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.

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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…

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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 minutes, he announced the blood to be flowing freely, and an almighty cheer arose: this meant a good year ahead for Naples.

In the same city, countless shrines cluster street corners, all dedicated to Diego Maradona (he played for Napoli for years), stuffed with pictures and (importantly) his hair strands and sweat.

And all in, I must have seen at least 10 thumbs and pinkies once-belonging to John the Baptist in chapels and churches across Europe: either he was a man of many digits, or something else is going on.

It’s the feel of the physical that connect us to relics: spit, sweat, blood, tears, hair and bones all make believable the stories in the Bible and elsewhere. It’s this same bodily fixation that flits behind what is probably the most fascinating of all religious relics, the veil of Veronica. Yesterday was the feast day of the woman of Jerusalem who became one of the most venerated saints of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. She’s the one who wiped the face of Christ as he made his way to be crucified in Calvary and, so the story goes, the cloth became imprinted with an image of his face. This tradition gave the saint her name: “true image” is vera icon in Latin, so in time these words fused to form “Veronica”.

There are a couple of versions of this event at the NGA: this one is Saint Veronica (c. 1470 – 75) by the Netherlandish painter Hans Memling (c. 1430/40 – 1494). Born in Germany, Memling became a citizen of Bruges in 1465 and then the city’s leading painter for the second half of the 15th century. This picture has the saint seated central within a landscape: it’s a peaceful devotional image that derives its calm from the pyramidal composition, the setting and the saint’s face (not one trace of the searing emotionalism of Memling’s master Roger van der Weyden). The shading on the robes is pointed and particular: a knack for observation renders the dress, faces and setting sharp and sensible. The style of the background landscape is hallmark Memling: feathered trees, rolling rocks and architectural detail, fading just a smidge at the edges, might have influenced Italians like Perugino and Raphael.

The thrall here falls in the area of the two faces: one devout, with downturned eyes and the other outward looking, on the cloth. His stare, so real and yet dead taps into the eery allure of relics to this day. Though there’s no historical or scriptural reference to Veronica’s veil, her legend became a linchpin in Christian lore and her cloth is one of the prize relics of the Church. She’s said to have taken it to the Holy Land before it was sited in Rome in the eighth century. By the 13th century it’d been taken to the Vatican, where it remains to this day.

This is the second take on the subject at the NGA, by the Italian painter Domenico Fetti (1589 – 1623). Now, isn’t his face fascinating for its veracity? The fabric is folded, fringed and flapped in a way that beggars belief. In the center hangs the purle-lipped falling face of Christ, flesh almost feelable (waxy with death?). Fetti’s fine brushwork forces us to get physical with a face, so much so that even if we reckon relics are nothing more than religious hocus-pocus, it’d be hard to argue with the power of paint.

The day had dawned so brightly. In a rural church in the Netherlands, a congregation prayed for Dutch courage and teamwork ahead of the FIFA World Cup final against Spain. Sister said that London’s Fulham Road had filled with heretofore unknown numbers of Dutch football fans: pub-fronts blossomed with bulbous protrusions of hundreds of orange balloons and their rafters rang with excited chatter. In Sussex, Mum attended an orange-themed dinner with Dutch diners, where one guest turned up head-to-toe (nails) in the country color, while here in DC Husband and I donned orange caps and tucked into Dutch cupcakes with fab flag touches.

And then the tension started. This is not the place any of you come for football follow-up or insight, but from where I was sitting (at the very edge of our armchair), it all looked rough and ready-for-explosion. The ref seemed as jittery and jangled as the players from the start and doled out a total of 14 yellow cards, as well as the fatal red one that dealt the Dutch a deadly blow late in the game. By now I’d started busying myself with urgent tasks around the house (frame-straightening, fork-polishing), rendered incapable of watching the screen. It was Husband’s yelp of indignation in the last four minutes of extra time that told of the single Spanish goal that sealed the Netherlands’ fate as the vanquished.

Today’s painting must mirror the melancholy born by the losers of the match. It’s called Ships in Distress off a Rocky Coast (1667), by the German-born Dutch painter Ludolf Backhuysen (1631 – 1708). This man was a marine painter who became Holland’s leading seascape artist in the last quarter of the seventeenth century. His sea-pieces are well-known and represented in museums around the world.

Here we have three fat-bellied boats, of the type that transported the country’s mercantile cargo. The spiked masts flap with the Dutch flag of banded orange, white and blue. Much like the pre-match hype we all enjoyed, this painting elevates and enshrines symbols of national optimism, but there’s obviously a desperate sense of foreboding here too. Things are quite literally on the rocks: the weather is whipping up a storm and the ships look set to crash against the sharp-edged, rapier crags at any second. Masts are snapping and the foreground shows that one ship has already sunk. Oh dear.

The pin-sharp precision on seeing this at the NGA suggests at first a faithful image of life. But Backhuysen is not above injecting some extra (invented) visual drama: the composition is deliberately off-kilter, and we’ve got complex rock shapes, splashing white spray and sharp contrasts of light and dark. This sort of subject might be a reminder of the fleeting nature of earthly success, something Dutch midfielder Wesley Sneijder must have sensed as his country’s chances slunk away.

Ugh. The higher the hype, the harder the fall, and Dutch expectations (and imaginations) had been ratcheting up since Holland’s clean sweep into South Africa and their heroic victory over tournament favorites Brazil. Still, there’s always the next one in four years’ time, and we need some sort of hope on the horizon: why else would Backhuysen tinge his dark grey and indigo waters with some golden-orange sun glow off to the left?

I’m turning to face the sun this Sunday, like a sunflower, since I’ve seen so many around recently. June burst with the bright yellow, big-headed blooms at our local Brookville market, breathing fresh floral air amongst the stacks of packeted bread. Last month too, Youngest Brother and Mum raised a fine forest of the flowers for selling at the school market and later along our street (TC and L are collecting cash for a charity trek to the base camp of Everest).

And then at Oldest Brother’s wedding just gone, Mum had a stunning, stylish sunflower on her hat: here it is in the chapel and later in the confetti line-up:

Naturally then, we’re goggling a gorgeous grower at the NGA: Le Tournesol (The Sunflower) is by Edward Steichen (1897 – 1973). Steichen was a photographer and painter: born in Luxembourg, his family immigrated to the United States in 1880 and he was naturalized in 1900. At first, Steichen stuck to a two-pronged approach, pursuing both painting and photography (his early canvases consist of soft landscapes and pastel portraits, made in a muted manner not dissimilar to his photographs of the time). By the 1910s however, his subtle painting approach was shunted out in favor of a hard-edged modernist style.

From that fertile ground sprung The Sunflower (c. 1920), painted in the period after World War I. After serving in the US army, Steichen upped sticks with his wife and children and went to live in a country house in Brittany, France. There he got stuck into gardening and enjoyed perusing natural phenomena up close. He captured his plants in a series of prying photographic close-ups, and our painting today takes those images as a departure point.

Though The Sunflower is a collaborative creative work (meshing Steichen’s interests in photography, gardening and painting), it stands apart as a work of striking abstraction. Instead of a fine-mesh spiral of seed pods in the face, this bloom is boiled down to a series of concentric rings, rippling from a central black orb through green gold, orange and pink. The twice-lined stalk leans off to the right, stuck at the side of a fat-bellied vase. All over, the planes of color are flat, unmodulated, untextured.

The image is surrounded by a shattered array of triangles and cropped rectangles, emblems of Steichen’s studies into the mathematical principles of plant growth. He’d come to believe that a rectangle, when dissected into three triangles, each in extreme and mean ratio, represented nature’s golden mean. I don’t totally get it but I do get a sense of the importance of the point for the artist.

Sunflowers have been saluted over and over in art, perhaps most famously by Vincent van Gogh. In fact the Dutchman’s florals had flowered Steichen’s fascination with the subject early on: in 1901 Steichen had visited a van Gogh exhibition and had been so moved he went back the next day, remembering years later that “three pictures of the now celebrated sunflower series made a particular and dramatic appeal to me.”

But Steichen’s Sunflower does not do the painterliness or atmosphere of van Gogh: instead, the machine-like efficiency of the image points to the influence of Precisionism, a 1920s set of US painters who showed industrial and architectural scenes in clean, simple and sharp manner. And it’s a wonder we’re even getting to soak up his sunflower today, since sometime between 1920 and 1923, in a crisis of faith, Steichen abandoned painting and destroyed all the canvases still in his possession. Luckily, by this time, The Sunflower had already left his hands: it’s virtually the only surviving example of its kind.

Peale, A Dessert. Courtesy of the National Gallery of Art

Having just got back from a short stay on Sicily, I’m keen to give Husband a taste of the place. Plopped in the mid-Mediterranean, Sicily really is a separate world (even though its northeast coast is within sight of the the Italian mainland), with its own raft of regional dishes and delights. A little history goes a long way in locating some of the flavors we found. The island is split into an east (Greek in ancient times but later rolled over by a rich layer of Spanish Baroque), a west and a north. The latter two have a history of all kinds of occupiers (Carthaginians, Romans), but most markedly these areas were Moorish.

Palermo (where we stayed, in the west), was once the Moorish capital, and had a golden age under Arab rule in the 10th and 11th centuries, when the island blossomed under expert agricultural practices of the settlers. The Moors also brought lots of exotic plants to the island (oranges, lemons, dates, figs, sugarcane and pistachio nuts), which all still infuse Sicilian dishes with distinct character, to this day. We saw lots of pine nuts muddled with raisins, sprinkled cinnamon spice and fresh mint: but mostly the Moorish influence is seen in the abundance of more-ish sugary sweets sticky-ing up every Sicilian street corner. You can’t move (sometimes literally) for the slabs of marzipan (sugar with almonds), cases of cassata (sugared ricotta) and fruit-filled sorbets, all staples of the Sicilian sweet-tooth.

Peale, A Dessert. Courtesy of the National Gallery of Art.

But before we get to dessert, let’s feast our eyes on something a little lighter, A Dessert by Raphaelle Peale (1774 – 1825). Raphaelle was the son of Charles Wilson Peale, a brilliant American portraitist, who named all of his 17 children rather ambitiously, after well-known artists, scientists and the like. Raphaelle became the best painter in the family, producing some fine, austere still-life scenes. These aren’t at all Dutch in appearance or feeling, but rather take from the Spanish 17th century tradition.

Here, what might at first glance look like a simple assemblage of tasty after-dinner treats, is in fact a flat surface filled with the reaching dreams of the new American republic. The Founding Fathers had found much to follow in the democracies of ancient Greece and Rome, so art started to fall in-line with a corresponding, neoclassical look that was balanced, clean and “majestically plain.”

Peale, A Dessert. Courtesy of the National Gallery of Art.

This Dessert is about serving up political principles as well as a snap of sweetness and crack of shells: the composition is ordered, each object lined up along a grid of sorts, parallel to the picture plane. The oranges sit in the middle of the canvas, the lemon finds a counter-weight in the walnuts and even the arc of the oranges is mirrored in the bend of the bowl.

Peale, A Dessert. Courtesy of the National Gallery of Art.

The colors are strong yet restrained and the shapes are sound and rounded off (see the spherical oranges). The Americans Peale painted for were practical people for whom art was not a priority: by making his fruit and nuts so palpable, Raphaelle grounds his work in the real world. A good job too, as I’ll be needing some of his ingredients to make Husband some of the Ricotta, Almond and Lemon Cake we savored on Sicily (recipe from Spring in Sicily: Food from an Ancient Island).

You’ll need:

• 250g (9oz) unsalted butter at room temperature
• 250g (9oz) caster (superfine) sugar
• 6 organic eggs, separated
• 250g (9oz) almonds, roasted then ground
• 70g (2.5oz) self-raising flour
• pinch of salt
• finely grated zest of 5 organic lemons and juice of 4 lemons
• 400g (14oz) fresh ricotta

Steps:

1. Preheat the oven to 180°C (350°F). Butter a 25cm (10in) round cake tin.
2. Beat the butter and sugar in an electric mixer until very light and fluffy.
3. With the motor running, add the egg yolks, one at a time, until all are incorporated.
4. Combine the ground almonds with the flour, salt and lemon zest. Fold into the batter.
5. Whisk the lemon juice with the ricotta until light and airy. Fold into the cake batter.
6. Beat the egg whites until they form soft peaks. Fold them carefully into the batter.
7. Tip the batter into the prepared tin and bake for 50 minutes.
8. Test for doneness by inserting a skewer into the cake (it’ll be clean when cooked through).
9. Remove the cake from the oven and turn it out onto a cake rack to cool.

Serves 6 – 8 (or one Husband and a hungry blogger for a couple of days…)

Newman, Twelfth Station. Courtesy of the National Gallery of Art.

Barnett Newman was an Abstract Expressionist, working in the 1940s, 50s and 60s. After Rothko, he’s the pre-eminent Color Field painter, opting for large expanses of sensual color. Born in New York in 1905, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants, he’d hit his 40s before he hit on his signature mark: the zip. Newman’s so-called “zip paintings” used thin stripes of color against plain backgrounds…

Check out this week’s video blog.

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Longhi, The Faint. Courtesy of the National Gallery of Art.

In 1811 a young French writer named Henri Beyle traveled to Florence for the first time. Coming from Bologna, his coach crossed the Apennines and descended to the city. He recalls: ‘My heart was leaping wildly within me: what utterly childlike excitement!’ Suddenly Brunelleschi’s dome surges into sight and Beyle bounds from his coach, leaving his luggage and lurching into the first great church he finds: Santa Croce. Here he tumbles across tombs, Michelangelo’s, Galileo’s, and turns his thoughts to other great Tuscans: Dante! Boccaccio! Petrarch! As he describes it: ‘The tide of emotion that overwhelmed me flowed so deep that it was scarce to be distinguished from religious awe.’

Now. We all at times see something so beautiful it takes our breath away. Or hear a thing so moving it makes the hair on the back of our necks stand up. But what befell Beyle was of another order entirely, tending to the trance-like, from what he tells us: ‘A supreme degree of sensibility where the divine intimations of art merge with the impassioned sensuality of emotion.’ And that’s not all. When he finally set foot outside Santa Croce, he suffered a flat-out fainting fit and fell flush to the floor.

Beyle (who assumed his nom the plume Stendhal as he wrote up his chronicles of travels in Rome, Naples and Florence) had spotted his symptoms but not his condition. What he felt was finally formalized in 1979 by a Florentine psychiatrist who labeled the fuzzy faint felt by some art-seeing people Stendhal’s Syndrome. Skeptics will scoff that it’s just the rough and tumble of the tourist trawl that brings on a case of the jelly legs: Lord knows it’s a lot to handle, with sunscreen leaking into eyes, the juggle of timetables, guide books, that sore from your sandals and odd-food indigestion. And a medical man might cite a common head-rush as the more likely cause of the symptoms.

Longhi, The Faint. Courtesy of the National Gallery of Art.

Let’s take a breather to look at The Faint (c. 1744) by Pietro Longhi (1702 – 1785). Shock! there’s a damsel in domestic demise: she’s deathly pale as others crowd her crumble. But, take in the tipped table, fallen cards and coins clattered to the floor, and the cause of her collapse computes easily. Our girl is a gambler and she’d been dealt a dumb hand: she simulated her swoon to grind the game to a halt! Smart. As servants swill to help her, all the bets are off.

Longhi, The Faint. Courtesy of the National Gallery of Art.

Longhi did a great line in insider-takes of the Venetian highlife: his subjects were upperclass ladies and gents then living a period of pleasure and decadence. These people were his patrons and would have been delighted with the painted detail of their décor: chinoiserie card table and moss-green damask on the walls.

Longhi, The Faint. Courtesy of the National Gallery of Art.

The one thing I look for in Longhi is more sharp satire: there’s none. Aside from that, I find his brush a dab bland, his colors a dab dull and his characters too diminutive and doll-like by far. Still, how else would be learn about the capers of the Venetian upper crust? A clue to his contemporary reception come from one Venetian journalist: “he portrays in his canvases what he sees with his own eyes.” And that’s the case with the farcical faint.

I like to believe in Stendhal’s Syndrome, since it stands as an art-lover’s beacon of belief: Florence made him faint, in an unreligious, all-aesthetic rapture. And, having seen some of Sicily’s staggering sights this week, I’ve also felt a tad woozy at times. And that was only partly down to the sunshine/ wine.

Titian, Ranuccio Farnese. Courtesy of the National Gallery of Art.

Been on Sicily for a few days and already I’m seeing parenting, Italian-style. So might flow an average day for an under-two bambino Italiano: get up, get dressed and get hoisted on a hydraulic car-lift by the mechanic fixing Mama’s car. Stop for a cornetto (croissant) and a succo d’arancia (orange juice) and help the barman make afore-mentioned Mama a caffe. Next it’s post-prandial perching on the vespas parked outside (perhaps a spin, if an owner is near) and later it’s stopping at the alimentari (deli) to choose cheese, meat and bread for lunch (plus a proffered slice of something to nibble on). All the while the tot’s being kissed and coddled by a complement of complete strangers exclaiming “bellissimo/ bellissima!”

The Italians might just be the most child-centric race on the planet, and there’s a looseness and confidence to their approach: it seems that as long as the kid’s in socks (or sandals in the case of the Sicilian sun) and is eating well (mangia bene), you’re doing due duty. There’s less of the obsessive micro-management you see more of in other countries, where the culture of raising ‘perfect progeny’ can create fear and neuroses among mums and dads. In Italy you’ll see plenty of spoon-feeding, but it’s a nip of wine at a late-night dinner with friends, or a chunk of the sugar-coated biscotto that came with a cappuccino.

Titian, Ranuccio Farnese. Courtesy of the National Gallery of Art.

But there’s one small Italian boy I’ve come across at the NGA who’s not enjoying the usual fun and freedom of his homeland’s parenting, usually so focussed on letting kids be themselves: this is a portrait of Ranuccio Farnese (1542) by Titian (c. 1485/90 – 1576). Titian was the greatest painter of the Venetian school: he had a long and prolific career in which he revolutionized every genre of painting that he worked in, including portraits like this, which were in great demand.

Ranuccio was a member of the powerful, aristocratic Farnese family and was 12 years old when Titian painted his portrait. He’d been sent to Venice by his grandfather, Pope Paul III, to become the prior of an important property belonging to the Knights of Malta (see the heraldic cross of that order emblazoned on the boy’s left lapel). Ranuccio went on to carve an impressive career in the church.

Titian, Ranuccio Farnese. Courtesy of the National Gallery of Art.

As is typical of a Titian portrait, the brilliance of his technique comes shining through. He limits his palette to black, white and rose, and enlivens the surface with sheen: there’s a dim gleam on the sleeves of the velvet cloak, a steady glow across the bodice and a fitful flicker on the satin of the Maltese Cross. There’s even a slim crescent of light sitting on the right thumbnail.

But it’s the ‘boy that would be man’ bit that gives this image such poignancy, pulled into prominence by Titian’s pin-sharp character insight. Made archbishop of Naples at 14, and cardinal at 15 (he was dubbed cardinalino – small cardinal –  for his young age), adult responsibility came to Ranuccio as a child. This is the thing Titian apprehended and suggested simply yet starkly in the boy’s cloak of office, which looks too cumbersome by far and is seen sliding off slender shoulders. The same thought is there in the features of the face, set into an expression of youthful anxiety. Nowhere is Titian’s genius more obvious than in this image: doesn’t it make you burst with wanting to buy the boy a great big gelato and tell him he’s got the afternoon off?

I’m stumped as to how to introduce Michelangelo: where does one start with a titan like this, whose career lasted three-quarters of a century, for which time he was unchallenged as the biggest and best artist in Europe? He’s now known the world over (pop star style) by his first name and his Adam, David and other icons are etched on the eyes of so many minds. Michelangelo (1475 – 1564) thought of himself as a sculptor first, but painting, drawing and architecture, he had it all covered. There’s a sprinkling of his scintillating brilliance sitting in the NGA, in the form or a few small drawings. And that’s cause for a serious sit-up-and-listen, since even the didiest of doodles by this man can and do fetch millions on the art market. We’ll look at two Male Nude sketches today.

It was the Post (Huffington) that pushed me into Michelangelo’s arms today. It seems that like any other great cult icon of our times, people are unable to let him or his genius lie. A few weeks ago the Post published an article about two neuroanatomists at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland, who’ve ‘discovered’ that the artist inserted secret anatomical illustrations into his paintings on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome. Yes, really. Rather like the physician Frank Meshberger who in 1990 ‘observed’ that  there was ‘a perfect anatomical depiction of a human brain in cross section’ in the God Creating Adam fresco, Ian Suk and Rafael Tamargo have unearthed body parts in God Separating Light from Dark: a human spinal cord and brain stem.

Now what I think is at best a Rorschach test-like effect in which two brain docs are seeing their favorite things, is spinning into speculation as to what these ‘codes’ might mean. Is this a comment on the crunch and grind between science and religion? Is this the artist’s attitude towards the church shining through? My two pence is that we’ll never know, so can we get back to the pictures now, please?

The NGA’s Male Nude sketches come off two sides of the same sheet (the verso is the “back” and the recto is the “front”). The hair-standing-up-on-end element here is the fact that these few and fine lines on a flimsy single sheet effortlessly record the mega mastery Michelangelo had in portraying the nude human figure. Much is made of the fact that he dissected corpses in Florence as a young man (he was well ahead of the legal curve on this one, and could only carry it out with the help of a friendly prior at Santo Spirito church). What he saw gave Michelangelo a grass-roots grasp of how we’re put together, all the better to put his figures together on the page, in paint or carved from stone.

Let’s take the recto view and work feet up: maybe I’m biased (Michelangelo is my main art crush) but how efficient and effortlessness are those sparse markings that lick into life this fabulous figure? Jutting calves, bulging thighs, a thicked-out torso and steady shoulders all make him look monumental, even though he’s mini. And that’s not all: read the believable bodily state and intent in the set of the legs, the swing of the body, the wheel of the arms and the drop of the head.

This is Michelangelo doing what he does best: unadorned images of the male nude, which for him could encode all the grace and godliness of man. And no need to look for anything more than that.

My heart and soul

And body too

Keep missing you

What am I to do?

The day’s so long

And the night’s so rough

Cause it seems like I

Can’t forget your love!

It feels just like

I’m gonna fall apart

And I don’t know how

I can make it now… so:

Come back!

You’ve been gone too long

You’re on my mind

And it’s hard to carry on

Come back!

You’ve been away too long

My heart is weak

from being strong.

That’s Luther Vandross, beseeching a beloved to return to his side (I think actually in this song it’s after the couple has hit a bit of a bump in the road). But in any case, what his crooning is chronicling in Come Back is the thing that happens as soon as you’re a couple: whether you’re dating, mating, co-habituating, or stating things before a priest and people-gathered, it’s singles turned double, two become one.

So it is that when pairs are parted, for whatever reason, and palpable proximity is prised away, it can be odd and oddly hard. Some say one day is sufficient for separation; others have their limit at seven; general sense states that after three weeks things will get really weird. Sure, we have phones, and email and all sorts, but these tech techniques ultimately do little to bridge the barrier of bodily separation. Because being together is what being together boils down to, I suppose.

So it is that as Mum, Sister and I settle into a short (girls only) stay on the isle of Sicily (we arrived yesterday and hey, I never suggested surgical hip-stitching to another half), my mind’s eye re-alighted on this painting at the NGA. It’s called The Corinthian Maid (1782 – 1784) and is by the English artist Joseph Wright of Derby (1734 – 1797). Joseph Wright (the ‘of Derby’ tends to get tacked on: it was his home town, and he spent most of his life there), trained in London before beginning work as a portraitist back in Derby. It was from the 1760s that he began to produce startlingly inventive scenes, hall-marked by saturated shade/light effects, which made him one of the most original artists of the 18th century.

The Corinthian Maid tells an ancient Greek tale of the daughter of a potter (spot the kiln hotly a-glow out back) whose beloved is set to set out on a journey (probably perilous, since he needs his spears and Fido at his side). She’s tracing the sleeping chap’s silhouette onto the wall, an image her father will use to make a ceramic keepsake, so she’ll have it to hold onto while her lover’s away. It’s clear why this sort of work by Wright was called a ‘candle-light’, delicately luminous as it is. Here it’s the hanging lamp concealed behind the curtain that throws features and gestures into relief. Wright must have wrung his hands in glee at the chance to paint a picture in which light plays a key role in the narrative that unfolds.

In fact, it was Josiah Wedgwood (a pioneer of pottery manufacturing) who commissioned the work: his vessels, decorated with low reliefs, would have been seen by an 18th-century audience as the aesthetic descendants of this ancient maiden’s attempts to have a hard-copy image of her man. Wright researched the topic for archeological accuracy: he studied the shapes of antique vases loaned from his patron’s collection and copied the clothes from classical sculptures.

It’s a special picture, full of focus and feeling, that has me hoping for her lover’s swift and safe return.

Get set for a history hit today: it’s the 4th of July and I’ve been finding out all about it. Independence Day (or the Fourth of July) has got to be the most gleaming, full-of-meaning of federal holidays (and there are lots to choose from) in the States. It’s the country’s national day, harking to the hallowed issue of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. This set out plans for the American colonies then still living under British rule to sever from foreign governance, on behalf of the new nation: it ushered in the War of Independence, but also formed a firm foothold in the trek towards freedom.

I chose an Eagle with Wings Outstretched and Open Beak (cast after 1862) as our image. It’s not quite as homespun a hero as we might have liked (the sculptor behind this – Antoine-Louis Barye – is as French as fries), but it will act as a rollicking reference to America’s national emblem. On every quarter I’ve ever popped into a parking meter sits an eagle with outstretched wings. On every dollar bill I’ve ever been billed sits an eagle with outstretched wings. He’s there on the great seal of the US, and thus also on husband’s business cards.

The US eagle stands for freedom and has done so from the time of the War of Independence. It’s said one early-morning session of whacking weapons and splashing guts had stirred sleeping eagles on high, so that they soared down to circle overhead of the fighting men. “They’re singing for freedom!” cried the patriots, and from around that time the symbol stuck.

As I mentioned, our eagle is by Barye (1795 – 1875) a Parisian sculptor who spent time from his teens sketching animals in the Jardin des Plantes (later he became professor of drawings at the Natural History Museum there). Barye couldn’t have picked a better place to ply his trade than Paris: the city gained a reputation as the  preeminent centre for sculptors in the 19th century. It was a time of revolution and republicanism allied to technical, industrial and social change, which led to lots of aristocratic and state patronage (our man enjoyed royal and upper-echelon commissions). Particularly popular were monumental works, especially of figures, but our Barye stuck to smaller, more furry friends. In fact he gained his nickname ‘Michelangelo of the Menagerie’ for being a central figure in the Animaliers school of artists.

This Eagle is a powerful, realistic work: the pantalooned legs, snagged talons, big beating wings and hooked beak all speak of an entrenched anatomical knowledge. There’s a quality of instantaneity here that’s arrestingly active: just settled or just about to set off? It’s ambiguous and that makes it thrilling, bringing us into the behaviors of the bird. And is that a snake I spy withering underfoot?

I’ll finish with another Eagle today: one of the best bird poems ever written, it’s by Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809 – 1892). Tennyson was poet laureate during the reign of Queen Victoria, an enduringly popular literary figure, and though his Eagle is small (just like our sculpture) it packs an incredibly powerful punch (ditto). The imagery is simple, as is the rhyme-scheme, but read and you’ll find it oddly unforgettable.

The Eagle

He clasps the crag with crooked hands;

Close to the sun in lonely lands,

Ringed with the azure world, he stands.

The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;

He watches from his mountain walls,

And like a thunderbolt he falls.

The wedding’s in the bag, so brother and bride are soon-to-be off on their honeymoon. They did something quite common for couples these days, and made the trip the feature on their list, in a honeymoon registry. So as a gift-giving guest you logged into their site to select from a host of honeymoon experiences. There were bigger bits (plush hotels, champagne dinners), interesting ones (spa days, boat trips, cultural tours) and mini presents to pick too (coffees, cocktails, ice creams, picnics). So clever and such a wonderful way to ‘send off’ the couple (rather than with a crock pot, however useful that may be).

These two are traveling through Italy for some time, taking in Rome, Naples, Sardinia and more. The route reminds me of the Italian leg of a Grand Tour, the traditional European trip taken by upper-class young men of means (Brits, Europeans, later the Americans) in the 1700s and 1800s. Lasting from some months to some years, the Tour was a sort of rite of passage, an educational eye-opener that exposed travelers to art, culture and the roots of Western civilization. France and Italy were must-stops on a standard itinerary.

Since the newlyweds are kicking off with a pleasurable stay in Venice (the jewel in the crown of any self-respecting Tour – as was a ‘cautious residence’ in Rome), we’re taking in Giovanni Antonio Canal, or Canaletto (1697 – 1768) today. He’s a favorite of my brother’s and is known above all for his superlative views of Venice. Taught by his father (a theatrical scene-painter), Canaletto spent the first years of his career creating opera sets. By the 1720s he’d turned to topographical views and, since his native city Venice could be compared to a stage set of sorts, he set about capturing on canvases her drama and spectacle.

From the get-go, his chief clients were English aristocrats, on their afore-mentioned Tours. In fact the buyer of our two paintings, Entrance to the Grand Canal from the Molo (1742 – 1744) and its pendant, the Square of Saint Mark’s (1742 – 1744) was the Earl of Carlisle, who hung them in his Castle Howard. Both works tell how Canaletto geared his art to beguiling British buyers.

He focussed on the top tourist sites and, since accuracy and detail were hot selling points, he made these the basis of his style. In the St Mark’s scene he painstakingly paints in the frilled tracery across the architecture of the Doge’s Palace, to the right. See the super-fine flow of arches in the portals of the basilica. In the Molo image, groups of people idle along a landing dock: it’s the morning and a fishmonger displays his catch to two wigged gents. Gondolas bob and across the lagoon soar the domed Redentore church (Palladio, 16th-century) and the double-domed Santa Maria Salute (Longhena, 17th century).

These sorts of paintings were essentially exquisite, detail-rich souvenirs of someone’s stay in the city. Canaletto’s tiny transcriptions of the sites before him may have been aided by a camera obscura (a darkened box which allowed an image of a brightly lit subject or scene to be projected onto a screen). In any case, he also sketched endlessly, to ensure his eye and hand stayed fresh. And boy, did it work. Here’s what one fellow Grand Tour operator, the engraver and antiquary George Vertue had to say about him in 1746: “the Famous Painter of Views, Canaletto of Venice, has procured a great reputation and his merit and excellence in that way… is much esteemed.” Buon viaggio!

Today’s video is dedicated to M and N on their wedding day! Stevens’s wonderful Woman in White, clutching her bouquet of bright-colored blooms, brings to mind a bridal scene. And the ways she’s standing, on the threshold of that frame, speaks of the start of a new life, awaiting. Congratulations M and N! All love, from Art 2010.

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My oldest brother is getting married on-the-morrow, so we’re set and super-excited for the big day. Weddings of course are primetime for lots of love-themed conversation, and top of the small-talk topics must surely be “how did the happy couple meet?” So I wanted to go with that theme today and wander into the wonderful world of dating. Yes, dating. Because like it or loathe it, it’s the thing that pre-dates love, marriage and even so much as a sniff at a horse-drawn carriage. I recently read about a new on-line dating coach who’s sharing secrets he claims can help anyone get their heart’s desire. Here are the boiled-down, bite-sized best bits of Matthew Hussey’s advice:

1. Women can make the first move (if you’re nervous on approach, deploy the three-step seduction plan: The Look; Proximity; Ask for a Favor).

2. Don’t scare someone off! Lighten up with loose body language and facial expressions.

3. Don’t be down if they don’t come over: if someone’s interested, they’ll be petrified of rejection. So take heart and turn to tactic 1.

4. It’s not so much about how you look but more about ‘a look’. Self-belief and a nice bright smile are more important that a high hemline and gym-honed bod.

5. Playing hard-to-get doesn’t work, and toying with affections/ expectations leaves people confused, insecure and frankly fed up.

We’re looking in on a date-played-out at the NGA today, albeit one set in the 17th century. This is called The Suitor’s Visit (c. 1658) and is by the Dutch painter Gerard ter Borch the Younger (1617 – 1681). He was an artist tipped to be talented from a young age, as evidenced in fine drawings that exist from when he was eight (his father, who was his first teacher, did that particular parental thing of dating them carefully). Born in the provincial city of Zwolle, ter Borch was unusually well-traveled for the time, making it to England, Germany, Italy, Spain and Flanders in his day.

This painting came once he’d settled in Deventer in Holland in 1654, where ter Borch became a successful and sought-after painter of genre (everyday life) scenes (Dutch 17th century artists were in the habit of capturing actions and elements of the everyday). He quickly pitched and placed himself as the go-to-guy for visualizing the richesse and refinement of the wealthy bourgeoisie. Here we have an elegant gent bowing down before a lady upon entering the room. There’s a woman playing an instrument at a table behind and another man who’s looking over his shoulder as he warms his mitts at a fire. The setting (imposing mantelpiece, gilded wallpaper) and accoutrements (instruments, plush furnitures, wool tablecloths) attest to the elite societal echelons we’ve entered. Can you tell how exquisite ter Borch’s technique was? He was astonishingly gifted at treating texture: in the area of the main lady’s silken skirts, see how he uses super-fine small strokes and a series of thin transparent glazes, all as a way of rendering realistic textural effects.

But top of ter Borch’s priorities as a painter was always the psychological interaction of his protagonists. His main man and woman here are clearly communicating through glance and gesture. Add to that the musical instruments and the dog (both of which carry strong associations of love) and I’m forced to finish with Hussey’s most golden rule: never sleep with someone on the first date!

It’s a fated day for Twi-hards: the next Twilight installment is achingly imminent. A recap for the over-fifteens: first came the 100 million-selling series of vampire-fantasy-romance novels by American author Stephenie Meyer, featuring Bella who falls for 104 year-old vampire Edward. Then came the films from 2008, shuttling their stars Kristen Stewart, Taylor Lautner and – sigh – Robert Pattinson to planet superstardom in the process.

I admit I dragged husband to see the second film New Moon, just to see what all the fuss was about. Though it broke box office records (biggest opening day in history), I’d be hard-pushed to tell you one good thing in it. Dull-as-ditchwater, flaccid-of-character and overdosed on ‘meaningful’ looks from the leads. But then I can see the (intended) audience lapping it up: sparkly vampires! six packs a-plenty! frustrated love story!

I won’t be seeing any more of the Saga (I think it’d test my marriage too much), but did want to mark the ‘momentous’ release of the third film in the States today (UK has to bait its breath until July 9), with a suitably creepy picture from the NGA. It’s called Oedipus Cursing His Son Polynices (1786) and is by the Swiss painter Henry Fuseli (1741 – 1825). Born Johann Heinrich Füssli in Zürich, he initially aimed to carve out a church career (he even got so far as to be ordained as minister in 1761). But when his unconventional views plunged him into hot water, he heeled it to London and settled there in 1764. A meeting with Joshua Reynolds raised his resolve to pursue painting, so he studied in Italy during the 1770s.

Fuseli’s breakthrough came in 1782 when his masterpiece The Nightmare caused a sensation at the Royal Academy. It remains his most famous painting and pushes a potent cocktail of sex and horror: here’s an incubus squatting on a woman’s abdomen, making her have a nightmare (the haunting horse peeking in might be a pun on ‘night mare’).

This work, like our Oedipus painting, flaunts Fuseli’s singular slant on Romanticism (the late 18th to early 19th-century style that – broadly – promoted individual experience and expression). The subject here (as often for Fuseli) comes from a learned literary source (as a youth he was introduced to Homer, Dante, Shakespeare and Milton, all salient sources in his art). It’s a scene in Sophocles’s Greek tragedy Oedipus at Colonus, which requires some info fill-in: king Oedipus had (unwittingly) killed his father and married his mother; the truth came out, she killed herself, he blinded himself and was expelled, leaving his sons Eteocles and Polynices to rule Thebes together. It’s when Polynices asks his father to help him overthrow Eteocles that our picture comes in.

Here it’s clear how Fuseli liked to pick the dark side of human nature like an open wound: he has the figures right up in our face, sunk in a dank place that’s fronded with ferny leaves. The gestures are highlighted across sickly-lit and sallow limbs, telling the tale. Oedipus – unseeing eyes rolling, enraged by his son’s request – strikes out with a double-barreled curse (which would cause his sons to kill one another), as Polynices recoils. Oedipus’s two daughters are witness: devastated Ismene has her head on her father’s knee while strong-willed Antigone aims to restrain him.

Fuseli fed his audience with generous helpings of violence, packs of primal fear and more than the odd hint of sexual perversity: which all reads a little like the tag-line for anything in the Twilight franchise.

Today’s the feast of saints Peter and Paul, princes of the apostles who stood as early leaders for their faith, so Apostle Paul (c. 1657) is up for discussion here. It’s an incredible image (whether you’re Christian or not) by Rembrandt van Rijn (1606 – 1669) that most-glowing master among golden age Dutch painters.

Paul’s particulars would have been well-known to a European artist working in the 1600s. A Roman citizen, he’d persecuted the “church of God” before his own conversion. The Acts of the Apostles describe how this happened one day on the road to Damascus: Saul (Paul’s original Hebrew name) had a searing vision of the resurrected Christ after being temporarily blinded. For affecting, visceral images of this incident, see here.

For this ponderous picture, Rembrandt focusses another facet of Paul, which is his writing life. Celebrated as an intellectual and a man of letters whose work would deeply influence Christian thinking, Paul has many epistles attributed to him. So here he sits, surrounded by the tools of his trade, head-in-hand, pen-poised, all evidence of how this artist could enliven even a still image with a dramatic sense of narrative. In Rembrandt’s later works like this one, gestures get less overt, though they’re never less expressive for it.

A shaft of vivid light comes in from up high, cutting into the murk and gloom of the room. It sits on the side of Paul’s face, haloing his head and illuminating his hands. The picture paddles in a broad, un-polished technique that’s typical of Rembrandt’s later works. Bold strokes define the lines of the desk and chair and mark in the contours of the clothes. Smudged, fudged areas of blended paint create an amorphous feel across the back wall. Some sharper sense of detail comes in with the clean lines that define the sword and pen: Rembrandt picks these things out, makes them sparkle with tiny dabs of bright white paint. There are swirling, sliding strokes scragging up the beard and a few feints and starts in the paint on the right hand that have you looking hard at the subject’s job-in-hand. For all the lack of (obvious) color contrasts here, Rembrandt’s vast variety of mark-marking is utterly virtuoso and visually electric.

The thing that’s most moving about this is that a picture of a man long-dead and buried in religious lore becomes not only an arresting physical impression, but also a lively study of the human spirit. Paul’s tension in an instant when the fluency of his writing has hit flush against a wall comes across in his forehead forage, the slack hand and those pages pestering to be impressed. The firm fix of his features reads concentration, exasperation. And that sparkly sword just standing by strikes in with the ominous inevitability of a martyr’s death.

The Apostle Paul is much more than an abstract image of a mythic man: in Rembrandt’s hands it becomes a work of compassionate psychological insight, which I can’t help but think might be infused with feelings from the artist’s own experiences at the time. While he’d enjoyed domestic happiness and professional success early in his career, Rembrandt’s later life was marred by personal and financial misfortune. He’d lost his 30 year-old wife in 1642 and three of their four children in infancy, and the year before this picture was painted he’d been declared bankrupt. So it wouldn’t be impossible (especially in an artist who left us over 70 self-portraits) to detect a shadow of self-imaging slicked-in here.

The feast of Saint Peter falls tomorrow, so I thought we’d take a peek at his story today (as seen in some of the works at the NGA), starting with the lead image, from the studio of Peter Paul Rubens (c. 1616). Before he met Jesus, Peter (original name Simon) was a fisherman, and it was his brother Andrew (also a fisherman) who introduced the two. The brothers hadn’t had much luck fishing, which changed as soon as Jesus arrived: suddenly they couldn’t haul up the fish-filled nets fast enough. Peter was amazed when Jesus told him: “You’ll be a fisher of men.” Here’s Duccio, Calling of Apostles Peter and Andrew (1308-11):

Jesus gave Simon the name Peter (Cephas in Aramaic, Petros in Greek, from the word for ‘rock’ in each language), telling him “you are Peter and upon this rock I will build my church.” In liturgical art, Peter is often seen as an old man with white hair, dressed in a blue tunic and yellow cloak. See this follower of Cimabue, Saint Peter (13th century):

Peter’s attribute is a set of keys, from the time Christ said to him: “I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven. Whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven; and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.” Marco Zoppo, Saint Peter (c. 1468):

Peter was a member of the inner circle of Jesus, along with James and John, and was at his side for many significant events. Vincenzo Civerchio shows Christ Instructing Peter and John to Prepare for the Passover (1504):

Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo depicts Christ Leading Peter, James and John to the Mountain for the Transfiguration (1770s):

Peter helped organize the Last Supper and played a big role in the events of the Passion. After the Resurrection, he was the first disciple to see the risen Christ. Later, Christ gave Peter the famed command of “Feed my lambs, tend my sheep, feed my sheep.” Diana Scultori, after Raphael, has Christ Making Peter Head of the Church (16th century):

In the time after the Ascension, Peter stood as the head of the apostles. He appointed the replacement of Judas, spoke to the crowds that had assembled after the descent of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost and was the first apostle to perform miracles in the name of the Lord: Rembrandt van Rijn, Peter and John Healing the Cripple at the Temple Gate (1659):

He was instrumental in bringing the Gospel to the Gentiles and aimed for the new church to be universal. His missionary efforts included travels to cities of the pagan world, ending in Rome. Philip Galle, after Maerten van Heemskerck shows Saint Peter Speaking to the People about Christ (16th century):

It’s certain that Peter died in Rome and that his martyrdom came in the reign of Emperor Nero, probably in 64 AD. He was crucified upside down, declaring himself unworthy to die in the same manner as the Lord. He was buried in the city and excavations under St. Peter’s Basilica have unearthed his probable tomb. His relics are now enshrined under the high altar there. Giovanni Paolo Panini, Interior of Saint Peter’s (c. 1754):

From the earliest days of the Church, Peter was recognized as the ‘prince’ of the apostles and the first proper Pope. He founded the official bishop’s seat (see) of Rome, which made the city so central to the Catholic church. We finish with this medal by Philipp Heinrich Müller, Saint Peter, Prince of Apostles (c. 1700):

Paul Bloom’s recent book How Pleasure Works (The New Science of Why We Like What We Like) will surely be piquing people’s interest. Blooms says “I’m not a happiness guy – there’s nothing new that I can tell you about how to live a fulfilling life. Instead, I am interested in the more concrete topic of pleasure.” Bloom breaks down the difference thus: happiness is a prolonged state of being that can come from a selection of sources (a relationship, religion, even your genetic write-up). Pleasure, by contrast, is an automatic/ instinctive response that has a shorter running time (from 30 seconds to an hour or two).

Some of Bloom’s bliss-bringers offer surprisingly simple ways to slip some to-savor moments into a day. From playing a song you love over and over, to seeing something that takes your breath away; giving is a good one (if we act generously, we feel joyful), as is grinning (there’s something called “facial feedback” that means that if you smile, you fool your brain into thinking you’re happy).

The perusing of pleasure turned me towards this Cape Cod Evening (1939) by Edward Hopper (1882 – 1967). It’s this sort of atmospheric portrayal of an East Coast scene that has made Hopper the best-known realist of the 20th century. He trained and worked first as a commercial illustrator but broke through the barrier into the art-world in the 1920s when the Museum of Modern Art bought his House by the Railroad. With that in the bag, he started started on art for serious, spinning out an eery, introspective style that became the Hopper hallmark.

Cape Cod Evening begins with the artist’s desire to make (in his words) “the most exact transcription possible of my most intimate impressions of nature.” The grass he glimpsed through his studio windows and he had it that the figures here were worked up without the use of models: “In the woman I attempted to get the broad, strong-jawed face and blonde hair of a Finnish type of which there are many on the Cape. The man is a dark-haired Yankee.”

But this is more than a simple, faithful transcription of nature: it’s a scene charged with strong (albeit ambiguous) emotional current. The composition is straightforward, and opens up a lot of space, which Hopper translates into physical separation between the couple and the collie. This extends to a lack of communication: the woman looks off, the man looks down and the dog has heard some evening sound.

There’s also a desolate quality to the light: it’s an odd sunlight/ twilight brightness that throws those trees into full-on, film-noir style shadows. Though the glare of the house and the glow of the grass focus us on the figures foremost, there’s an effect of encroachment and threat in the ringing darkness beyond.

Hopper sees things with an iced, impassive eye that adds to his look of alienation. There’s a fug of futility here that comes from the cutting out of all the plush and pleasure: no rapport between the man and woman (at least in this instant); no move to pet that beautiful pooch (physical contact with animals works wonders); the stunning setting goes unseen. So it is that from a title full of the promise of ease and please (Cap Cod Evening) streams a scene shadowed by introspection and fearful footlessness. Yes: happiness can be elusive for all at times, and I think Hopper is hinting this here. But he’s also stopped-off those simple sources of pleasure that can be tapped into every day.

I feel a bit blue this morning, sad that the Hump is done and dusted: loved meeting you, readers! check out the photos on the Hump page! So I’ve been on the hunt for mood boosters and found some help close at hand. Here’s what Leatrice Eiseman, executive director of the Pantone Color Institute and author of More Alive with Color has to say: “there are days we need a shot of adrenaline before we even get out of bed, and colors can help with that.” Eiseman suggests that “by surrounding yourself with bright colors – something as simple as an orange bathrobe or a yellow umbrella – you can give yourself that needed energy boost to face the day.”

So, Rupert Bear: he knows what to wear. Ever since this character appeared in England’s Daily Mail in 1920 (he’s still a popular children’s comic strip), he’s been sporting his bright red jumper (sweater) and matching checkered yellow trousers (pants) and scarf. How’s that for a get-up-and-go outfit? And over here the little girl who’s graced Morton Salt pots since I-don’t-know-when also knows a thing or two about power dressing: this is her in the 1950s in a sun-colored dress (she’s most known for a yellow raincoat).

It makes sense that it’s the colors that cluster in the ‘warm’ section of the color wheel (red, orange and yellow) that are the most energizing, and that’s behind my double-pic pick for today. First up is Larry Poons, an American abstract artist born in 1937. Poons rose to prominence in the 1960s with paintings of small circles and ovals against colored backgrounds. This is Tristan da Cugna (1964), which I think is named after a volcanic group of islands in the south Atlantic Ocean, the most remote inhabited archipelago in the world. Here we have a confetti of light-colored oval shapes bobbing across a brilliantly saturated orange surface. There’s a sense of the twitching life of infinitesimal organisms, of ready-to-burst energy. The scintillating sense of movement trapped in works like this classed them as Op Art (short for Optical Art), the 1960s art movement that used hard-edged flat areas of paint to play with the eye and mimic the impression of movement. All I know is that Poons has made me want to get up and get jiggy with it.

Also rocking the orange approach is Félix Vallotton (1865 – 1925), a Swiss painter and printmaker whose Marigolds and Tangerines (1924) comes at the end of his career. In the 1890s Vallotton had been associated with the Nabis, a group of artists who sought to revitalise painting by rejecting naturalism and preferring a simplified, subjective vision. Later though, Vallotton veered towards something more truthful and technical. He received some criticism for this (one detractor said his creations creaked “with an intolerable dryness” and that his colors “lack all joyfulness”), but I like the crisp and uncompromising character of this painting.

See the gleaming weave of the wicker, the different textures on the belly of the jug, the dark glossy leaves. And I’d certainly contest the claim that there’s no joy in these colors: Vallotton has surely captured what people call a ‘pop’ of color, as his orange fruit and flowers dot punchily across this picture.

And Vallotton offers a double-whammy for feel-good factor: a Harvard study has shown that looking at blooms early morning sets you up for higher energy levels for the rest of the day. So I’m loving all the orange around our apartment right now. Do you have a color that makes you feel a certain way?

Check out this week’s video. And thank you to everyone who came to last night’s Hump Party.

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This week I’ve been laying into ‘online’ a little, suggesting (on Monday) that it can lead to loneliness and encouraging (on Friday) people to peel away from their Facebook wall. But it seems that ‘on-line’ is shaking off its ‘isolated’ and ‘cyber’ stigmas: on the self-same day that roomfuls of Art 2010 readers will gather at the Hamiltonian Gallery in DC to celebrate the half-way point of this blog project (still not too late to sign up for the Hump!), I’m seeing that tech can actually teach people how to meet up en masse, in the real world.

Hundreds of millions of us live at least part of our lives online and at first people predicted this would rot us into socially-severed virtual vegetables. But our need for human contact, and our feel for a (real) face-to-face connection has confounded early assumptions about our online era, to the point that the internet is encouraging us to interact like never before. For example. The Foursquare app allows users to check in at various locations in cities around the world, to broadcast a location to existing friends and would-like-to-meet new ones. Google Latitude is similar in that it gauges where your love-ones are, and Loopt lets users find and chat to each other.

And who wants in on these tech-sparked initiatives around the world: Dutch Open Coffee on Linkedin connects business professionals in Dutch cities for a weekly coffee meet. In France, Apéro Géant uses Facebook as an organizing tool to pool tens of thousands of people to faire la fete in huge open spaces. And check this a recent tweet from SouthWest Airlines: “Hey Panama City! Join us @ Tootsies @pierpark 9-11 tonight! 1st 100 customers to whisper #seaturtle at the door get drinks on us! #SWAECP.”

All these real real-world gatherings beg us to join this bustling bunch on The Beach at Villerville (1864) by the French painter Eugène Boudin (1824 – 1898). Boudin was important as a direct precursor of Impressionism: the key that unlocked his practice was the fact that he painted outdoors, one of the first French landscape painters to do so (in fact it was Boudin who encouraged Claude Monet to begin painting outside). Growing up in the northern coastal town Le Havre and with a father who worked as a maritime pilot, perhaps it isn’t a surprise to see that Boudin was beckoned by the sea as his principal subject. His marine paintings are seascapes, or beach or harbour scenes, all fresh and infused with salt, sand and sea air.

Here’s he’s got a pack of pleasure-seekers on a beach in northern France. 20? 30? There are tons of them there, and Boudin begins to detail their fluttering skirts and long-tailed jackets. But the focus here, as is usual for Boudin, is the luminous sky that takes up so much of the picture space. Juddering and patched, it arcs across, shot-through with a smear of yolk-yellow and inklings of just-there pink. The sky is where we see ‘Boudin the early Impressionist’ come out, in it’s haziness and sense of instantaneity. His friend the artist Corot was amazed by Boudin’s skies, telling him: “You are the master of the sky.”

The sight of these ladies and gents all under one roof (so to speak) brings me back to the mass-mingling trend we’ve been talking about. I’ll say that even though it’s great to see tech-led social ‘scenes’ starting up in the real-world, let’s be clear: in the case of Boudin’s beach-goers, no internet was needed.

How marvelous to have been flies on the wall for the cringe-laden Cameron/ Sarkozy showdown last week. The official occasion was the visit of France’s President Nicolas Sarkozy and his wife Carla Bruni to London to mark the 70th anniversary of Charles De Gaulle’s wartime broadcast urging his nation to resist the Nazi occupation of France. But the real story became Bruni’s blistering bid to command the camera at all costs.

Carla’s campaign started with a draped Dior number (just the right side of a tad too tight) and seems to have centered around luscious lash fluttering and endless salon-style hair flicking. She locked the lens at every opportunity and no one else stood even a slim chance against the slim, glossy, I’m-the-bossy show-boating. Carla kept her most impudent move for the ceremony itself: sitting side-by-side with Samantha Cameron, she spied a fat black fly that had alighted on the white bodice of the wife of the UK PM. Bruni seized at the opportunity, but instead of just telling Sam about the insect (surely the most sensible thing to do), she leaned across, arm and body, and languidly swept it off herself.

Sam’s reaction said it all (a smile at first, but a rigid pose and nerved expression that told another story), as did Carla’s: her smug brow-raise and simpering smile screamed of her delight at having ‘helped out’ (with the cameras clicking all the while). Why the hell wasn’t she just listening to the ceremony, instead of fly spotting and swatting?

Anyhoo, it’s the “no flies on Sam Cam” (or on Carla, more like) that buzzed today’s picture onto the page: Cardinal Bandinello Sauli, His Secretary, and Two Geographers (1516). It’s by the Italian High Renaissance painter Sebastiano Luciani (c. 1485 – 1547) who’s better known as Sebastiano del Piombo, a nickname he acquired when he became Keeper of the Papal Seals in 1531 (the seals were made of lead, piombo in Italian).

Del Piombo worked first in Venice (where he was most likely born) and then Rome (where he settled in 1511). His early works show the stable compositions and delicate, balanced color-play of Giovanni Bellini and Giorgone, but when in Rome he did as the Romans were doing, and adopted a bolder, more vigorous style. His new look came in under the influence of Michelangelo, who was a mentor of sorts, helping out with patrons, procuring commissions and offering under-drawings for some of his works. In short, he was the sort of friend you want, not one who pulls the ‘it’s all about me flicking off of flies’ move.

Del Piombo produced many an important religious picture and was justly sought-after as a portraitist. This is one of the earliest Italian group portraits and shows the cardinal on the left (then at the height of his influence in Rome) and three companions gathered around a table (two are discussing that open geographical manuscript). The picture says several things about del Piombo in Rome. He sharpened his eye for faces (highly individualized here) and learned to carve out clear and solid figures (no doubt under the aegis of Michelangelo). These (life-size) figures sit close to the viewer, cropped at their edges and shunted forward by the green hanging drape. The rich palette of saturated reds, greens, whites and blacks show that Sebastiano retained his love of resonant Venetian color.

And my main point in the picture? It’s that fly, of course, just chilling on the left knee of our cardinal friend. See it now? There you go. So we should ask ourselves: why is it there?

Anyone been watching Work of Art: The Next Great Artist on Bravo? Rapid recap: it started June 9th and has 14 aspiring artists compete in weekly art-themed challenges for a prize of a solo show and $100,000. I missed the first one but tuned in for the second, in which the artists were asked to make sculptures from materials plucked from an appliance dump.

It’s reality TV, alright. Cast of out-there characters? Check: from the ‘villain’ (46 year-old performance artist Nao Bustamante: “I feel like I’ve already won”) to the ‘hottie’ (Jaclyn Santos wears tight clothes and photographs herself with legs akimbo). Snarling judges? Check: especially Jerry Saltz (current art critic for New York Magazine) known for his no-nonsense put-downs (“it’s a bunch of junk on a table”). Throw in a Simon (not Cowell this time, but the art expert Simon de Pury), plenty of run-ins and a withering tagline (“your work of art didn’t work for us”), and the reality recipe is complete.

Still. I found it all oddly alluring, perhaps because competition has a habit of being good for art. In 15th century Florence, artists were pitted against each other to vie for big public commissions: from that competitive context came Lorenzo Ghiberti’s baptistery doors and the cathedral choir stalls by Luca della Robbia and Donatello. And competition was certainly a formative factor in the growing of one of our greatest Renaissance masters, Raphael. Born in Urbino in 1483, Raphael is regarded, with Leonardo and Michelangelo, as the third member of that most exclusive of clubs: One-Name High Renaissance Masters Are Us. And it was competitive spirit that got him there.

This Madonna and Child with St John the Baptist (c. 1507) dates to Raphael’s Florentine phase, before he was called to Rome to work for the Pope. In Florence Raphael met the art-might of Michelangelo and Leonardo, both of whom had established styles and stature by this time. Our man’s approach? Knuckle down. All the lines, re-lines, shadings and workings here expose the hand of a man who’s addressing his shortcomings.

Raphael’s most valuable response to other art personalities was a redoubled sense of self. An able ‘absorber’ of others’ advances (he borrowed Leonardo’s pyramid composition and Michelangelo’s human forms here), he’s nonetheless negotiated a niche for himself. Here he’s settling into one in the series of sweet, tender Madonna and Child scenes that made his name in Florence. Raphael excelled at the ‘heartfelt’ thing, and it became his hallmark throughout his career. It’s that same sense of self that made 23 year-old Miles stand out on the show, as he used his OCD-inflicted sleep deprivation as the basis for a profoundly personal, praise-winning piece.

One of the main reasons why artists’ drawings are coveted is the same thing that will make a success of the show: it’s always fun to watch people make art. Raphael’s drawing is valuable because it lays bare for us luddites the artist’s processes. Done in black chalk with traces of white, Raphael drew up this cartoon (from the Italian cartone, for sheet of paper) as preparation piece for an oil. Stand close and you’ll see the outlines all pounced with pinpricks, so he could shoot through puffs of charcoal onto a canvas set up behind. Only then, with his design transferred, could he start to paint up La Belle Jardiniere:

Now I’m not saying by any means that Bravo will be bringing forth anyone even an eighth as brilliant as Raphael. I’m just saying, don’t dismiss the show just yet.

Tonight, as he claps closed his computer, Husband will hustle out of the door straight to a dinner at a DC dining establishment. No other halves allowed (it’s business, not pleasure), so I’ll be on my tod this evening. Naturally, a night alone is no biggie at all (it’s a chance to catch up on The Hills, is how I see it), but it did get me thinking about loneliness in general. Who can have missed the headlines that hit after the recent publication of Emily White’s memoir Lonely? White’s story was stark, and struck some serious chords: a 30-something successful lawyer, her life was left in total tatters when chronic loneliness suddenly set it.

Odd this: it’s easier than ever to be ‘in touch’ these days, but still loneliness looms large as a social scourge. People can have scores of pals in online portfolios, but lack the real people you can pester in the middle of the night for a weep and a moan. To make matters worse, loneliness is still tarnished as a social taboo (White couldn’t admit to her situation, and often fictionalized a social life in the presence of her colleagues).

One artist at the NGA not afraid to face her loneliness is Alice Neel (1900 – 1984). Born in Pennsylvania, Neel attended the Philadelphia School of Design for Women. She married the Cuban painter Carlos Enriquez in 1925 and the pair lived in Havana for a time, an experience that awakened Neel to the artistic avant-garde and sparked her life-long political consciousness.

Two harrowing thorns stick out in Neel’s personal history, thorns that went on to shape her art. She lost her first daughter to diphtheria within a year, and her second daughter (born soon after in 1928) was taken to Cuba by Enriquez in 1930. Neel suffered a massive nervous breakdown soon after. Once recovered, she started to steep her art in the trauma of losing the girls and her husband: anxiety, loss and loneliness were dominant themes throughout her career, as is clear in Loneliness (1970), our painting for today.

The work shows us Neel’s expressionist use of color and line: a blood-red chair sits against sickly yellow. On the floor and walls, patches of paint blotch across the surface, while that black blind hangs heavy and oppressive, overhead. That black picks out the outlines, clear against the bright colors, outlines that seem to seek concreteness or containment.

Loneliness has strong psychological sting. There’s the suggestion of voyeurism, of looking achingly at the (social) lives of others. There’s the pang of absence too, in that eerily empty chair. So it is that in this simple scene, the emotion is as thick as the brushed-on paint. Towards the end of the 1960s, Neel’s star had started to rise (by the 1970s she was seen as an important American artist). It’s key to see that, even at the height of her career (in which she worked principally as a portraitist), she still returned to her core-concern themes.

I suppose the thing is that there’s a line between ‘loneliness’ and ‘alone’. If you’ve friends that can be fetched fast from the wings, you’re unlikely to feel lonely, even if alone. In fact, in these super-connected times, it’s not bad to practice being by ourselves. But, if there’s an inability to communicate with others, that’s when loneliness starts to set in. And that’s the sensation that radiates here, in the vacant chair and those blind windows. Disconnectedness is everywhere.

It’s Fathers Day today, so offspring everywhere are crafting cards, picking out flowers or up the phone, or whipping up a batch of pancakes/ pastrami-stuffed sandwiches (Dads like pancakes and pastrami). And I’ve been lingering on and listing up some of the things my Father has taught me, thus far:

1. Laughter is key: a well-judged joke can brighten the darkest moment or a tough situation; laugh with your other half, in good times and bad.
2. Tool-belts or bust: Dad has made toys, party props, sandpits, swimming pools, wedding topiaries and more in his time. Being handy is handy.
3. Don’t ask, don’t get: fresh-made French fries every time, the shaded spot on a summer campsite, and invaluable for following dreams. Just be sure to ask politely.
4. Pack rat, within reason: we’ve had a seriously stuffed-full cellar at times, but some things are for keeps.
5. Know when to stick to or ditch tradition: line-up-in-height-order kid pics must go, but lined-up-in-height-order entrance into the room on Christmas morning should stay.
6. Stop worrying: I’m still perfecting Dad’s clear, fix-it mentality, with a dash of intuition and tons of terrier approach (no matter how intractable the problem seems to be).
7. Actions speak louder than words: everything from ferrying five kids with far-flung activities, schools, universities and lives to slowing my step as he walked me down the aisle.
8. Be yourself, and don’t waste time watching Baywatch (which I still did) and reading trashy magazines (which I still do).
9. Titian’s Venus of Urbino isn’t all that interesting…
10. NEVER sleep through your stop on a train.

So how appropriate is it that today we’re taking a seat alongside the man who’s regarded as “the father” of modern art? Paul Cézanne (1839 – 1906) painted his Artist’s Father, Reading “L’Evénement” (1866) such that it flickers with the charge that ran through their relationship. Cézanne’s Papa was a wealthy banker and tradesman, who had high hopes for his boy’s future, none of which involved any art. Law yes, banking yes, but art no: totally impractical. Pity for him then that Paul followed his intuition and persuaded Papa to let him go to Paris in the early 1860s to train as an artist.

This painting is a line in the sand, an assertion of independence in the face of his father. It’s a big picture, with a calculated composition: Pop is perched precariously close to the edge of his seat. Paul’s played with the perspective too, tilting it so the floor slopes sideways, as if seeking to slide Papa out of the picture. There’s tension between the clod-hopping shoes and firm-filled legs and those tiny supports at the base of the chair.

NB too the framed painting on the wall, just above Papa’s head: that’s a still-life Cézanne completed shortly before beginning the Artist’s Father and a small, stinging statement of his artistic accomplishment. Even the masthead of the newspaper here has meaning: it’s L’Evénement (not Papa’s preferred read), chosen to reference the novelist Emile Zola, art critic at the paper at the time and a close friend of Cézanne, who’d championed his pursuit of art.

This portrait was painted before Cézanne began painting outdoors, filtering fresh light and clean color into his work. And yet it’s riddled with his brilliance and addled with unmistakable intensity, seen even in the pushy paint handling, and the way things are laid on thick in slabs of pigment. What we end up with is a rich and poignant rendering of this father-son relationship.

‘Alleeeeeeeeeeeeeeedd Joaaaaanne Foooorrdd’ came the call, summoning Husband and I into our interview at the hands of the U.S. Citizens and Immigration Service yesterday. In 30 minutes, we set about proving that our relationship is to be believed and bonafide: we’d packed a binder to bursting with all the failsafe don’t-doubt-us documents, but found that in our case, our case could be made with the following:

Two ‘joint-life’ accounts (bank and insurance)

Two sheets of photos (Husband’s collated collection of first-meet to marriage pics was the one thing that sparked interest in our interviewer: ‘Is that scuba diving? What about shaaaaarrrks??’)

Next, after some fact-confirming, came the relationship cross-questioning. We’d been warned and weaponed for a serious grilling, so I’d revised where Husband has his socks, how much he weighs, how much he earns and what he eats each morning. But in the end this is all that came up for us:

To me: how did you meet your husband?

To Husband: have you met your wife’s family? Has she met yours?

The single sweat came on when I couldn’t confirm our home phone number: as Husband stepped in, the interviewer snapped: ‘This is her interview, Sir!’

In a show of odd synchronization, that morning I’d come across an article in my magazine, on six women relating the reasons behind their respective naturalisation as US citizens. I was stopped in my tracks by some of the stories that started with struggle and strife and ended in relief and release as the women were accepted as new American citizens.

The article offers a particular viewpoint of American experience, and our painting Eve (1967) does the same. It’s by Billy Morrow Jackson (1926 – 2006), who did his BA at Washington University in Saint Louis, and then an MFA at the University of Illinois, Urbana. In the course of his career, Jackson received a collection of government commissions, from the Bureau of Reclamations, NASA (to record the Apollo space program) and the state capitol buildings of Olympia, Washington and Springfield, Illinois.

Jackson is realist painter, his approach slotting into the acute style that reacted against Abstract Expressionism from the late 1960s. There popped up photo-realism and super-realism, as artists like Chuck Close peered closely at things around them. Here there’s the appearance of realism in the accurate perspective, the flap of the flag, the snap of the tree twigs and the slats on the building. But actually, that’s where the dogged detailing ends, and where Jackson jacks up his artistic license. Look closer and the sense of sharpness doesn’t want to deliver: lines are imperfect and things are blurred. What is a focus is the light: a shining wall of it hits the walls, silhouetting the objects and shaping the composition.

Jackson is often compared to Andrew Wyeth and Edward Hopper in their use of realism to put across feelings of isolation and vastness. Certainly there is some of that uncomfortable ambiguity here: the sky, peach and bleached of interest, dominates, sitting on top of a low-down horizon line. The woman is alone, seeming disconnected and gazing out at what we can’t know. But somehow I catch a subtle joy in Jackson, that’s unlike Wyeth and Hopper’s eeriness and hopelessness. Here there’s a sense of a time and a place, that seem to combine into a candid but positive acceptance of reality. Not far from the attitude I traced in that article.

During a DC dinner the other week, our conversation was cut by the buzz of berries and the flash of phones, so talk turned to the tech that’s changing our times. One guest hated how hard it is to prioritize in the swell of a constant stream of emails. Another said she struggles to be in the moment, ever armed with an active device…

Check out this week’s video blog. And special thanks to Apple (without which this blog and the videos would not be possible).

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The night her mother Debbie died of cancer this year, British teenager Sarah Phillips picked up her mobile phone and sang into it a home-made tribute. The song, later set to a string of family videos, became an internet sensation with hundreds of thousands of hits, raising more than £100,000 for charity and lending a benchmark to grip on for a family in grief. Four weeks after Debbie died, Sarah entered the iTunes chart with her eye-pricking and visceral version of Paolo Nutini’s song Autumn.

The song and sequences (particularly the mosaic motif used at the end) brought to mind this mural-size portrait at the NGA: Fanny/Fingerpainting (1985) is by the American artist Chuck Close (b. 1940). As a student at Yale in the 1960s, Close was bitten by the Abstract Expressionist bug, then raging rampant across New York City canvases. A few years on though, Close distanced himself from the style, starting to stem the flow-in-favor of its wild and willful workings. His approach? To reduce the power and the presence of the BS (brush-stroke).

Supperrealism is the style that Close had settled on by 1967 (the name was coined in the mid 60s): flourishing in the US in that decade and the next, Supperrealism took an infinitesimal approach to painting, slowing it down, sharpening it up. Fanny/Fingerpainting (a portrait of the artist’s grandmother-in-law) will talk us through the fine-print. Close works from photos (Supperrealists seek mostly to mimic the mimetic quality of photography), so this would have started as a black and white snapshot. Next he draws a grid onto his canvas to start copying the image, scaling it up, square by square.

In this case, we’re met with an experimental technique Close created in the mid 80s: inking his fingers, he imprinted them onto the surface. Simple in essence, though this is a far cry from the pre-school school of finger-painting. By controlling the amount of paint daubed and by playing with the pressure applied, Close achieves rich tonal range. It’s frankly unnerving, this level of precision: stand back and you’d swear this is a plus-size photo, detailing every dip, crease and crevice on an old woman’s face. But then, step close and the thing dissolves before your eyes into a blurry blotched swell of tiny tadpole-like marks.

Close’s finger-painting is a touching (literally) record of the artist’s hand, all the more moving in light of the spinal clot he suffered in 1988, which left him paralyzed from the neck down. Close’s most acid fear of not being able to make art again was quashed by his own grit and grind: in 1989 he started up art again, at first by holding a brush in his teeth. Gradually he regained movement in his arms and found ways to paint (at first with a splint with a taped-on paintbrush).

Close’s name is apt and apposite, since he’s super-skilled at bringing us in close with his portrait heads. At times the proximity is frankly uncomfortable, forcing extreme intimacy upon the viewer. At others though it’s a path towards beauty, as the surface markings move into mesmeric abstraction. What’s breath-taking is the way the face emerges here, flesh and blood and seeming to breathe, from a massive mesh of puny prints.

DC gets to dripping in these summer months, not just with sweat (though dang it is hot) but also with interns: trooping in in their thousands, bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, ready and set to enter offices all over town. There’ll be phalanxes of photocopying for them to do, coffee runs, lunch runs and that ever-present filing problem. But I’m sure interns here also get some cool stuff come their way, this city being what it is. And don’t forget the real raison to be here is that toe-hold, or full-foot-hold on the ladder to the cream of careers. Husband’s younger brother has done many an internship, so to a good extent, he knows the score. But this year, as we settled him into his intern digs, Husband did have one warning to impart: beware the blog-spot Spotted: DC [Summer] interns.

Strictly anonymous and oh so popular, this is a chance for those that dread the deluge of summer-time staffers to let rip about the rude, riotous and ridiculous incidents involving their interns. Here are some snippets from June 6 and 4:

Spotted: Who Wears [Short] Shorts

In the Senate Cafeteria this afternoon a young brunette intern was spotted wearing black wedges and tan “formal shorts” that hit mid thigh. I know it’s recess, and it’s hot out and all, but unless you’re a tourist, honey, no.

Spotted: No, Really … He was Playing ‘Head-up, Seven-up’

Today, one of my interns put his head down and took a nap for half an hour this morning. I know it’s recess week, intern, but seriously. Bold move, sir.

The message is clear: the office has eyes and pens are poised, ready to record all the stresses, strains and ‘slight’ irritations that abound between any mentor and mentee. Which brings us to our pic of the day: Portrait of a Young Man and His Tutor (1685), by Nicolas de Largillierre (1656 – 1746). Largillierre is labelled “almost Flemish” for the fact that, though born in Paris, he passed his youth in Antwerp. He also spent time in England, which upped his Flemish factor for the exposure it gave him to Anthony van Dyck, No. 2 Flemish painter of the 17th century after Rubens, who’d settled there in the 1630s. Largillierre was back in Paris when he came to paint this.

Can we tell that Largillierre specialized in portraits of the wealthy middle classes? Oh yes. There’s pin-sharp precision in the facial features: does anyone else see the down-like fluff on the upper lip of the young man? And the super-fine spider veins threading through the ruddy cheeks of the tutor? Oh and see the hairstyles: the youth looks like he’s just stepped out of a salon, so verily bouncing and buxom is his tumble of teased-out curls. As for the old chap: feathery and flyaway at best, with a high forehead and pate peeking through. This kind of fascinating, fastidious focus on physical detail is the thing that exposes Largillierre’s Flemish side.

In all, this oozes Baroque “grand manner” in the formality of the pose and crisp silhouettes. And there’s also a definite psychological dimension. Portraiture was near the top of the set hierarchy of French Academy painting, mostly for the demands it placed on a painter to really observe and understand his subjects. We no longer know the ID of this pair, but still, we sense all sorts of things in the dynamic between this duo. What underlying things (oh, for a 17th-century blog-spot) do you see in their expressions and body language?

With the World Cup picking up pace on the pitches of South Africa and fans flooding into stadia or in front of screens, I thought we’d take a little taste of another world tour today, in the company of the artist Robert Rauschenberg (1925 – 2008).

Rauschenberg. What a rock star. He moved away from Abstract Expressionism when others were moving towards it and ultimately loosened the movement’s grip on American art. He invented the ‘combine painting’, a trail-blazing art form in which he mixed up an often out-there mesh of images and media: oil painting, screen-printed images, 3D things you’d buy at the market, a stuffed goat with a  tyre around its middle: it all went into his mad melting pot. Then in the 1960s he started down the 2D path, using collage and newspaper images to make prints that said important things about modern life. Rauschenberg said: “Painting relates to both art and life. A pair of socks is no less suitable to making a painting than wood, nails, turpentine, oil, and fabric.” See what I mean? The man’s a dude.

We’re picking him up on his R.O.C.I. tour, which kicked off in Mexico City in 1985. The Rauschenberg Overseas Culture Interchange (R.O.C.I. – pronounced “Rocky” – for short) was an ambitious nonprofit project conceived (and in large part funded) by the artist to create communication with global nations through the language of art. Our work today Wall-Eyed Carp/ROCI JAPAN (1987) was part of that project.

Here’s the drill: R.O.C.I. goes to a country to work with local artists and artisans. They make art. He goes to a major museum in that country to exhibit that art (as well as what’s been produced in other R.O.C.I. nations) to the public. At each stop along the way, Rauschenberg leaves a gift of some art made there, as well as sending a piece from each outpost straight to the National Gallery in Washington! For a cumulative exhibition that took place there in 1991.

Phew. By all accounts this was a sell-out tour. He attracted millions of viewers across the 22 participating countries (in China, 70,000 showed up during the first week alone). How thrilling then to come face-to-face with a proper piece of concert memorabilia: even Husband was star-struck when I asked him to photograph our Wall-Eyed Carp.

And what a staggering work this is. It’s in the East Building tucked away in a lobby, right alongside the main auditorium. It’s huge (206.5 x 621 x 5.1 cm), with a Japanese fish kite plastered across it. The skin of the fish ripples and flays at the tail, lending instant texture and interest. Elsewhere around, there are swathes, splashes and strips of bright-colored paint, bleeding here, blotted there. Adding to the menu of marvelous variety are a map and photographic images of Japan.

This eye-engaging work shows how richly Rauschenberg absorbed the materials, images, techniques and information from places and people he visited at his artistic stop-off points. Many say they see a rift in Rauschenberg pre-and-post world travel. I can well imagine it:  whereas before, New York was his studio/ inspiration, once he’d broadened his mind and met so many artists, his vision was bound to blow up big time.

Best of all is the message he talked about: “It has to be from people to people. We want to communicate our human kinship. I trust art to do that.” Did you ever hear a more moving and simple mantra for world peace and understanding?

It’s Flag Day here today, which I needed to look into. Commemorating the adoption of the flag of the US in 1777, it seems a set and serious celebration: in 1916 President Woodrow Wilson proclaimed June 14 as Flag Day, and in 1949 an Act of Congress sealed the deal.

One of the things that caught my eye when I first came to this country was the proud proliferation of so many flags. As we threw open the windows of our San Francisco hotel room, myriad roofs, decks, spikes and spires all showed the flip-flap of the star-spangled banner. The meaning of the markings is familiar to me now: 13 horizontal bands of alternating red and white refer to the 13 colonies that rebelled against the British monarchy. The blue rectangle in the canton, with its 50 small white five-pointed stars, stands for the 50 states. So it’s part history, part unity, with just as a dash of grit and aggression thrown in. A good combination, as flags go.

Ever since finding out about Flag Day, I’d saved this painting specifically (in fact I think it might have been Husband who scouted it out). It’s called Allies Day, May 1917 (1917) and is by the American painter Childe Hassam (1859 – 1935). The first impression (aside from the flags, with their festive flood of red, white and blue) is surely of Impressionism, and that’s spot on: Hassam fell head over heels for the look and feel of the style during a three-year stay (from 1886) in Paris.

Once back in the States, Hassam settled in New York, and the city became the backdrop for his street scenes (portraying urban life in the 1890s) and (later) his series of flag paintings. The NGA’s Allies Day captures a spine-tingling moment, as mid-town Manhattan is bedecked with billowing flags upon America’s entry into the Great War in the early part of 1917. It’s Fifth Avenue that has Hassam’s eye, and we can see why: the British Union Jack, the French Tricolor, and Stars and Stripes together stitch a stunning patchwork of across the sky and street (temporarily renamed “the Avenue of the Allies”). This is one of the parades that honored America’s allies in the war and in fact this painting itself became part of that celebration, as the artist dedicated it to “the coming together of [our] three peoples in the fight for democracy.”

Doesn’t this painting recall that teeming street scene we looked at by the Impressionist Pissarro? Hassam follows his French Impressionist forebears by choosing a nice high vantage point from which to survey the scene. With that he achieves a good overview, as well as a nice line in dramatic spatial recession (spot the milling in the middle-distance).

Hassam was among the first American Impressionists, central in bringing the movement to the US. The things putting him in the Impressionist corner here are the bright colors (so much the essence of this scene, where national unities are underscored by the saturated reds, whites and blues); the broken brushwork; the modern theme (in true Impressionist fashion, this shot is a snap-shot, a flicker of a moment in time). But there’s a difference in the quality of the brush: it’s less daubed and dissolving than we’d see in a Monet, so overall, Hassam’s look lingers more solid.

This pretty, punchy picture was shown in New York in November 1918, just days after the armistice was declared. A fact that surely unfurls some of the true, deep meaning of a flag.

Don’t forget to RSVP for the Hump Party, readers! Thursday 24th June in Washington, DC!

In the car this Tuesday just gone, husband and I heard on the radio that June 8th was the 200th anniversary of the birth of Schumann, German composer, aesthete and music critic. Robert Schumann (1810 – 1856) had started out pursuing a career as a virtuoso pianist (his teacher boosted his belief he’d be the best in Europe after study with him). However, when a hand injury slowed and then stalled Schumann’s chances, he decided to spin his musical energy into composing instead.

Up to 1840, all Schumann’s published material was written for the piano (showing, I suppose, that early allegiances stay strong). Later though his output bloomed as he wrote symphonies, chamber-work and more. The most noted shift was his turn to voice, as an opera, choral works and over 200 lieder (songs) all trickled from the nib of his pen. Early in life, Schumann started collecting poetry, which began a literary bent that played a big part in his interest in song.

It’s hard to ignore the soaring voices and plonking piano keys coming from this canvas of The Choristers by the Italian Alessandro Magnasco (1677 – 1749). Born in Genoa to a painter, Alessandro was sent to Milan as a young man to learn commerce. But, attracted to life as an artist, he convinced his patron there to cover the costs of an apprenticeship with an esteemed artist in the city (name Filippo Abbiati). This was around 1680: by the 1690s, Magnasco had completed his training and was plying his trade as a portrait painter.

It seems that this phase was short-lived: a good chunk of the artist’s output came to comprise melodramatic landscapes (usually with storm-tossed trees and raggedy rocks) and by 1695 he’d started capturing scenes from daily life. Indeed our work, painted at the end of Magnasco’s career and life, still shows him operating in the area he was drawn to.

This raucous work makes a point about Magnasco: often it’s tricky to classify what a picture is: history, genre, fancy, portrait? Here we have a cast of almost Punch and Judy-like characters, teetering on the cusp of caricature (small heads, deep-set eyes, distinctive noses, exaggerated gestures). These lively, brink-of-burlesque figures are his ‘type’ and it’s they who zip all the zing into this singing scene.

The composition sits settled towards the ground, with the figures arranged in a left-to-right sweep. Their clutter is balanced by the shot of blue sky spied below the columns and arches of the classical interior (in fact that same blue does a lot to hatch the picture into a cohesive whole: see how it’s dotted across in the garments of the men).

At first, the Milanese much lauded Magnasco’s work, loving the way his unusual subjects (such as monastic life, ceremonies and rituals of religious sects, brigands or beggars, witches and devils) spotlighted issues of social reform and contemporary social ills. But during the last 15 years of his life (the period in which our picture falls), his work was deemed “worthless”, “ridiculous” and audiences started to turn away.

Perhaps it’s the edginess in his art that fell out of fashion: I love the super-sized song sheet here, for instance, and the way the furls of the furniture move with momentum, as if alive, but maybe those things were a little too much, and a little too ‘mad’. But madness sits alongside genius (so the cliché goes), and as was mentioned at the close of our radio show: for Schumann lived out his days in a mental institution, suffering from hallucinations and schizophrenia.

One bouncing new arrival at the spring box-office has been Babies, a buoyant, fun-filled film documentary by Thomas Balmès. Following the first year in the lives of four infants from different parts of the world (Mongolia, Namibia, San Francisco and Tokyo), the trailer alone has been making people coo for months:

The stars (Ponijao from Namibia, Mari from Tokyo, Hattie from the US and Bayarjargal – the lone male – from Mongolia) were all cast while still in-belly. We meet the babes at birth and sit ring-side as they major milestone their way through their first 12 months (sitting, crawling, walking and more). It’s the simplest ‘first breath to first steps’ plot synopsis. Balmès certainly sweetens the pill of parenthood: reviews reckon there’s not one single truly ‘tricky’ moment sticky-ing up the screen. Instead, from those four corners comes an airbrushed, immaculate image of babyhood, filled to the gills with the ‘aww’ factor. For Art 2010, Babies is well past its due date and I’m happy the film finally popped out: I’d been looking for a link-in to this precious painting by the Austrian artist Gustav Klimt (1862 – 1918).

Let’s look first at the man behind the pic. Klimt’s modernist credentials colored his career: he was a founder of the Vienna Secession (1898), a group of artists that resigned from established academic bodies and exhibiting societies to thrust forward the aims of various modern movements. He was also a principal Jugendstil (Art Nouveau) painter in his time, adopting the patterns of whipping organic forms that hallmarked that Euro-American movement of the 1890s. He’s famed for his portraits of beautiful, wealthy women and for frank, realistic renderings of nudity (which often caught him up in controversy). His most renowned work is (of course) The Kiss: is there a more-lauded image of sensual love in the Western canon?

Let’s bring it back to our Baby (Cradle) now, which dates to the very end of Klimt’s life (1917/18) and showcases a late version of his highly distinctive, visually rich style. Coming in loud and clear are his ‘decorator’ credentials: he’d studied decorative arts as a student and later in life (1883 – 1892) shared a studio for decorative painting with his brother and another artist. In fact, Klimt achieved his most consistent successes in applied arts (for example, mosaics).

There’s a jumbled mountain of material swaddling the baby: it dominates the space and commands the eye. The surface is all riddled with patterns rendered in luscious lively lines. Ornamental motifs (spirals, swirls, squares, rounds, dots, dentils) move to abstraction while the bold colors (deep blues, mauves, greens and magnolias) elaborate and luxuriate with each other. It’s all brought about with emboldened brush-moves: this is the thing that’s rocking the baby, the cradle that’s moving from side to side.

And yet still, the viewer’s eye is drawn to that small face sitting atop the mountain, with its tender and open expression. It’s an unconventional composition: a soaring pyramid with a head propped on top. What’s astonishing is that though so little of the baby is visible, we’re still left with a lasting impression of his newness and vulnerability. So, far from being lost in the embrace of the swathes, we seek him out in his joyous bundle.

At the end of his life, Klimt caught this earliest stage of humanity on canvas, which brings me back to the Balmès film. The director has said that one of the main things he looked for in the families he’d follow was that children, once born, would be totally loved. Did Klimt set out to convey that same, encircling sense of adoration here, do you think?

Breakfast is ‘the most important meal of the day’, giving us a count of calories to keep going through to lunch. But setting that side of things aside for a moment, let’s talk about why breakfast is really important. Think about it: whether you’re a granola guzzler, a cereal and milk muncher, a fruit fan, a muffin man, a pop tart toaster, an egg eater, a pancake flipper or a syrup-on-anything slur-per, there are fistfuls of fun, flirty and fabulous dishes to choose from. And they all say something about who you are, at least on that day…

Check out this week’s video blog. And special thanks to the Diner in Adams Morgan.

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Football frenzy is about to take hold in a big way, with the start of the 2010 FIFA World Cup  in South Africa. 32 teams are out to contest the championship, starting tomorrow, and ooh it is so exciting! What is it about the World Cup that makes even those not much-fussed by football at any other time set their schedules and clocks to catch every last kick and corner of a game? Or makes people paint their faces to screech at a screen? What is it that has my two younger brothers, loyal to the Netherlands to the last, don all-orange sports regalia whenever “the boys” are set to play? The World Cup is emotional, compelling and has more impact on lives than we might have imagined:

I’ve even been sucked into some of the pre-play punditry (football is nothing without the endless chinwagging). I’ve learned that England reckons it’d be “inconceivable” for the side to win without their talisman Wayne Rooney, who’s central in their bid to end decades of under-achievement.

After a strong qualifying campaign in which they won all their matches and had them first-in to the finals in South Africa, the Netherlands reckon they’ll reach the semi-finals “at the very least.”

US midfielder Michael Bradley (son of the country’s coach Bob Bradley) has warned England to expect a physical approach from the USA during Saturday’s clash: “we’ll make it really hard.”

Reigning world champions they may be, as well as the second-most successful international team ever after Brazil, but Italy’s players are in the odd position of approaching this year’s tournament as dark horses. They’ll be sticking to their mountain-moving mantra: “the team above all else.”

Today’s work is called Boy Balancing on a Ball (model 1888, cast c. 1905), since it’s as soccer-specific as I could get at the NGA. It’s by a German sculptor, Johannes Götz (1865 – 1934). Götz attended the Kunstgewerbeschule (art school) in Nuremberg from before going on to study sculpture at the Berlin Akademische Hochschule in 1884 and 1885. Then, as a young man keen to pursue the arts, he did what many other German sculptors of his generation did, and joined the Berlin studio of the imperial sculptor Reinhold Begas, where he was employed from 1885 to 1890.

So it was while he was a pupil of Begas that Götz created his Boy Balancing on a Ball (in German: Balancierende Knabe). Modeled in 1888, a cast of the work was sent as part of the German contemporary sculpture installation to the World’s Exposition in Chicago in 1893. That tells us something about the excitement that surrounded this small statuette when it was made, and indeed it does have the draw-in dimension.

Cast in bronze, it has an almost liquid fluency (the polished surface of the material makes it look ‘melting’). It’s sensuous too, the way that light slips over the “skin” and contours of the work. It’s a simple idea – a boy on a ball – but the balancing act that’s brought in invests even this small work with concentration, tension, pleasure and play. I find the free-wheeling arms so oddly engaging, set as they are on a shifted-to-the-side vertical. The knees and gripping toes, aligned horizontally, finish the “grid-like” compositional core, which offsets the looser, curved lines of the ball, torso and head.

Mostly though what makes this magic for me, is the small smile on the face of the boy and his belief that, if he only tries hard enough, absolutely anything has got to be possible.

Sometimes our food habits seem as fickle and faddish as the fashion industry: the latest super-berry, the best anti-something veggie, the hot new vital vittles are all-in one season, all-axed the next. And while we’re better at bandying about key consumption concepts like fair trade, food miles, organic, sustainable, we’re still seduced by ritzy new restaurants and  catchy new cookbooks doing fussy fusion food. The biggest and baddest contradiction in our culinary terms is that we worry about things depleting while all the while producing mountains of gleaming black bin bags at the back of the house.

Food waste is the seething, slimy monster that must be man-handled at home. Top of the most-shocking stats: food flicked into the trash in Europe and the US could feed the world three times over. British households alone discard enough edible stuff to fill Wembley Stadium (their biggest soccer arena) to bursting, eight times a year. Can you believe that more than a quarter of that comes served in its original packaging? A whopping one in every three bags we drag back from the market ends up in the bin: imagine what that can cost a person in a lifetime!

This Banquet Piece with Mince Pie (1635) has long been a favorite of mine at the NGA and, though it was painted at a time when waste was an issue for other reasons, it’s well-matched to our debate today. This is the largest-known painting by the artist by Willem Claesz Heda (c. 1594 – 1680) a master of Dutch 17th-century still-life painting, who brought to tradition to his native Haarlem.

This picture is typical of Heda’s monochrome manner (in 1620s – 1640s) in setting up this sort of scene, with its series of subdued, close, tonal harmonies. Here he pulls together a prize podium of of golds, silvers and bronzes, all put against a plain, neutral background (softly illuminated) and a creamy tablecloth (artfully crumpled).

It’s clear here the other thing the artist is concerned with is rendering different textures (an obsession he shared with most Dutch still-life painters of the time). He’s got a dull sheen on that pewter dish, high gloss on the silver knick-knacks and a sharp gleam on the glassware. It’s all looks uncannily real, touchable, eatable. And in fact therein lies the trick of the pic: what at first appears as an extended invitation to some sumptuous feast, is in fact a resonant reminder of the transience of human life and achievements. Platters and knives teeter at the drop-off to the floor. Goblets have already clattered and shattered, as has that food-stand. An obvious symbol of the brevity of life is the snuffed candle seen to the left, and the mauled main dish (Heda’s special, a mincemeat pie) tells us that all things, eventually, decay.

Heda’s pleasure-filled painting is an ode to the fleeting life and was not intended as a comment on waste. But, to our eyes in our times, those left-to-linger foods should set alarms bells ringing! There are some simple solutions we all can adopt to make sure we munch through all the food in the fridge: if it leads to less landfill, that means less methane, which is better for world, all round.

I’ll end with the lemon, with its curling peel: in Heda’s case it’s an emblem of deception (beautiful to behold but sour to the taste). But I’ll take it as a lesson for our trashy times, that things half-finished shouldn’t be binned, but turned into must-eat treats instead.

It’s too soon to be optimistic said Obama during his most recent trip to the oil-hit Gulf of Mexico coast. As the disaster deepens (beaches in the tourist area of northwest Florida just saw the first sure signs of oil), I’m turning to Sea Battle at the NGA. Not because there are grounds for any level of literal comparison, but rather because this picture’s ripping sense of rupture and effluence evoke the natural and political fall-out from the spill.

Wassily Kandinsky (1866 – 1944) was an abstract art pioneer. Born in Moscow, it was seeing a Monet masterpiece aged 29 that made him move to Munich. There he began Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) in 1911, a group of Expressionist artists clustered around the creed that creativity was inert in academic art and that an artist had a spiritual mission.

The Blue Rider trotted towards abstraction in art, but the trek was treacherous indeed. You see, art without a subject was an utterly revolutionary proposal at the time. Sure, in the first decade of the 20th century, Fauves and Expressionists had liberated color, Cubists had split objects into multiple planes and Futurists had challenged concepts of time. But for all this flattening of frontiers, until 1910 artists had stuck to a subject, however hard to identify.

The lyrical, mystical, color-shot canvas of Improvisation 31, Sea Battle (1913) hard-leans into abstraction and lays Kandinsky’s claim to being the first non-representational painter. But even here, what might at first glance appear formless and free is in fact more manicured than that (prep work for a painting like this might take months). The main motif is a pair of battling sail ships, tall masts as slim black lines, cannons blasting while waves roll under-keel. At the upper left stand the tall towers of an about-to-topple city.

The core clatter at the center spins into a radiation of forms and lines out to the edges. A dagger-like diagonal fractures the picture’s left and right sides. The artist saw acute angles as comforting and warm (occurring abundantly in nature), so these are seen as yellow and blue. On the other hand, he reckoned right angles to be a cold man-made contrivances (never naturally in evidence in nature) and accordingly painted these in crimson.

Let’s look now at possible meaning in this inventory of ‘images’, because these jagged lines and jostling color forms are invested with incredible apocalyptic charge. They suggest collapse and turmoil (note how the sides are flatter and calmer). The rise and plummet in the mashed medley of shape, color and line suggest things subsumed by fierce, far-beyond forces. Sea Battle is dated around the eve of World War I, and though it doesn’t allude to a specific war (according to the artist), he did say he sought to visualize “a terrible struggle … going on in the spiritual atmosphere” here.

Sea Battle stands as the start-point for a kind of abstraction concerned with emotion, by an artist who felt fervently that man trod at the threshold of a new spiritual era, and that art should serve to sever human attachment to the material world. This is the thing that cajoled Kandinsky’s leap of faith into the abyss of total abstraction (though this picture tells us how elusive that last leap really was). He said “Abstract art places a new world, which on the surface has nothing to do with reality, next to the real world.” So perhaps my initial comparison wasn’t too out-there, after all.

What’s on your summer wish-list? Swimming in the sea? A tan to top all others? Late-night, still-light dinners? Traveling? Tenting? Whatever your idea of the ideal summer time-spend, let me let you in on one thing that got me day-dreaming about the season recently. Martin Dorey is a writer, surfer, serial Volkswagen camper van owner and keen shrimper from North Devon, whose new book, The Camper Van Cookbook, is already on my birthday list.

Dorey is in the habit of dragging his (willing) wife and two daughters off on camper van adventures around the UK. The book charts life on the road and is interspersed with delicious ‘two-ring’ recipes (suited to a camper van cook’s equipment) by Sarah Randell. Here’s one lunch done camper cuisine: find and forage mussels fixed to rocks by the sea; scrub them clean; chop chili and garlic, fresh coriander and basil and steam the lot in a tin of coconut milk. That’s Thai-style mussels in just a few ticks (and tasting the better for being al fresco and the fruit of some light, leisurely labor). OK so such camper van antics won’t tickle all reader’s taste buds, since downshifting is not uplifting to everyone’s mind. But I do think Dorey’s essence of escaping the humdrum and his pull towards a please-yourself, mellow and simple escape is just what the doctor ordered for summer, for all.

In the spirit of these things, today’s pick is Ceres, Summer (c. 1718) by the Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684 – 1721). The greatest French painter of his time, Watteau played a major part in shaping the Rococo style in the 18th century. He was much-inspired by theatrical scenes and among his most distinctive creations was the fete galante (courtship party), in which be-costumed beauties stroll in idyllic settings flirting, and serenading one another.

Ours is not such a scene but still relays the fragile beauty of Watteau’s work. Ceres is the Roman goddess of the harvest and here she’s surrounded by the signs of the summer zodiac: Gemini (twins twiddling to the right), Cancer (crab-like creature crawling underfoot) and Leo (burly beast on left). This painting was one of four showing all the seasons, ordered for the home of a rich banker, Pierre Crozat. She’s the only one to survive.

Summer has a shimmering charm. Central sits the elegantly-dressed figure, whose flesh is more pudgy and palpable than in other Watteau works: he studied Crozat’s art collection while painting this and here I sense the presence of Paolo Veronese (16th-century, Venetian). The way the pink fabric pulls pliable over her legs, enlivened by light and shade, veers back to Veronese, as does the surprise punch of the pastel colors. The solidity of the scene (formal pose and bulk of body) is loosed into softness by the fronds of flopping corn, the fluff of the clouds and the fuzzy heads of all the figures. This summer mirage is making me want to abandon my desk for a stroll in the sun, preferably slurping an ice tea.

Head for Art is starting summer with a bang this year at our Hump Party!

Please join us to celebrate the half-way point of the Art 2010 blog project:

Thursday, June 24th

6.30 to 8.30

Hamiltonian Gallery (1353 U Street, NW)

There’ll be wine, an exclusive artist’s performance and fantastic art giveaways!

RSVP today on the Head for Art site (follow signs for the Hump Party).

Ever fancied reading out your teenage love letters? Or those squirm-inducing journal squiggles in which you set out to ‘heal the world’? No? Well think again, and get galvanized, because ‘cringe parties’ are all the rage and hitting a hip scene near you. And you’d better be afraid DC residents: one such ‘shame event’ just went down at Town Danceboutique, a trendy club that combines cabaret, lush lounges and a high-energy dance floor. As a 32 year-old gallerist read from her journal about the crushes she’d crashed-and-burned with at summer camp (age 11), the audience squirmed and squealed and shook laughter: “Please, oh God, please make Michael [top crush] like me a little.”

Shame parties have been running riot all over America, ever since LA screen-writer David Nadelberg found “the most atrocious, overreaching letter” to an object of youthful affection and started running Mortified in 2002. Hot-cheeked evenings are selling like hot cakes in London now too, with Cringe (Facebook fan page: ‘Teenage Diary Writers Unite!’).

Sharing the shame seems to be about (voluntarily) standing in front of packs of unknown people to enunciate the most blush-bringing extracts from your (typically teen) diary. First bra? French kissing fluster? It’s all good fodder for a night of embarrassment, empathy and lots of laughs. For that sense of intimacy, frisson and fun, we’re turning to Francois Boucher this afternoon, whose Love Letter (1750) hangs at the NGA. Parisian Boucher (1703 – 1770) was one of the highlights of the Rococo period (the light, playful style that dominated the arts for the better part of the 1700s).

This work shows how Boucher would blatantly thrust out sauce and sensuality, a heady hash much-loved in the highest social circles (his first royal commission came in 1735): in fact this very work was commissioned by Madame de Pompadour. Born Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson, the Marquise de Pompadour became the maitress-en-titre to King Louis XV during the 1740s (she stayed as his official mistress long after they’d ceased to share a bed). Madame de Pompadour liked Boucher: he painted her often (the portrait here dates to c. 1758) and she involved him in many an art project.

The Love Letter and a companion picture were painted for Pompadour’s chateau at Bellevue. It’s a pastoral idyll (see the sheep flocked around) with a young ‘shepherdess’ about to open (or send? I’m not sure) a love letter. Except she’s not dressed for a root-around in dirt-filled fields, and instead clad in the finest silks. Boucher adored assembling a decorative sense of disorder in draperies: see how the folds of her skirts flow, tumbling like bed sheets. To add to this (intended) mischief, a contemporary audience would certainly have picked up the erotic overtones sounded by those pretty piggy toes peeking out.

What Boucher was best at was tickling pink the rosy tints of human flesh in his subjects. See how our shepherdess blushes beautifully, an effervescence coating her cheeks, letting us know of some of the scandal that might be on her mind. Herein lies the brilliance of Boucher’s painting, which captures charming colors and then caresses them into a state of sheen and iridescence. So for all his frivolity and focus on fondant fancies, his painterly polish is undeniable.

And here today he suggests that sharing your secrets, however sauce-like or cringe-worthy, can be a communal, enjoyable and (even) therapeutic experience. So dig out your diaries, dear blog readers, and get yourself outing all that teen angst and shame.

Today is World Environment Day (WED), a global celebration for positive environmental action. It’s been commemorated on 5 June since 1972 and is one of the principal vehicles through which the United Nations stimulates worldwide awareness of the environment and encourages political attention and action. At ground-level, WED aims to enable people to be responsible, and recognize their personal power to be agents of change in support of the globe: organize a neighborhood clean-up, stop using plastic bags, plant a tree, walk to work, start a recycling drive. Click here for more daily ‘do something’ tips.

Rwanda is hosting this year’s core celebrations and 2010’s WED theme is “Many Species. One Planet. One Future.” It’s echoing the urgent call to conserve the diversity of life on the planet and stem the tide of extinction. WED’s conservation action has already managed to bring some species back from the brink of termination, and has restored some vital natural habitats around the world. But today’s World Environment Day is looking to lend fresh energy to the resolve to do much more (and much faster) in the race against extinction.

One artist at the NGA who’d be frenzied at the thought of world habitats withering to death is the Frenchman Henri Rousseau (1844 – 1910), who’s perhaps best-known for his large-scale exotic scenes of wild plant and animal life. His subject-of-choice is all the more note-worthy since (and this despite his claims to the contrary), he never actually left his native country. Rousseau is thought of as a Naive painter, which means he’s (loosely) defined as someone with little or no formal training. And that’s right in the case of Rousseau, who we know spent most of his life working as a tax collector at the Paris tollgates. This earned him the still-sticking nickname Le Douanier (the customs officer).

The NGA’s Tropical Forest with Monkeys (1910) and Equatorial Jungle (1909) present the artist’s particular preoccupation with painting exotic places well-beyond his borders (and well-beyond his ken): this tallies with the Naive artist’s tendency to be driven by a subject of especial interest. Our picture for today, the Equatorial Jungle, is a huge lush green-colored fantasy set in a jungle. If Rousseau aimed to emulate academic Salon painters, he was betrayed by his lack of training, which comes trundling through. For a start, the composition is simple and instinctive: amassed, assembled, seeming unstructured. There’s no real scientific perspective either: notice how the foliage actually flattens the space, the 2D leaves overlapping and almost giving an impression of collage. The crowding-with-detail is a dead-giveaway, as is the endearing way he’s nestled his beasties away from sight, perhaps unsure of quite how to paint in paws, paunches and haunches.

Rousseau had an unshakeable belief in his own talent and exhibited almost yearly at the Salon des Indépendants, the counter-current collective that allowed artists to show outside of the official, academic Salon. And though his work was ridiculed in his own lifetime, he did achieve his life-long aim of having a picture hang in the Louvre, albeit posthumously. A huge step in the right direction for Rousseau came when he was discovered by a young Pablo Picasso, a powerful spotlight that brought a lot of new appreciation his way. And I have to say, I know this scene looks simple and bewilderingly basic, but there’s a childlike straightforwardness and an innocent vitality that’s oddly addictive and absolutely alluring.

In 1907 Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) had stunned the art world with what would later be recognized as the first Cubist painting: Les Demoiselles d’Avignon was inspired by tribal art and proposed a new way of seeing reality, namely  simultaneously from all angles.

Our painting here, The Lovers (1923), was a complete departure from that work: Picasso never limited himself to a single style for long since he was so versatile and imaginative.

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I’m befuddled by a fiddle: 12 luthiers (makers of stringed instruments) in Markneukirchen, Germany are busy building what they hope will be the world’s largest (playable) violin. The town has a long tradition of musical instrument-making that stretches back 350 years, but no one’s ever attempted this: the would-be world record breaker will be 14 feet tall and will weigh 200 pounds plus. Now they just need a giant to play it.

I thought we’d play out this tune and look at The Old Violin (1886) by William Michael Harnett (1848 – 1892). Born in Ireland, Harnett was raised in Philadelphia in his working class family. As a teen he trained as an engraver, which led to classes at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts from 1866 and a stint studying in New York from 1869. In the 1880s he passed six years in Europe, perusing old master still-life paintings, preparing to make his mark on the genre back home. He did this this by ditching the typical tabletop (orienting his images upright instead), and priming painstaking trompe l’oeil (‘fool the eye’) tricks.

The Old Violin is Harnett’s masterpiece, which starts with a simple arrangement: a violin hangs squarely suspended on a battered green door. Glowing sheets of music appear behind, reading two well-known melodies, and there’s a piece of snipped newspaper and an envelope bottom left. This work bewitched viewers from the off: “A painting has been added to the Art Gallery, which has created a furore,” read one Cincinnati newspaper. “Visitors will need no guide, they will find it by following the crowd,” said another. Viewers would literally reach to grasp and grip the objects, unsure if they were painted or not.

So how did Harnett harness his visual trickery? Well, he starts with a shallow space, key in keeping our eyes on his objects (the door defines the entire space). Layering is important too, so he’s got the violin and bow on top of the sheets, shadows and all, as if bursting beyond the logical limit. Things ripple and crinkle: he’d foreshortened the envelope and the edge of the clipping, shading deftly all the way. He’s even cut off the corner of the envelope, as if it’s been stuck into the frame, toying with the impression it’s the only real object here.

Harnett also applied some serious sorcery in terms of technique: on the hinges for instance he first added sand or coarse pigment to brown paint for an rough under-layer, before moving a dry brush tickled with orange paint over the surface. For the clipping, he painted slender blocks of thin black paint over a white background and while it was still wet he scratched at it with a fine point to trace lines in it. This let through the under-layer and created a ‘typeface’ that looks real but is in fact illegible.

But quite aside from the visual vexing this is also a work of multi-layered meaning, bringing in the tensions between old and new, the everlasting and the fleeting, illusion and reality. At the core of all these meanings ticks the transience of time, which Harnett highlights in the fair wear-and-tear of his objects.

This work helped Harnett position himself as the most famous still-life painter of the last quarter of the 19th century, but it does raise one question in my mind. See how he’s signed his name on the envelope? Why, after using such time-consuming tactics to fool his public, did he want to write in his identity in such an obvious and legible way?

I’m confused: I’d read somewhere that 1 June was National Cake Day in the States, and I’d literally been sitting on my hands to keep from writing about today’s painting before now. I’d even trawled husband through town and had him catch eye-catching cakes on camera for the occasion (here are some of the juicy fruits of our labor):

I now can’t retrace my National Cake Day source, and in fact my search has hurled me headlong into a sticky internet mess of American Food Holidays: seriously, it seems no day is unfettered to feting some foodstuff or other. I hope you’re ready for the sugarplums to dance in your head, because here’s some of what we’re in for this month:

1 June National Hazelnut Cake Day (my mistake); 2 June National Rocky Road Day (how to celebrate?); 6 June National Applesauce Cake Day (yuk); 11 June National German Chocolate Cake Day (nein, danke); 12 June National Peanut Butter Cookie Day (could twist my arm); 14 June National Strawberry Shortcake Day
 (yes); 17 June National Cherry Tart Day
 (yes, yes); 22 June National Chocolate Eclair Day (not so much); 26 June National Chocolate Pudding Day
(which way to the gym?); 29 June National Almond Buttercrunch Day (how much for a year’s membership?).

I hope that lot hasn’t left too-sweet a taste on the tongue, as I’m going to write about Cakes here anyway: it’s by the American artist Wayne Thiebaud and is surely one of the most tempting things at the NGA. Born in 1920 in Arizona, Thiebaud (pronounced ‘tee-bo’) spent his childhood in Long Beach, California. He developed an interest in the arts early on and as a young man worked various jobs to build his skills (apprentice at the Walt Disney Studio, cartoonist and designer, artist in the Air Force during World War II). After his release from duties in 1945, Thiebaud worked as a commercial artist for several years before making a commitment to a career in painting. He began formal studies at San Jose State University, then transferred to California State University at Sacramento, where he finished both a BA and MA in studio art and art education.

As a teacher and a painter, Thiebaud was always drawn to realism, admiring especially Johannes Vermeer, Jean-Siméon Chardin, and Thomas Eakins. By 1960 he’d selected from his menu of possible subjects and opted (most often) for production-line foods found in diners and cafeterias: pastries, pies, other delectables. So great was his taste for food fodder that people often asked if he’d been in the industry: the answer is no, aside from a short stint in a cafe called Mile High & Red Hot, where the ice creams were served ‘mile high’ and the hot dogs made ‘red hot’.

Cakes (from 1963) shows an array of baked beauties, teetering dream-like on stilted plates. There’s chocolate, angel-food, layer, custard-cream, fruit and all sorts to choose from. The saucer-shaped shadows sitting beneath seem to send the cakes soaring upwards towards us and are typical of Thiebaud. The acid colors ‘pop’, as does the heavy-set pigment application all round (seen in-the-flesh, the pasted-on-paint is staggering).

Thiebaud was associated with Pop art painters because of his interest in objects of mass culture (certainly his colors and shadows are characteristic of ad imagery). In fact, when his paintings first exhibited in 1962, they were taken as indictments of America’s increasingly shallow consumer culture. Thiebaud himself has always disputed this read, and says his subjects are nostalgic, rather than nasty. I’ll take Thiebaud’s interpretation any day, as well as a slice of that swirly one, please.

I was more-than-a-little surprised to find a painting with a similar sort of approach and message at the NGA. It’s called Self-Portrait before a Painting of “Amor Fedele” (1655) and it’s by an Italian artist, Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, who’s known by his nickname Guercino (“the squinter”, after a visual ailment he had). Born in Cento (Emilia-Romagna), near the artistic centres Bologna and Ferrara, Guercino (1591 – 1666) was apprenticed at 16 to local painters. But despite this (as he himself said) he was largely self-taught, and looked at other artists to hone his own distinctive style that was rich and painterly, with naturalistic figures and bold tonal modeling. Guercino’s work carries characteristics of the Baroque, which prevailed in the 17th century, and which was keen on dynamic movement, emotional intensity and theatrical effects.

Guercino ended up spending most of his life in his native north Italy where he enjoyed a steady stream of important commissions, but he also had a brief period (1621 – 1623) in Rome. While there, he worked for Pope Gregory XV and for Gregory’s nephew Cardinal Ludovico Ludovisi, for whom he painted an exuberant cycle of ceiling frescoes (perhaps his most famous work) that included this image of Aurora.

Our Self-Portrait before a Painting of “Amor Fedele” is a much later work and sees the squinter damp down the exuberance of his teens and twenties in favor of a calmer, more classicizing manner. On the right stands the man himself, hair scraped sideways over pate, and palette and six brushes in hands, seeming as if he’s about to daub pigment onto the large canvas behind him. The picture he’s in front of sits on an easel and shows an amassed and unmistakable collection of signs of fidelity: there’s Cupid (quiver and bow) the little god of love, who’s hooked his finger through the collar of a dog (much-used emblem of faith and loyalty). Beyond these there’s a snake seen eating it’s own tail, which could be a sign of unity and wholeness.

Certain things make the image look refined and serene: the down-to-earth naturalism of the babe’s body, with soft shading shaping the flesh and facial features. The colors help to lighten the mood, especially that jewel blue of the sky and the red and pink pops in other places. And instead of any energetic posing, we’re firmly fixed by the steady stares of the artist and Cupid, both achingly asking us to ‘get what we’re saying’ about him being faithful. If I’m honest it makes for a rather odd picture, unsettling in its beseeching intensity, and it’s this that reminded me of Tiger’s own earnest eye-lock with the camera in his ad. Guercino seems to have been a devoted family man who always painted close to home, so I’m not sure what may have prompted this work. Perhaps he too had things on his mind. But while Tiger’s ad scrapes the bottom of the barrel of base taste, this picture at least leaves us some dignity and beauty, wouldn’t you say?

It’s Memorial Day in the States, a federal holiday commemorating US men and women who have fallen in military service. Memorial Day was first enacted to honor Union soldiers of the American Civil War and it’s said that the first one was observed by formerly enslaved black people at the Washington Race Course in Charleston, South Carolina. The place had been used as a Confederate prison for captured Union soldiers, and as a mass grave for Union soldiers who died there. After the halt to hostilities, people exhumed bodies and buried them individually, building a fence around the area and an arch for their Union graveyard. In May 1865, people reported that crowds of thousands gathered at the site for sermons, singing, and a picnic on the grounds.

Our work today is one of the most moving in the NGA: it’s called the Shaw Memorial and is one of the greatest American sculptures of the 19th century. It celebrates the sacrifices of the Massachusetts Fifty-fourth Volunteer Infantry and their Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, who died along with half his regiment in an assault on Fort Wagner near Charleston, South Carolina on July 18, 1863. Though the men were defeated, the battle proved a poignant event of powerful symbolic significance, as the Massachusetts Fifty-fourth was one of the first African-American units of the Civil War.

The artist here is Augustus Saint-Gaudens (1848 – 1907) one of America’s foremost sculptors. He was born in Ireland to a French father and Irish mother; the family emigrated to the States when Augustus was a few months old and settled in New York City. After small steps as an apprentice and some classes in art, Saint-Gaudens studied in Paris, becoming one of the first Americans to study sculpture at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. Saint-Gaudens embarked on a sort of personal pursuit to see this sculpture made when there was unprecedented interest in honoring fallen heroes through the public and permanent medium of sculpture in the aftermath of the Civil War. The artist’s decade of devotion was added to years of public pushing for such a work and culminated in the finest achievement of his career.

The original bronze (1884 – 1897) is on Boston Common and what the NGA has is a patinated plaster version, the full-size counter-copy that the sculptor worked on even as the original was being installed. He traveled with this piece extensively, the mobile mock-up he could offer to an excited international audience.

In the NGA you feel the full force of this innovative fusion-piece of grand equestrian sculpture and narrative relief. Packed on top of one another are figures (16 I think), all with faces of fully-finished and individualized features. There’s a level of observation and detail that steeps the image in rough realism (backpacks, bootlaces).

Central, young Shaw sits piston-straight from his hair-tips to his toes. Against his vertical grain drives the forward thrust of the troops: see their diagonal bent, as endless legs cut into the composition with progress-pressing lines. See how Saint-Gaudens balances the messy mass of weapons on the left with the empty air to the right. And the ethereality of that allegorical figure flying above (with an olive branch for peace and poppies for death) contrasts starkly with the physical, palpable soldiers, whose hearts are still hard-beating their chests.

This memorial is mesmerizing: harmonious, yet dynamic, filled with action and yet not awkward. As I stood before it to take my pictures, I could almost hear a beat of drums and the fall of foot.