skip to main |
skip to sidebar
“My beard points to heaven, and I feel the nape of my neck on my hump,” Michelangelo wrote in a poem about his experience painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. “I bend my breast like a harpy’s, and, with nonstop dripping from above, my brush makes my face a richly decorated floor.” To accompany that poem, the artist sketched himself at work, stretching up to apply paint to the freshly applied plaster (detail shown above). In Michelangelo: A Life on Paper, Leonard Barkan, a professor of comparative literature at Princeton University, examines how Michelangelo—best known for timeless works chiseled from stone or painted on architectural surfaces—revealed his deepest self on that most fragile of media, paper. By following Michelangelo’s paper trail, Barkan discovers a more versatile artist of both pictures and words who seems more human and strikingly more modern than the Renaissance genius of legend. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Paper Trail."
[Many thanks to Princeton University Press for providing me with a review copy of Leonard Barkan’s Michelangelo: A Life on Paper.]
The art collecting world remains as much about collecting name cache as it does about collecting art. Becoming a trusted dealer and banking on that brand name allows you to build your bank account. It’s that seemingly unbreakable circle of influence that makes the recent L’affaire Guy Wildenstein in Paris all the more scandalous and troubling for art collectors and art lovers. Wildenstein, an international dealer in Old Master and Impressionist art for decades, stands accused of stealing valuable art works from the estates of dead customers entrusted to his care. The French government seized a room full of works believed to have been seized unlawfully by Wildenstein. Mix in the fact that Wildenstein is a major contributor and “bon ami” of French President Nicolas Sarkozy and you have the makings of a major scandal of international proportions that leaves not just Wildenstein’s estate and his victims’ estates unsettled, but shakes the foundation of art dealing to its very core. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Estate Unsettlement."
For a country that created a special holiday just to remember those who have fought for our freedoms in war, we do a lot of forgetting the rest of the year. 2011 marks the sesquicentennial of the beginning of the American Civil War in 1861. As a recent article by Helen Stoilas and Javier Pes in The Art Newspaper points out, whereas the bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln’s birth in 2009 spawned a slew of special museum exhibitions across the country, this year’s special event has inspired not a single major exhibition in the United States for 2011. What does it say about the American psyche and, perhaps more importantly, how culture-shapers perceive that mindset that the Civil War remains a taboo topic? Are we still fighting that war on some level? What kind of civil action—or cultural civil action—will it take to end the Civil War so that we can remember it? Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Civil Action."
One of the true joys of the internet is that you can do pretty much anything (even blog) from the comfort of your own bedroom (maybe even in your pajamas). That convenience and access keep us searching for newer devices to keep us online wherever we go. Up to now, virtual museum-going seemed a hit-or-miss proposition. An institution here or there would go out on a limb and put their content on a platform. Some museums sought online life through existing forums such as Second Life. Google, however, has taken virtual museum-going to a new level with Google Art Project, a consortium of 17 museums around the world sharing not only gigapixel versions of works in their collections, but also allowing you to “stroll” virtually through their galleries. Finally, you can examine Vincent van Gogh’s 1888 Bedroom in Arles, housed in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, from the comfort of your own bedroom, anywhere. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "From Your Bedroom."
