960 is a mature, masterful work that poetically achieves Rothko's intention to create a spiritual art. As eloquently stated by John Graham in 1937, "The purpose of art in particular is to re-establish a lost contact with the un-conscious . . . and to keep and develop this contact in order to bring to the conscious mind the throbbing events of the unconscious mind." Rothko's early experiments with abstraction, whether influenced by automatism, archaic art, symbolism, or anthropomorphism, ultimately sought to capture this spiritual dimension. By the 1950s and 1960s, pure color and a sense of light became Rothko's vocabulary to express his inner perceptions and to engage the viewer's unconscious responses.

Rothko's genius in the use of color as form, and his ability to hold on a single plane colors that advance and retreat, are amply demonstrated in this work. Rothko soaked paint into the canvas, resulting in a subtle diffusion that is similar to the feathery effect of watercolor. The orange form in No. 14,1960 is a velvety mixture of light and heavy strokes of paint, and this layering effect creates the luminous quality of the color. The rich warm brown in the background is a more solid paint application that envelops or cradles the more airy orange form. The blue form is a vibrant contrast to the orange, creating a sense of energy or tension where the two colors engage each other across the horizontal band of brown.



Zim Zum l
In the decade after World War II, Barnett Newman (1905-1970) emerged as one of the leading abstract expressionist artists. Known primarily as a painter, Newman was also deeply interested in sculpture and architecture. Zim Zum Iis a large-scale, fully experiential sculpture that has its parallel in the abstract expressionist artist's large-scale. Like those wall-sized works, Zim Zum Iinvites direct participation, or even communion. Purchased directly from the estate of the artist, Zim Zum Iis the last great sculpture completed by Newman during his lifetime. The piece has been on extended loan to the Tate Gallery in London.

Composed of two walls, each of which is constructed of six Cor-ten steel plates, Zim Zum Itakes the form of a corridor that the viewer can walk both through and around. Each of the walls zig-zags at right angles, creating (if seen from above) a series of equal-sized sqare spaces through which the viewer passes. Newman had been exploring the notion zig-zagged walls since the early 1950s, when he conceived of an architectural setting for showing paintings in which each work would hang on a solid wall that was lit by a second wall of solid glass set at ninety degrees from the first. In 1963, Newman incorporated zig-zag walls into an architectural model for a synagogue.

Zim Zum Iwas originally made for an international group exhibition at the Hakone Museum in Japan. Its scale was influenced by the maximum size of what could be accommodated as ship cargo from New York to Japan. Newman's original design for the piece called for a scale approximately fifty percent larger than that of Zim Zum I. The larger version of the piece, which became known as Zim Zum II,was completed posthumously in 1985 to the artist's original specifications.

Zim Zum Ijoins two other works by Newman in the SFMOMA permanent collection. Untitled(Number 3) from 1949 -- a small, early oil painting bearing horizontal stripes--was given to the Museum by the artist's widow, Annalee Newman in 1996. The collection also contains the acrylic painting Untitled,from 1970, a fractional gift of Mrs. Paul L. Wattis that was the last canvas Newman completed before his death the same year.

[AnAmericanMother]

eddie, thanx for the help. (And thanks for putting up that lovely NC Wyeth Maine picture.) My objections to Frazetta have to do with his anatomical knowledge. His big muscle-bound guys cross the line of the improbable (the thigh muscles are often out of drawing or out of proportion to the development on the rest of the body, and you KNOW that the pillagers did a lot of walking and heavy lifting, dragging all those poor girls around by their hair!) and his ladies . . . well, he hasn't any more idea how a woman is put together than Michelangelo did in his sculpture of "Night" for the Medici Chapel! Without being too, ahem, explicit, they have the same problem with not knowing how certain portions of a lady's upper anatomy are attached to her chest muscles . . . they're not just stuck on there with super glue (or at least they shouldn't be :-D ) (Some, however, have advanced the theory that "Night"'s model was suffering from breast disease . . . and I haven't looked at that many undraped females by Michelangelo.) There's also something funny about the way Frazetta handles the insertion of the thigh muscle into the pelvis on his women. Do you know if Frazetta works from live models or out of his head? I'm a great believer in George Stubbs's theory (and da Vinci's), that knowing how the insides are put together is absolutely essential to painting the outsides.

pepsi, I'm with you on Norman Rockwell (there are so MANY good artists that I'm sure I missed a few . . . I just saw the thread and started typing.) I saw the Rockwell exhibit when it toured to Atlanta. If all you've ever seen are the magazine reproductions, look at the originals if you get a chance! He was a very, very accomplished artist and his magazine covers were just a small portion of his output. The occasional sentimentality and the lack of subtle color and detail were the result of his clients' demands (and even the great Renaissance masters had to put up with the demands of their clients -- they paid the bills!) The "Girl in the Mirror" was in the exhibit, and the original is breathtaking.

[AnAmericanMother]

Oh, and mentioning Michelangelo reminded me of something . . . did you know that Norman Rockwell based the torso and limbs of his "Rosie the Riveter" on Michelangelo's "Prophet Isaiah" from the Sistine Chapel? Talk about homage to a master!

[socal_parrot]

Ah, the classics.

[AnAmericanMother]

Like this:

Kinda neat, isn't it?

[AnAmericanMother]

. . . or not.

Is there any thread around here where the inept can practice posting jpgs? (sorry!)

[ConvictHitlery]

Art, abstract: product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled, to the utterly bewildered.

[vannrox]

If the picture is already on the Internet do this...

This technique is called Linking or Blogging

1. Locate the Picture that you want to post. (This will be on another web site.)

2. Now move your mouse cursor over the picture.

3. Make a RIGHT click. (Most of use do LEFT clicks only. But if you make a RIGHT click a menu will appear. You want access to that menu.)

3. On the menu that appears should be a term called "Properties".

4. Click on PROPERTIES.

5. A different window will appear. This will consist of all the properties of the picture that you are interested in.

6. The following information should be displayed:
..........Protocol
..........Type
..........Address(URL)
..........Size
..........Dimensions

7. Highlight the value that is given as the "Address(URL)". ANd do a copy. Note. Make sure that you get the entire long URL in. I hasve sometimes missed the front half or the end, so be careful.

8. Now when you post a message place this text in the message:
img src="" border=1

9. Make sure that you enclose it with <> . OK?

10. Finally PASTE the URL that you copied and put it in between the IMG SRC="", the "". OK?

Good Luck.

[AnAmericanMother]

Thank you! Thank you!

Some of us are happy to be dragged kicking and screaming into the computer age . . . we're just not very good at it, that's all. I will gather my courage and try again!

[pepsi_junkie]

The jpg has to be online somewhere, let's say it is at http://wwww.example.com/NotReal.jpg, then all you have to do is type the following, eclosed in"< >" brackets instead of the "[ ]" ones:

[img src="http://wwww.example.com/NotReal.jpg"]

That's all there is to it. I didnt do it directly in my post because the pix were kinda big and I didnt want to bog down the bandwidth for people unless they were motivated to click the link.

[AnAmericanMother]

OK, let's try this again . . . :-D

[AnAmericanMother]

Dang. Looks like it worked. Thank you VERY much!

[vannrox]

Thank you very very VERY much for your link to Bud Plant's web site. AWESOME. I have an old old catalog. I could spend a life time looking at all the fine work there. Thanx. BUD PLANT

[vannrox]

CROSS REFERENCING to Same Post on "NEWS" portion Forum on Free Republic. Interesting comments there as well. This post is on "General Interest" Forum.

CROSS REFERENCE LINK

[evilC]

To vannroxs's answer I will add:

It can be helpful to add the image height and width as well. This allows the browser to set aside space for the picture before it is downloaded.

Without this the browser may have to wait for the picture to finish downloading before it can display the page. With it, the browser can display a "placeholder" and download the text surrounding the picture making the page appear more quickly for people with slow connections.

The final tag would look like this
<img src="url" height="image height" width="image width">

In the right-click menu, the dimensions are given as width x height (I think).

Also, always include the http://

You can practice posting pictures in the HTML sandbox