Art Blog - Art In History

The other day a member asked me how she could get more visitors to notice her gallery among the multitude on the site. I gave her several suggestions, including sending people to your gallery through other media such as Facebook, blogging about it, or using key descriptive words in your text. Another way is to have a niche, a little corner of the art scene which, when a viewer is looking for it, they will find only a handful artists who qualify. If you are an Equestrian painter, or a painter of infant portraits, your chances are vastly improved… Continue reading… 4 comments

I have discovered over the years that one of the things that turns me on most in my visual environment is accidental composition: the unplanned conjunction of elements into a grouping that has balance, energy and meaning. I find this in nature in abundance, but also in the works of man gathered together at random, or changed by alterations or decay over time. What results is composition which takes me beyond the familiar rules into new possibilities. Historically, I find this same fascination in Impressionists like Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec. With the aid of candid photography, which created arbitrary slices of the world, they revolutionized the way artists could think about composition in painting… Continue reading… 2 comments

Photos courtesy of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum website. I am writing today to talk about one of my all time favorite museums: The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. I am also writing in defense of the personal museum, as contrasted to the "scientific" museum which has been the model for the last 100 years. For me, the richness of the total experience in a personal museum outweighs the disadvantage of not seeing all works in a neutral setting and perfect light. The Gardner museum is a recreated Venetian Renaissance palace, built by Isabella to evoke the Barberi Palace in Venice, which she leased for her trips there, and designed to display her personal collection of art… Continue reading… 2 comments

In each of the previous posts I have asked the question "What challenge did this artist set himself that sets his work beyond good to great?". Not all my favorite artists have such an ambitious enterprise, but I will show one more; Michelangelo. For me, the remarkable thing about his work is how often he rose above crippling external limitations and turned them into glorious oportunities. The "David" is an excellent example, especially if we accept the story about its creation. According to contemporary sources, a truley magnificent block of Carrara marble, intended for another sculptor, was tragically damaged in transit, with a chunk broken off in the middle almost to the center of the block… Continue reading… 3 comments

Once again, I would like to talk about an entirely different kind of patron: an Institution as patron of architects. Yale University is not alone its its enlightened approach to patronage, but it may be the first and most influential. Beginning in the 1950's, if not before, Yale made a conscious decision to take advantage of its unique position as an initiator of major architectural projects to further the careers of the best, but not best known, architects of the period. The first and arguably most significant of these choices was to hire Louis Kahn to design its new gallery and visual arts building. Completed in 1953, this was the first major commission for an extroardinary architect whose ideas had heretofore been known primarily through his writing and teaching… Continue reading… 1 comment

Architectural spaces are a special subset of the spatial realm which comprises our environment. They are by definition human-centered, created by humans for human purposes. Whether strictly utilitarian or primarily symbolic, they give order and definition to the space they enclose, and are a fundamental way in which we make sense out of our relationship to the universe. This is true of the real spaces we build, but also of the spaces described by artists in their paintings. When an artist creates a space on his canvas, he intends you to inhabit it in your imagination. By making the space comfortable and familiar, or alternately strange and forbidding, he can create a visceral response which draws on our long experience of inhabiting spaces… Continue reading… 0 comments