Hi,
Last week I had two medical procedures, which I’m happy to say produced expected results, that is, nothing has changed since the previous time I’ve undergone them. So as to be allowed in the clinic I had to have the COVID-19 test. I walked up to 77th Street and stood outside of Northwell Hospital; we weren’t admitted in until they were ready to give us the test. The entire process took about an hour and fifteen minutes. Unfortunately 45 minutes of that was standing outside in the heat, which I guess is better than standing outside during a hurricane which would have been the case the next day. Although not by much. As I waited on line in the direct sunlight and 90 degree heat and looked at the other people on line, several of whom were elderly like me, it occurred to me it would have made more sense to either offer appointments or make a waiting space available inside the hospital. After the walk and the wait I confess when I sat down inside I felt every bit the old man I am. I was surprised that when I finally got inside they didn't take my temperature and didn't ask for any identification other than the script from the doctor. The test is unpleasant but quick and they only went up one nostril which was fine with me. I was told we'd have the results in 24-36 hours which turned out to be the case. And I discovered that they didn’t ask for any identification as there is no charge for the test. And I tested negative, which I’ve been accused of being for years.
When I had my physical last month, the EKG in the doctor's office showed an “atrioventricular block and premature atrial contraction.” The doctor told me not to worry, which I always say is easy for him to say. I looked it up and it didn’t indicate anything to be concerned about. Then when I was in the clinic they did another EKG and it showed the same results so he recommended I go see my cardiologist and I have an appointment with him on Wednesday. One of the things about aging is you visit your doctors and more often than not there’s something to discuss whereas when you’re young you visit your doctor and when he’s done all he says is see you next year. But as I intend to continue aging for as long as possible I will do what the doctor recommends.
I’m looking forward to the reopening of the Met, which is scheduled for August 29th, but I haven’t decided exactly when I’ll visit. I’m wondering if it will initially be very crowded with all the people who missed it or if attendance will be sparse as people wait for the vaccine. I also wonder how timed admission will work although I’m guessing it will be like what I experienced at the supermarket. I was looking forward to this exhibit when it was first announced and there’s plenty in it that will be enjoyable. I wonder if there will be things that aren’t usually on display. I have notes on my calendar for the latest rotation of the drawing corridor and the Chinese exhibit and I wonder if they will be installed. Of course, I probably won’t be able to tell if the Chinese has been rotated as I won’t remember what was up when I was last there.
‘This Has Made Us Reflect on Who We Are’: The Met Celebrates Its Anniversary With a Sweeping Exhibition Surveying 150 Years of Its History
https://news.artnet.com/exhibitions/the-met-150th-anniversary-exhibition-1899587Since I mentioned memory, here’s a three minute video about senior citizen’s memory sung by Tom Rush. I have to laugh if I don’t want to cry.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yN-6PbqAPMThis article on “mansplaining” reminds me of a story about the making of the movie Judgment at Nuremburg, which was about the trial of the Nazi Generals and government officials during the second world war.
Judy Garland and Montgomery Clift became close friends during filming. Clift hung around an extra week after his scene was completed, so he was able to sit in the corner and watch Garland do her scenes. (It also greatly inflated his "expenses only" agreement). As she broke down on the stand, he wept openly. When she finished her take, he went over to Stanley Kramer, his eyes and cheeks still wet with tears, and said, "You know, she did that scene all wrong."
She Explains ‘Mansplaining’ With Help From 17th-Century Art
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/10/books/nicole-tersigni-men-to-avoid-in-art-and-life.html?action=click&module=Editors%20Picks&pgtype=Homepage Nice introduction to women Impressionists in the article below; you may be unfamiliar with some of them as I was. I hadn't heard of Marie Bracquemond before reading this.
The Women of Impressionism: Berthe Morisot, Mary Cassatt, and Other Pioneering Figures Who Shaped the Movement
https://www.artnews.com/art-news/artists/who-are-the-most-important-female-impressionist-artists-1202695284/ Here’s are two short videos from the Frick; the first on one of my favorite paintings and the second on a household employee of the family. This second video shows scenes of the house while the Frick’s were living in it. I look forward to finally seeing the second floor of the Frick when it reopens after renovations in 2023. To me, 2023 sounds even more like a date out of Buck Rogers than 2021. Where’s my hover car?
Comtesse d'Haussonville | What's Her Story?
https://www.frick.org/interact/miniseries/whats_her_story/comtesse_dhaussonville What's Her Story: Ruth Berlin
https://youtu.be/bBR0r7jiy94 Here's an article on another of my favorite paintings, Renoir's, Luncheon of the Boating Party. This resides at the Phillips museum in Washington D.C. It's a very large painting and hangs on one wall in a square room. I remember my brother telling me about what to expect when we visited and I saw it for the first time. He led me into the room and had me turn to face it and it just fills your vision. As it says in the article Duncan Phillips spent a fortune for it and he was up against Albert C. Barnes who wanted it for his collection and eventual museum. Having lost it to Phillips Barnes was invited to see it. Upon seeing it Barnes said to Phillips, this the only one you got? To which Phillips replied, it's the only one I need. A great comeback. The article told me something very surprising that I didn't know, Renoir had hurt his arm and painted it with his other hand. Earlier this year I saw an exhibition at the Cavalier Gallery of contemporary artist David Peikon, who paints in a representational style, and in his biography it said he experienced the same thing. He injured himself and had to paint with the other hand. Like Renoir it wasn't noticeable. Two remarkable artists.
Renoir’s ‘Luncheon of the Boating Party’ Captures the Height of Summer Leisure. Here Are 3 Things You Might Not Know About the Impressionist Icon
https://tinyurl.com/y2pxmpx6 This is an absolutely wonderful little slide show about Hokusai’s woodblock print, “Ejiri in Suruga Province,” the 10th image in his renowned cycle “Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji.” He speaks of the influences on Hokusai and how Hokusai then influenced the French Impressionists. Many wonderful illustrations.
A Picture of Change for a World in Constant Motion
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/08/07/arts/design/hokusai-fuji.html This is a short video about an exhibition at the Royal Academy of the Arts in the U.K. that I would love to see.
Inside the exhibition: Gauguin and the Impressionists
https://youtu.be/4SrNLsyliZg And, here’s an exhibition I would also truly love to see, Titian, Guercino, Guido Reni, Vermeer, Rembrandt, Van Dyck, Rubens, Jan Steen, Claude and Canaletto. I wish it would travel. The second link shows a number of the paintings.
Buckingham Palace art collection to go on gallery display for the first time
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2020/aug/16/buckingham-palace-art-collection-gallery-display-first-time https://www.rct.uk/collection/themes/exhibitions/masterpieces-from-buckingham-palace/the-queens-gallery-buckingham/the-exhibition This is another video from the Met with a curator discussing one of their great paintings, in this case, The Harvesters by Pieter Bruegel the Elder.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8k7fOXlVxwY&feature=youtu.be In the Washington Post, Sebastian Smee writes about some of his favorite paintings. The Post has a pay wall which sometimes is in effect and other times isn’t, randomly it appears. So I can link to the first article but I’ve copied the second. In the first article he discusses Monet’s, La Grenouillère at the Met. It’s arguably one of the first Impressionist paintings and Smee describes it thusly, “To our eyes, the image looks reposeful, soothing, sedate, like the opening of a Merchant Ivory film. It was actually a cesspool of sex and vice.” So we’re actually viewing a 19th Century Sin City. The second article is about Jean-Étienne Liotard’s pastel portrait of Maria Frederike van Reede-Athlone at Seven Years of Age. I love Liotard and this is a wonderful painting. I’ve linked to the image.
Broken brushstrokes
https://tinyurl.com/yxlf65kd Jean Etienne Liotard - Portrait of Maria Frederike van Reede-Athlone at Seven Years of Age
https://shop.getty.edu/products/pc-liotard-portrait-of-maria-frederike-at-age-seven Washington Post
Beauty in blue
Jean-Étienne Liotard brought the medium of pastel to a level of rare perfection with his portrait of a 7-year-old girl
By Sebastian Smee July 29, 2020
Every 7-year-old looks beautiful to eyes past a certain age. So it’s hard to say whether this 18th-century portrait by Jean-Étienne Liotard is of a particularly lovely 7-year-old or whether it’s just a particularly lovely picture. I’m going with the latter. Anyone can see it: The level of artistry is astonishing.
The medium is not paint but pastel, which Liotard (1702-1789) came as close as anyone to perfecting. Pastel is powdery and sensitive to light, so for its own good, this portrait spends a lot of time in storage. But I’ve noticed that when I visit the Getty and it’s on display, it’s always surrounded by sighing admirers.
Liotard died the year the French Revolution broke out. He spent his peak years flitting around Europe fulfilling portrait commissions for the royal families, popes, cardinals and aristocrats.
The son of a jeweler, Liotard grew up in the proudly independent city-state of Geneva, where he trained as a miniaturist. He was a contemporary of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and, like the great philosopher, moved from Geneva to Paris, where he studied portraiture.
In 1738, Liotard traveled to Constantinople (Istanbul). He stayed there for four years, perfecting his pastel technique with pictures of local domestic scenes. When he came back, he kept an eccentrically full beard and continued wearing Turkish clothing, earning him the nickname “the Turkish painter.” He made portraits of subjects including his Dutch wife and Rousseau in “exotic” Eastern costumes at a time when fashion was regarded as an integral aspect of good portraiture.
At some point, Liotard also developed an intense love of the color blue. All of his best pictures hinge, chromatically, on pure shades that hover somewhere between sky and royal blue. Here, Maria Frederike wears a rich blue cape with a white fur trim. Slightly lighter hues of the same color can be found in her hair ribbons, her dress, the collar of the little dog she cradles like a doll and her eyes.
Up close, you can see how Liotard used both the texture of the vellum surface and the opaque, subtly layered and slightly granular pastel to imitate the look of skin, with its pores and shadows and highlights. The delicate striations of diagonal highlights on the girl’s rosy right cheek give it a palpable luster. And the set of the child’s lips against her skin is realized so sensitively that you cannot conceive that so much soft, dimpled vitality depends for its underlying structure on something as ghastly as a skull.
Notice, above all, her eyes. They seem to have noticed something, and to react with a kind of tender calm, verging on disinterested amusement. Few things are as moving as youthful self-possession. Meanwhile, the little dog — possibly a Japanese Chin? (I defer to the dog experts) — stares out of the picture with doggy bemusement.
And now a few Flickrs.
Andy G.
Jeanne Lazareva
https://www.flickr.com/photos/jeannelazareva/49627403881/sheerness
https://www.flickr.com/photos/nylonlynn/49690398327/IMG_7460
https://www.flickr.com/photos/elliekent/49641151938/A curtsey for my friends and of course my girlfriend.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/cindyhants/48544738686/20160326_25
https://www.flickr.com/photos/sissymaidjoslyn/25454631744/
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