At what age do you think it is that birthdays bring with them more than the pleasant promises of cake, ice-cream, balloons, bouncy castles and lots of presents? When does that nasty aftertaste take hold, the one that reminds you that yes, there might be friends, family and fabulous festivity, but they all come with a little label in clear handwriting: hip hip hooray! you are a year older! I reckon it might be right around the time you’re already allowed to do everything legally, so no need to nick another notch into your personal timeline.

Well, if there ever was a painting (or, rather, series of paintings) that does away with any allure in ageing, I’ve found it at the NGA. In fact, there’s no getting away from them, hung as they are just of the East Garden Court in a small square room, one picture per wall. Welcome to the story of your life, dear reader, recounted in slightly terrifying terms. The Voyage of Life (1842) is a famed four-part series by the American painter Thomas Cole, following a man (everyman, I suppose) along the river of life. So far so cheesy. But if you think this is an all’s well that ends well tale, then sit tight.

We begin with Childhood (seen at the top), in which a bouncing babe sits flinging his arms up towards a pretty pastel sky. His wooden boat is whittled with wonderful carvings, while lush and opulent plant life explodes both in his barge and along the banks of the river. The water is calm and he’s overlooked by a lovely-looking angel figure. Next comes Youth. Here our man is seen striving to take hold of his destiny: he’s alone in his boat and reaches a wedding-cake-like-looking castle in the sky, emblematic of all the things one wishes for when young (a boyfriend, a girlfriend, fame, fortune, a fast car, a fabulous dress). All still looks to be under control, though is that the angel leaving his side? And I’m sure there were more flowers in amongst all those leaves before…

On to the next and it’s Manhood now. The traveller is still mostly on track, though it does look a little like things have taken a turn for the worse. The stream has deviated and is directing us towards some turbulent, rapid-like reaches. The boat looks less sturdy, rocks abound and there’s nought but a gnarled, leafless tree off to the right. And as for the angel? Still there, but sitting on a cloud now. Very far away.

Old Age couldn’t come quick enough after all that, and thank goodness things have settled slightly. The man is white-haired and weathered but there’s calm and a come-hither call from up above. Oh wait, from heaven.

Thomas Cole (1801 – 1848) was born and brought up in the industrialized north of England before emigrating to the US at age 17 with his family. He’s famed for his landscapes of American wildernesses as well as two series of allegorical paintings, including The Voyage of life. Whether we read into this a Christian doctrine or a personification of America itself, it’s an unsettling sort of thing to look at. I find myself thinking about which picture most applies to my stage in life. Surely it can’t be all doom and gloom in the middle years of one’s earthly tenure? A state only abated by the onset of old age? If that’s the case Cole, then thanks for the warning. I’m putting the kibosh on birthdays for me, from here on in.

Happy Birthday Husband, for tomorrow. And also B, H and YO. Join my birthday embargo, if you like…

From body image yesterday to body language today. I do like a bit of body language analysis (shamefully to the occasional point of encouraging Husband to “walk in step with me” so that, should we ever be snapped for a b-language shot, we’ll be read as “in-step and in-tune with one another”). I know, I need help.

Our subject here is Boris Johnson (Mayor of London) interacting with Tracey Emin (contemporary artist). Of this picture, UK body language expert Judi James said this in the Mail on Sunday: “In an era in which politicians turn themselves inside out to produce the perfect sound-bite, reverting to the kind of naturalistic gesticulating and posing you’d see on your average Thunderbirds puppet between takes, Boris shines as a beacon of unfettered individuality.”

Clearly, Boris is about as far from polished politician mould as he can get: kooky look, double-trouble pose with Tracey, crushed suit and a funny way of strapping his hands across his belly (as if to keep them out of trouble). All of it adds up to an unlikely image for someone with such a lot of power, but therein lies his engaging genius. As James says: “When we see a bumbling exterior our brains disregard the obvious and deduce the opposite – that the man is a cerebral giant.” Which makes me wonder all the more about today’s painting, The Emperor Napoleon in His Study at the Tuileries (1812) by Jacques-Louis David (1748 – 1825). I introduced David yesterday as the leading artist of the Neoclassical movement in France and today we’ll take a closer look at his bespoke blend of antique elements and air of stern morality and heroic sacrifice.

Napoleon Bonaparte was the emperor of France in the early 1800s and David was his favorite artist. In this work, the man stands more than 5.5 feet tall – that’s close to life size – so we can have a good go at goggling him at close quarters. The face tells us instantly that he needs to shave, and to run a comb through his hair. And the clothes tell us that he’s a trooper as well as an emperor. David is intending us to see this as a spontaneous snap-shot (see the rumpled carpet underfoot, as if he’s just pushed back his chair?). But this is no photo-op: there were no photos. Rather, it’s a pic packed packed with evidence of careful planning and contrived posturing. So let’s see what these two want us to see. He’s the main military man: legion of honor medal on his chest (awarded to himself, naturally), and a sword set on his chair.

He’s a clever law-giver: scroll on desk reveals the letters CODE (Napoleon’s code became the basis for French law), and he also holds a seal for documents in his left hand.

He’s better than Caesar: Plutarch’s Lives (on the likes of Julius Caesar and Hannibal) sits at Napoleon’s feet at the bottom of his desk) and he’s been burning the midnight oil for France: the clock says 4.13, the candles are all-but burned out, and there are bees (read industriousness) sewn into the fabric of the chair.

So how does does this level of contrivance make us see him? Do David’s codes and clues lead to the notion of Napoleon that he intends? The brilliance of Boris is that his pose is unplanned, so that the bumbling naturally intimates a big brain. But in this heavily nuanced portrait, is it artifice or the actual man? Boris’s wayward thatch of candy-floss hair is actually like that, all the time. Would we say the same for Napoleon’s oh-so-carefully unkempt crop?

I do like to look on as female politicians plan a strategy for gaining women’s support. Sure enough, one of the oft-opted-for procedures is to criticize size-zero models, as if a remark that digs into the skinny ribs of undernourished actress-model-whatever types will secure solidarity in the female voting ranks. In England, one such now wading into the weight debate is Equalities Minister Lynne Featherstone, who recently announced a ‘body-confidence summit’ to discuss skinny celebrities. Hers is a familiar refrain: skin-tight stars make us sad and hack at our self-esteem, so she feels we women need more curvy role models. She picks out and praises Mad Men’s Christina Hendricks as absolutely fabulous.

Now, I’m all for a bit more meat on our role models’ bones but don’t you too find Featherstone’s stance just a pinch patronizing? As if we don’t understand the sacrifices and dangers thinner celebrities expose themselves to, to look the way they do. Further, I think Lynne has overlooked an important thing: Hendricks’s bombshell figure, all super-shapely hourglass and killer cleavage balanced atop slim pins and elegant ankles is about as unachievable for most of us as a catwalk stalker’s. For me, Featherstone might find more fortifying poster girls at the NGA, where there is a freer, less forced feting of the female form, in all its shapes (tall or small) and sizes (big or small). Just look at Ingres, whose velvety, voluptuous Madame Moitessier lifts and nips the curvilinear character of one female form into a life-size celebration of womanly beauty.

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780 – 1867) found fame as a champion of the classical tradition in France. He trained briefly with David (the leading artist of the Neoclassical movement in France) and topped that off with nearly twenty years in Italy. In a long and successful career, Ingres stuck to his principles of classical art: they play out here in this portrait of Madame Moitessier (daughter of a wealthy government official) who stands grandly before us in three-quarter length. There’s evidence of detailed draughtsmanship underpinning the picture and see the painter’s preference for the highly finished surface. Ingres famously stated that a paint surface should be as smooth as “the skin of an onion” and I can only imagine he ate some super slick onions in his time because I can detect nary a single brushstroke on this painting.

These are things that make him classical and academic as an artist. But they don’t cover the thing that we’re here for today, which is the deliciousness of the image. That comes in part from the burgundy background standing stunning against her creamy skin. It’s also in the symmetry of her simplified features, ringed-around by roses. Mostly though this portrait wins power and presence through the artist’s belief that line is of utmost importance. It’s line that snakes sinuously into her waist, and slopes over her shoulders. Line marks out the measure of her forearm and the implied incline of her behind.

Ingres used line to carefully caress form into fulness and the result is beautiful. With him, there are no thoughts of the size of her thighs or the cup of her cleavage, only marvel at the methods of presentation and transformation. Every inch of skin is treasured and tweaked into shaded softness, all draped in an evening dress that’s trimmed with lace and decorated with jewels. So I suppose it’s really what you do with whatever you’ve got that counts: the clothes, the carriage (and maybe the color of the wall behind you).

I promise I’ll stop talking about our London trip after this, but I do think one last pop appropriate. Because it’s there I was treated to Oliver Twist the musical. As soon as we three settled in our seats, and the minute the first beats beat their way up to the gods, we were flung into a rollicking Dickensian saga.

The story of orphan Oliver is in the marrow of most people’s bones, so I’m not going to narrate it here. But there is an aspect of the tale that transfixed me (along with the song that came with it). It’s at the point where Oliver wakes in the home of Mr Brownlow to the calls of street vendors, and puts out a gut-wrenching call for someone to “box up” the morning for him, forever, so sure as he is that all this goodness will fade for him before too long. Here’s Who Will Buy from the 1968:

I ran with this this morning for a couple of reasons. One being that it’s Labor Day in the States, which means no laboring today! Instead it means lie-ins, lazing and a whole lot of “what shall we do today?” I’m betting a lot of Labor Day fans (there are always those odd ones who prefer to be at work) will, like Oliver, be wishing (though perhaps not warbling) that this morning can be bought, boxed up and broken out whenever, forever.

The second spur was the fact I had a total Who Will Buy morning yesterday, with Husband in the Cunningham Falls and the Catoctin mountains. Now I’m not sure where the enchanted creek and magical woodland we wandered through featured in between those two places, but I do know that we were instantly wrapped up in the wonder of nature in a way I want to relive again and again.

Rather than try to tell you what it was like, I’ll use this Wooded Landscape (1663) by one Meindert Hobbema (1638 – 1709) to try to translate the experience. Hobbema was a Dutch landscape painter who lived in the great Dutch age of landscapes. Born and then based in Amsterdam, he was a friend and the only documented pupil of Jacob van Ruisdael (regarded as the greatest of all Dutch landscape artists), though he did develop a distinct style. Hobbema’s masterpiece, The Avenue, Middelharnis (1689 at the National Gallery, London) is the thing he’s essentially known for now, what with its powerfully simple composition and its celebrated central perspective scheme:

While I’m ready to admit that this work is not as unforgettable at that work (which some would cite as the most memorable of all Dutch landscapes), our Wooded Landscape does have all the halcyon hallmarks of a Hobbema composition: a woods and a winding road, a walker or two (other works might have a mill or water).

But you know why it’s really great? Because it manages somehow to tap into and take me back to the tingling magic of our own woodland walk yesterday: the serenity of the setting, the leaf-laden trees, the clumps and tufts of diverse undergrowth. The clarity of that sunlight that cuts through and illuminates patches and pieces. I’m certain if I peered close enough I’d spy a scattering of browning acorns, a thatch of fallen branches and a trail of toadstools and mushrooms too. In short, this Hobbema completely captures the look and feel of our own hobble through the woods one morning. So it looks like Oliver and I both got our wish.

On our recent trip to the UK, I became obsessed (quite suddenly, en route to the airport) with the thought of an English Tea. It’s all MB’s fault: as I flicked through a Tea Time baking feature in the magazine she writes for, I came across Victoria sponge, scones and a sticky ginger ring. So you see, with the taste buds thus tantalized, the trip to England would have been a dead-beat, dead-loss without some proper Tea taking.

Let’s get this straight. I’m not talking a cup of earl grey sipped at breakfast, or a mug of builder’s brew slurped in an afternoon slump. No, not the ticket. I wanted English High Tea, with small sandwiches (cucumber and crustless, of course), cake, cream, jam and pots and cups of steaming tea. As the excellent AA Milne once said: “A Proper Tea is much nicer than a Very Nearly Tea, which is one you forget about afterwards.”

Once there, we bee-lined Amberley, for there can be no forgetting this enchanted village in West Sussex with a ticks-all-the-boxes Tea Room at its heart. Here, in a quaint building that oozes charm, everything is home-baked; scones, breads and stands crammed with cake (carrot, coffee, chocolate) and biscuits. Locally roasted coffee, or (for the purists) tea, comes served in great big mugs made by the village potter. We love the owner and are huge fans of her eclectic pets that plop patiently on the floor by the wood burning stove.

Now. I can find no better way to toast a great Tea than John Frederick Peto’s Old Kettle. I did try to find another painting, because you see, we’ve looked at Peto prior to this: he was with us on Jan 29 (buns and tea cup), and on Jun 11 (kipper and kettle). But honestly, can we resist a man who cooks up such rustic and relishable treats? Peto (1854 – 1907) was a painter of trompe l’oeil still-life. He was born in Philadelphia, where there was a still-life tradition established by the Peale family (July 10): he was influenced by Harnett (June 3) and the realism of Eakins (January 19).

In the case of this Old Kettle (c. 1890s) we have what can best be described as a modest picture: small, painted in oil on wood and with mussed-up edges. There are those that point at Peto as an example for how not to do still-life: un-elegant, un-glossed, un-convincing. But frankly I hanker after his homely paintings: I love the long lean matchstick sitting on the ledge, the green-tinged copper on the inside of the lid and the dents that tell of clumsiness or age. All in all, Peto is particularly good at making me feel a certain way: it might not be high-brow, it might not even be brilliant, but it sure does stir up a lovely brew of memories and atmosphere.

In this case he’s got me thinking along the lines of a good cuppa, conviviality and some big old sponge-cake, all teetering and lathered with cream and jam. As one wise man once said “Tea is drunk to forget the din of the world” and I couldn’t agree more: it’s civil and peaceful to sink into a seat and sip and nibble in the late afternoon. And to think Peto’s little picture, with its old kinked kettle, could steep such strong impressions.

Let me tell you about this painting. It’s called Cattleya Orchid and Three Hummingbirds and I’ve had my eye on it since I started this mad caper called Art 2010. What’s not to love about this painting? You want steamy, dreamy atmosphere? You got it. Partial to pretty, exotic plants? No problem. Interesting botanical growths? In spades. Beautiful, long-tailed, whip-winged birds? Three, no less.

So you can see I was sold from the start: all I needed was the perfect prompt to parlay this picture into a winning post. Hmm… So first I thought I’d go the way of the cake, and link to London’s phenomenal Hummingbird Bakery. The name, of course, makes the connection. And then I thought I might discuss buttercream and cake crumb alongside this sweet, sugary confection of a painting (“Hummingbird Bakery is a sweet tooth’s delight” runs the Gwyneth Paltrow quote on the cover of their cookbook). But at some point I ruled the connection too strained for consideration, and with so many of you lovely readers having never hovered at the Hummingbird counter or hoovered up three cupcakes in one sitting, I thought the link might get a little lost.

So next I opted for the orchid angle and searched for some sort of orchid holiday (are you starting to see how I work at these things?) Well, from here on in I waded into an (at times) unnerving pool of orchid enthusiasts. I didn’t find a day but uncovered a month: April is national (in the States, I suppose) orchid month. Rats, missed that.

So thank goodness for National Hummingbird Day folks, as it has offered up my third (and finally successful) go at heave-ho-ing Heade’s gorgeous Cattleya Orchid and Three Hummingbirds into Art 2010. I read (admittedly only in one place, on one site) that National Hummingbird Day is always the 1st Saturday in September. It works for me, so here we are: happy hummingbird day!

What more pleasant way could there be to honor and celebrate this unique birdie than with this densely detailed and deliciously colored painting? Let’s look at the man behind the magic. Martin Johnson Heade (an American, 1819 – 1904) started out painting portraits (stiff ones) but moved onto landscapes in the 1850s (two European trips in the 1830s and 40s softened and refined his style). By the 1860s he had started incorporating still-life elements. In 1863 Heade made the first of three trips to South America, where his artist friend Frederic Edwin Church urged him to paint lush large-scale views. But Heade headed instead for smaller, less trumpeted treasures and started on a series of small works – eventually numbering over 40 – depicting hummingbirds (he imagined a book titled The Gems of Brazil, but it was never published). Heade returned to the tropics twice after that: in 1866 he went to Nicaragua, and in 1870 to Colombia, Panama and Jamaica, all the places behind his plush pictures of plants paired with birds.

This is so treat-filled: a dense dream-like mist cloaks the distant jungle; twisted tendrils of moss and lichen drip from the tree and that punchy pink orchid dances and dominates in the foreground. To the right perch the birds (one flits, two sit) around a scraggly nest loaded with little white eggs. What I like about Heade is the sheer, sexy life of it all – no dry scientific study this, it’s a lush and lovely look at nature at its most buxom and bursting. It’s a heady recipe of still-life and landscape, shot through with lots of sweet nectar. To me it all looks good enough to eat: perhaps the cake comparison wouldn’t have been too bad after all.

Art 2010 followers! A super special video today, to present an exciting new initiative! Head for Art tours are, as of this moment, up and running! Watch this week’s promotional video (shot in DC and Rome, no less) to find out more about what we can offer by way of beautiful, bespoke cultural travel experiences. And be sure to click on the new “On Tour” tab on our main menu in the next few days. Bon Voyage!

As I exited the immense IMAX cinema in the Natural History Museum recently (having just seen The Wildest Dream: Conquest of Everest) I was left with one line ringing in my ears: “because it’s there.” The film follows climbers Conrad Anker and Leo Houlding as they summit Everest. Anker in particular comes across as a man possessed: even as he attempts to free-climb the “second step” (a protruding ridge-like rock that bulges just before the tip of the Mount) he’s mimicking and imagining another climber. Either he’s addled by altitude sickness or he’s totally engaged with the spirit of one George Mallory. I’m thinking the latter is more likely. Let me explain…

British George Mallory was obsessed with becoming the first person to conquer the untouched Mount Everest. He was last seen 800 feet below the summit in 1924, before the clouds rolled in and he disappeared into legend. His death stunned the world. Fast-forward 75 years and it’s American Anker who comes across Mallory’s frozen body and his belongings on the mountainside. The only thing missing is a photo of Mallory’s wife Ruth, which he had promised to place on the summit.

As Anker and Houlding press up the mountain with their padded suits and efficient equipment, it’s staggering to think what Mallory attempted in the 20s. His words “because it’s there” (given in response to a journalist asking him “why try?”) reveals something of the deep-seated sense of challenge and obsession that haunted him.

Today’s painting is no Everest, but it does seize some of man’s fixed gaze on far-off mountains, some of the quality of our fascination and fear with such monolithic mass. Lake Lucerne (1858) is by Albert Bierstadt, a Romantic landscape painter born in Germany but moved to Massachusetts aged three. One big thing with Bierstadt is his mix of Germanic style with American subjects and approach: so for example when Bierstadt went back to Germany to study in the 1850s, he spent his time with American artists based there.

This view sees him on the verge of a great discovery: in 1859 he’d embark on his first visit to the western US, where he’d drink his fill of the stunning scenery and start to churn out large-scale views that’d make him popular from the 1860s. But this is before all that, back in Europe, at Lake Lucerne, in central Switzerland: it is the most important work of his early career, based on on-site sketches.

If ever there was a picture that could suck you in, this is it. First up, the detail is entrancing: sharp as a pin and photographic with clarity. That wending road on the left just seems to usher us into the view… There are pastoral patches here and there: a traveller’s camp to the left, a harvest happening in the centre. But really this is all about mountain magnitude and might: see those peaks soaring, scaling skywards, right off the water’s edge.

When he’d finished Lake Lucerne, Bierstadt sent it to New York, for the annual exhibition at the National Academy of Design. It caused a sensation and started his star trajectory. In subsequent works that sealed his success, Bierstadt focussed on the American west, looking especially at the Rocky Mountains. But you know the funny thing? All those later paintings still tap into his early, European mountain impressions. Just the composition and look of most them hark back to peaks like the ones in this painting. Just one more man who couldn’t get a mountain off his mind.

TC and L… Pots of luck for your trek to the Base Camp of Everest. We’ll be thinking of you and can’t wait to hear the stories and see the photos on your return! Eat your granola bars guys!

Oh my! The claws were out in ferocious force last week when I was in England. During my trip, a very odd thing happened, that was caught on CCTV and then posted online. I wonder whether the “Cat Woman” scandal has slipped across to the States though, so just in case, I’ll fill you in. Mary Bale is a greying, unmarried, 45-year-old bank cashier from Coventry who once sang in a church choir. So far, so spinster. But this isn’t the proverbial tale of a lonely lady living with lots of cats for company, all wee on her carpets and scratched-up furniture. On the contrary, Bale is being lambasted as a new national hate figure for trashing a tabby cat called Lola: she put it in a wheelie bin, where it was trapped for 15 hours. See the disturbing footage for yourselves:

This trapped-tabbycat tale is going to need two paintings for proper pondering. First we’re with the Russian-born Mark Rothko (1903 – 1970) and an early work by him called Woman and Cat (1933). It’s such an exciting painting, because it shows us Rothko right after he started painting (in 1926), before he was seduced by Surrealist idiom and much before the thing we now know him for, those huge abstract pictures of horizontal bands of color with muzzy edges. So this pic paints a picture of what people are citing as the dark and deranged side of Cat Woman. I’d say it is very expressionist, and I think what’s being expressed is the woman’s distress. Her colors incline to the dark and dank and the rough features of her face fall into a closed-off, consternated look. She’s alone (Bale is a “reclusive and solitary figure” according to her neighbours) and raises her arms in what might be self-defense or fear (people talk about Bale being frustrated and powerless in her life). It all feels so uneasy: Rothko radiates repression and rancor. On top of that the gloom-addled interior (dark floor, murky walls, all rendered with fat, angry strokes) reflect Cat Woman’s current confinement: Facebook hate groups were mobilised in moments and she has a police guard outside her house, after death threats started coming in. Bale is off work too, due to stress, and may be prosecuted by the RSPCA (Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals).

But now from one tail to another, and something a little lighter from Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841 – 1919). This is his Woman with a Cat (c. 1875) an altogether more tame take on human-animal relations. Who doesn’t adore a bit of Renoir, the artist so famed for his brushy, lushy scenes of French life? This picture catches him on the cusp of the big time, already showing the softness of stroke and the delicacy of color that would seal his fortune. Renoir said, “… it is not enough for a painter to be a clever craftsman; he must love to caress his canvas too…” and here he does just that, across the skin and hair of the woman and over the tufty fur of the animal. I selected this to consider another side of Bale, the side that says she’s a cat lover who once even owned one as a pet. “I cannot explain why I did this” she has said: “it is completely out of character and I certainly did not intend to cause any distress to Lola.” It’s all very weird and frankly unfathomable. But for now, if we can judge by the creamy whip of Rothko’s cat and the contented face of Renoir’s feline, Lola the little kitty is the one who will come out of all this unscathed.

A huge hello to all my new friends at The Ensworth School in Nashville: great to have you join Art 2010. If there’s anything you would like me to write about, let me know!

I was just in London and found time for Trafalgar Square, to see what was sitting on top of the famous Fourth Plinth. In recent years this erstwhile empty pedestal (it was made in the 1840s to exhibit an equestrian statue that was never completed) has played host to works by Marc Quinn (Alison Lapper Pregnant, 2005), Thomas Schütte (Model for a Hotel, 2007) and Anthony Gormley (One and Other, 2009, in which members of the public ‘became’ the art work by booking hour-long sessions on the Plinth).

2010 has seen another sea change with the current Plinth commission, which is called Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle. It’s a model of HMS Victory, Admiral Horatio Nelson’s flagship at the Battle of Trafalgar, by British artist Yinka Shonibare: it is the first Fourth Plinth piece to tap into the historical currents of its context. 15 ft long and 8 ft tall, the bottle (with giant cork) was made by aquarium specialists in Rome. Best of all, the ship’s sails are all stitched from opulently patterned fabrics associated with African dress, because the artist wants to stress ties between the birth of the British Empire and Britain’s present-day multicultural context (he himself is of Nigerian descent).

Just behind Shinobare’s ship sits another that played a “most noble and distinguished part” in the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805: this is JMW Turner’s Fighting Temeraire, in London’s National Gallery and voted the UK’s most popular painting in 2005. The painting shows the Temeraire (which means “fearless”) a 98-gun man-of-war that came to Nelson’s aid when his flagship came under fire, being tugged to dock at the close of its career. This is the London Turner:

So today I’m turning from one Turner treasure to another, that’s closer to hand here in DC: the picture at the top is Keelmen Heaving in Coals by Moonlight (1835). This is not the bog-standard snap-shot of the slog of the industrial revolution that the title might suggest, no sir. Instead, under Turner’s touch, a night-time of toil is transformed into an addictive vision of lush loveliness.

From somewhat hairy beginnings (he was the son of a London barber), Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775 – 1851) grew into the most original and imaginative figure in the history of English landscape painting. Let’s look at what we love about him. First up the composition,  in an of itself a revelation. The water channel is clustered either side with ships, rigging and distant factories, leaving an enormous space for a stunning sky to bounce in a barrel vault from left to right. And what a sky, guys. Turner was taken, nay preoccupied, with how to capture the effects of light. So here I think he started with a series of thin glazes (like varnishes) and then piled onto these thicker (impasto) layers. This is turbo-charged Turner moonlight: great gluts of bright white and crusted pigment make almost-palpable the glittering light of night.

At the sides then, the keelmen and their squat solid vessels, the silhouettes of the ships and the distant shore-line seem almost eaten by the licking flicking flames and the surrounding smudgy smokes and watery vapors. There’s a delicious sense of insubstantiality that’s typical of Turner at his most Romantic. Instead of a crisp and clean-cut impression of the men and machinations that make possible the conveying of coal from the north down the Tyne in keels and sailing ships, we’re thrust into a timeless landscape of nature and human-nature, working with and against one another. It’s as relevant today as it ever was. And he didn’t even need a bottle to keep it fresh.

Recently, with my youngest brother in tow, I visited the Air and Space Museum on the Mall. It’s part of the Smithsonian Institution and is, I believe, DC’s most popular museum, explored by over 10 million visitors each year. As you approach it, the soaring architecture of the building (designed by Hellmuth, Obata and Kassabaum) sets the tone for an air-space experience of the most mighty kind. A total of 23 galleries display 240 aircraft, 50 missiles, a planetarium and a theater with a five-story screen. There are balloons and space capsules of aviation and space flight.

You need to brace yourself for this place. That many million a year do not a calm and serene visit make: you’ll be squashed and squeezed at various points (oh the irony, in a “space” museum). But if you can stand the hubbub and keep concentration amidst thronging crowds, you’ll lay eyes on some hot historic chattels. Like the plane that Charles Lindbergh first flew solo across the Atlantic in 1927 and the earliest plane by Orville and Wilbur Wright.

Taking us into space today is Moon (1935), an image instantly alluring for its oddity and beauty. It’s by the American Arthur Dove (1882 – 1946), who worked as a newspaper illustrator before moving to Paris in 1907, where he exhibited his Fauvist paintings at the Salon des Indépendants (1908 – 09). Once back in the US, he bought a ramshackle Connecticut farmstead and immersed himself in nature. Nature is of profound import for this artist, who’d look to the forms and feelings he found there for guidance. Moon was made during a time that Dove spent in his family home in Geneva, New York: it was a productive period, in which he sought to refocus his attention on oil: “to let go of everything and just try to make oil painting beautiful in itself with no further wish.”

So here we have an ultra simple composition, made up of a sphere that seems attached to a base by a brown trunk. It’s a tree covering a shining full moon. But before you say it looks nothing like that, consider that he’s pioneering abstraction here (in fact, Dove’s earliest abstract works date as far back as 1910). His abstract forms are mostly drawn from natural forms, which he’d simplify down to an essential-ness (he called them his “extractions”).

I like here the earth-bound colors (brown and green) that range from pale and muddied to dark and shining. The brush marks are measured, short and thin, layered up over one another so that the image is invested with a supernatural radiating sense of the intense. It’s impossible not to pick up the reverberations of Dove’s excitement – euphoria even – in the midst of nature and, specifically in this case, beneath the moon. It’s a marveling awe-filled stance he takes: there’s that beam connecting him to the flat of the land but he seems to be aspiring to and reaching for the heavens. Which brings us back with a bump to the Air and Space and perhaps another angle on man’s obsession with the moon. One of the most-touched and bustled around bits of the museum is the Apollo command module that carried Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong and Michael Collins on their historic mission to the moon in 1969. And as I considered Neil Armstrong’s words at his famous first steps, I found them not so far removed from how Dove described the experience of his moon: “like walking on the bottom under water.”

This time last week Husband and I were at a wedding of dear friends in the UK. Though, instead of focussing fully on the exchange of vows or immersing ourselves in chit-chat with other guests, we found ourselves running through some “moves” in our minds. Even as we ate our delicious dinner, repeats and rhythms danced through and dominated our brains. Let me explain: this is an email we received from the groom ahead of the big day:

“CONFIDENTIAL! Seriously. Not a peep to ANYONE. Not even a hint of a surprise please! We want this to be completely unexpected and unanticipated! We would love you to help us in a bit of fun… We’d like you guys to join us in our first dance! We are going to be dancing a slow dance (for the first bit) and then it will turn into… JAI HO! And we would love you to join us for the Jai Ho for a bit of a laugh.”

Now. Jai Ho is a mystery to me until I click on the video link he’d sent, to then see a slim dance instructor snaking her way through the choreographed dance sequence that appears at the end of the 2008 film Slumdog Millionaire. Yes, that one. Dudes, this dance is no side-step and click situation. Oh no. It’s fast, furious and required much of our flight over to flog the snake-hipped sequences into our less-than-limber minds and bodies.

In the end, it was a blast and sent the evening into overdrive. In fact all our jigging and jerking has reminded me of this energetic Dancing Couple (1663) by Jan Steen. Hailing from Leiden (where I too was born), Steen (1625/26 – 1679) is one of Holland’s most popular painters (along with Rembrandt, Hals and Vermeer). So much so in fact that his name “Steen” has become part of Dutch proverbial language: “a Jan Steen household” refers to a rowdy, chaotic home. He was an inventive, versatile and prolific artist (in all, about 800 paintings are attributed to him) and painted a wide range of subjects, including portraits and historical and mythological works. He’s best known though for the kind of comic scene of contemporary life we are looking at today.

Here we have a couple celebrating a festive occasion, which might be a village kermis (fair) judging by the tents we can see in the background. As they both boogie, musicians play, people eat, drink and smoke. Grown-ups flirt and children are seen playing with toys. Not surprisingly perhaps, Steen himself wanted to be part of all the fun and paints himself into the picture (he’s the man sat at the table to the left, stroking the chin of the woman at the end).

Yet. Despite all the light-heartedness and let-looseness of this scene, there’s a tense undertow to it all. This sort of Steen scene is famed for containing a moral message, brought up in a series of emblematic references. So here, the cut flowers and broken eggshells on the floor, as well as the young boy blowing bubbles on the right have symbolic meanings of waste and transience attached to them. Pleasures on this earth are short-lived Steen seems to say, and he adds the church tower, perhaps as a suggested route to more rooted contentment. Life lessons aside, it’s impossible not to warm to the artist’s ebullient cast of a-tinge-crazed characters. And anyway, everyone knows a bit of dancing never hurt anyone.

Far be it from me to comment on the machinations of love in all its manifestations, but I’m going to venture that we notice, don’t we, when there’s an ill-matched pair. By ill-matched, I might mean decided decades separating the one from the other, or definite discrepancies in levels of beauty. Even pertinent polarisation in intellect or interests. As an example: this summer there’s been much feasting (in photographs) on the (wrinkled) flesh of billionaire Italian tycoon Flavio Briatore (60) and his perter, perkier model wife Elisabetta Gregoraci (30). Across the pond, age is but a concept for contemporary artist Sam Taylor-Wood, who just gave birth to a baby girl by her toy-boy fiancé, actor Aaron Johnson. She’s 43, he’s 20.

And what are we to make of the luminous Cate Blanchett alongside her more ‘homely-looking’ husband? Or the model-turned-author Sophie Dahl, who towers (even when not teetering in heels) over her pint-sized other half Jamie Cullum? Well would you know it, pairing unequal couples has interested menfolk for millennia: the notion has a literary history dating back to Plautus (a 3rd-century BC Roman comic poet), who cautioned old men against courting young women. Fast forward a few hundred years to the late 15th/ early 16th centuries, and the coupling of old men with young women (or vice versa) had become a top theme in northern European art and literature.

Which brings us into the bosom of this itch-inducing painting called Ill-Matched Lovers (c. 1520/ 1525) by Netherlandish artist Quentin Massys (1466 – 1530), leading painter in Antwerp from c.1510 to the end of his career. This pic pushes an unequivocal moral lesson: old age (especially if it’s lecherous) leads to foolishness (spot the fool on the left, an accomplice in the theft of the old man’s purse). There’s also the point that a woman’s allure can cause a man to lose his wits (and wealth).

The image is underwritten by an intricate composition that radiates out from the lady’s contorted, unconventional pose (it takes a moment to untangle the hands and arms and see who’s who). More interest is added in the exceptional faces, especially the one of the old man on the right. That beaky nose, the leering, gaping yellow-toothed mouth and the piggy eyes all send shivers down the spine (precisely the point, presumably). The grotesque, gnarled look of him suggests inspiration at least to an extent from Leonardo da Vinci’s caricature drawings.

Massys then makes a massive contrast with his woman, whose smooth skin, pretty fine features and shining hair provide a pleasing foil to the old man. There’s real pressure in the scene here, enhanced by the uncertainty as to who’s mistreating whom and delineated by the deck of cards, which plays on the idea of competition between the sexes.

The Ill-Matched Lovers is an excellent example of Massys’s ability to assimilate aspects of both northern and Italian art. On the one hand he’s rooted in the northern tradition (those sculptural folds along the man’s left arm feel typically Netherlandish to me), while on the other he’s showing strong influence from Italian Renaissance art (he may have visited the country between 1514 and 1519). The monumentality of the forms for instance speak of a more southern sensibility. So that’s northern and southern styles yolked together in an unlikely artistic union: would we call them an ill-matched pair?

Pop to the shops with Art 2010 in this week’s video and learn a whole new way to pick and choose a prime picture off the shelf.

Check out this week’s video blog. And special thanks to TC for his guest appearance.

Now why didn’t anyone tell me about Shark Week? I missed all the hair-raising and the gut-spilling at the start of August and was totally unaware that the powerful predator was mashing its jaws all over the box. One thing’s for sure: next year I’ll be sitting up front and centre for Discovery Channel’s Shark Week, a long-standing tradition in the broadcaster’s summer schedule (they first ran a full week of shark-devoted shows in 1987). This is a shot of the channel’s Maryland headquarters during this year’s Week, taken by one of my lovely readers:

This year sounds like it was a belter, with a lineup of specials called frightening things like “Ultimate Air Jaws” (filmed with an HD camera that captures 2,000 frames per second, so the action is so slow you can count the shark’s teeth!), “Into the Shark Bite” (cameras make it possible for us to see inside a shark’s jaws), and (my favorite) “Shark Attack Survival Guide.”

Sharks always spark up ridiculous buzz in the TV ratings and it’s not hard to see why: the pulsing predator-ness, the mean-eyed, sharp-toothed look of them. They’ve long conjured up awe and fear in equal measure, which is why, even though it’s not shark season anymore, I’m going to share this amazing painting. It’s called Watson and the Shark (1778) and is by an artist called John Singleton Copley (1738 – 1815). This man was regarded as colonial America’s greatest painter, which is impressive given the fact he was largely self-taught. By the 1760s Copley had established himself as the colonies’ leading portrait painter, making a small fortune and mingling with affluent society.

But what we’re looking at today is not a portrait, no sir. Watson and the Shark is a depiction of an event that took place in Cuba in 1749: a 14-year-old boy called Brook Watson was swimming in the Havana Harbor when he was attacked by a shark. The animal came back repeatedly, first stripping the flesh off Watson’s right leg below the calf, the second time biting off the boy’s right foot.

When this painting showed in the 1778 exhibition at the Royal Academy in London (Copley had settled in England in 1775), it stunned spectators, who’d never seen anything so grisly before. And yet, the use of blood is modest at most (just some traces of it in the water and on the shark’s mouth) and the picture stops and crops at the exact place where Watson’s lost foot would have been. In limiting the guts and the gore, Copley spares his swooning lady spectators, and (after all) he did have to ensure that this would not be censored. Just imagine though how he might have re-painted this, were it for an audience now.

What is utterly gripping about this painting is the way the artist adds cut and thrust to a still image. We read a sense of the forward movement of the boat (into the body of the shark), and there’s the emphatic diagonal of the main rescuer’s spear as he attempts to jab away the attacker. There’s the mighty, meaty sweep of the shark from back right to front right (so colossal is the beast, we’re seeing just its head and tail), and the dipping downward triangle formed by the two men leaning over the boat.

Worst is pale, thrashing Watson in the water: the moment is frozen and we’re left to imagine his fate. Incredibly, he was snatched from the jaws of death and went on to become a successful merchant and politician in England. Wonder if he ever considered appearing in a special on how to survive a vicious shark attack.

I met my first Bart through one of my brothers, who introduced me to the spike-haired, high-voiced cartoon character that’s so ingrained on all brains. My second Bart was a bit of an oddball, a boy in another brother’s class, who I recall once rubbed a burger across his face. Neither of these crazy characters could come close to the big Bart that’s beaming down from the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel: in the titanic scene of the Last Judgement there, St Bartholomew appears perched on a cloud, clasping the loosed husk of his own skin as well as the sharp tip with which it was removed. Michelangelo, the master responsible, painted his self-portrait in the molten pelt.

See what I mean? That Bart is hard to beat, but the NGA is giving him a good run for his money with their Martyrdom of Saint Bartholomew (1634) by the Spanish artist Jusepe de Ribera. This is honestly one of the most breathtaking works I’ve written about thus far on Art 2010, and we’ll look at it today because yesterday was the feast of St Bartholomew.

Let’s start with the man behind the martyrdom. Born to a shoemaker, Ribera (1591 – 1652) settled in Italy at a young age (first sited in Parma in 1611), and then spent most of his career in Naples, where he became the leading artist of his generation. People labelled him Lo Spagnoletto (little Spaniard) after the country of his birth, and it just so happened that at the time Naples was under Spanish rule, so much of his output was shipped off home.

Religious works were a Ribera mainstay, and this subject in particular was popular in the climate of Counter-Reformation Italy and Spain. This shows the final moments before apostle Bartholomew’s death by flaying. We’re literally on Bartholomew’s side, slapped into the heart of the drama as he spread-eagles his arms left and right. Ribera is a master of drama, of scenes of unsubtle forcefulness: let’s take a breath to see how he does it in terms of his style. Basically, this boils down to a blend of sharp Spanish realism and intense chiaroscuro (light/ shade) effects, the latter adopted from Caravaggio. Ribera had been in Rome in 1615, where he came into contact with the Caravaggisti, artists working in the style of Caravaggio (the master himself had died in 1610). So it’s lifelikeness and light that give this picture it’s awesome power: see how crisp, clean light catches the saint’s profile (piercing eyes, jagged nose, open mouth) and how it highlights his petitioning left hand. Light also calls attention to the instruments of imminent torture, which are symbolically held in the shape of the cross.

The gaze, the gestures and the whole feel of this work are infused with Bartholomew’s faith, which is so strong that it seems to transfix the executioner and halt him in his actions. More than that, the killer’s hatched brow and half-lit face hint at incipient doubt, and possible conversion (the light that illuminates both men could be seen as divine resplendence). Unlike a Caravaggio, this work is enlivened across its surface by a variety of brushstrokes and textures, which whip the thing into greater psychological potency. It makes my top ten at the NGA.

Isn’t it interesting that 9% of the US population has a birthday in August? That’s the highest for any month and certainly brings the brain to wonder what was so conducive to baby-making nine months ago. So if August brings lots of new baby bundles, then an article I read recently can be brought into play. It was about a book called Pink Brain, Blue Brain: How Small Differences Grow into Troublesome Gaps – and What We Can Do About It by Lise Eliot, Associate Professor of Neuroscience at the Chicago Medical School.

Eliot had started writing a book about the differences between the brains of boys and girls, but faltered when she found the evidence just wasn’t there. So that project turned into this one, in which she draws on her experiences as a scientist and mother to make a case for the plasticity of young brains. Eliot argues that it’s the way we treat different genders that shapes our expectations of boys and girls. Her advice seems straightforward: short of giving little girls toy guns and dressing boys in pink from birth, the idea is that parents can bring out untraditional strengths in their kids if they so choose. Focus on feelings with a young son for instance, or get him a pet to stir nurturing skills. Get a girl to take more risks and really get stuck into physical play. Basically it seems Eliot’s all about the open mind: just because she’s a girl, doesn’t mean she won’t like trucks and mud. And just because he’s a boy, doesn’t mean he isn’t scared of going down the slide.

Thank goodness that in the case of today’s painting, we shan’t be concerned with gender stereotypes, for in Fragonard’s Visit to the Nursery (c. 1775) there are more important things at play. Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732 – 1806) represents the final, magnificent flourish of the Rococo style in France. Having made his name with history painting in the grand manner in 1765, he abandoned seriousness and turned to more congenial subjects. Indeed today we know him as a typical painter of gallant and sentimental scenes, though this work in fact has Fragonard in more muted voice. First of all we’re not with a frivolous maiden in a frothy dress: here we’re bedside in a domestic interior. The style also stresses a more sober approach: clear and stable composition (with a pyramid form at its center), diluted color-palette and controlled brushwork. Together these all indicate the stricter tastes that were de rigueur in pre-Revolution France.

This sweet-as-peaches scene seems busy celebrating the sound morals of home. Our attention is trained on a familial set-up in which a couple behold the babe that is blissfully sound asleep. The artist has tamped down his interest in vibrant colour and wilful brushwork to deliver something much more pure and simple. And how interesting that our penchant for peering in on the lives of others (especially if they are raising children) has remained essentially unchanged for years.

Ooh it’s enough to send even us grown-ups into a grump: today in DC (and only a week or so away in the UK), the summer holidays are officially over for droves of students. This morning they’ll have to rise and shine a lot earlier than they’ve got used to, to sleepily suck some cereal into their faces before boarding the bus, the parental taxi or the pavement to schlep to school. Summer assignments will be handed in and new ones set. There’ll be tests and trials and trying not to drop your lunch tray as you make your way to a table.

I wasn’t one to totally loathe school (some might even suggest I was a biiit of a geek) and certainly enjoyed some things about the start of term: seeing friends again, or favourite teachers (like I said, geek), our new classroom and so on. Best of all was our annual pre-school drop-in to a hyper-marché at the end of our holiday in France: here I’d get to gather all the interesting European stationary I could grab.

In honor of today’s disgruntled (and the odd excited) student, we’re taking in this little Prince and Princess of Saxony, because (and call me crazy) but from the first time I clocked this pair, I’ve been thinking “school photo”. You know the ones that get done at the start of an academic year, of the young (students) and the old (teachers), all sitting pretty and smiling inanely at the camera. Well, the connection might be a courageous one, but these portraits serve similar purposes to our photos now of the young in their uniforms.

Lucas Cranach (1472 – 1553) was a painter, etcher and designer of woodcuts and one of the most successful and innovative artists of the Northern Renaissance. He established his reputation in Vienna, working in the cultural circle around the newly-founded university, but it was when he went to Wittenberg to become Court Painter to the Electors of Saxony that he became truly successful.

Our little Prince and Princess (both dated c. 1517) were no doubt painted in the line of duty: royal progeny that wanted recording and celebrating in paint. Is it not instantly clear that Cranach is a splendid portraitist? In his career he came up with the full-length portrait as an independent work, but even in these little-bitty pictures, there’s the thud of kids clattering into the room and the thrill of two tiny personalities. There’s all the red relish of their garments to deal with first: he has on a garnet red brocaded tunic topped off with a russet cloak. At his neck there tinkles intricate beading and gilding. Our Princess must be pleased with her ornate dress, laced across the front and interrupted by puffed sleeves, all enlivened across the neck with garlanded swathes of what look like loosely-looped banded chains.

The crunch for Cranach comes in the faces, painted with a tenderness and an insight that pricks emotion behind the eyes. His little crown has slipped lop-sided and he half-looks, half thinks about smiling at us. Her gaze is more steady, angled off to a side, her mouth is fixed and her eyes are unflinching. This is so much more than a faithful following of some kiddie features: Cranach has captured something essential in these characters. For me the little Prince might be one to watch: there’s something cheeky in the alertness of his face, while our Princess looks like an obedient little girl, maybe a model student in class today.

I’m coming over au natural today, and taking you down a wildlife path. It started with shocking story from across the pond, of a fox attacking twin babies in East London. The animal came into the house through a patio door left open due to the heat, before finding the girls and mauling them as they slept. The parents (watching TV at the time) called 999 after chasing the animal away and a Scotland Yard spokesman said this: “Police were called at approximately 10pm on Saturday June 5, to an address in Homerton E9, to reports of a fox attack. Officers and the London Ambulance Service attended and found two nine-month-old girls with injuries. Both babies were taken to an east London hospital where their condition is described as serious but stable.”

Wow. If foxes didn’t already have a dirty rep, they definitely did now. In town or country, it’s common in England to think of urban and feral foxes as a nuisance: they dig up gardens and plots, steal fowl (and unguarded pets), even pick fruit. In fact, so set was the British government on culling the critters that it ran an extermination operation for decades, only abandoned in the 1980s as it had proved ineffective in containing the population. At present it’s estimated there are 240,000 foxes on the island.

Personally, after years of living in England, I’ve not a bad word to say against foxes. As a species, they don’t seek conflict (attacks on humans are extremely rare) and only become bold in city settings because they’re more used to humans. If you do find one in your home (says urban wildlife consultant John Bryant), it’s usually enough to quietly but firmly tell it to scram, and shepherd it out of the door. The fact remains that it’s a magical moment to spy a fox trotting lithely across a field, or sitting silently under a bush: those flashes of red are archetypal of the British countryside.

So it is that I’m cutting these critters some slack and taking today to see some of their good points. Here to help is John Woodhouse Audubon (1812 – 1862) second son of the artist/naturalist John James Audubon (he of The Birds of America fame). This son took an early interest in animals and drawing; he became an active traveler and collector of specimens. By 1833 his father was giving glowing reports: “John has drawn a few Birds, as good as any I ever made, and in a few months I hope to give this department of my duty up to him altogether.”

John Woodhouse spent a time studying painting while his family was in London in 1834 before becoming absorbed into his father’s avian project (a demanding scheme, for which specimens were hunted, then fixed into life-like positions, measured and painted). From his first forays of collecting bird samples, John Woodhouse developed an interest in mammals, which he went on to paint as portraits that he exhibited in New York throughout the 1840s and 50s. This silky creature shows skill in conveying not only facts of physical being, but features of fox behavior: the crouched position, swift legs, sweeping tail and alert eyes.

This artist had a whopping nine children, two by his first wife, and seven by his second: given his line of work, and his understanding of animal habits, I trust he shut his patio door at night.

Shopping – it’s what the weekends are all about, right? No doubt there’ll be a need-to-see-to supermarket sweep, for the week’s essentials and the inevitable onset of that I don’t want to be here on a Saturday or Sunday slump. But, on the brighter side, there might be some proper shopping, where things are bought for pleasure and the blood-pumping feeling of “I just have to have these $300 shoes”. Shopping is a national pass-time in the last two places I have lived: London’s Oxford Street is never bereft of walls of marching shoppers all stepping in time to the beat of the buy. And in DC, my first proper pop at American life, there are malls galore and high streets to astound.

So today’s post is taking a long hard look at the man who makes us so putty-like in his hands, pliable and able to part with our cash for the fabulous things he has on offer. This Portrait of a Merchant is one the NGA is understandably proud of (it appears on their highlight Director’s Tour). It dates to c. 1530 and is by the Netherlandish painter Jan Gossaert (c. 1478 – 1532), whose alternative name “Mabuse” derives from his probable birth place. He’s first documented in the Antwerp Guild in 1503 following 15th century Netherlandish styles, but after a trip to Rome in 1508/09 his works started to display distinct Italianate elements and infusions.

Here we have a merchant seated in a cubby hole, wreathed around by the tools of his trade. On the table there’s a talc shaker (for drying ink), an ink pot, scales for testing the weight (and hence the quality) of coins, quill pens, and paper. Pinned to the wall are balls of twine and batches of papers labeled “miscellaneous letters” and “miscellaneous drafts.”

The painting proposes Gossaert’s artistic marriage between the styles of Northern and Southern (that is, Italian) Europe: I’d say it’s one of his best attempts. On the one hand we get to window-shop all this scintillating Netherlandish detail: I’m just so happen to be someone who’s takes pleasure in minutiae and I could stand for hours before this thing unpicking the bits and pieces arrayed across his desk, the furled things hanging up above, the shape and textures so expertly rendered. And then on the other we’ve got a clear inclination towards the massiveness and monumentality of Italian High Renaissance art: it’s there in the pyramidal bulk of the sitter, in his meaty head seen signaling from the background and it’s there even in the making-a-meal-of all the knick knacks on display. It’s as if the artist is placing both these aspects before us, asking us to come in and delight in his daringly different product.

Gossaert is as focused on filling every inch of his canvas as any artist I’ve found, so much so that one might suspect some horror vacui. But then again, it might have to do with our sitter, whose shady glance in our direction and prim mouth inform us of the insecurity and apprehension that haunted merchants and bankers in the 1530s. So greed-filled was the climate of the times that the Dutch humanist Erasmus saw fit to sum up the moral attitude thus: “When did avarice reign more largely and less punished?” It’s enough to make me rethink at least a purchase or two.

Prepare to be taken aback by this week’s work: it’s an icon of early modernism that shattered the way art was seen forever.

Check out this week’s video blog. And special thanks to TC for filming this week’s video.

Question for you: how many maps do you think you’ll see today? Is there a globe at home, or a world map on the wall at work? There might have been a metro map this morning, to check which line you needed to link to. If you’re new to an area (whether living or visiting), I bet there’s a place-map nestled inside your handbag or rucksack right now. Perhaps you made a mind map for a school project or company debrief, or looked at the layout of your local mall. Ever tapped into Google maps to decide on an area for happy hour?

Maps make up much of our day-to-day experience and they have, clearly, changed the world. In 1885 for instance businessman Charles Booth was skeptical about a claim that a quarter of Londoners lived in extreme poverty, so he employed people to investigate: they found the true figure was 30%. The findings were entered into a ‘Master Map’ using color categories, from black (lowest class, semi-criminal) to gold (wealthy). The authorities were terrified into action, and the first council houses were built soon afterwards.

Also in London, the tube map was dismissed as ‘too revolutionary’ when it was first submitted in 1931. The final version, completed a couple of years later by Harry Beck, solved the problem of how to represent clearly and elegantly a dense, complex of interweaving train lines. Placing the stations at similar intervals regardless of their true locations amplifies the area of central London, increasing its clarity, while the straight lines and interchange symbols confer simplicity and order.  

For all of us, Google Earth (c. 2005) presents a world in which the area of most concern to you can be at the centre, and which – with map content overlaid – can contain whatever you think is important. Almost for the first time, the ability to create an accurate map has been placed in the hands of everyone, and it has transformed the way we view the world.

All this is going to guide us to a wonderful work at the NGA, that hangs impressively (it’s 1.2 meters high and 3.6 across) in the East Building concourse lobby. It’s Reconciliation Elegy (1978) by the American artist Robert Motherwell (1915 – 1991) who was one of the youngest Abstract Expressionists. While others were stuck in a realist style in the 30s, Robert studied philosophy at Harvard. He started painting full time in 1941 after moving to Greenwich Village, and by 1944 he’d made it into Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century gallery.

To me, this brings to mind a projection world map: the areas of black paint collect to approximate the shapes of the land masses we are familiar with, and the demarcating verticals add to the effect. But obviously, this is not literal map. On the contrary, it will have been executed with Motherwell’s rapid brush stroke and with his customary integration of accidental effects. I’m sure I spot slim trails of spattered drops, as well as areas of drag and bits that have been smudged and fudged over.

It’s a breathtaking work that has about it a sense of awe and wonder and utter magnitude. No doubt drawing on his philosophical learning, Motherwell once said that “Without ethical consciousness, a painter is only a decorator.” Perhaps our read of this painting has been wrong: from our first impression of not being able to find anything accurately on this ‘map’, would we now say that Reconciliation Elegy offers up exactly the right kind of world view?

Michelle Obama’s recent summer break in Spain with her daughter Sasha made one thing clear: the First Lady was under fire from the start. Things got off on the wrong foot as the administration rushed to tamp a diplomatic blunder (their website contained a warning that “racist prejudices could lead to the arrest of Afro-Americans who travel to Spain”). Then she was lambasted for her stay at the Costa del Sol with friends: people started to quibble about the official portions of the trip, to be paid for by the US taxpayer. The final insult seems to have been the fact that Michelle had a beach closed off so that she and her party could go for a swim after a day of sightseeing.

Sharp-tongued New York columnist and blogger Andrea Tantaros likened the President’s wife to French queen Marie Antoinette, writing: “To be clear, what the Obamas do with their money is one thing; what they do with ours is another. Transporting and housing the estimated 70 Secret Service agents who will flank the material girl will cost the taxpayers a pretty penny.”

The furore this trip to Spain caused is all such utter nonsense. First up, a presidential party must travel and be protected accordingly, no matter where they are. People seem to feel it’s appropriate to unpick every inch of a public person. Yes, Michelle scoops food for the homeless and plants things in her garden. Yes, she’s down-to-earth (in spades) and shops on the high-street. But at the end of the day she is a First Lady, living an exceptional life. I get that these are stringent times, but even so people might have to accept and get over the fact that the position the First Family is in comes with certain perks, plain and simple (as well as very real downsides, I’m sure).

The fact that we look up to people in the public eye (be they politicians, royals, heads of state, even celebrities) as moral, intellectual, social and sartorial exemplars is made manifest in this extraordinary painting by Sir Peter Paul Rubens (1577 – 1640). We’ve already introduced him on Art 2010 as the greatest and most influential Baroque artist in northern Europe. He was called “prince of painters and painter of princes in his lifetime”, an epithet that sits exceptionally well with today’s work.

Agrippina and Germanicus (c. 1614) shows a husband and wife: Germanicus, the adopted son of the emperor Tiberius, was a brilliant general while Agrippina, granddaughter of Augustus (Rome’s first emperor), was renowned for devotion and bravery. Roman text positively glows with praise for these two (who were alive in the early years of AD). Tacitus talked about her as “the glory of her country”, while Suetonius said he “possessed all the highest qualities of body and mind.”

What’s interesting then is that Rubens wants to reflect those shining moral qualities in his portrait: how does he do this? by making both physically beautiful. She is handsome, with pearly plush skin and shiny blonde hair. He is more olive-toned, with an aquiline nose, strong mouth and elegant brow. This is such an unusual format, a double-bust, and one that taps the attentive eye instantly in the gallery. Ancient cameos are behind the composition, of which Rubens had numerous examples in his personal collection of antiquities. The portrait amounts to a projection of good inner and outer qualities and suggests too (in the ledge that separates us from them) the natural and necessary otherness of a leader’s experience.

Tonight at 7 p.m. at Politics & Prose (5015 Connecticut Ave., 202-364-1919) writer and angler Paul Greenberg will read from his new book “Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food” ($30, Penguin). It’s a book that’s swum into stores at just the right time, as people turn their minds more to the repercussions of our consumption of things from fresh and salt water. Farmed versus wild salmon; rising mercury levels in tuna; sustainability and ethics: there’s a lot to weigh up before we batter a bit of plaice and stick it on a plate next to some chips.

Greenberg does something smart in his book: rather than succumb to the (typical, apparently) fisherman’s fetish of coming over all ADD and offering “a maze of all the different fish out there”, he focusses on four popular fish varieties. His menu reads salmon, bass, cod and tuna, i.e. those we see most in our market-places, all of which are on the cusp of domestication in some way. Apart from the fact that he’s adamant that some fish are strictly not suited to taming, Greenberg’s main concern isn’t extinction: it’s the loss of magical abundance in the wild.

Time it right, and you can encounter that impression of precious, jewel-like nature at the NGA, with this delightful Finny Fish (1948). It’s by the American artist Alexander Calder (1898 – 1976), who worked variously as a sculptor, abstract painter and illustrator of children’s books. He was born into a fertile artistic lineage: his father and grandfather (who both shared his name) were important sculptors, and his mother was a portrait painter. Calder worked first as an engineer (he’d received a degree from Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey), and a work like this fish is essentially a marriage of his engineering and artistic minds. It’s dubbed a “mobile” (a term coined by Marcel Duchamp in 1931) and Calder’s “mobiles” (as well as their earthbound counterparts the “stabiles”) revolutionized sculpture.

Our fishy friend is a lot less abstract than Calder can get (you’ll probably have swinging in your mind one of his works that looks like an assemblage of suspended leaf and berry-like shapes), but this still gives us a whiff of the tack Calder takes. It’s a question of manipulating painted steel rod and painted steel wire into a delicate construction that’s simple and yet significant, see-through and yet see-me!

Imagine if you will our friend the fish suspended from a wire and bobbing along in space: Calder had experimented with motorised mobiles in the 1930s but soon settled with the idea of just natural air currents animating his works. As the fish flows free in the breeze, all those small pieces of glass, shards of ceramics and other interesting knick-knacks tied over his side will start to twitch and tinkle: Calder as an enchanting and lyrical sense of play.

The artist described his mobiles as “four dimensional drawings” and I can see why: this fish has an integral sense of flat line and strong design and yet exists so totally in the round. It’s a clever tension and one that draws attention to the space it’s in, sparking musings about natural habitat and wonderful wildlife. Which are important thoughts for us to be having about a fish.

In our last year of living in England, Transport for London launched a campaign to create more considerate behavior from tube travelers: it involved animated characters wearing messaged T-shirts: I won’t drop litter, I won’t play loud music, I won’t eat smelly food. In amongst all those negative messages appeared one positive affirmation: I will offer that person my seat. This brings me to the DC Metro, a clean, cool travel retreat save for one persistent pest: the Seat Hog. Have you ever, dear reader, set your satchel on the seat next to you, and angled your back just so, to make it plain others need not apply for the second seat? Or on the flip side, have you stood bow-legged in the aisle of a Red Line railcar (keeping an armpit out of your face and a butt from banging into you) as the train accelerates down the track? These circumstances do not a pleasant journey make.

I’ve heard that in the New York subway authorities have scotched seat selfishness: a rider who takes up more than one seat risks being cited for “disorderly conduct” and charged a $50 fine. We have no such rule, relying instead on the civility of Washingtonians, but we’d best learn to be nice because Metro projects that by 2020 there will be even higher levels of congestion (120 passengers per car): something to look forward to then.

All this rail chitter chatter rattles us right on over to The Railway (1873) by Edouard Manet (1832 – 1883). Get this: the Gare Saint-Lazare (then the most bustling train station in Paris), is essentially unseen in this painting. Here’s what a contemporary had to say: “You ask me, where the devil can the railway be in the painting, The Railway. Where is it? By Jove! there, in this smoke which leaves its modern gray trail on the canvas. It’s true, the locomotive is missing and one does not see the train. The smoke is enough for me, because it denotes the fire, which is like the soul of the engine. And the engine, as you who are listening know well, is the intelligence, the glory, and the fortune of our century. For future generations, our nineteenth century will be a locomotive…” (Jacques de Biez, “Edouard Manet” Lecture, Salles des Capucines, Paris, 22 January 1884).

So you see, Manet is a man of modernity, unable to resist painting advances in industrial technology (he said “one must be of one’s time and paint what one sees”). But before all the buffering smoke unfolds a fascinating figural duet: she is Victorine Meurent, the artist’s top model in the 1860s, and the child the daughter of a painter friend. What he weaves is an intricate web of oppositions: one’s in white with a blue trim, the other in white-edged dark blue. One wears a black hat, the other a black band. One’s hair is loose, the other’s tied. The most alarming contrast is the gaze of the girls: one out to the trains beyond the bars, while the woman watches us oh so closely.

This painting shows the lighter, sweeter colors Manet went in for after 1870 as well as his looser, freer handling. It was accepted at the 1874 Salon, though people were perturbed by it’s unfinished appearance and the odd title of the work. Though if you ask me, this work is bang on track.

I’m serving up an assumption today, but not of the kind you might expect. It’s an important Sunday for Christians of the Catholic church, as well as those of the Eastern Orthodox church, the Oriental Orthodox church and the Anglican Communion. That’s a lot of people, people, and more or less of them might know that today is the feast of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary.

The Assumption (which I only learned about as I hammered home facts for my art history finals) is the bodily taking up of the Virgin into Heaven at the end of her life. Catholicism teaches as dogma that Mary, “having completed the course of her earthly life, was assumed body and soul into heavenly glory.” This doctrine was defined by Pope Pius XII in 1950 and stands as a cornerstone of Catholic faith: in churches that observe it, the Assumption is a major festival.

Now, we’ve no dogmas or doctrines at Art 2010, except maybe the daily delight at a pretty painting. But I did think we might as well get into the spirit of things with this sprightly work by someone new to the Head for Art group: may I present Nicolas Poussin.

This man is a master if ever I saw one. Although he spent almost all of his mature career in Rome, Poussin (1594 – 1665) is thought of as the most important French painter of the 17th century, exerting hefty influence on his contemporaries and subsequent generations of French artists.

To be honest, things didn’t go so smooth at the start: after settling in Rome aged nearly 30, it took him a time to find direction. But, it wasn’t long before he did, as this Assumption of the Virgin (painted two years after his arrival in Rome c. 1630) shows.

So here we have the actual event: the Virgin has lifted from her earthly tomb and is seen soaring twixt a pair of pillars heavenwards. It’s bodily alright: she’s clad in her conventional red and blue and is being boosted along by a horde of fat and frankly fabulous cherubs. Hard to fathom that this is among his first-known paintings, so confident in composition and color does it seem. The design is pinned by the fluted columns (I like that things aren’t quite symmetrical) and anchored by the block of the tomb. The darker clouds that cluster near the top square off the scene, while the meandering puff that cuts a diagonal across the canvas adds the necessary line of dynamism.

And isn’t his color-play just delightful? The tonal contrasts on the blue mantel are stunning at the heart of the scene. Elsewhere, a heady yet delicate palette of pinks, peaches, whites, grays and mauves provide a vibrant supporting role.

Later in life, Poussin became deeply drawn to art of the classical world and got in the habit of pondering his pictures ad infinitum (so much so that people called him the painter-philosopher). But at this point Poussin is still all about joyful exuberance, as captured in the billowing clouds, swirling draperies, and cheeky cherubs. This rapid movement, shifted off-center composition, and rich colors all must come from his interest in Venetian painting. Above all, he’d been struck by Titian in Venice (who also happened to have painted an Assumption scene). See any similarities?

One of best nights I’ve spent in Paris was at an underground supper club one winter’s night. We were taken by dear friends to a top secret location (address and details texted during the day of the dinner): we entered through a nondescript door and climbed some stairs. We came into a gorgeous Parisian interior, softly lit and elegantly decorated, filled with a few other diners and delicious smells. Introductions done, seats were taken and then started a flow of phenomenal dishes, I think 12 courses in all, all seamlessly set one after the other on the crisp linen before us. Wines went with every morsel we mouthed and at the end of the evening we were invited to donate as much as we felt was right (an amount was suggested but not enforced).

It remains one of my most magical dining experiences, one I long to re-live as soon as we’re back. But the fact is, with this sort of set-up becoming increasingly popular and pervasive, I mightn’t have to go so far afield. Secret supper clubs are popping up all over Europe and Latin America: apparently the concept has its roots in Cuba, where people would open their homes during the 1990s to earn a little extra income while avoiding government scrutiny.

In London, the trend has had a handful of underground outfits a year or so ago grow to close to 100 these days. Among the newbies is the Old Hat Club. I think this sort of eating appeals on a number of levels: the food will be good (and often adventurous: we ate some crazy good combinations in Paris); there’s the chance to mingle with strangers (but equally no pressure to do so if you don’t want); and above all underground dining delights in the frisson of its sheer secrecy.

Call me crazy but that hush-hush atmosphere is well-represented in this painting by Claude Monet: it’s called Interior, after Dinner and dates from 1868/1869. For most, Monet (1840 – 1926) needs little introduction: we know and love him as the leading member of the Impressionist group, the one who longest practised their principles of absolute fidelity to the visual sensation and painting directly from the object, often outdoors.

Here’s something fun I found while reading for today: Cézanne is said to have said of Monet that he was “only an eye, but my God what an eye!” The description fits this picture well, since it shows how Claude would neglect detail in pursuit of optical verisimilitude. Even though this is an early-ish work (before his Impressionism proper took flight), here he’s still after an atmosphere as opposed to fussing over form.

A man stands at the fire, leaning loosely on the mantel and seemingly looking in our direction. Two women sit facing one another: one’s engaged in some needlework, the other has her back to us. There’s an air of instant intimacy in the grouping, gathered off to the side of the snapshot. Two cups and a pot sit on the table and a gorgeous lamp glows brightly above it. Just before painting this, Monet had met Manet, whose work he had earlier admired. There is certainly the feel of thorough Manet modernity here, the fresh sense of actual life as it was lived in that day. Best is the shrouded sense we get: the demi-darkness that only let’s us in so far. A secret supper, if ever I saw one.

“Everyone knows Italians don’t speak with their mouths: they talk with their hands!” Join me as I explore the meanings of hand gestures and find some expressive manual communication at the National Gallery…

Check out this week’s video blog. And special thanks to the people of Castiglione Fiorentino…and their gestures.

Marilyn Monroe’s star has scarcely diminished in the 40-odd years since her death. Is this thanks to her beauty, or the fact she had affairs with a couple of the Kennedy brothers? No doubt her roles played some part, and the circumstances surrounding her death at just 36 a rather larger one. For me though, the single most important thing in fixing MM into public awareness both back then and now is the artist Andy Warhol: it’s his Green Marilyn (1962) we’re looking at today.

Last week, August 5th marked the anniversary of Marilyn’s death: naked and face down, she was found at her home on Fifth Helena Drive. “The long troubled star clutched a telephone in one hand. An empty bottle of sleeping pills was nearby,” reported the Associated Press that morning. For 48 years this death, and the events that later came to light (reports of a visit by her lover Bobby Kennedy; of an ambulance that took her away breathing and brought her back dead), has remained one of Hollywood’s most enduring and tantalizing mysteries.

Which is why Warhol is still doing her such a service: in the face of the scandal and slur of her demise shine his bright, confident pictures that fix her permanently on a pedestal, at her best. Born in Pittsburgh to immigrant Ruthenian parents, Andrew Warhola (1928 – 1987) was a sickly child. As a young boy he’d pass the time in the company of film star magazines, planting the seed for his fascination with all things celebrity. He started out as a commercial artist, but by 1960 was recognized as a leader of New York Pop Art phenomenon, along with Wesselmann and Lichtenstein. The latter said “we wanted to paint pictures so outrageous and ugly that no one would want to buy them, so we used commercial art to send it up, but instead they became high fashion, and our mockery was taken dead seriously and we all settled comfortably into repetition.”

From the banal (repeated rows of Coke bottles) to the macabre (car crashes) Warhol covered it all in the distinctive language of modern advertising. His glamorous portraits of Hollywood stars were also rendered in garish colors and with simplified imagery. He made Marilyn many, many times: her cocktail of glamour and tragedy made her a perfect muse. The work at the NGA is based on a famous publicity still and relies in part on the radical technique that Warhol brought to the traditional genre of portraiture. Called serigraphy, or silk-screen printing, it’s a stencil-like method by which paint is brushed over a screen (of fine silk) so that the color penetrates those parts of the screen that have not been masked. Successive masks can be added to the screen and colors can be combined. Originally developed for commercial purposes (since it’s possible to use unskilled labor to make the prints) Warhol used serigraphy to reel off rapid production of almost identical images.

Much is made of the way in which Warhol turned his art into a successful enterprise with the use of mechanical printing processes: he’d even deliberately remove all traces of his involvement by employing assistants to make up his works. So does it matter that nothing was unique or that he hadn’t actually made stuff himself? Not in the least it seems: “Everyone should be famous for fifteen minutes” is what he said, and as this work shows, both he and she have lasted immortal a lot longer than that.

Last week the stars took to their Twitter pages to herald the news that the controversial ban on same-sex marriage in California had been overturned. Ellen DeGeneres (come back for another Idol..!) was among the first into the ether, stating simply “Equality won”. Kelly Osbourne said “I’m so happy over the news on Prop 8” and was joined by her fellow reality star Kim Kardashian: “This news is amazing… Congrats to everyone!!!”

It’s about time for this about-turn, which comes despite the 2008 public referendum in which a majority of voters in the state upheld the conventional stance that marriage should only be between a man and a woman. Ruling on a lawsuit brought by two gay couples claiming the voter-approved ban violated their civil rights, Chief U.S. District Court Judge Vaughn Walker said the ban was “unconstitutional” and did “nothing more than enshrine in the California Constitution the notion that opposite sex couples are superior to same sex couples.” He went on to say that Proposition 8 “fails to advance any rational basis in singling out gay men and lesbians for denial of a marriage license.”

The strike-down of the ban is a key victory for gay rights and a big step in the direction of marriage equality, so to celebrate I’m delivering van Gogh Roses (1890) today. Vincent (1853 – 1890) was born the son of a Dutch pastor, and was early on employed by the picture dealers for whom his brother Theo worked. He didn’t begin to become an artist until he was destitute after his dismissal from the mission (he’d intended to become a priest) in 1880: art sparked for him in 1886 when he went to Paris and met with Impressionism.

In 1888 van Gogh became fixated on the idea os establishing an artists’ colony in the south of France. After setting himself up in Arles he invited Paul Gauguin and others to join him. Indeed van Gogh appears to have become infatuated with Gauguin, with some suggesting that their blistering fight, which lead to the famous ear incident, was behind van Gogh’s suicide in 1890.

Most will know about van Gogh’s tragic demise into mental disturbance, but the time he spent in institutions was also fervent and fruitful for his art. This piece for example was painted while he was in an asylum at St Rémy, one of two rose paintings he made at the time. Roses didn’t have an especial meaning for the man, I don’t think, but I do believe he thought of plants as emblems of birth and renewal. Perhaps painting Roses was part of a healing process, as his words suggest an eager energy: “… in a frenzy. Great bunches of flowers, violet irises, big bouquets of roses…”.

This still-life is pulsing with active life: it’s in the choice of colors, from a fresh-mint green background to a sea green surface. Elsewhere forest greens fizz with a varied palette of neutrals that feel clean and pure. Originally these roses were pink (their color has faded) so imagine the optimistic compliment of green and pink we’d have seen.

The paint is properly pasted on: fat ribbons of it drive around (there’s especial energy in the diagonals at the back). So piled on is the pigment, in fact, that van Gogh left both rose works at the asylum when he left on May 16: “These canvases will take a whole month to dry, but the attendant here will undertake to send them off after my departure”, is what he wrote to Theo. They arrived to him on June 24, days before he shot himself.

The author Edward Verrall Lucas once wrote “there is more refreshment and stimulation in a nap, even of the briefest, than in all the alcohol ever distilled.” So that’s some serious refreshment, then. Scientific research does stand behind the physical benefits of short bouts of sleep, which seem as integral to our well-being as a bowlful of fiber or a long walk in the country. Taking naps makes us more alert and creative, improves our mood and increases our productivity: one Harvard Medical School study shows that a 45-minute nap improves learning and memory while Matthew Walker, assistant professor of psychology at the University of California at Berkeley, has it that we “need to sleep before learning, to prepare the brain, like a dry sponge, to absorb new information.” It seems that a biphasic sleep schedule (napping as well as sleeping at night) helps us shuttle info into the prefrontal cortex, where it becomes part of our long-term memory.

What all the science doesn’t delineate is the sheer deliciousness of a nap: the decadence of sneaking off to crawl under the covers, draw the curtains and sink into a cool pillowcase, letting the world and its worries drift into the distance. A nap is a sweet stolen moment, taken when the day is not yet done and when others aren’t around. There’s one woman catching her 40 winks at the NGA: this is Nicolaes Maes’s Old Woman Dozing Over a Book (c. 1655). Maes (1634 – 93) was born in Dordrecht, the son of a well-to-do soap boiler (how’s that for a bit of bubbly parentage). Early evidence of his career is sketchy, though there was some learning to draw with a local or general master (een gemeen Meester).

The important thing is he went to Amsterdam and studied with Rembrandt c.1648, soon turning into one of his most accomplished pupils. This is one of the Maes portraits done in a Rembrandt-esque manner (he was also known for scenes of everyday life, called genre). This old woman holds all kinds of fascination from the start, not least for the fact that she’s shut off from us: she’s asleep, eyes closed, head held against her hand. It’s amazing how the artist causes curiosity simply by sending his sitter off to sleep.

Her face is fabulously painted: it’s velvety, the brush strokes and paint perfectly mimicking the softened touch of older skin. Notice how in some areas, Maes might have deliberately soft-focused certain details: the material under the woman’s elbow, the text which appears smudged across the page. Why did he do this? Because from where I’m sitting, it looks if he’d wanted sharp-sightedness, he’d have had no trouble: see for yourself the clutch of glinting keys appended on the ledge.

For all it’s seeming peace and quiet, this for me hosts an edgy undercurrent, which has to do with the lengthy tradition that associates sleep and death (see the two states matched in the Bible, Shakespeare, the Romantic poets). It’s a subtle suggestion that might just be at play here, so that Maes doesn’t quite deliver the sweetest dream.

There are a few things I’ll never forget from ballet class. Like the fact I was always at the back (tall girls don’t get to grace the first row), and the leotards (pink, blue and – cruelly- grasshopper green). There was the learning how to style a perfect bun (two nets, not one, and particular pin application), and how to tie the slippers just right. I recall pain and subtle clock-watching, but also elation when performing on stage and feeling like your body pretty much rocked if it was seriously OK with bending this way and extending that.

When we were ready, we got to go en pointe. Pointe shoes let ballet dancers be on the tips of their toes (en pointe) for extended periods of time. They have two structural features to let that happen: the ‘box’ is a hard enclosure in the front of the shoe that encases and supports the dancer’s toes (the end is flattened for the dancer to balance on); the ‘shank’ is a piece of rigid material that stiffens the sole to provide support for the arch of the foot en pointe. Pointe work is all about putting across an impression of weightlessness and extreme elegance, but it also gets pretty painful, people. There’s blood and sometimes tears. Which is why last week’s new Guinness World Record for the Most Ballerinas En Point at One Time (230 of them, for just over a minute) is huge.

I’m frankly thrilled we have an excuse to put on our dancing shoes and sashay on over to Edgar Degas, whose fascination with the ballet fetched up some of our most fantasy-filled artworks. Born in Paris to a wealthy family, at first it looked like Degas (1834 – 1917) might become an academic painter, in the Ingres mould. But by the late 1860s he’d started to develop a deceptively casual kind of composition (probably influenced by Manet, possibly by Whistler, and certainly by snapshot photography). He coupled this with an inclination to modern subject matter. His first pictures of dancers were painted around 1873, and from then on ballet girls (as well as laundresses, models dressing and bathing, and cabaret singers) became his principal subject in 100s of works.

Both The Dance Lesson (c. 1879) and Before the Ballet (1890/1892) reveal the artist’s interest not in the perfected, polished performance of the ballet, but rather in its more casual, candid qualities as captured in behind-the-scenes snaps. Both are done in striking and unusual horizontal format: the shape gives a sense of space, enhanced by the dancers being cropped by the edges of the canvas and placed off center. These are fresher than photos for the sense on an instant they bring.

This large and ambitious work is called Four Dancers, c. 1899 and exists in various versions. Notice how even though Degas is not big on detail, he does define the arms, necks and heads of the dancers in this case, perhaps responding to or referencing the dancers’ concern with line and shape. The off-stage performers seem to have been filtered through the theater lights and come over in a charming complimentary colour scheme of red-orange and green. And the best bit about going to the ballet with Degas? There is never even an inkling of the toll it takes to be on tippy toes.

It’s a saucy Sunday today I’ve decided, as I’m starting with an artist who paints with her breasts. Yes, her breasts. Meredith Ostrom is making quite a splash (and a mess, I imagine), by using her body bits in interesting ways. Lured to London by its ritzy, glitzy art scene, 33 year-old former model Meredith is originally from New York. She’s well-settled in the city’s celebrity clan (she dated Duran Duran’s Nick Rhodes for years), and her work seems an extension of her sensation-filled life-style.

Ostrom trained as an artist but claims the gift of painting in her birthday suit came about by chance: what started as an experiment for a group show in New York a few years ago has swelled into a full-time and buoyant career, including solo shows and the odd performance (always well attended, I’d hazard a guess). When asked how it feels to paint naked, Ostrom states the obvious: “Well, cold!” (she applies the stuff with surgical gloves and gets it off with washing up liquid). Her work sells for thousands in New York and London: for her latest series, called Diamond Dust Bust, she painted herself, rolled in diamond dust and pressed herself against a large canvas. DDB (which to me even sounds like a bra size), has been going down a storm: according to Ostrom, the president of Georgia has snapped one up and Nicolas Sarkozy’s brother has one as well.

I’ve gone for today’s painting because, well, it’s pretty obvious I’d say: what a lot of bouncing boob on show! This is called A Lady in Her Bath (c. 1571) and is by the French artist François Clouet (c. 1510 – 1572). As upfront as he is here, I’ve not really oggled much at Clouet in the past: he was the son of Jean II Clouet, a Netherlandish artist, whom he succeed as court painter to the French kings Francis I, Henry II and Charles IX. François was the foremost portraitist of the French Renaissance and seems to have had the nickname Janet: here’s what Ronsard, his contemporary as court poet, had to say: “Janet, honneur de notre France.”

This Lady in Her Bath is a portrait too, we think: she might even be a royal mistress. She’s sitting in a tub that’s lined with white material that she’s pulling back with her left hand to reveal the artist’s name inscribed below. Her right hand rests on a board that supports a plump and sumptuous still-life (behind the bather, a boy is about to grab at the grapes). To the left, a smiling wet nurse suckles a baby on a mind-boggling, balloon-like breast while in the background, a maid holds a pitcher of water as more is heated for the bath. Her cleavage too is rendered with attention.

The scene is anchored by a pleasing symmetry, drawn in by the crimson curtains either side. Things like the exquisitely painted sheen on the fabric, the smooth nudity and the fineness of the detail dotted around (fruit, jewels, interior décor) all point to a union of Flemish naturalism and the crisp, clear and erotic lines of some of the Italian Mannerists. It’s French courtly art at it’s breast. Sorry, best.

Never let it be said that I’m one to squander a metro trip, because it was on a recent hop from one stop to the next that my eyes alighted on an ad for the BrickFair. After a scurry to my computer and a flurry of excited research, I established that this is one mega Lego Fan Festival, taking place in the DC area this weekend! It’s not too late people, to get a serious Lego groove on, meet the most dedicated Lego aficionados from all over the USA and marvel at their plastic-bricked creations great and small. Here I was thinking my older brother was the last word in LEGO obsession, so constant was the scriitch-scraatch sound of his hands raking through trays of the tiny blocks as a child, as he built the most mind-boggling robots, spaceships and more. No. BrickFair is of another order entirely, an event that will give you (so the site says) a newfound respect for the little bricks and a head full of creative construction ideas.

Now, at the risk of finding a somewhat facile link, I’m going to run with Ad Reinhardt today, if only for the fact that this fabulous pair of color-popping paintings remind me at least a little of LEGO. The corners, the colors, the interlockingness of the forms: are you with me on this one? Good, then let’s go.

Let’s start by labeling the American Ad (Adolph Dietrich Friedrich) Reinhardt (1913 – 1967) a pioneer of abstract painting. Born in Buffalo (the second biggest city in the state of New York), he studied art history in the early 30s before pursuing abstract art at the New York Academy of Art and Design from 1936 – 37. Next he got involved with the FAP Scheme (1937 – 41), the Federal Art Project called WPA (Works Progress Administration), which was encouraged by President Roosevelt and designed to relieve artists in the depression of the 1930s by giving them public buildings to decorate. Bricks for kicks, if you will. After that, Reinhardt became a member of the American Abstract Artists (1937 – 47): I never knew such a club existed before this, and wonder now whether they met for yearly fan festivities.

It was in the late 1940s that Reinhardt hit on his Abstract Expressionist style. Here we have him working on two large (80 x 60 in.) Untitleds, one that mixes Red and Gray (1950) and one that matches Yellow and White (also 1950). I’m especially won over by Red and Gray, which speaks clearly in the language of bright colors and geometric shapes that he sought out at this time. Ease your eyes into a state of fixedness and you’ll see how the shapes and shades enter an elegant battle for supremacy: red over gray or the other way around? It’s hard not to get locked into the loveliness of this alien-like grid. I like that things are not-quite crisp, that here and there the edges get blurred: there’s evidence of his brush all around.

Eventually, Reinhardt’s pictures began to settle increasingly into single fields of color, first red, then blue (in the early 50s) and ultimately black (from the mid 50s), in a total stripped aesthetic that must have beaten a path to, and banged on the door of Minimalism. These later works were purged of subject and painterly expression (here’s one I’m showing you from the NGA). Of these Ad said: “I am simply making the last paintings that can ever be made.” I’m a snitch nervous of something being the last thing that can ever be made: what would our LEGO lovers have to say about that?

We’re feasting our eyes on a Chardin today, but before we get to his pile of plump peaches, let me introduce my sister Meike, an accomplished and charismatic cook, who’s taking us through a truly tantalizing recipe here…

Check out this week’s double feature video blog. Special thanks to Meike.

I need to share something important, and it involves a snacking experience I had yesterday. Imagine the scene, if you will: it’s hot, it’s getting late. Lunch appears as a distant pinprick on the hunger horizon and supper has yet to slip into view. So off I set to our “local” Starbucks. I say “local” because all things are relative and in our case the coffee shop is a 20-minute walk away. And yes, you’ve guessed it, by the time I’d trudged there (DC is steaming even in the evening), my sugar levels had dipped an extra couple of inches.

I ordered one of my regular drinks and could not resist one thing winking at me from the food counter: have you even seen a Starbucks apple fritter? Man, are they ugly. All bulbous and brain-like in fact, with unsightly protrusions of dough wriggling here and there, all graced with a white sugar glaze. Needless to say, I’m a sucker for a fritter and I bought that puppy right up. And would you know, the moment those puffs of donut dough got gobbled, I started to smile on the inside. You see, a good snack makes all well with the world: focusses the mind, lifts the mood.

If you’re still with me at this stage, thank you for sticking with the story. You’ll no doubt be wondering why I’ve frittered away time on a fritter. Well, it’s because yesterday I was struck by a piece of snacking wisdom: eating an apple fritter is not so different from devouring a picture in an art gallery. Think about it: both bring a high, break up a daily routine and offer a treat for the senses. You can bite off as much as you care for that day: feast on colors and leave it at that; consume a composition, or mull over a meaning; take in a technique or nibble at the history.

Take this Green Apples and Scoop by Walter Kuhn (1877 – 1949), a perfect, in-between-meals morsel. Ideally for my example, there’s not too much to digest as regards the artist, who was one of a generation of US painters who carried his feel for contemporary European art into a distinctly American style. It was from 1901 to 1903 that Kuhn studied in Europe (in Paris and Munich) and, though he settled in New York on his return, his continental experience continued to articulate his art.

The painting plops us right into the individual style that Kuhn honed during the 30s (it’s dated 1939). In broad terms, this involved quite flat, simplified, outlined forms against a dark background. Things are often done in brilliant color, as in the case of these acid green apples. Can anyone help but feel lifted by the site of a playful, joyful thing such as this? The colors, shapes, and love for an everyday thing bring relief, release and a buoyant belief in man’s ability to make beautiful things. Exactly the thoughts that ran through my mind as I dove into my donut treat.

The key thing to hang onto is all things in moderation: just as you’d not eat eight fritters on the trot, I’d discourage the consumption of too much art in one go. Smaller, more frequent treats are best, not gorging but gauging the amount you actually need. And the real bonus of our apple  “snack” at a gallery? You’ve saved yourself 420 calories.

I’m afraid it’s another cheap and cheerful connection today folks, one that’s facilitated by my TIVO. Naturally, as soon as I returned from traveling abroad last week, I felt impelled to catch up on a small segment of reality TV. The segment in question concerns those ever-compelling Kardashian sisters (those of the K names: Kourtney, Kim, Khloe, Kylie and Kendall), the older three of whom now star in a spin-off from the original family show called Take Miami (aren’t you all so sorry you’re not up on this stuff?).

The goings-on are (needless to say) by turns ho-hum and horrifying, the latter aspects stoked in large part by oldest sister Kourtney’s no-good boyfriend Scott (who’s also the father of her baby son Mason). The most recent ep ended with a poignant, simmering shot of Kourtney left literally holding the baby alone after Scott’s latest crazed antics (punching a mirror in some sort of stupor). Well, that made me think (I know!) of our painting today.

It’s been ages since I’ve wanted to bring the marvelous Modigliani into the Art 2010 fold, so I’m frankly pleased my (occasional) reality TV fetish has proved fruitful. What an instantly vexing and visceral painting this is: it verily pulses off the wall in the current Chester Dale exhibit at the NGA.

Amedeo Modigliani (1884 – 1920) was born in Livorno, Italy, the fourth and youngest child of a well-to-do Jewish family. In the early 1900s he studied art in Florence and Venice before moving to Paris in 1906 and setting up a studio in Montmartre. Modigliani ended up spending the rest of his life there, more or less, no doubt drawn by the fact that from 1904 Paris became the most progressive of artistic centers (think Florence in the Renaissance). Modigliani settled suavely and quickly into a bustling ambience filled to the gills with painters, sculptors, art dealers and publicists, and buoyed by a market made strong with upwards of 100 private galleries.

For me, a work like this Gypsy Woman with Baby looks simple, but that’s a deception: there are deep undercurrents of art historical awareness here, especially of an Italian heritage. See her oval face (which shows mask-like indifference or incisive characterization, depending on your taste), which recalls the long visages of a Botticelli. The elongated forms of her body (the neck most remarkably here) echoes Mannerists of the 16th century. And the sinuous lines that dance down her skirt, over her chest and alongside her face slink in the same way as Sienese painters of the 14th century. So it is, that in his art of assembled, ever-so-subtle influences, we must see Modigliani as the greatest Italian artist of the 20th century, and not a French-formed painter at all.

I’ve never been able to shake the sense of sadness I get when gazing at a Modigliani, and this beauty, with her rosy cheeks squared in a quizzical frontal stare (painted but one year before the artist’s death) is no exception. Maybe it’s because in the shades of blue and grey there are echoes of the tragedy that laced the artist’s life: once he’d contracted tuberculosis as a child, the illness persisted throughout his adulthood. A handsome, amorous and gregarious man, he added fuel to the fire of his ill-health by drinking and drug-taking to excess: he said he’d drink himself dead, and he essentially did. It also happened that Modigliani was known as ‘Modi’ for short, from which by natural corruption the French referred to him as un peintre maudit (cursed). It all adds up to a rather riveting reality, that I for one find hard to divorce from his art.

Imagine that pullover you gave to Pops for his birthday or the cookbook you selected for your sister at Christmas getting as much airtime and attention as the Cameron-Obama gift exchange that happened in July. For the UK Prime Minister’s first official visit to the White House, much was made of the gift-giving that went on between the two. Cameron clocked up credibility and kudos for his choice of an edgy, electric painting by the British graffiti artist Ben Eine. As his color-popping Twenty First Century City crossed the Atlantic, Eine (a collaborator of Banksy’s and one of the premier artists of the street genre in England) had this to say: “It’s not the kind of recognition I seek or get every day, but Cameron seems quite a positive kind of guy and Obama’s a dude. I would probably have had issues if it had been for Bush.”

As for Obama, he pasted over previous poor form (an iPod for the Queen? incompatible DVDs for former Prime Minister Gordon Brown?) with a signed Ed Ruscha lithograph called Column With Speed Lines. Reportedly chosen because it’s red white and blue, the colors on both countries’ flags, the work is said to be worth an estimated $7,000.

Who might have dreamed up the inspired idea of regaling a Ruscha (b. 1937), d’you think? Some fingers point to Michael Smith, who hung one of the artist’s works (on loan from the National Gallery of Art) in the Obamas’ living quarters last year, when he was chosen as the decorator to appoint their White House. Smith is from southern California, so perhaps has an affinity with the artist: Ruscha is Nebraska-born, but considered a quintessential LA artist, having carved his career in the state.

I Think I’ll is the 1983 NGA piece that hangs in the first family’s living quarters. It’s a striking, streaky, blood-orange thing that possesses an unusual property: the longer you look at it, the more words and phrases slip up off it’s surface. There’s “I think maybe I’ll…” in large block letters scaling from top left to bottom right. Other fragments in smaller print (“Maybe… yes…”, “Maybe… no…”, “On second thought”) are scattered here and there. A tiny “Yet” almost drops off the bottom edge.

In his early days Ruscha, who’s classed as one of the most influential artists of the 20th century Pop art movement, painted single words that packed punches: slam, smash, honk, that sort of thing. In the 1980s though, he softened his approach, to float equivocal phrases across painted grounds, conjuring up combinations and calling on endless interpretations.

It’s hard to imagine George W. Bush (who called himself “the decider” during his presidency) opting for a piece like this, filled as it is with phrases about uncertainty and indecision, which we don’t naturally associate with executive power. But Ruscha, who’s represented by the powerful Gagosian Gallery and who’s an established supporter of the current administration, sees political potential in the painting: “I hope my painting has the reverse effect on White House decision… I am 1,000 percent behind this administration.” So it is that, in it’s current setting, I Think I’ll is loading more meaning into its already impressive arsenal of ambiguity. And so it is that, by being hung in esteemed surroundings, the Ruscha lithograph and the Eine painting might also become measurable national treasures. Regifting is never an option.

During our recent week of Italian holiday-making, one of our party of family and friends was reading ravenously through the latest Frances Mayes. As a filler-inner, Frances is the American university professor, poet and writer now most-known for the memoirs that document her delving and settling into la vita Italiana (started when she bought an old house high in the hills of Cortona in Tuscany some 20 years ago, and made the area her home).

Her book Under the Tuscan Sun: At Home in Italy became a bestseller before being made into a film. Mayes in general does a nice line in lifting to the surface elements and aspects of Italian culture that otherwise might remain rather more under the radar. Her latest book is filled with her latest fascination, the Italian artist Luca Signorelli (c. 1440/50 – 1523), who just so happens to be from Cortona. She really rates him as one of the top Renaissance painters, so I decided to take a better look at this Luca today.

This Bust of a Youth Looking Upward and Two Nude Figures date from c. 1500: they’re on two sides of the same drawn sheet. Though there are three fab paintings by this man at the NGA, I settled on the drawings for the fact that they remind of a poignant passage from the Life of Signorelli as written by the 16th-century biographer Giorgio Vasari. After a plague had swept through Cortona in 1502, claiming Luca’s son, the father undressed him and proceeded to draw his naked body, “so that by the work of his own hand, he would always be able to have before his eyes that which nature had given him and which adverse destiny had snatched away.”

These sketches make crystal clear Signorelli’s profound preoccupation with the male body in prime form. Here is a man who took the interest in anatomy fairly typical of his time to a whole new level of love for muscles, movement, and the well-plumped rear. With him, bodies are infused with life-force and faces are filled with individuality: these are the things that give even small studies such as these visceral energy.

Signorelli was a salient influence on Michelangelo (especially when it came to his nudes on the Sistine Chapel ceiling): it could be that the latter drew deep inspiration from Luca’s masterful frescoes in Orvieto Cathedral, not far from Rome. It’s often Signorelli’s fate to rather lose lustre alongside some of the bigger, more blockbuster names of the Renaissance, so it might be that in Mayes he has secured a useful champion. Through her love of her own area of Italy, she’s come across someone who needs to be more praised and more raised for his art (and who will appreciate the cultural recognition she brings).

I’ve long been a big fan of walking. Perhaps it’s a practice in-built from my time in Milan: Italian Sunday evenings are sacrosanct as the period of the passeggiata, which translates as a leisurely stroll through one’s hometown with family or friends. City-dwellers would don their Sunday best, perhaps gobbling a gelato, and chat away into the evening, all the while ambling along Milan’s main scenic streets.

In another setting now, I’ve not lost the habit of filing on some flats or lacing up my trainers to tramp the streets. In a new area, footfall is the fastest way to get to know the lay of the land (I’ve been told all along that Washington is ‘walking’ city, though there are times when only the metro will do for this urban sprawl). If you’ve yet to grow fond of the gym, walking is a well-known way to burn calories and cull inches from here or there (in fact, I recently read about a New York trainer who’s rolling out a Walk Before You Eat scheme, in which dieters sandwich a meal between two long distance walks).

It seems all round that walking is hitting a certain stride, trend-wise. Rumor has it that even Los Angelenos are starting to close off their cars in favor of treading their traffic-congested city. In England, where the rolling hills and the famed green reaches have made walking more of a quintessential national pastime, the Ramblers just celebrated their 75th year. Formally known as the Ramblers Association, this is a charity that makes public footpaths available to all (and I think they beat down Madonna when she campaigned to shut down just such a footpath behind her English country house).

Now, what better work for today than this Walking Man II (1960) by Alberto Giacometti (1901 – 1966)? This Swiss artist is best known for this sort of thin, elongated human figure (this one’s done in bronze), though he’d started out making flat, almost 2D works that drew on primitive art, and was then a Surrealist in the early 1930s. From the mid 1930s, Giacometti returned to working from models, and showing the outside, rather than the inside world, and over time his figurines became smaller, more spindly. He was in Switzerland in the time of World War II, but returned to Paris in 1945, where he befriended the likes of Picasso, Simone de Beauvoir and the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre.

This sort of work from him looks simple enough: a stick man of sorts strides right before left, looking ahead. But stand a little longer and there’s an incredible energy that radiates off the roughened surface of the material. Perhaps it’s in the indistinct and yet set features on the face. Or the way the shoulders are angled stiff and straight. There’s a palpable purpose in the hang of the arms and a definitive direction in the line of the legs.

I think Giacometti is a beguiling barometer for the existentialism that pervaded post-war Paris, so that this genre of gristled, emaciated figure naturally conjures up thoughts of solitude and death. Some say he found it a challenge to translate reality into sculpture, but for me this speaks clearly of the strife he must have seen in his lifetime. Mostly, it’s the way the feet are fettered to the lumpen block at the base that’s surprisingly suggestive.

Husband and I added the odd art touch to our wedding last year, such as our table-names, which were all based on paintings (of couples cuddling, caressing, clinching…). But our art injection was nothing compared to a recent wedding party thrown by auctioneer Simon de Pury (currently appearing as the bright, blustering mentor to the contestants on Bravo’s Work of Art: The Next Great Artist) and Michaela Neumeister, who married six months ago.

Truly, this was an art-party that had guests’ jaws to the floor, so much did it alter the notion of celebration: the good news is, we’ve got the inside track from someone who was on the inside. Invitations specified that guests should arrive at the Saatchi Gallery (in London’s Chelsea) at 7pm sharp. There, people were presented with seating tickets for supper tables and ushered to the top floor. In the first room stood a raised table stacked with 1,000 shucked oysters and cut lemons, all on a bed of ice. This lot was “lit to perfection” and left people standing around, wondering what to do.

In the next gallery, another table, this time festooned from above with a surreal Magritte-style sky-scape of strung-up salamis, big and small, thick and thin. Also there were knives, mustard jars and a big brown bag stuffed with bread rolls. The next two rooms racked up buckets of champagne  and bottles of beer, as guests started slowly to gather  the gist of the evening’s intent: to drink and devour the displays, thereby delving into this ‘artwork’ in the most intimate, munching way. Later, a dinner was dished out on heaped-high platters on a series of beds (all white linen and fluffed-up pillows) scattered across a room.

So it’s in imagining that shimmering stack of oysters that we turn to Manet’s oil on canvas Oysters (1862) today. Edouard Manet (1823 – 83) reacted strongly against the academic history painting of his teacher and began a career as an artistic rebel with his work the Absinthe Drinker (1859). This scene, selected from the seamier side of life, set him on a trail towards modernity, with an eye for new subjects and a hand for a fresh style.

Oysters is one of Manet’s earliest still-life scenes (reportedly painted for his fiancée) and shows the brilliance of his burgeoning technique. His art is often based on an opposition of light and shadow, with as little transitional half-tone as possible. He preferred to paint directly from his models with speed and immediacy, with a limited palette in which black was extremely important. Brushwork is blindingly good: single slicks fatten the oysters across their shells and paint puckers across the pickled skin of the fruit. Each color and stroke stands independently on the canvas: it’s our eyes that blend them into form.

Manet loved the Louvre and drew much of his artistic guidance from Velazquez, Goya and Hals, whom he ‘met’ there: this pic has shades of a 17th-century Dutch still-life and 18th-century Chardin. His work though was too out-there for the Salon, which frequently turned down his offerings (Manet spent his year craving Salon acceptance).

Back now to our out-there art party hybrid, for the most eye-popping piece: before dinner, guests watched Simon and Michaela getting ready for the feast in glass-doored cubicles. After he’d had his hair cut and dried, Simon shattered the glass door and claimed his bride, breaking down her door to join him. Now, why didn’t we think of that?

I’ve not got the usual video for you this Friday I’m afraid (though I’m hatching big plans for upcoming ones). No, instead I’m taking a break today and giving Husband (who’s our hard-working camera and editing man) some much-needed rest and relaxation too! Here to help us get into the lazing state of mind is John Singer Sargent (1865 – 1925) with this lovely, languid portrait called Nonchaloir (Repose), from 1911.

Sargent’s masterful technical facility (see his hand whip-whipping across the shimmering skirts here), as well as his knack for showing to perfection pretty sitters in their sumptuous surroundings, made him popular with well-heeled patrons on both sides of the Atlantic. But, by 1909 he’d grown faintly tired of this well-trodden format, and was keen to “experiment with more imaginary fields.” One upshot is this deliciously recumbent image of his niece Rose-Marie Ormond Michel, caught in a completely unconventional pose and seemingly miles off in a state of semi-snooze. Makes you want to kick back and do the same, doesn’t it? See you tomorrow (and next week, for our new video).

A lick of paint and a splash of color can do even the dingiest, direst corners a world of good, and that’s whether we’re talking a small, private space or a big, public one. I recently read about a drive that’s transforming Rio de Janeiro’s slums through community-driven art. Called the Favela Painting project, it’s all been cooked up by Dutch artist duo Haas&Hahn, and they’ve already done and dusted two campaigns in Vila Cruzeiro (Rio’s most notorious slum). Now efforts are focussed on O Morro, where the plan is to prettify an entire hillside slum: already 34 houses and some 7,000 square meters have had a brush with beauty.

Perhaps the best thing about the project is its community-boosting benefits, in offering training (everything from different types of paint to safety measures while working on scaffolding) and employment to local residents. Dre Urhahn, one of the Favela Painting artists, explains: “This work of art can make a colorful difference in the lives of local individuals, the community and the city of Rio. It has the potential of working as a catalyst in the processes of social renewal and change.”

This got me thinking: there are unadorned, eyesore-style spaces all over the urban world: imagine what dashes of color and design could do. It must have been the idea of adding color and charisma to a city environment that inspired Frank Stella’s Sacramento Mall Proposal #4 (1978). I’ve been itching to give you a slice of Stella (born 1936) since we started, as he’s such an icon of American Abstract Art. When he started on the art scene in the late 1950s, Stella struggled in the wake of abstract expressionism, which had set the standard for avant-garde art since the late 1940s. So Stella searched for a new way, his own way, to approach the canvas. Over the course of his career, he’s been mind-blowing in his technical invention, ranging from an austerity close to Minimalism in early paintings to multi-colored, 3D works that tussle and tumble off walls.

One of Stella’s earliest and perhaps most enduring solutions to the painting problem was the stripe: a series of black “pin-stripe” paintings made his name in New York in 1959. He stayed on the austere tack through the early 60s, but gradually his canvases took on more curved shapes and more bright color. The Sacramento Mall Proposal #4 from the late 70s certainly harks back in some sense to the repetition and flatness that he found so useful at the start of his career: here we have an arrangement of thin-strip squares, set in a nesting format across the canvas. Stella seems still entranced by working systematically in a specific series: it’s a sort of problem-solving approach to painting. The rhythmic geometric arrangement creates a surface that is at once staid and scintillating: order and reduction are set against an energetic rainbow run of kinetic color.

It was in the 1970s that Stella started his move away from flat works to compositions which projected out from the wall. He worked with collage at first, then progressed to shallow reliefs and finally fully spatial constructions that could even be considered sculptures. What’s interesting about the Sacramento Mall Proposal #4, is that while it’s 2D and done in acrylic on canvas, it still possesses it’s own proposals for projection: in the mind (a mall??) and in the eye.

Shameful to admit, but there was definitely the odd occasion on our honeymoon (sat in the back of a safari truck, or on a beach seeing the sun set), when my mind trespassed momentarily into treacherous thank-you note territory. A mistake, I grant you, to start totting up the numbers of need-to-writes, as Husband looked on and lounged in ignorant bliss, but wedding guides are eerily emphatic about the right way in which to write to your guests after the event. In the end, it took two weeks, four pens, a stack of stamps and one throbbing index finger to get the lot labelled and shoveled into our mailbox in time.

The funny thing is, I rather enjoyed it, for reasons beyond the re-living of our day. I’ve since tracked the source of my springy mood: expressing gratitude is one of the surest routes to happiness. In his book The Energy Bus: 10 Rules to Fuel Your Life, Work and Team With Positive Energy, Jon Gordon says that “it’s tough to be stressed and feel grateful at the same time”, so it follows that thinking up all the things we’re grateful for (from a ripe banana to a trip to the Bahamas), and putting them on paper, is a fast-track way to way-hey.

I’m imagining for today’s post purposes that the letter in our painting The Letter is of the thank-you note variety. This work dates from 1906 and is by the Frenchman Pierre Bonnard (1867 – 1947). Born into a wealthy family, Bonnard studied law before a poster he sold to a champagne house made up his mind to pursue painting. In 1890 he shared a studio, which became a meeting place for the Nabis, a group of artists inspired by the colorful, primitive paintings of Paul Gauguin. When the group parted ways in 1899, he struck out on his own.

Bonnard liked domestic interiors, of women bathing, dressing, sleeping (lots featured his wife Marthe, whom he met in 1893 and married in 1925). These tender, private scenes became known as Intimisme (the most intimate thing here is the angled view: as if we’re standing close, looking on). What’s also apparent is Bonnard’s penchant for Japanese prints: the flat, decorative feel of this composition owes much to works he saw in Paris. There’s a strong sense of modeling in the forms, and a heavy use of impasto (lumpen oil). Most engaging is his use of color: after 1900 Bonnard’s palette took a turn for the richer, and he tended to work with around eight vivid colors. Here he’s placed maroon against indigo, brown against peach, mustard opposite turquoise, and the lone rose pink letter (or is it an envelope?) pops off the page pleasingly. It’s an odd blend perhaps, but one that beats and is balanced: Bonnard’s color play proved most influential on later painters.

The benefits of giving thanks are fulsome and far-reaching: gratitude helps us feel in control (by taking credit for the good things in our lives); it improves our health (easing our state of mind); it helps us cope better with trauma (by focussing on what’s good in life, in the present) and it bolsters self worth and esteem. All that from a simple thank you! Which is why I’m such a fan of Naked Thanks, a juicy, jaunty and often irreverent year-long blog project in which “Two American girls from the ‘me’ generation, write 365 bare-boned tell-all thank-you’s in an attempt to become more appreciative human beings.” You’ll be shocked (in a good way) and can thank me later.

At the cinema last week, the trailer for a new film Countdown to Zero blasted into the auditorium. See what we saw here:

Written and directed by acclaimed documentarian Lucy Walker, it traces the history of the atomic bomb, from origins to the present state of global affairs. Walker makes a compelling case for worldwide nuclear disarmament, an issue more topical than ever, with the Obama administration aiming to revive the goal today.

Seeing the trailer jettisoned my mind towards Jean Fautrier (1898 – 1964) a French artist whose works are pitted and punctured in the most profound way by his experiences of war. He’s a fascinating figure: he moved from France to London aged 10 and later studied at both the Royal Academy and the Slade School of Art, before returning to Paris in the 1920s to hold his first exhibition.

World War II had an indelible impact on his output: so much of the art that came out of the continent in the postwar years sought to convey the physical decimation, social unease, political division and economic collapse that had happened in Europe. People placed Fautrier as a pioneer of Art Informel (a term coined by the French critic Michel Tapie to describe the spontaneous abstract painting popular in Europe in the 1940s and 1950s), but he himself resisted the label, as he did all other attempts to place him in a cultural pigeon hole. Fautrier’s art, he said, was based only in reality, and an unbearably harsh one at at. For example, his studio at Chatenay-Malabry was near a wood where, during World War II, the Nazis executed prisoners each night (he himself had been arrested and briefly detained by the Gestapo in 1943). The screams haunted Fautrier, and he flailed to log his feelings of terror and helplessness in a series of paintings and sculptures called Otages (Hostages).

Despite the prosecution of prominent leaders of Nazi Germany at the Nuremberg Trials in 1946 and the implementation of the Marshall Plan the following year, Europe could not release itself for a long time from the legacies of the war. In art, bleak realism and brutal symbolism only eventually gave way to warmer colors and more direct imagery, though I suppose our work today Body and Soul (1957) shows some softening in the artist’s eye and mind. Certainly, it tells of the technique that Fautrier found postwar, his haute pate (high paste) approach, a multi-layered, sculptural painting style. Here we have the typical thickened effect of his later works: it’s made up of oil and varnish with sand and dry pigment on paper mounted on canvas. After the fattened application of materials, he scored the surface, interrupting it and breaking it up.

The artist asks us to see reality reflected in this work, and look long and hard enough and it’s sitting there, simmering below the surface. The idea of the transformation of the body was significant in these years and here we have both “Body and Soul” caught up in a tumor-like bulb in the middle of the canvas. The pinkish hue here and there adds hints of beauty, while the amorphous, open-like nature of the form indicates a subtle eroticism. But for me Fautrier is still shot-through with pain and tragedy, and this still aches with the angst of an existential crisis. So that even though this work is filled with freedom and a sense of individualism, it’s not clear of what the critic Herbert Read referred to it as “the geometry of fear.” And in the 1950s that fear was focussed on the growing threat of nuclear war.

It’s Monday morning, which means it’s back to work for many men and women everywhere. But, for a new wave of feminist housewives (a generation of female graduates who are choosing full-time motherhood over high-flying careers), this morning could comprise cookie-baking, crayon coloring and duck-feeding at the park.

And they wouldn’t want it any other way, according to a recent article in the UK’s Daily Mail, because after decades during which the number of women at work has steadily increased, it appears that the tide is now turning back to a more traditional family model. In Britain in particular, growing numbers of young, well-educated women are grinding the have-it-all generation to a halt and choosing motherhood over careers. “There’s a kind of radicalism about stay-at-home mums that’s emerging,” says Justin Roberts, one of the founders of the UK’s influential parenting website Mumsnet. “Whereas some women used to hate saying they were full-time mothers, there’s a trend towards giving up work and being out and proud about it. It’s not a thing to be ashamed of anymore.” In the US too, mums have started calling themselves “house managers”, a title that might better indicate the import of the job.

And feminists, before you prickle and perish the thought of so many years of hard graft gone to waste, hear this: Jill Kirby, director of a Westminster think tank called the Center for Policy Studies describes this new take on the work/life balance as “maternal feminism”, saying “feminism shouldn’t be defined purely in terms of the work place. A very important part of choice for women is the ability to devote time to children and motherhood, too.”

Let’s look at how this domestic scene might play out in a picture: Hide and Seek (c. 1877) is by the French painter James Jacques Joseph Tissot (1836 – 1902). Born in Nantes, he settled in England after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71. Friends with Degas since their student days in the 1850s, like Degas he worked in a realist vein, as a peintre de la vie moderne. Here we’re inside an English room, the artist’s studio. In the fore and middle grounds, four children play at hide and seek (one infant and three faces), while in the background lounges a lovely lady: it’s Kathleen Newton, with whom Tissot lived from 1876.

The way Kathleen’s clapped open her paper and wears a slightly sardonic air, while her nieces and daughter amuse themselves, infuses the scene with a kind of cool calm. Once this woman had entered his house and home, Tissot focussed almost only on intimate, everyday depictions of the cut and thrust of the secluded suburban household. So here we get the delicious clutter of a high-end Victorian interior, complete with collapsed cushions on the couches and chaises, animal pelts, angled frames, rimpled rugs and gleaming lamps and ceramics. We also get the delightful froufrou dress on the infant (topped off by a tumble of California curls) and an array of tiny, tense faces behind.

Seeping into this room though is a sense of sadness that links to the woman and the way we’d want her to be with the kids. Her separation from them has to do with her health: Kathleen died in 1882 and it’s as if Tissot is trembling with an awareness of her illness here. Just see how he undermines the tranquility with an ashen mask that hangs near Mrs. Newton at the entry to the conservatory.

Warning! If you’re likely to be offended by the loucher and more licentious links that Art 2010 occasionally makes between art and the art of living, then look away now. Because today we’re discussing Speedos, and Lord knows it’s going to get messy. It’s summer, so swimwear has been preying on my mind (and parading before my eyes). Fact is I’ve got shocking news to report: Speedos (those clingiest, briefest of briefs) have had a huge surge in sales this year. So if you’re planning to be on the beach or by the pool at some point soon, don’t say I didn’t tell you.

Now. Snug-fitting things are fine, in some quality-controlled conditions. Remember Daniel Craig coming out of the ocean in some super-small trunks in his first James Bond? See, that was fine. Or the finely-tuned and tanned ‘Australian Rugby Team’ that fetched up in the pool in the second Sex and the City film? Also fine.

But Speedos become borderline obscene if they’re seen on the more beer-gutted, sunburned, socks-worn-with-sandals bodies of the Brits (who are the ones who’ve boosted sales by 153% this year). How to explain this distressing trend? Aspirational attiring? Jeremy Langmead, editor of the UK’s Esquire magazine thinks so: “It’s never the cute guys who wear them on the beach. It’s the middle-aged fat lumps who’ve seen a picture of a toned guy in Speedos and think if they wear them they’ll look like him.” Others see a more money-minded cause: in May, as sales of Speedos soared in the US, fashion experts speculated that the shortening of swim shorts could spell improvements in the stock market.

Would you believe it, there’s an artist at the NGA who’ll allow us to ponder this pressing issue further: Francesco d’Ubertino Verdi, called Bachiacca (1494 – 1557) was a Florentine painter who started out in the studio of Perugino. In 1515 he was working with other artists in the city on painting room furnishings and by the 1520s he’d established himself as a painter of predellas and small cabinet pictures. Later his output included large altarpieces.

The Flagellation of Christ then is a relatively early work (c. 1512/1515) and slots into the smaller-scale pieces Bacchiacca was doing at the time. There are tangible traces of Perugino’s influence here: in the balanced arrangement of figures and architectural forms, in the restrained facial features and controlled gestures (remember this is a torture scene) and in the landscape fading into blue beyond the action.

Everything is flushed with poise and prettiness: the detailing on the arches and column capital, the feathers flouncing out of the hats of Christ’s persecutors and the twirls of material draped across the groins. And it’s those loin-clothes that I want to focus on for now, because they reveal a lot (double entendre intended) about the time and art trends. They’re sparse so that we’ll see more of the bodies beneath: the Renaissance saw resplendent achievement in anatomical awareness and Bacchiacca had probably been boning up in his bones and muscles and flesh-painting (see how he’s showing us how good his buttocks are on the right). The artful arrangement of the twills of material on the left and on Christ again pronounce the presence of Perugino’s style: he was a fan of this sort of decorative detail.

So what have we learned, by the close of this post? That better bodies, good fit and none-transparency are all musts for ‘banana hammock’ wear? Otherwise, they’re just bad beach behaviour. And gents, if you still insist on a Speedo, just stay out of the very cold water.

Straight up, the best thing about being on holiday (aside from the good food, booze, friends, family and sun/sea/sandals special) is the reading room it gives you. Out in Italy (poolside as I type), here are some of the things I am enjoying NOT reading right now:

1. Emails (the boring ones)

2. Bills and bank statements

3. Letters from our building berating us for bringing food and beverage into the pool area

4. The manual for our new TV remote

5. The shopping list

6. The back-to-the-shopping list, with the things on I forgot the first time

And here are the things I AM enjoying reading:

1. Trashy magazines (purely to keep my finger on the pulse, you understand)

2. Recipes for what we’ll cook tonight

3. Protection details on the side of a sunscreen bottle

4. Books, books and more books

Reading (the right things) is relaxing, no two ways about it, we’ve all read the statistics that prove as much. I’m guessing it’s because going into a good book lets you get into another world, and opens up fresh vistas for the mind’s eye. It was this thought that sprang instantly to mind when I saw this painting for the first time: it’s called Forest of Fontainebleau (1834), by the French artist Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (1796 – 1875). Corot started out working in the family drape business, but moved over to art with the help of an allowance from his father: good thing too, as he evolved a sublime and separate style that became key to the development and direction of French art.

This work is a biggun’ and says all sorts of things, about Corot’s training and the tastes of the times: the academic landscape tradition was being re-booted right now and Forest of Fontainebleau was proudly put on show at the Salon of 1834. It’s a hybrid ‘historic landscape’, lifted beyond the bog-standard landscape by the figure in the foreground. Now for me, this picture was an obvious pick, since the reading woman tied nicely to the ‘book-reading opens up new worlds’ thing. But Corot’s contemporaries would have taken one look at the loose-haired, peasant-dressed, wilderness-bound woman and spotted Mary Magdalene. The tiny deer springing in the distance completes the classic attributes of the saint.

This forest is far more than a formulaic academic image: Corot is more of a mover and shaker than that. Though this was done in-studio, Corot had started the painting en plein-air (outdoors) push, and based this on sketches and studies done outside. Corot’s radical move beyond the studio, spurred by the need to make accurate the appearance of the natural world, had him develop a freer, more natural style within he classical French tradition.

Here there’s a sensitive treatment of light: see it shining through the canopies of leaves and over the sunken river bed. He tends to use a limited range of colors, aiming to achieve form and depth through subtle tonal relationships of light and dark. His creamy, dreamy surface texture comes through with his use of small and quick brushstrokes. In many ways this man anticipated Impressionist landscapes and, though he declined to participate in the first Impressionist exhibition, what he did on his canvases caught the imaginations of pupils and followers including Pissarro, Morisot, Renoir, Monet, and Sisley. I suppose like a good book, Corot cleaved open a whole new world of possibilities for them.

For the first time, I felt the full force of the collections (and the breadth of the challenge of Art 2010). And I hope it’s a good chance for all of you (especially those living further afield) to explore the Gallery, top to bottom!

So here it is, around my world of art in under 7 minutes.

Today’s the feast of Mary Magdalene, a woman described in the New Testament as one of the most important figures in Jesus’s ministry. In texts, Mary is identified by ‘Magdala’, which might mean she was from the town of the same name on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee. Also, in Aramaic, ‘magdala’ means ‘tower’ or ‘elevated, great, magnificent.’

Mary Magdalene has been seen as a prostitute, a sinner, or simply a woman who abandoned herself to a life of luxury before turning to Christ. In fact at their meeting, he cleansed her of the “seven demons” that defined her earlier life. Here she is in the eyes of Bernardino Luini (c. 1480 – 1532), one of the most popular Milanese painters of the early 16th century.

He shows her as a beautiful, worldly woman, dressed in elegant attire and holding what might be the emblems of one of her iconic actions (the anointment of Christ’s feet with her tears and hair). It’s sometimes said that Luini paints as a poor man’s Leonardo da Vinci, and indeed she does have, in that enigmatic half smile and the soft hazy effects of her skin, some distant shades of the Renaissance master.

Once purified, the Magdalene devoted herself to Jesus and his teachings, entering into his inner circle. Indeed, in apocryphal texts, she is portrayed as a visionary and leader of the early movement, who was loved by Jesus more than the other disciples. Several gnostic gospels (such as the Gospel of Mary, from the 2nd century) even see her as a special ‘disciple’ who had a deeper understanding of Jesus’s teachings and is asked to impart this to the other apostles.

In any case, she was a prominent figure in Jesus’s last days and stayed with him until the end. She was present at the cross, when the male disciples (except John the Evangelist) had already fled. This side panel from a Crucifixion altarpiece by Pietro Perugino, shows her standing serene and composed at the side of the action.

Perugino (c. 1450 – 1523) was hailed as “the best painter in Italy” in 1500 (he was a formative influence on the young Raphael) and this work, with its calm, classical balance and proportion is a good indicator of his style. The poise and prettiness here are in stark contrast to how Moretto da Brescia, another Italian artist from around the same time (1498 – 1554) manifests the Magdalene in this crucial scene.

Here she’s red-haired and ravaged by the experience of seeing Jesus dead: clasping his feet, face buried in is legs, her own thrown left and right. Moretto is a man who took up aspects of the Venetian style (the city was close to Brescia in northern Italy), especially their color and play of light. However, the searing emotion of this scene could only have been created in the rarified religious zeal of a provincial place like Brescia.

According to all four Gospels of the New Testament, Mary Magdalene was the first person to see the resurrected Christ (‘Noli me tangere’ he told her: do not touch me). She then spent the final years of her life in the wilderness, clad only in her hair, in repentance. To close we’ll take Giulio Cesare Procaccini (1574 – 1625), from Lombardy. This elegant image shows a swooning Magdalene amidst a set of supporting putti and music-making angels. The two figure groups are hatched into harmony by a series of gestures and glances. This is the Magdalene in uninhibited ecstasy, moments before being born up to heaven.

I had TIVO triple-checked and ready, set to go ahead and record the early episodes of D.C. Cupcakes, a new six-part reality series on TLC on Friday nights. It catches the kitchens of Georgetown Cupcake, this city’s sweetest success story, started in 2008 by sisters Sophie LaMontagne and Katherine Kallinis (who left careers in fashion and finance to bake their way to bliss). The duo now sell 5,000 of their frosted favorites a day, and the pavement outside their new-site store (3301 M St. NW) sags under the weight of the all-hours, hour-long wait-line.

Ooh was I looking forward to it, but for me the first two eps fell flat. They seemed to lack some key content: cupcakes coming out of the oven raw, or running out of red velvet on Valentine’s Day do not a throbbing plot-line make. And though the one-off jobs the sisters take on start out fun (a carnival mask for St Jude’s Hospital, a project for an animal rescue fundraiser), how often can you cover a shape with 1,000 mini cupcakes and have it be original? We’ve all seen better big-cake baking on Ace of Cakes and TLC’s own Cake Boss. Mostly though, a show (even one as sweet and digestible as this) really needs one or more appealing characters at it’s center, and while Kallinis looked likable, sister Sophie came across as controlling (“we’re the only ones who can do the signature swirl”), cross (“we’re bakers, not sculptors!”), and competitive (“my pup-cakes won!”).

Still, nothing stopping us celebrating all things treat and sweet with this still life from the NGA: Still Life with Sweets and Pottery is by Juan van der Hamen y León (1596 – 1631). The son of a Flemish father (also a still-life painter) and Spanish mother, he spent his life in Madrid. His paintings speak of his dual parentage, falling into the bodegón (still-life) tradition of Spain, but still looking markedly Flemish.

The Spanish ate up the artificiality of still-life and it was scenes like this that garnered van der Hamen y León a rep as the best Spanish still-life painter of the 17th century (at a time when the genre was being seen as a worthy subject in its own right). In an abstract setting with a darkened background, he starts to mix his ingredients. The ring-like stoneware bottle sits at the center of the composition and starts a play of other spheres and circles: the marzipan boxes to the right are foreshortened into ovals, there are round-bellied jars of honey and preserved cherries, a circular tray of balled donuts, snaky cakes and fat frosted figs. These sinuous sides soften the sharp-edged setting, and interest is added by the fact that the objects are exposed to different degrees to the light source. Texture is tongue-tinglingly tasty: powder-sugared, gleaming fruit peel, wicker weaving, dull clay, wood and glass are all here. Careful use of one color (red) in various tones, hatches the forms into a harmonious whole, so that looking closely at this planned-out picture is both an intellectual and a sensory in experience.

Few could find fault with a Georgetown Cupcake: their flavors are amazing, the cakes are moist and the frostings unusually unctuous. I’ll be watching the show to see if it gets better, but so far it looks like a fluffy sweet filler for the summer months schedule. What do you think?

Flicking through a magazine last week, my eye alighted on an Oreo ad: “Milk’s Favorite Summer Dip” said the slogan near the top, while the image splashed cool blue and white across the page. There’s an up-close Oreo drifting in a mug of milk and two blue straws bending over the edge, looking just like the side-bars of a swimming pool step-ladder. It’s a clever pic, designed to dip into the milk-dunking thing but also conjuring up cool connections with summer fun and snacking.

“Milk’s Favorite Cookie” has encountered numerous ad incarnations, all involving the must-dip idea, which means they zone well into the zeitgeist of a melting midsummer, when stripping off and dipping in is foremost on most people’s minds.

So it is that Oreo has inspired today’s post, in which we’re dipping the Art 2010 toe into Postimpressionism, with Paul Gauguin (1848 – 1903). Born in Paris to a French journalist father and a half-Peruvian mother, as a young man Gauguin turned his back on his world as a wealthy, respectable stock-broker and family man to devote his life to art, having piqued his passion by trying out his hand as an amateur artist and collecting Impressionist works. This was more than a new-job plunge: he careered off a cliff into unchartered cultural territories. In a bid to eschew “the disease of civilization” he sought inspiration and solace among primitive communities in Brittany and Tahiti (he had two extended stays on the island: 1891 – 93 and 1895 – 1901).

This work The Bathers (1897) was painted during his second time in Tahiti and suggests the things he was after as an artist. He’d started out experimenting with exotic imagery long before he ever set foot in an exotic place, but these women, with their fascinating faces and beguiling behaviors brought him into contact with what he called noble savagery: “I have decided on Tahiti… and I hope to cultivate my art there in the wild and primitive state.”

Color is important in Gauguin: Postimpressionism often applied unnatural coloring as a pathway towards more authentic expression. Here there’s glowing pink and peach grasses, and warm-yellow and lavender eddies on the water. During his first stint on Tahiti, Gauguin’s colors had appeared flat and intense: now he’s blending more and adding softness and shading. These colors seem fragrant with the perfumes of paradise: it’s one of his most sumptuous and successful harmonies. Gauguin was always captivated by color, calling it “a profound and mysterious language, a language of the dream”, and when his name was made after his death (with a huge retrospective in Paris in 1906), it was his radical anti-naturalistic use of color that had an epic influence on 20th-century art.

In other ways too, this picture pulses with primitive beauty. The forms are emphasized in their geometric-ness; space and scale are abandoned for intimacy. Gauguin diverged and differed from Impressionism for the fact that where they sought to see outward appearance, he was after something more inner. In fact The Bathers makes it plain that Gauguin wanted to wash off the shackles of naturalism and drench his works with feelings and spirituality: there’s a mellow dreamlike dimension here, steeped in suggestive evocation of native beliefs and behaviors, especially at the level of the eyed-communion between us and the two women glancing over.

Gauguin succeeded in freeing himself and his art from the limits of the traditions that ran before him, and for those that came after, his works were as refreshing as a cool glass of something on a hot day. The cookie, I’m guessing, was optional.

Husband and I spent a good deal of Sunday at the National Museum of the American Indian and boy, were we bowled over. Native Americans have often suffered in US museums, turning up in tacky dioramas near the dinosaurs. But this one’s different, since indigenous populations from all over the western hemisphere have had a say in the context in which their peoples are placed.

The key part of that collaboration for me is the building itself: designed by a Canadian architect (Douglas Cardinal), but with input from Native American leaders, it’s an incredible curvilinear structure carved from Kasota limestone. It has a cliff-like appearance, and is so other than other things sitting along the Mall, while still working in total harmony with its surroundings.

Husband and I came first to the canteen, which is rightly renowned for dishing up delicious, authentic foods. After the fried bread (which was fantastic), we were faced with fierce feelings as soon as we entered the exhibitions: the stories of genocide, betrayal and marginalization cannot but provoke anger and sadness. The histories galleries cast contact between two hemispheres in catastrophic terms: from 1492-1650, European contagions claimed as many as 9 lives out of 10, so that a world previously untouched and untampered in 10,000 years was summarily shattered.

In the contemporary galleries, the stress fell on the importance of strategies for staying native, of survivance (this is more than simple survival, it’s about keeping a culture alive). One young Kahnawake had it this way: “my ancestors fought hard to remain who they are, and because of my ancestors’ defence of their culture, I am here today. Now I have the responsibility to do the same.”

The single most mesmerising and meaningful thing for me was the realisation that for Native Americans, their situational experience, always in-touch with its surroundings, had for thousands of years sprung philosophies, food, behaviors and beliefs. Not to mention an unshakeable sense of proper identity: “no one can go into this world and be peaceful with themselves unless they know who they are.”

And to think all that was rent away. That’s what George Catlin was fighting against in his pictures at the NGA. Catlin (1796 – 1872) was an American painter, author and traveler who specialized in pictures of Native Americans and the Old West. Following a short stint as a lawyer, he turned to painting, ultimately producing two major collections of images of American Indians in North, Central and South America. He was the first artist to attempt anything like it.

So it is in Room 65 of the NGA, you’re plunged into an exotic world of hunters, dreamers, doctors, cooks, students and leaders, none of whom were just “Indians” and none of whom had ever heard of “America” before the 1400s. It’s here that Catlin has us come face to extraordinary face with the characters he sought to save. Like the Boy Chief (1843) from the Ojibbeway tribe above, or White Cloud, Head Chief of the Iowas (1844/45) below.

This is See-non-ty-a, an Iowa Medicine Man (1844/45) rendered with detail, delicacy and a sense of dignity.

Catlin claimed his interest in America’s “vanishing race” was sparked by outrage at US government’s mistreatment of Native peoples: he saw the frontier as a place of corruption, delivering devastation to tribes. His Indian paintings were a way “to rescue from oblivion their primitive looks and customs.” And yet imagine if they’d needed no rescuing at all.

Every month or more in the year leading up to our wedding, Husband and I attended St Michael’s Church in Amberley, West Sussex. Building started there c. 1100 and continued through the centuries, so it’s filled with a curious assortment of old chattels: a 12th-century font here, 13th-century frescoes there. So enthusiastic was I about these, that I made our photographer promise to snap them all at the start of the day (these are the pics we tend not to look at, but at least I can share with you all today):

The sad thing is, the things we saw in St Michael’s and that still linger in Medieval and Renaissance places all over Europe, are at risk of slip-sliding into the unknown. London’s Victoria & Albert Museum recently ran a survey ahead of its re-opening of their extensive Medieval and Renaissance galleries, as a way to gauge levels of knowledge and interest in the period, its art and artifacts.

Here’s what they got: it rained a lot in the Middle Ages, blood-thirsty barons blocked peasants in dungeons, people ate too much red meat, drank mead and the poor gobbled a lot of potatoes (if they weren’t scrabbling in the dirt like chickens). Oh dear. Worse still, most of those asked turned their noses up at medieval art: “my child can draw better than this” was one particularly pointed assessment. The Renaissance faired marginally better, with the survey turning in a more optimistic measure of knowledge and interest in the era.

But real rock-bottom was reached when the V&A assessed how slip-shod general awareness of the theology and liturgy of Christianity has become: since around 80% of the collections in question are religious in one way or another, they were, well, shafted. It seems that as fast as a flash, millennia of a Christian culture have become hazy and lazy of late: everywhere in the West (except the US) has seen a slackening off of religious practice, and there’s less transmission of the stories and symbols in families and schools (in the 1940s Religious Studies was a compulsory subject in schools, but by the freer 60s and 70s they’d petered palpably).

Societies are more markedly diverse these days (and thank goodness for that), but it’s brought with it a more median approach where religion’s concerned, with schooling on the subject seeking to stress similarities and common themes between faiths and creeds. All of which means that the facts, figures and features of any particular faith can fall easily into deeper oblivion.

Wherever we stand as individuals on this, I’m thinking hardest about the art historian. How to handle all that old, religious art, which becomes less relevant, relatable and real the more its emblems and events are lost to time. In one way, old images can be returned to the role they started out with: instructing the illiterate (so to speak) on an event and its significance.

I’m running a kind of experiment today, with this pair of stained glass windows from the NGA, showing The Angel and Virgin of the Annunciation (1498/1503). They’re by Ser Giovanni di Domenico “de verti” (of glass windows), about whom we know little, other than he was a priest and glass craftsman. Wherever we stand on religion and its transmission, perhaps the basics of any faith are key for unlocking the real beauty and meaning of images like this? You decide.

So it seems that Starbucks customers at drive-throughs across America have been paying for the next customer behind them. I’ve yet to be on the receiving end of such a random act of kindness (when it comes, make mine an extra large, triple shot, mocha-choca-latte with whipped cream and syrup and a sponge cake and coffee cake on the side), but I was interested to see what it’s all about.

The Random Acts of Kindness Foundation first popped up 15 years ago, to persuade people to practise kindness and “pass it on”. Kindness can be incorporated into everyone’s everyday, they say, and “as people tap into their own generous human spirit and share kindness with one another, they discover for themselves the power of kindness to effect positive change in their lives and the lives around them.”

At first, I understood “random” to mean an act towards someone you don’t necessarily know or imagine to meet again, but I believe in this case it relates more to the unexpected element in a gesture. And that’s what I see here, in this little helper who had my heart from the start: The Early Scholar is by the American Eastman Johnson (1824 – 1906). Born on the east coast, Johnson ‘burst’ onto the art scene with a crayon-portrait studio at the age of 18, before moving to Washington, DC to make black and white likenesses of eminent figures. It was in 1849 that his training took off in earnest however, with an extended study-stay in Europe: he did drawing at the Düsseldorf academy in Germany, and painting in an artist’s studio close by, before heading off to the Hague in Holland.

Johnson was among the first American artists of his generation to receive extensive training abroad. His stint in the Netherlands (three years in all) was highly unusual for an American artist at the time and it was no doubt the start of his art in genre scenes (images of everyday life, in which the Dutch Old Master tradition excels). During the 1860s and 1870s Johnson became one of his country’s most sought-after specialists in this area (our picture today dates to c. 1865).

The Early Scholar has him looking at national life in the most home-oriented and humble way. A work like this would have been the end result of careful study and numerous charcoal and oil sketches, a kind of concentration that mirrors that of the character seen here. What I think works well is the way he strips the scene to a bare-bones state: it’s so close-colored all of this, with little emphasis on tonal variety. The composition is simple, with a sliding diagonal on the right and an array of verticals on the left bringing the eye to the quiet action taking place in the middle. There, a sliver of hot color and a peek at the profile of a concentrated lad concentrate our eye on his simple act: rocked forward on his chair, hand held on the stove door, it radiates warmth and human connection.

There are lots of backed-up benefits to expressing kindness, apparently: it nurtures healthy relationships, as well as good mental and physical health, and gives a “helper’s high”. Indeed, do it regularly enough, and random acts of kindness procure a happiness state equivalent to that of getting a college degree or more than doubling your income. So, certainly sign me up for some of that! And I’ll see you in Starbucks (you’ve got my order).

Teniers the Younger, Tavern Scene. Courtesy of the National Gallery of Art.

What’s the one thing more British than a bright red phone box? Or a bright red post box? Or a fistful of fish and chips wrapped in yesterday’s greased-stained newspaper? Even more English than sipping tea and nibbling scones with jam and clotted cream on a lawn trimmed to within an inch of its life?

Check out this week’s video blog. And special thanks to all things British, pubs, the Queen, Prince William, Prince Harry, Wimbledon, grey skies, long queues, scones, cups o’ tea, H&M, Paul Smith, bangers & mash, Cambridge, David Beckham, the Wombles, Brown sauce…

Hooray for a hump (of flesh, that is). There’s been sited on the sartorial horizon a first ripple against the tide of rippling six-packs that have dominated men’s fashion since, well, forever. Flick through the pages of a gentleman’s style rag and the looks are lamely limited: either it’s taut, tanned and totally hairless, or it’s pale, painfully skinny and basically pre-pubescent. Anything else (flesh? flab? forays of hair?) has been seen as so unhip it hurts, which is odd, since the looks above are miles off the more meaty reality for Brit and US men.

In most areas of life, a bit of chub and an extra chin do little to dampen the progress of the more portly fellow, but even for the fatter man, fashion has been the final frontier. Until one cool high-end Dutch magazine (trust the Dutch) called Fantastic Man produced a beautiful shoot sold as “a series of stylistic suggestions for bold summer fashions to be worn by gentlemen of quite marvelous shape.” The mag’s creative director Joop van Bennekom (36 inch waist) said: “when we started the magazine in 2005, men’s fashion was all about Dior Homme and very skinny boys who were 14 and 15 years old. We were men in our 30s and couldn’t relate to that at all. We have been thinking about doing this for a couple of years, and it has taken a long time to find the right men, and get clothes, because they are not sample size.” The result is a confident, corpulent display of mighty chaps in clothes that look mighty good and made-to-measure for their more “marvelous” form.

Here’s a good representative for the broader man at the NGA. He’s The Prefect Raffaele Raggi (c.1625) by the mega Flemish artist Anthony van Dyck (1599 – 1641). He’s not new to Art 2010, but his prodigious story bears repeating: an independent master by c. 1615/16, he was Rubens’s chief assistant while still in his teens, after which he went from strength to strength (in Italy, England), ultimately now known as the greatest Flemish artist of the 17th century (after Rubens).

It was this sort of portrait that won the artist a European reputation. This prefect is identified by the crest in the upper right hand side of the picture. The image flutters with elegance: the slender drooping hands are a van Dyck speciality, as is the whipping sash so slickly and rhythmically applied. Texture is another van Dyck delight: just see the different effects he achieves across the sheeny armor, the hair, the stubbled chin.

Hard to believe then, that this is a portrait of a dead man: indeed, the artist’s first of a deceased sitter. Around 100 years prior, this man had got the Raggi family admitted to the Genoese nobility, so this portrait is a lineage-emphasizer. But, as far as we can tell, van Dyck used a live model here, to bring that lively face and twitching expression. More to the point, the flesh is ample and all-too palpable: there’s a pad of it under his chin and no doubt it’s protruding beneath the armor on his belly. And yet, with the pose, the look and the air of winning authority, van Dyck’s Raggi makes plain an important point: what a fatter man lacks in lean and lithe, he makes up for in bigger and better. This one’s got gravitas, which you get only by being a bit more, erm, abundant. Like a Winston Churchill, or an Elvis perhaps (before he ate one too many fried peanut butter sandwiches).

Ooh it all sounds like a terribly troublesome way to show your mettle: running through thin streets in front of a pack of 12 crazed bulls. And yet, every year, people sign up for encierros (from encerrar, to lock up, or pen) or bull runs, in towns and cities across Spain, Portugal and some spots in Mexico and southern France.

The most famous bull run (you’ll probably have heard) takes place in Pamplona, in honor of San Fermín, with things kicking off on July 7th and the last run happening today. The aim is to keep ahead of six fighting bulls and six steers (young castrated oxen) as they race their way along an 850 meter course from off-site corrals to the bullring in town. The bulls that run on the first day of the festival are killed that night, ready to be basted, roasted and dished up in Pamplona’s restaurants.

Anyone can get involved in a run (from locals to loco visitors), and thousands of these (mostly male) daredevils line the roads of the route. They’ll have drunk their fill the night prior (San Fermín is as much about festivities as it is about fear), but I can only imagine that the prospect of a stampede of seething animals at 8am offers the the swiftest of hangover cures. Injury appears to be a likelihood if not a certainty, with reams of runners getting hurt in a fall or a skirmish to the side. An unlucky few will feel the spike of a horn or the thud of hooves (last year there was one fatal goring).

In honor of all this bull chat, we’re taking a look at this Head of a Bull (1824) by Gaetano Monti at the NGA. Monti (c. 1750 – 1824) was an Italian sculptor on whom details are scarce. As far as I can surmise, Monti was a Neoclassical sculptor, working in the style that dominated the late 18th and early 19th centuries. As an Italian, he was well-placed to do so: Neoclassical sculpture was focussed in Rome.

So here Monti is manhandling marble (the preferred medium of Neoclassical artists, since it has all those lovely links with ancient statuary). I’m not sure if Monti managed a set of assistants on this (only adding the ‘last touches’ himself), but in any case someone was responsible for a lot of alluring animalistic observances: this strikes as a straight-up, close up bull head.

This work doesn’t do the Neoclassical norm of suggesting philosophical content or stressing rational thought, but it does emit the quality of “noble simplicity and calm grandeur” that was so much prized in art of the period. The prefix “neo” comes from the Greek word for “new” so Neoclassicism simply means new classicism: for me, this bull conjures up Greek myth, Roman sacrifice and a certain timelessness. It also makes me rather relieved I’ll never be caught staring this animal in the face for real. Here’s what retired American pilot Peter Rostow from Texas (who ran for about 35 meters this year before taking cover in a doorway) had to say: “I know bulls, but they came about a hundred times faster than I thought they would… I wasn’t prepared for that, and the intensity of the senses was overwhelming, the smell of the bulls, the sound of them running, and the fear.”

Among my most churning church experiences was a feast for Saint Gennaro in Naples one year, where a cardinal from Rome rocked two phials of the 3rd century saint’s be-crusted blood before a congregation of avid believers. After 18 m