La Lecture by Pablo Picasso

La Lecture by Pablo Picasso

Background story: 

It was completed by Picasso in January 1932 in time for his exhibition at the Kunsthaus in Zurich,  entitled Picasso by Picasso: His first Museum Exhibition 1932, and is a portrait of his muse, Marie-Thérèse Walter, who it is said transformed the life of this great Modernist artist. This painting was among a series from the beginning of 1932, which introduced this young woman as an extraordinary presence in Picasso’s life and his art.

The story goes that the then forty five year old artist introduced himself to the seventeen year old girl outside a Paris Metro station.  On recounting the tale of the meeting, Marie-Thérèse said she remembered Picasso’s words as they came face to face:

“…I knew nothing – either of life or of Picasso… I had gone to do some shopping at the Galeries Lafayette, and Picasso saw me leaving the Metro. He simply took me by the arm and said, ‘I am Picasso! You and I are going to do great things together’…

 La Lecture belonged to a group of paintings, painted by Picasso in January 1932 in anticipation of the major retrospective he was planning that June.  Today’s painting is Picasso’s depiction of Marie-Therese and it was the first time that she had appeared in one of his works.  Earlier paintings of his showed her features implanted discreetly in the background and it was this unconcealed portrayal of his mistress which led his wife to realise that there was another woman in her husband’s life.

Picasso’s lover and muse’s potent mix of physical attractiveness and at the same time her sexual naivety had an intoxicating effect on him and his rapturous desire for her brought about a number of compositions that are amongst the most sought after of his long career.  In 1935, Marie Thérèse Walter had a daughter with Picasso, Maria de la Concepión, called Maya.  Sadly for Maria-Thérèse, a year later in 1936, Picasso switched his affections to a new love, Dora Maar a woman he met when he was painting Guernica.  Marie-Thérèse left Picasso and took their daughter to live in Paris. 

source: http://mydailyartdisplay.wordpress.com/2011/02/02/la-lecture-by-pablo-picasso/

*wing of dove-peace and love

Heart-shaped face

Double portrait! Marie-Thérèse's face and she and Picasso are kissing

Yayoi Kusama’s ‘Dots Obsession'

Yayoi Kusama’s ‘Dots Obsession'

 Dotted Pumpkin 2011, reflection is presented in two modes: formally, in the continuity of the balloons’ red-and-white polka-dot pattern on the gallery walls, floor and ceiling, and in the infinite effect created by floor-to-ceiling mirrors. Both installations incorporate the viewer as a crucial element.

Dots Obsession visually approximates the hallucinations Kusama reportedly suffered as a child, in which the entirety of her surrounding space was covered with repeating patterns. The installation also reveals the artist’s careful attention to the construction of space through colour and form, and to the play of light and perspective accomplished by repeating a few simple devices — creating an immersive experience from red paint, white dots, giant balloons and strategically placed mirrors.

 Kusama’s art shows her long-term fascination with organic repetitive patterns, vigorous and psychedelic colours, reflection, electric lights, and infinite space. Her vibrant, fascinating, magical work has an almost hallucinatory intensity.

*Fact, She lived voluntarily in psychiatric institution in order to hv a better understanding of psychology and inner visions!
The dots have therapeutic and overwhelming effect!
Offers the audiences a sense of floating and a vision of other worldiness

Julie Mehretu: Empirical Construction, Istanbul

Julie Mehretu: Empirical Construction, Istanbul, 2003

I am so happy that I have seen her latest work in Kassel:)

There are many layers of symbols and representational elements and different perspectives---bursting city!

Julie Mehretu makes large-scale, gestural paintings that are built up through layers of acrylic paint on canvas overlaid with mark-making using pencil, pen, ink and thick streams of paint. Mehretu’s work conveys a layering and compression of time, space and place and a collapse of art historical references, from the dynamism of the Italian Futurists and the geometric abstraction of Malevich to the enveloping scale of Abstract Expressionist colour field painting. In her highly worked paintings, Mehretu creates new narratives using abstracted images of cities, histories, wars and geographies with a frenetic mark making that for the artist becomes a way of signifying social agency as well suggesting an unravelling of a personal biography.

Mehretu’s points of departure are architecture and the city, particularly the accelerated, compressed and densely populated urban environments of the 21st Century. Her canvases overlay different architectural features such as columns, façades and porticoes with different geographical schema such as charts, building plans and city maps and architectural renderings, seen from different perspectives, at once aerial, cross-section and isometric. Her paintings present a tornado of visual incident where gridded cities become fluid and flattened, like many layers of urban graffiti. Mehretu has described her rich canvases as ‘story maps of no location’, seeing them as pictures into an imagined, rather than actual reality. Through its cacophony of marks, her work seems to represent the speed of the modern city depicted, conversely, with the time-aged materials of pencil and paint.

The Snail Henri Matisse

The Snail, Henri Matisse



Happiness, Enthusiasm for life!
Balance of composition and the harmony of colours

Matisse told André Verdet (pp.64-5), 'I first of all drew the snail from nature, holding it. I became aware of an unrolling, I found an image in my mind purified of the shell, then I took the scissors'. He has combined pairs of complementary colours - red/green, orange/blue, yellow/mauve - to create a particularly vibrant effect. He gave the picture the alternative title La Composition Chromatique[Chromatic Composition].

Untitled-Robert Gober

2.Untitled-Robert Gober 1990

It reminds me of  René Magritte

In 1989, Gober began what would become a series of disembodied partial limbs with Untitled (Leg). The wax “amputation” is a cast of the artist's own leg, embedded with human hairs and dressed with a man's shoe, sock, and partial trouser. The body fragment speaks of absence, of detachment, of loss; the object is loaded with all that is not there. Gober did not place the limb on a pedestal; rather it was installed as if emerging from the gallery wall, describing an uneasy balance between interior and exterior states. Gober's disembodied limbs and appendages imply a psychological fracture. Julia Kristeva writes that in a state of abjection, borders between object and subject cannot be maintained.3 Rooted within the tradition of Freud's uncanny,Untitled Leg is difficult and unsettling because it provokes a reaction in which there is a hesitation in recognising the object as animate or inanimate.

The mundane,fragmented and displaced objects--increasing fascinating and repulsive
It is interesting to note that a simple object can generate issues e.g. isolation, mortality, victimization and vulnerability

We can always find meanings on familiar things:)

Why Your Five Year Old Could Not Have Done That: Modern Art Explained

I found this book in the public library!
I find the title of the book quite fascinating coz ppl usually said that a 5 year old kid could draw sth as Picasso.

Some modern art pieces that I find interesting and connections with the art pieces I have seen last year in the Documenta 13

1. Hannah Höch, Cut With The Kitchen Knife Through The Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany (1919-1920), 


CUT WITH THE KITCHEN KNIFE includes more than 150 illustrations of works Hoch created during 1918-1933, the Weimar years. Hoch assembled her montages by selecting photographs of women from illustrated print sources and juxtaposing them with fragments of scenes from Weimar and German colonial society. Readers will be intrigued by the surprising even shocking compositions which combine the pleasure of viewing mass media images with critical, even destructive feelings about the subject matter. 
It is the largest and most overtly political of Höch’s photomontages. Yet both its scale and “content” were alien to her sensibility. Most of the collages are small—“intimate” is not an inappropriate word—and without the vitriol typical of Berlin Dada. A German critic described the photomontages as being “skeptical in an almost tender way” and this seems about right. For Höch never took great interest in expounding an anti-art agenda.

I rmb:geoffrey farmer leaves of grass 2012

The work features a great number of figures cut out from the pages of Life magazine that have been mounted on dried-grass sticks.
Wt Geogreffy said: 
 I think there are many things that are going on in this piece and I hope people get a sense of that. In one of the last issues of Life, I found a small image of Susan Sontag’s book On Photography. It is about one centimetre by one centimetre. It appears at the very end of the piece, next to a tiny Lady Diana. I think, in some ways, the piece is dedicated to Sontag and to her writing. Not to say there is a warning there, but perhaps there is.

I am not really conceptual. I don’t think up a concept and then execute it. I learn through discovery and from direct contact with the material I am using. Even though the work might emanate out of an idea or interest and may have a horizon, I don’t really know exactly what I am doing

Bernard Buffet: New York

It is a city of geometric heights, a petrified desert of grids and lattices, an inferno of greenish abstraction under a flat sky, a real Metropolis from which man is absent by his very accumulation; the implicit morality of our new Greuze is that we are distinctly happier in Belleville than in Manhatten.
This is a folklore New York rather like Bizet's Spain or the Italy of the Theatre Mogador: an exoticism which confirms the Frenchman in the excellence of his habitat.

According to Buffet, the architecture of this city is uniformly longiform and quadrangular. Here the grid reigns under its most ill-favoured aspect: the contour, this black line which encloses everything, obviously intends to expel man from the city. 

By obsessively multiplying the window, by inlaying it with black, Buffet empties it, destroys it, makes the living edifice into a dead surface, as if number, unless it is swarming, must fatally establish an abstract order.

To paint New York from above, at the top, is to rely once again on the first spiritualist myth, i.e. that geometry kills man. In his way, Buffet follows in the wake of our venerable moralists, for whom the refrigerator is antipathetic to the soul. 
The intentional desolation of his New York-what can it mean except that it is bad for man to live in groups, that number kills the spirit, that too many bathrooms are harmful to the spiritual health of a nation, that a world is too 'modern' is a sinister world, that we are bored when we are comfortable, in short according to the most reactionary remark of human history, the alibi of all exploitations, that 'money doesn't make happiness?' It is not New York which is terrible, it is work. 

Roland Barthes: Buffet Finishes off New York