This weekend I unearthed an internet treasure. It’s a music video by a band called Hold Your Horses, for their song 70 Million. In it, the band-members mimic a whole series of famous paintings, starting off with Da Vinci’s Last Supper before taking on everything from Botticelli’s Birth of Venus to Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring. Featuring Magritte, Michelangelo, Mondrian, Munch and many more, it’s a raucous, rollicking romp of an art history lesson.

This video got me thinking about the long-standing link-ups between art and music, and more specifically the contributions of artists to album covers. In 1967 Andy Warhol came up with a (peel-able) banana for a record by The Velvet Underground. In the same year, British Pop artist Peter Blake made the colorful sleeve for the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Guns and Roses featured a figure from Raphael’s School of Athens on their Use Your Illusion artwork and Coldplay took Delacroix’s Liberty Guiding the People as the basis for the cover of their most recent album.

There’s an artist at the NGA behind one of the most subtle and unusual album covers out there. Gerhard Richter’s photo-painting Kerze (Candle) adorned Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation of 1988 and became one of the most famous covers in pop history (the original canvas sold for £7.1 million at Sotheby’s in 2008). There’s one painting by Richter at the NGA -- called Abstract Painting 780-1 (1992) -  that hangs in the mezzanine terrace of the East Building. Richter’s a German artist (b. 1932) who trained in the former East Germany, where painters had to produce realist art to support propaganda requirements of the state. When he move to the Federal Republic in the West in 1960, he started working from photographs and developed a style that was neither realistic nor abstract.

As well as his photographic art (the Kerze album cover was such a work), Richter made abstract pictures like the one at the NGA. Abstract Painting 780-1 reveals the way the artist builds up cumulative layers of paint, applying colors wet-on-wet. He blurs certain sections and scrapes across others to expose prior layers of pigment.

This is a non-representational painting: though there’s some sense of dim images spied through a smeared window, the physical work drags your eyes and mind back to the paint all the time. The medium seems to have will and whimsy of its own, showing Richter’s method of working in stages, responding naturally to the painting’s progress. It’s an incidental and intuitive approach, not a million miles away from Pollock’s automatism (which we looked at yesterday), in which a work becomes an accumulation of spontaneous, reactive gestures of adding, moving and subtracting paint. Sheets of vibrant color emerge, patterns pop up and the artist’s tools leave little snail-trails on the surface.

One of the most magic effects that crops up out of Richter’s random painting process is the illusion of space and a logical recession. When looking at Abstract Painting 780-1 it’s almost impossible not to imagine and remember images in our real-life lives. Richter would be pleased: he’s known for saying that “art has to do with life” and sees it as the most valuable type of thing to believe in. And oddly enough, even though this work isn’t on any album covers as far as I know, when I see it in person it makes me think of music.

Here’s the Hold Your Horses video. Free copy of their album for the first reader to correctly identify all the artists and works featured. Please submit your answers via comments.

A week ago today, an 80 year-old lady named Ruth Kligman passed away. A painter and artists’ muse all her life, Kligman will forever be remembered in the history of art as the sole survivor of the 1956 car crash that killed Jackson Pollock, her lover at the time.

Kligman was 26 when she first met Pollock in 1956 (he was 44, estranged from his wife and losing his battle with alcoholism). Kligman recalled in her book Love Affair: A Memoir of Jackson Pollock, that he looked “tired out, sad … his body seemed as though it couldn’t stand up on its own.” Only a few months later Kligman was riding with Pollock when he, intoxicated, ran the car off the road and flipped it. The crash killed Edith Metzger (a friend of Kligman’s) and himself. Kligman was thrown clear of the car and seriously injured.

Kligman’s passing brings back Pollock’s own demise and sudden death, which have added a harsh mystique to his status over the years. Born in the rural west, Pollock (1912 – 1956) studied art in New York and became a leading Abstract Expressionist. It was in 1947  that he started making the drip paintings that made his name and revolutionized the way a painting was supposed to be made. Ditching the easel, Pollock tacked unprimed canvases to the floor in a barn at his East Hampton home. Using enamel house paints (oils weren’t fluid enough), he literally poured them from the can, or dripped them with sticks or hardened brushes.

Pollock had been painting in this drip style for three years when he made Number 1, 1950 (Lavender Mist). It represents a high point of what came to be called his Action Painting. It’s huge (221 x 300 cm) and shows how Pollock overturned the idea of composition. In making this, he’d move around and over the canvas, flicking his wrist and arm, shaking his whole body in free gesture. Every inch of the canvas becomes a record of a physical encounter. Long, curved lines, tick-like flicks and bleeding splats lead the eye. Some areas suggest chaos and chance while others indicate order and design. This “all-over” style – where no part of the picture is more significant that any other – creates a mass of restless, eddying energy that engulfs the spectator. Here, it looks like Pollock applied the black paint first, a sticking-out skeleton over which he added subsequent shades. The intricately woven webs of white, grey and peach evoke great banks of lavender wafting in the sun.

Pollock wanted to find a technique for his age and was taken by the idea of automatism – that is, abandoning conscious control of a picture. He said: “when I am in my painting, I am not aware of what I am doing.” It seems that this free and unrestrained aspect of his art came to be reflected in his wild and reckless life (excessive drinking, high-speed driving). In the short time Pollock worked on Action Paintings (he abruptly abandoned the drip style in 1951), he diverted the path of painting forever. And yet despite his fame (he was dubbed Jack the Dripper by Time magazine, and Life magazine suggested he was “the greatest living painter in the United States”), he seems never to have found peace or happiness for himself. At least it seems that his young lover Ruth Kligman would have been able to empathize: she always maintained that she knew better than most how truly hard the life of an artist is.

Tonight is the Oscars and the stage is set for the 82nd Academy Awards. Held at the Kodak Theater in LA, this is of course billed as the year’s largest, most lavish movie event. In the past, I’ve attempted to follow the awards from London, willing proceedings to get underway before I (inevitably) dropped off on the sofa. So I’m excited this year to see the ceremony in real American time for the first time, and plan to be there for the films, the fashion and everything in between.

French Theater (c. 1856) is chosen for its special audience atmosphere. It shows a theater crowd, but also brings to mind modern-day cinema, or perhaps viewers at a ceremony of sorts. It’s by a French artist called Honoré Daumier (1808 – 1879) whose career is one of the most unusual in 19th-century art. Born into a family of artists in Marseille, Daumier’s father moved the family to Paris in 1816 in pursuit of a literary career. When these plans fell through, the young Honoré had to find work fast. After a number of menial jobs, he learned lithography, aged 14: some time with a commercial printer then fine-tuned the techniques he needed. Lithography is a printing process on a flat piece of stone or a metal plate: the hard surface is etched with acid to form a design that selectively transfers ink to paper. From 1829 on, Daumier produced lithographic caricatures of his own and embarked on a 40-year career as a comic artist to the weekly press.

Daumier was better known in his lifetime for his satirical cartoons and caricatures than he ever was for his ‘proper’ art. And yet, as a painter, he was admired by fellow artists like Corot, Degas and Delacroix. Daumier’s choice of subject-matter mostly placed him in the Realist tradition, a mid-19th century French movement that emerged as a reaction against the outdated strictures of academic art. Realist works tended to be large-scale, showing rural peasants or the city working class, and focussed on an unidealized account of reality. While French Theater doesn’t strictly fall into the Realist category (it’s small and shows a more up-scale crowd), it does reveal the engaging honesty of Daumier’s eye and exactly how good he could be, despite never having had a proper art training. My delight is in the true-to-life details: spot the double chins, hair-growth patterns and noses of varying size.

What’s also brilliant here is the well-observed body language, brought to life with spontaneous brushwork that anticipates the expressive oil of the Impressionists. The spectators are all angled in their own way towards the stage. Shoulders are shifted, heads are turned and hands are held quietly in lap. There’s real spontaneity in the group’s zig-zag, forward-back of bodies as people lean to catch the show. Body language is one of the best ways for an artist to tell a story, and the gestures here pull us quickly into a theater environment. The darkened color palette (which still allows for a studied handling of light) adds to the mood.

The sheer vastness of Daumier’s lithographic output and the unsurpassed brilliance of his printing style still to this day tend to overshadow his achievements as a painter. In a work like this though, Daumier’s day job, which called for a candid interpretation of real-life events, actually served to make the snapshot all-the-more gripping. I wonder how he’d picture all of us, glued to our screens once the Oscars get underway. Just make sure there aren’t any popcorn kernels stuck in your teeth, I’d say.

Are you a clutter bug, a pack rat, or some other creature of horrendous hoarding habits? Are you met in each room you enter by a nerve-inducing jumble of unopened letters, leaking pens, piles of books, old magazines, empty plant pots, ground-bound picture frames, cables for goodness-knows-what and clothes you bought ages ago but still haven’t managed to hang up?

If so, you’re far from alone. The recession hasn’t stemmed our product purchasing, since the thrill of shopping is still there. If anything, the tough financial time has increased our inclination to clutter (according to charity shop organizations in the UK and US), with people now less able to let anything go. Serious amounts of stuff start to control us, ruining our lives instead of enhancing them. “The compulsive state of buying things and holding on to them … is a form of addiction,” says Annie Bennett, a psychotherapist and author in the UK. And it gets worse. According to Romaine Lowery (who founded the Clutter Clinic in the England), “people get to the point where they are desperate … Clutter is bad for your health and very stressful … I’ve seen a link between clutter and depression.”

The order and organization we’re after is here, in the distinctive work of Piet Mondrian (1872 – 1944), an artist who searched a long time for his personal abstract style. Born in Holland, he trained at Amsterdam’s Academy of Fine Arts, and worked in a naturalistic Dutch style, an Impressionist and van Gogh-influenced style, and a Cubist style before hitting on his own brand of clear lines and clean spaces in 1920.

This painting is called Tableau No. IV; Lozenge Composition with Red, Gray, Blue, Yellow, and Black (c. 1924 – 1925). It shows the areas of solid color (limited to white, grey and the primaries) and the black vertical and horizontal lines that we associate with Mondrian. The linear elements of the composition, intersecting at right angles, are assiduously aligned for a balanced asymmetry. The resulting rectangles are filled in with color, a sort of exploration of mass. Note how the colors are placed at the peripheries. It was in 1918 that Mondrian started turning his square canvases 45 degrees (without rotating the lines in the composition) to rest “on point”. He said his lozenge compositions were about cutting. Indeed, the sense of cropping is emphatic: the forms feel incomplete, sliced off at the edges, with the implication being that things continue beyond the canvas.

In 1917 Mondrian had been instrumental in founding De Stijl (The Style), a Dutch artistic movement that also gave its name to a journal propagating the group’s theories. The core concept of De Stijl is known as neoplasticism (new plastic art). Mondrian explained what this meant for him in an essay called Neo-Plasticism in Pictorial Art:  “… this new plastic idea will ignore the particulars of appearance, that is to say, natural form and color. On the contrary, it should find its expression in the abstraction of form and color, that is to say, in the straight line and the clearly defined primary color.”

Mondrian’s reduction to the essentials of form and color carve out a visual simplicity that’s ultimately intended to suggest spiritual harmony and order. What better prompt could there be for us to de-clutter our homes and clear up our lives? If cleansing and organizing will lead to peace, serenity and a sense of inner calm, then sign me up for an instant home overhaul. Just hang on one minute while I try to locate my dustpan and brush…

Have you ever clicked “send” and thought, seconds later, hang on, what did I just do? Most email users could probably own up to a couple small online slip-ups. Like, sending a message to the “wrong John”, replying to the entire department instead of just one co-worker, attaching the wrong document or forwarding something with just a little too much information. The thing is, in the big scheme of things, these minor blunders will mostly blow over quite quickly and quietly.

Check out my second video blog. And special thanks to Baked & Wired coffeeshop in Georgetown.

Today is World Book Day, as celebrated in the UK and Ireland. Other countries mark the day at different times of the year, usually in April. Whenever it takes place, World Book Day is intended as a global celebration of books and reading. It was designated by UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) to heighten awareness of the importance of literature for a fulfilling life.

Never before have we needed to read so much. At a time when people are worrying more than ever about the permanence of their work or the stretchability of their wealth, just six minutes with your nose in a book can reduce stress levels by 68%. But in case you’re not one to crack open an old tome, then fret not: the 21st century is giving books a whole new look to ease-up and improve reading experiences. It’s hardly surprising I suppose that books haven’t escaped unscathed from technology’s ruthless march. In the last couple of years alone, we’ve said hello to the Sony e-reader, Amazon’s Kindle and lately the Apple iPad. In December 2008 Nintendo launched their Classic Books Collection (CBC) in Europe (it’s set for release in North America in this June), a computer program made for the Nintendo DS that includes 100 works of classic literature. In the UK, take-up has been overwhelming, turning the CBC into a top-selling product, as suddenly square-eyed kids and teens have started trawling their way through Oliver Twist and the like.

Whichever way you get your lit fix, there’s a painting at the NGA that shows the story of a reader’s absorption. It’s called A Young Girl Reading (c. 1770) and is by the French artist Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732 – 1806). From the town of Grasse in southeastern France, Fragonard was a rapid, spontaneous painter. His whipping brush and gorgeous colors well embody the ebullient Rococo aesthetic that prevailed in France at his time.

This picture just glows. The girl seems to be sitting before a window (light illuminates her face and body and casts a faint shadow on the wall). Thick, weaving brushstrokes create the shaded contours of her yolk-yellow dress, concentrating on her sleeve, causing it to bloom over the armrest. The fat, cushy pillow propped against the wall is sketched in with a looser hand, its sinkable-in shape moulded to the body of the girl and showing a shimmering blend of mauve and lilac thread. These striking colors are picked up in the crinkling hair ribbon and the flutter of bows on the girl’s bosom. The flush on her cheek stands out against the white collar, sharp-edged with the handle of the painter’s brush.

As well as all this surface charm, there’s a sure solidity underpinning the picture. Look for the vertical of the yellow-brown wall and the horizontal line of armrest in the foreground, creating a visual frame that squares off the scene. It’s Fragonard’s way of focussing our eye on an intimate moment, watching this young girl escape into a book. With his confident colors and bravura brushwork, Fragonard seems to be celebrating the act of reading, in his own particular way. There’s genuine sensitivity in his rendering of her face, attentive and coming alive with the words on the page. This is what’s worth remembering as people pursue the “next big thing” in reading gadgetry. After all’s said and done, it’s just the story that matters. A great yarn, well told, will jump off the page no matter what. Just ask Mr Dickens, last seen on your kid’s Nintendo.

Lately, I’ve been watching a lot of Supernanny, a TV show that follows families getting help with their tricky kids. The woman who comes to call is 38 year-old Brit Jo Frost, a sort of modern-day Mary Poppins. I kid you not, no matter how extreme or mundane the problem, Jo has a kind yet no-nonsense approach that’s as refreshing as a hot, sweet cup of tea.

The show debuted in the UK in 2004 and was snapped up by ABC in the States not long after, becoming an instant ratings hit. Each episode starts with Jo observing a family, before rolling up her sleeves to set house rules, establish discipline and build an all-important routine. A lot of her focus goes onto the kids, getting their behavior up to scratch. But parents are also pulled up on shortcomings, especially if they’re lazy or not keen to get their hands dirty with poster paints. Once a family’s approaches are corrected, results often seem to come thick and fast, with relief and elation all round.

The shots of calm, smiling and well-behaved kids that flit across the screen at the close of each episode made me think of The Westwood Children (c. 1807) at the NGA. This unusual and endearing portrait is by an American artist called Joshua Johnson (c. 1763 – 1832), who was the son of a white father and black mother. Joshua was born into slavery and freed in 1782. Having received minimal training in art (perhaps he was self-trained, we’re not sure), he practiced as a portraitist, advertising in Baltimore’s city directories. Johnson was the first African American artist to make his living by painting and roughly 80 portraits are now attributed to him.

In this portrait, Johnson depicts the male children of Margaret and John Westwood, who was a successful Baltimore stagecoach manufacturer. I’d say the tender relationship between the boys is a main focus of the picture. At the center of the image is John, the oldest son, reaching his arm around his younger brothers. The two smaller boys clump together, clasping hands, perhaps uncomfortable with having to pose. The boys are in their Sunday best, buttoned into the high-waisted trouser suits that were fashionable at the time. With the three figures arranged neatly off to the left, Johnson introduces the window to design a balanced the composition.

The Westwoods have oval faces, thin lips, large, penetrating blue eyes and fine, sandy hair. Their features look sweet and their lace collars delicate, owing to Johnson’s practice of applying paint in thin layers. There’s little use of light and shade on the bodies of the children to bring out their roundness, though they do cast light shadows across the floor.

What makes Supernanny so compulsive is the footage of kiddie mayhem. There are massive meltdowns at the supermarket and total tantrums at tea-time. It’s quite something, to see a two year-old get out of bed 108 times in the course of an evening. None of it’s too much for Jo though (perhaps that’s why she got a roaring mention in the House of Commons not long ago in a discussion about preventing the causes of anti-social behavior). She’d approve of the Westwood children, that’s for sure, all suited and booted and on their best behavior. With flowers in hand and a flush on their cheeks (suggesting they’ve just come in from outside), she’d say they’re doing exactly what kids should. And that little pup with a bird in his mouth? Well someone had to do something naughty!

What do you know about burlesque? Exotic dancers, striptease, feather tassels and eye-popping corsets? It’s an art form that’s seen a serious revival in recent years. Some might have heard of Dita von Teese, America’s Queen of Burlesque, who’s been giving elegant striptease performances since 1993. Born Heather Renée Sweet, she’s spearheaded the rebirth of burlesque with a classy look and a string of signature erotic dances, famously incorporating giant carousel horses, powder compacts and martini glasses. Thousands of copycat acts have sprung up in von Teese’s wake, all keen to cash in on burlesque’s new mainstream allure.

But burlesque wasn’t always about  striptease. The term has its root in Romance languages (French ‘burlesque’, Italian ‘burlesco’, Spanish ‘burla’) and means to joke or to send up. In the 18th century, it was being used throughout Europe to describe musical shows that combined serious and comic elements for grotesque and humorous effect. The casting of female stars in lead male roles gave burlesque its popular appeal. It was only in the 20th century in America that burlesque became risqué and closely associated with striptease. In these more sensual shows, women performed on elaborate sets in lush, colorful costumes to mood-appropriate music and with dramatic lighting.

Ultimately though, American burlesque still derives its erotic essence from a French invention. Famously, the striptease originated in Paris in 1889, with the opening of the Moulin Rouge, a cabaret club close to Montmartre in the red-light district of Pigalle. The ‘Red Mill’ became an instant hot spot of iniquity, with wild performances and courtesans plying their trade. Few artists were able to conjure up this loose, bohemian scene as evocatively as Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864 – 1901). Born into one of France’s great aristocratic families, Lautrec was crippled as a teenager, and learned to draw during his convalescence. Determined to pursue life as an artist, he got a formal, academic training but was more influenced by Degas (whose gritty social realism he liked) and Japanese prints.

After his arrival in Paris, Lautrec gravitated to Montmartre, where he set up a studio and immersed himself in the heady night-life. His favorite models were singers, dancers and prostitutes, many of whom were his friends. This work at the NGA is called Quadrille at the Moulin Rouge (1892) and thrusts us into the underbelly of the red-light district. In the middle ground, a dancer stands, legs far apart, hands on hips and skirts pulled provocatively up. There’s an almost-ugly snarl on her face as she stares down an elegant pair of patrons on the left. This is painted in oil on cardboard, a quick, throwaway medium, and reveals the essential workings of Lautrec’s unique and seductive style. The whole composition is cut through with an incisive linear quality: see the dark outlines on the ladies’ dresses. The colors are kept earthy and murky, patched into the outlines in a quick decisive manner.

Certainly, there’s an element of grotesque surprise here, in the juxtaposition of the two women (notice the man is almost cropped out). The artist seems to makes a point of the difference in their dress and expressions, even the way they hold their clothes. There’s humor here, but it’s of the desperate sort. Isolated and depressed by his physical handicap, Lautrec must have gained some insight into the harsh, alienated lives of his subjects such as this. There’s no room here for feathers or sequins or martini glasses. There’s none of the refined and more ‘wholesome’ striptease top burlesque acts are putting on today. Lautrec is all about an unpolished reality, and the effect it has is quite unnerving.

It’s the first of March and spring is in the air in Washington. This morning, with the sun shining and small clouds skittering across a blue sky, it was easier to see a shift in the seasons and warmer days ahead. Soon there’ll be buds shooting off the branches and sharp green blades rising out of the ground, followed by the popping of thousands of colored buds. One poet capturing our sense of the expectation at this time is the English Romantic William Wordsworth (1770 – 1850). Here’s his poem,  A Change in the Year:

It is the first mild day of March:
Each minute sweeter than before,
The redbreast sings from the tall larch
That stands beside our door.

There is a blessing in the air,
Which seems a sense of joy to yield
To the bare trees, and mountains bare;
And grass in the green field.

In honor of an imminent bursting into floral life is today’s pick, Still Life with Flowers and Fruit (c. 1715) by the Dutch artist Jan van Huysum (1682 – 1749). Coming from a family of artists (his father and three brothers were also painters), van Huysum established a reputation as the leading still-life painter of his time. This work showcases his virtuoso skills as an artist. It shows a wild and abundant profusion of blooming flowers, reaching and tumbling out of a terra-cotta vase set on a ledge. There is little sense of recession, with the flowers right up against the picture plane, and that foreground muddle of ripe-to-eat peaches and grapes looking set to spill into our world. There are a few ribbon-like leaves and long, tracing tendrils that lace over the bunch, rhythmically whirling the composition into a spin. These sweeping lines bind the work together and lead the eye from bloom to bloom. Although trained by his father, van Huysum learned how to gather this kind of composition from a couple of other Dutch artists, Jan Davidsz de Heem (1606 – 1684) and Willem van Aelst (1626 – 1683).

Jan van Huysum was secretive in his work, so much so that not even his brothers were allowed in his studio, for fear they might see how he purified and applied his colors and achieved such clarity in detail. Looking over this work inch-by-inch, we quickly get a measure of his technical abilities. The analysis of different flower-heads is so close and acute that he has no trouble bringing the look and feel of the plants to life on the canvas. From the light, papery petals of the peonies, to the waxy, falling folds of a tulip, it’s a tour de force in verisimilitude. Here and there, tiny dew drops sit globular and translucent on leaves. Spot too the insects buzzing around, such as flies on the fruit and butterflies skirting at the edges, each one minutely and painstakingly rendered.

Like one of his artistic models Willem van Aelst, van Huysum often painted flowers that don’t all bloom at the same time. So here we have asters, carnations, hollyhocks, hyacinths, irises, poppies, roses and tulips all bundled together. While he did at times work from earlier drawings he’d done, van Huysum seems to have preferred studying flowers from life, spending time each summer in Haarlem, then as now a horticultural center. In fact, in one letter to a patron van Huysum wrote how he couldn’t complete a still-life that included a yellow rose until it blossomed in the early months of the following year. We now know how the artist must have felt, waiting with bated breath for the first unfurling signs of spring.

This is the time of Holi, a spring celebration in India also known as the Festival of Colors. According to the Hindu calendar, it typically falls at the end of February, start of March. Holi is an ancient occasion with many legends attached to it, but the overarching ideas behind the festival are the triumph of good over evil, the ushering in of spring and getting the gods on-side for good harvests throughout the year.

The main Holi event is an almighty clash of colors that unfolds in the thronged streets. Children and adults of all ages spill out of their houses with colored pigments in a rainbow of shades to dust, smear and coat each other top to toe, calling out “Holi Hai” as they do so. It’s also possible to drench each other with colored water, prepared with mixed dyes from the rows of pigment kiosks that line the streets at this time of year. Holi is India’s second biggest festival (after Diwali) and much-loved for its exuberance and loosening of societal rules. Mostly, it’s memorable for its intoxicating medley of colors exploding all round.

There’s a wall at the NGA that’s flooded with color, albeit in a slightly more ordered way. It dates from 1993 and has a seriously long title: Wall Drawing No. 681 C / A wall divided vertically into four equal squares separated and bordered by black bands. Within each square, bands in one of four directions, each with color ink washes superimposed. This is by Sol LeWitt (1928 – 2007), an American artist who first came to public attention in the mid 1960s with “structures” (a term he preferred to “sculptures”) and big drawings like this. He was also a prolific painter and printmaker.

LeWitt was born in Connecticut to a family of Jewish immigrants from Russia. He travelled to Europe before serving in the Korean War, thereafter moving to New York in the 1950s to study at the School of Visual Arts. He is well known for this sort of large-scale wall drawing (in the NGA’s East Building), of which well over a thousand have been made. In keeping with the way he worked, LeWitt’s wall drawings are usually executed by other people, who follow detailed how-to instructions supplied by the artist.

As is clear from this work, LeWitt is into line and regularity in a big way. He’s a fan of geometry and measurement, which lends his art a distinctive, clean exactitude. What’s most amazing about the strict order of this arrangement is that out of the lines and the repetition comes joy. The patterning escalates the beauty of the colors, causing them to come alive in combinations before the eye. The lines start to stress movement, revealing (for me) how a diagonal has more momentum than a horizontal. Overall, it’s a dazzling effect, not dissimilar to the fresco wall art LeWitt would have seen in Europe.

Many critics described LeWitt as a Minimalist, but he himself denied this association. Instead in 1967, he coined the term “Conceptual art” to describe his work. This radical move changed the way people thought about the relationship between an idea and the art it produces. For LeWitt, art was about a concept first and foremost (manifested in the fact that he delegated the execution of his works to others), saying “Ideas cannot be owned. They belong to whoever understands them.” What an exhilarating thought, that we might get to the workings of this artist’s mind just by looking at this wall in the NGA. Failing that, it’s our very own chance to get up close with a festive flurry of vibrant colours.

Brains are the brand new status symbol, as people predict that this decade will be all about IQ. After years of an extreme intellectual diet that had current affairs at one end and tacky celebrity gossip at the other, the middle ground of brain-nurturing stuff is back, giving us a chance to re-flex our flabby noodles.

Suddenly we’re seeing a feast of things to feed our intellectual curiosity. The School of Life is an alternative learning centre for adults set up in London in 2008. Its calendar of events includes talks and workshops geared to providing a place to think intelligently about life’s challenging questions. Also in Britain is Intelligence Squared, the country’s top debating forum, which stages discussions on a variety of topical issues between politicians, journalists and media people. The live events attract thousands, with millions more watching online. Then there’s TED, an American organization that invites specialist speakers (from neuroscientists to Hollywood directors) to give an 18 minute talk on any subject, which also clocks millions of views on the internet. And isn’t it interesting that one of the best-selling books at Christmas was Flip It, a self-help book that promises to sort your brain for clearer thought?

The Italian sculptor Pietro Magni (1817 – 1877) offers a 3D vision of our new intellectual zeal. Born in Milan, Magni studied at the city’s Academy of Fine Arts before moving to the workshop of a fellow sculptor. His marble figure The Reading Girl (model 1856, carved 1861) made his career, bringing acclaim and fame in both Europe and America. The work sticks to the artistic tradition of verismo (or “realism”), which was popular in Italian art in the middle years of the 19th century. There’s a lot of delicate carving that’s gone into making the different textures (cloth, skin, hair, paper, wood) come alive and look believable. One English critic who viewed the work in the 1862 International Exhibition in London wrote: “Magni’s Reading Girl, truthful … to the hem of the garment, to the turned leaf of the book, and the torn rushes from the bottom of cottage chair.”

But this sculpture isn’t just about looking real: there are levels of intellectual and emotional complexity that make it rich with significance and resonant with meaning. The girl sits on a rough rush chair, on a simple tile floor, suggesting she’s of the poorer working-class. She’s homed in on and, judging by the tear streaking her left cheek, moved by her book. The words – legible in the first exhibited version of the sculpture – are lines by an Italian poet who championed freedom during the Italian uprisings of 1848. Our girl also has a portrait medallion around her neck, of the Italian patriot Giuseppe Garibaldi. So she’s learning about (and feeling support for) the imminent “Resurgence” in her country that will lead to its eventual unification.

Psychological research shows that an important part of a contented life is to spend some of your day thinking about ideas or purposes that are bigger than you are. That means finding things to cultivate and expand your mind, in meaningful, unpretentious ways. And it seems we’re spoiled for choice just now. But I want to return to The Reader just before I sign off because, we couldn’t help but notice that she’s wearing just a nightie, that has slipped off one shoulder to reveal a breast. Provocative and seductive, this must surely have enhanced the work’s appeal wherever it was shown. But hey, I guess she’s telling us that engaging your brain is sexy again.

If you live in a city somewhere in the world, then you’ll know the highs and lows of metropolitan life. On the up side there’s buzz, and bakeries, bars and brasseries opening all the time. There’s culture, whether it’s theater or museums you like. In fact, whatever you’re into is on your doorstep, be it food, fashion, friends, or fun. But there are down-sides too, don’t forget. Who here likes bumper-to-bumper driving, or metro trains so packed you’ve no option but to park your face in someone’s armpit? What about those huge queues at the ATM or the feeling, frankly, that you could do with a breath of fresh air?

If you’re an urbanite, you’d better brace yourself for more of the good and bad of the city. Just 100 years ago, less than 5% of the world’s population lived in cities. In 2008, for the first time in humanity, that figure exceeded 50% and by 2050, the number will have reached 70%, representing 6.4 billion people. In the last two decades, the urban population of the developing world has grown by an average of 3 million people per week!

If reading about this extreme push towards urbanization has got you feeling claustrophobic and in serious need of a cottage out in the country, then Camille Pissarro (1830 – 1903) is here to help with a painting that shows delight in the city scrum. While not the most famous of the Impressionists, Pissarro played a part in binding the movement together (he was the only artist to participate in all eight of their shows, for example). As an Impressionist, Pissarro liked painting outdoors but later in life, when ill health prevented this, he’d paint street scenes from hotel windows. Boulevard des Italiens, Morning, Sunlight (1897) is just such a scene, showing one of the four ‘grand boulevards’ in Paris (named after the Théâtre des Italiens built on it in 1700s, now replaced by the Opéra-Comique).

Pissarro anchors the composition with the large road running into the picture. His screens of trees add a feeling of depth through superimposed layers. He’s using the short-broken strokes typical of the Impressionists here, which creates that vibrating atmosphere you’ll get at the start of a busy day on a busy street. Here, those ordered building facades at the top of the picture give way to a flurry of whipping tree branches, before the chaos comes in at street level. There’s activity all around: carriages, coaches, horses and hundreds of people, clustered and milling here, isolated or in pairs there. Pissarro’s paint application is perfect for injecting a kind of unpredictable urban energy into the work: I get the feeling he’s seeing one organic organism here from his high-up hotel room.

This picture shows how Pissarro takes pride in a pulsing, Parisian scene. Even late in life, he enjoys picking out the particulars of his metropolis, relishing the hustle and bustle of his human hub. During the 19th century, Paris had hosted a number of World’s Fairs. These huge public events displayed an arresting array of things such as engineering feats (the Eiffel Tower served as the entrance arch to the 1889 Exposition), and new machines and gadgets. There were often artistic and musical attractions, entertainment shows and exhibits representing peoples and places from around the world. These Fairs made people feel their city was the most exciting place on earth, and Pissarro would see one more in 1900. It’s this confidence and optimism that he taps into in his picture, and it’s what we’ll want too, as we head towards incremental urbanisation.

The question “Do blondes have more fun?” has taxed some big brains over the years. Recently, top academics gathered at the Sorbonne in Paris to mull it over. A few years ago, Joanna Pitman’s book, On Blondes came out, with its detailed study of the significance of blonde hair through history. Even Charles Darwin turned his formidable grey matter to this matter, analyzing if hair color plays a part in choosing sexual partners.

Today, in my first ever video blog, I’m pondering this question with the help of Neroccio de’ Landi’s Portrait of a Lady (c. 1485) at the National Gallery of Art. And at my local hair salon (special thanks to Violet Hair and Skin Care in Georgetown).

PANKS (Professional Aunts No Kids) are on the rise! With a funky new name and a cool new profile, real (and elected) aunts are shaping up to be the most fun family member. The acronym comes courtesy of the American website savvyauntie.com, which provides a forum for aunts with no experience of children of their own, on topics such as activities to engage youngsters and the best age-appropriate gifts to buy. It seems it was high time for the childless aunt role to get a shake up since the landscape has changed, says Melanie Notkin, Savvy Auntie superior and founder of the website. Apparently in America, 45% of women under 44 currently don’t have children and in the UK research by the Centre for Longitudinal Studies at the Institute of Education suggests that 30% of current female university graduates are expected never to have kids, for whatever reason.

PANKS are valuable and popular since, put simply, parents need all the help they can get, especially these days with busy lives all round. In her 2010 bestselling book Committed, author Elizabeth Gilbert says it’s high time the auntie brigade gets a rebrand. She argues that aunts have always been crucial to social cohesion and that “as a species, we need an abundance of responsible, compassionate women on hand to support the wider community.”

I went on the hunt for an NGA PANK and found one in the form of the female artist Berthe Morisot (1841 – 1895). One of the mainstays of the Impressionist movement, Morisot participated in all but one of the group’s eight shows and often hosted meetings at her home. She came from a prosperous family with distinguished artistic connections (her great-grandfather was Rococo artist Jean-Honoré Fragonard) and her varied education included lessons from the French landscape painter Corot.

This picture is called simply The Mother and Sister of the Artist (1869 – 70) and is one of Morisot’s largest works (101 x 82 cm). She’s known for this kind of charming domestic scene: this one was begun when Morisot’s sister Edma Pontillon stayed with the family to await the birth of her first child. Morisot’s casual composition, with figures and furnitures gently overlapping, creates a homey feel. Some lithe, loose brushstrokes (on the back wall and Edma’s robe) add a sense of spontaneity. Best is Morisot’s ability to render the delicacy of light, to show in oil how a sun-shaft passing through a window makes things look and feel different.

Morisot received help from the painter Edouard Manet (with whom she had an artistic rapport) on this work. Manet’s confident brush is seen in the older woman’s face and dress, differing from the more fiddly refinement of Morisot’s touch in her sister’s features and the floral upholstery. Morisot wasn’t a pushy painter in terms of her style, but she needed to be pushy to get her work shown, since women’s art was widely derided at the time.

For a while Morisot relished the perks of being a PANK, spending time with nephews and nieces, spoiling them, enjoying the fact she could hand them back the moment they became irritable. In 1874, she married Edouard Manet’s brother Eugene and they had one child, Julie, four years later. So even though her time as PANK proper was short, her art tells me Morisot never struggled to see the serene and satisfying privilege of this position. Need more convincing? Just check out The Cradle (1872, Musée d’Orsay, Paris), an utterly enchanting picture that shows Edma with the new baby.