Is This the Missing Half of the Most Controversial Painting Ever?

If any painting could be labeled “not safe for work,” it’s Gustave Courbet’s 1866 L'Origine du monde (in English, The Origin of the World; and, once again, NSFW). Banned even from Facebook, proving that prudery’s alive and well in the 21^st century, Courbet’s graphically realistic painting of a woman’s nude torso went unseen by the public until 1988 and didn’t enter a museum collection until the Musée d'Orsay accepted it 7 years later. An article in Paris Match (available only in French) reports that a painting has been found that is the “lost” upper half of the painting (shown above), which shows the face of the model of the infamous work. Courbet experts argue over whether or not this really is part of the original L’Origine, but if it is, what does that discovery mean for that painting and for how we see (or don’t get to see) what has become the most controversial painting ever? Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Is This the Missing Half of the MostControversial Painting Ever?"

Special Forces: Is Specialization Killing Art Today?

The 18^th century French Neoclassical painter Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres played the violin well enough to hold his own with “Sold His Soul to the Devil” good musicians such as Niccolò Paganini and Franz Liszt. Ingres took that intimate knowledge of music to add a different kind of beauty to works such as The Turkish Bath (from 1862; shown above). That little piece of trivia came to mind as I read an interview with The Moderna Museet’s new director, Daniel Birnbaum, in the October 2010 issue of The Art Newspaper. “Specialization is a problem of our time,” Birnbaum complained in response to a question regarding his interest in literature and philosophy as well as art. “There are many artists who work in different fields. A big museum such as the Moderna can tear down the walls between art and literature, for example, and I want to try such things.” What is the cost of specialization today, when art schools prepare artists who may know the techniques of their discipline but little else? How do we get back to the “good old days” of Ingres? Have artists today sold their souls to art schools at the risk of never being “true” artists? Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Special Forces."

Monster Mash: Picasso Meets Degas at the Clark

Growing up, I spent many a rainy or wintry Saturday afternoon watching classic old horror films such as Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man or Dracula Vs. Frankenstein. It always seemed that one monster inevitably ran into another. Modern museum blockbuster exhibitions often have the same feel as they try to pit one monster talent versus another in their galleries. For example, in 2003, the MoMA’s Matisse Picasso squared off the two modern heavyweights so closely even the “versus” was superfluous. The Philadelphia Museum of Art’s current show Late Renoir could easily be retitled Renoir Meets Matisse or Renoir Vs. Picasso. Pablo Picasso enters the art history ring again in the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute’s Picasso Looks at Degas, the first exhibition to pair those two artists and study the latter’s influence on the former. This monster mash of influence and difference illuminates both artists in a fresh way that’s downright scary. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Monster Mash."

[Image: The Blue Room (The Tub), 1901, by Pablo Picasso. Oil on canvas, 50.5 x 61.6 cm. The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. Acquired 1927 (1554). © 2010 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.]

[Many thanks to the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute for providing me with the image above from and a review copy of the catalogue to Picasso Looks at Degas, which runs through September 12, 2010.]

Print the Legend: “Painting History: Delaroche and Lady Jane Grey” at the NGA, London

In the classic Western film The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, James Stewart’s character confesses that he wasn’t a hero only to hear the newspaper man he’s confessed to respond, "This is the west, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend." When Lady Jane Grey met her end on the executioner’s block in 1554 after once serving for nine days as the Queen of England, the facts of her death soon became a legend of martyrdom. Nearly three centuries later, French artist Paul Delaroche revisited the legend in his 1833 painting The Execution of Lady Jane Grey (pictured), which became the sensation of the 1834 Salon exhibition. In Painting History: Delaroche and Lady Jane Grey, the National Gallery of Art in London reexamines that moment in history when a French artist used the legend of an English monarch to say something both about art and about French society in the nineteenth century. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Print the Legend."

[Image: Paul Delaroche, The Execution of Lady Jane Grey, 1833. Oil on canvas © The National Gallery, London.]

[Many thanks to the National Gallery of Art in London for providing me with the image above and other press materials for Painting History: Delaroche and Lady Jane Grey, which runs through May 23.]