להכיר את הת'ר ג'יימס אמנות

פורסם ב: קטעי וידאו

מאז 1996, הצבנו מעל 6,500 יצירות אמנות והרחבנו את טווח ההגעה הגלובלי שלנו עם נוכחותנו בלונדון, בזל, ניו יורק, לוס אנג'לס, סן פרנסיסקו, פאלם דזרט, ג'קסון הול, ניופורט ביץ ', מונטסיטו, אגם קומו ופאלם ביץ '. אנו שואפים להציג יצירות אמנות יוצאות דופן של האמנים המפורסמים ביותר בהיסטוריה באופן אישי, נגיש ומעשיר.

פגוש כמה מהאנשים של הת'ר ג'יימס אמנות שחולקים את תשוקתם לאמנות באמצעות אוצרות והתקנה באיכות המוזיאון, טכנולוגיה ומחקר חדשניים, ויחסי ייעוץ מותאמים אישית.

מיקוד גרפיקה

על פי הקטלוג שנערך על ידי מוזיאון ברנדיוויין ריבר לאמנות, השרטוט הראשוני של דייגי הבקלה הפוריטניים הושלם על ידי נ.צ. ויית' לפני מותו באוקטובר 1945. הערך מתעד תמונה של הסקיצה וכן כתובות של האמן וכותרתו, "דייגי בקלה פוריטנים", המאופיינים בקטלוג כ'חלופיים'. בכל מקרה, הבד בקנה מידה גדול הוא יצירה ייחודית שאנדרו ויית' נזכר מאוחר יותר שצוירה אך ורק בידו, שיתוף פעולה מתוחם של עיצובו וקומפוזיציה של האב שהובא לידי ביטוי על ידי הוצאה להורג יוצאת דופן של בן. עבור אנדרו, זו בוודאי הייתה חוויה רגשית ומורגשת עמוקה. בהתחשב בתשומת לבו של אביו לפרטים ולאותנטיות, קווי ספינת המפרש הקטנה מייצגים שאלוט, שהיה בשימוש במהלך המאה השש עשרה. מצד שני, סביר להניח שאנדרו העמיק את גווני הים חסר המנוחה יותר מאשר אביו, בחירה שמעצימה כראוי את האופי המסוכן של המשימה.

אנדרו ווית' ונ.C ווית'

Having unwittingly inserted himself into the Pop Art conversation with his Great American Nude series, Tom Wesselmann spent the rest of his career explaining that his motivation was not to focus excessively on a subject matter or to generate social commentary but instead, to give form to what titillated him most as beautiful and exciting. His disembodied Mouth series of 1965 established that an image did not have to rely on extraneous elements to communicate meaning. But it was his follow-up performances with the Smoker series and its seductive, fetish allure that raised his standing among true sybarites everywhere. Apart from perceiving smoking as cool and chic, a painting such as Smoker #21 is the consummate celebration of Wesselmann’s abilities as a painter. Enticed by the undulating smoke, Wesselmann took great pains to accurately depict its sinuous movements and observe the momentary pauses that heightened his appreciation of its sensual nature. Like all of Wesselmann’s prodigious scaled artworks, Smoker #21 has the commanding presence of an altarpiece. It was produced during long hours in his impressive Manhattan studio in Cooper Square, and the result is one of sultry dynamism — evocative, sensual, alluring, sleek, luscious, and perhaps, even sinister — a painting that flaunts his graphic supremacy and potent realism varnished with his patented sex appeal flair.<br><br>Tom Wesselmann expanded upon the success of his Great American Nudes by focusing on singular features of his subjects and began painting his Mouth series in 1965. In 1967, Wesselmann’s friend Peggy Sarno paused for a cigarette while modeling for Wesselmann’s Mouth series, inspiring his Smoker paintings. The whisps of smoke were challenging to paint and required Wesselmann to utilize photographs as source material to capture the smoke’s ephemeral nature properly. The images here show Wesselmann photographing his friend, the screenwriter Danièle Thompson, as she posed for some of Wesselmann’s source images.

טום ווסלמן

Between Île-de-France and Burgundy and on the edge of the Fontainebleau Forest lies the medieval village of Moret-sur-Loing, established in the 12th century. When Alfred Sisley described its character to Monet in a letter dated 31 August 1881 as “a chocolate-box landscape…” he meant it as a memento of enticement; that its keep, the ramparts, the church, the fortified gates, and the ornate facades nestled along the river were, for a painter, a setting of unmatched charm. An ancient church, always the most striking townscape feature along the Seine Valley, would be a presence in Sisley’s townscape views as it was for Corot, and for Monet at Vétheuil. But unlike Monet whose thirty views of Rouen Cathedral were executed so he could trace the play of light and shadow across the cathedral façade and capture the ephemeral nature of moment-to-moment changes of light and atmosphere, Sisley set out to affirm the permanent nature of the church of Notre-Dame at Moret-sur-Loing. Monet’s sole concern was air and light, and Sisley’s appears to be an homage keepsake. The painting exudes respect for the original architects and builders of a structure so impregnable and resolute, it stood then as it did in those medieval times, and which for us, stands today, as it will, for time immemorial.<br><br>Nevertheless, Sisley strived to show the changing appearance of the motif through a series of atmospheric changes. He gave the works titles such as “In Sunshine”, “Under Frost”, and “In Rain” and exhibited them as a group at the Salon du Champ-de-Mars in 1894, factors that suggest he thought of them as serial interpretations. Nevertheless, unlike Monet’s work, l’église de Moret, le Soir reveals that Sisley chose to display the motif within a spatial context that accentuates its compositional attributes — the plunging perspective of the narrow street at left, the strong diagonal recession of the building lines as a counterbalance to the right, and the imposing weight of the stony building above the line of sight.

אלפרד סיסלי

When forty rural Sacramento Delta landscapes by Wayne Thiebaud were unveiled at a San Francisco gallery opening in November 1997, attendees were amazed by paintings they never anticipated. This new frontier betrayed neither Thiebaud’s mastery of confectionary-shop colors nor his impeccable eye for formal relationships. Rather, his admirers were shocked to learn that all but seven of these forty interpretations had been completed in just two years. As his son Paul recalled, “the refinements of my father’s artistic process were ever changing in a chameleon-like frenzy.” The new direction had proved an exhilarating experience, each painting an affirmation of Wayne Thiebaud’s impassioned response to the fields and levees of the local environment he dearly loved. <br><br>Viewed from the perspective of a bird or a plane, The Riverhouse is an agrarian tapestry conceived with a kaleidoscopic range of shapes and simple forms; fields striped with furrows or striated fans, deliriously colored parallelograms and trapezoids, an orchard garnished pizza-shaped wedge, and a boldly limned river, the lifeline of a thirsty California central valley largely dependent upon transported water.<br><br>The Riverhouse is a painting that ‘moves’ between seamlessly shifting planes of aerial mapping that recalls Richard Diebenkorn’s stroke of insight when he took his first commercial flight the spring of 1951, and those partitions engaging a more standard vanishing point perspective. Thiebaud explained his process as “orchestrating with as much variety and tempo as I can.” Brightly lit with a fauve-like intensity, The Riverhouse is a heady concoction of vibrant pigment and rich impasto; one that recalls his indebtedness to Pierre Bonnard whose color Thiebaud referred to as “a bucket full of hot coals and ice cubes.” Among his many other influences, the insertion of objects — often tiny — that defy a rational sense of scale that reflects his interest in Chinese landscape painting.<br><br>As always, his mastery as a painter recalls his titular pies and cakes with their bewitching rainbow-like halos and side-by-side colors of equal intensity but differing in hues to create the vibratory effect of an aura, what Thiebaud explained “denotes an attempt to develop as much energy and light and visual power as you can.” Thiebaud’s Sacramento Delta landscapes are an integral and important part of his oeuvre. Paintings such as The Riverhouse rival the best abstract art of the twentieth century. His good friend, Willem de Kooning thought so, too.

ויין תיאבאוד

Alexander Calder executed a surprising number of oil paintings during the second half of the 1940s and early 1950s. By this time, the shock of his 1930 visit to Mondrian’s studio, where he was impressed not by the paintings but by the environment, had developed into an artistic language of Calder’s own. So, as Calder was painting The Cross in 1948, he was already on the cusp of international recognition and on his way to winning the XX VI Venice Biennale’s grand prize for sculpture in 1952. Working on his paintings in concert with his sculptural practice, Calder approached both mediums with the same formal language and mastery of shape and color.<br><br>Calder was deeply intrigued by the unseen forces that keep objects in motion. Taking this interest from sculpture to canvas, we see that Calder built a sense of torque within The Cross by shifting its planes and balance. Using these elements, he created implied motion suggesting that the figure is pressing forward or even descending from the skies above. The Cross’s determined momentum is further amplified by details such as the subject’s emphatically outstretched arms, the fist-like curlicue vector on the left, and the silhouetted serpentine figure.<br><br>Calder also adopts a strong thread of poetic abandon throughout The Cross’s surface. It resonates with his good friend Miró’s hieratic and distinctly personal visual language, but it is all Calder in the effective animation of this painting’s various elements. No artist has earned more poetic license than Calder, and throughout his career, the artist remained convivially flexible in his understanding of form and composition. He even welcomed the myriad interpretations of others, writing in 1951, “That others grasp what I have in mind seems unessential, at least as long as they have something else in theirs.”<br><br>Either way, it is important to remember that The Cross was painted shortly after the upheaval of the Second World War and to some appears to be a sobering reflection of the time. Most of all, The Cross proves that Alexander Calder loaded his brush first to work out ideas about form, structure, relationships in space, and most importantly, movement.

אלכסנדר קלדר

Trained as a woodcarver, Emil Nolde was almost 30 years old before he made his first paintings. The early paintings resembled his drawings and woodcuts: grotesque figures with bold lines and strong contrasts. The style was new, and it inspired the nascent movement Die Brücke (The Bridge), whose members invited Nolde to join them in 1906. But, it was not until the garden became his locus operandi by 1915 that he built upon his mastery of contrasting luminosities to focus on color as the supreme means of expression. Later, Nolde claimed “color is strength, strength is life,” and he could not have better characterized why his flower paintings reinvigorate our perception of color.<br><br>Much of the strength of Nolde’s dramatic, Wagnerian-like color sensibilities is the effect of staging primary colors, such as the deep reds and golden yellows of Sonnenblumen, Abend II, against a somber palette. The contrast highlights and deepens the luminosity of the flowers, not just visually, but emotionally as well. In 1937, when Nolde’s art was rejected, confiscated, and defiled, his paintings were paraded as “degenerate art” throughout Nazi Germany in dimly lit galleries. Despite that treatment, Nolde’s status as a degenerate artist gave his art more breathing space because he seized the opportunity to produce more than 1,300 watercolors, which he called “unpainted pictures.” No novice in handling watercolor, his free-flowing style of painting had been a hallmark of his highly-charge, transparent washes since 1918. Sonnenblumen, Abend II, painted in 1944, is a rare wartime oil. He let his imagination run wild with this work, and his utilization of wet-on-wet techniques heightened the drama of each petal.<br><br>Nolde’s intense preoccupation with color and flowers, particularly sunflowers, reflects his continuing devotion to van Gogh. He was aware of van Gogh as early as 1899 and, during the 1920s and early 1930s, visited several exhibitions of the Dutch artist’s work. They shared a profound love of nature. Nolde’s dedication to expression and the symbolic use of color found fullness in the sunflower subject, and it became a personal symbol for him, as it did for Van Gogh.

אמיל נולדה

בתחילת שנות ה-70 של המאה ה-19 צייר וינסלו הומר לעתים קרובות סצנות של חיים כפריים ליד כפר חקלאי קטן שנודע במשך דורות בזכות דוכני החיטה המרשימים שלו, הממוקם בין נהר ההדסון לקטסקיל במדינת ניו יורק. כיום הארלי מפורסם הרבה יותר כהשראה לאחת מיצירותיו הגדולות ביותר של הומרוס, Snap the Whip שצויר בקיץ 1872. בין הציורים הרבים האחרים בהשראת האזור, נערה עומדת בשדה החיטה עשירה בסנטימנטים, אך לא סנטימנטלית מדי. הוא מתקשר ישירות למחקר משנת 1866 שצויר בצרפת בשם "בשדות החיטה", ומחקר נוסף שצויר שנה לאחר מכן לאחר שובו לאמריקה. אבל הומרוס היה ללא ספק גאה ביותר בזה. זהו דיוקן, חדר לימוד תלבושות, ציור ז'אנרי במסורת הגדולה של הציור הפסטורלי האירופי, וטור דה פורס מואר בדרמטיות, ספוג באור השעה הזוהר הדועך במהירות, מצופה בתווים פרחוניים ונגיעות קוצים של חיטה. בשנת 1874 שלח הומרוס ארבעה ציורים לתערוכה של האקדמיה הלאומית לעיצוב. אחד מהם נקרא "ילדה". יכול להיות שזה לא זה?

וינסלו הומר

Emerging at the end of the Gilded Age, N.C. Wyeth was one of the most important American artists and illustrators. His paintings and illustrations brought life to classic literature from Treasure Island to The Boy’s King Arthur and more. He is most remembered for his ability to capture crucial moments in narratives, fleshing out just a few words into a visual representation of deep drama and tension. Patriarch of the Wyeth artistic dynasty which includes his son Andrew and grandson Jamie, his influence touched future illustrators and artists.<br><br>Perhaps his most important legacy is how he shaped American imagination – of America itself and of wild possibilities. Wyeth’s powerful paintings gave life to many of the stories America told of itself. His early paintings captured life of the American West and some of his most beloved illustrations were for novels such as The Last of the Mohicans or short stories like “Rip Van Winkle”. Despite this success, Wyeth struggled with the commercialism of illustrations and advertisements, seeking his work to be accepted as fine art. Throughout his career, he experimented with different styles shifting from Impressionism to Divisionism to Regionalism.<br><br>N.C. Wyeth produced over 3,000 paintings and illustrated 112 books. His illustrations for the publisher Charles Scribner’s Sons were so popular they became known as Scribner’s Classics and remain in print to this day.<br><br>This quietly powerful painting of a Native American forms part of a quartet of paintings, inspired by and a metaphor for the four seasons. The paintings were used to illustrate George T. Marsh’s set of poems “The Moods”. Wyeth recognized that the series came at a crucial moment in his career in which the paintings go beyond realism to capture atmosphere and mood, an internal world of emotion made external. He even contemplated and attempted to write his own poems based on these paintings.<br> <br><br>Summer, Hush is a striking example of Wyeth pulling from his imagination and melding it with careful observation of nature. As noted in a letter to his mother, Wyeth combined the fictional subject with natural effects as in the sky. Native Americans were a subject he returned to numerous times; these paintings reflect not only Wyeth’s fascination but also of America. As observed by art historian Krstine Ronan, Wyeth was part of a larger dialogue that developed around Native Americans, cementing a general Native American culture in the imagination of the United States. Thus, the painting operates on numerous levels simultaneously. How do we relate to this painting and its conception of the four seasons? How do we interpret Wyeth’s depiction of a Native American? What role do Native Americans play in America’s imagination?<br><br>We must also not forget that these works were first used to illustrate the poems of George T. Marsh. Marsh, a poet born in New York who often also wrote of the Canadian wilderness, provides subtle evocations of the seasons hinted at in the series title “The Moods”. This painting was used alongside “Hush,” which ends:<br><br>Are they runes of summers perished<br><br>That the fisher hears –and ceases—<br><br>Or the voice of one he cherished.<br><br>Within these few lines, Wyeth gives us a thoughtful and restrained painting that stirs from within. The poem and the painting avoid obvious clichés to represent the seasons. They develop a profound interpretation filled with sensitivity.<br><br>These paintings were important to Wyeth who hoped that “they may suggest to some architect the idea that such decorations would be appropriate in a library or capitol or some public building.” Summer, Hush demonstrates Wyeth’s control of color and composition so that small touches such as the ripples of water or the towering cloud that envelopes the figure are in service to sketch out the feeling of summer and of the poem. Through exploring this rich and complex painting, we are better able to appreciate NC Wyeth as an artist and the role this specific painting plays in the context of art history.

נ.C. וייט

The frame of reference for Irish American Sean Scully’s signature blocks and stripes is vast. From Malevich’s central premise that geometry can provide the means for universal understanding to Rothko’s impassioned approach to color and rendering of the dramatic sublime, Scully learned how to condense the splendor of the natural world into simple modes of color, light, and composition. Born in Dublin in 1945 and London-raised, Scully was well-schooled in figurative drawing when he decided to catch the spirit of his lodestar, Henri Matisse, by visiting Morocco in 1969. He was captivated by the dazzling tessellated mosaics and richly dyed fabrics and began to paint grids and stipes of color. Subsequent adventures provided further inspiration as the play of intense light on the reflective surfaces of Mayan ruins and the ancient slabs of stone at Stonehenge brought the sensation of light, space, and geometric movement to Scully’s paintings. The ability to trace the impact of Scully’s travels throughout his paintings reaffirms the value of abstract art as a touchstone for real-life experience.<br><br><br>Painted in rich, deep hues and layered, nuanced surfaces, Grey Red is both poetic and full of muscular formalism. Scully appropriately refers to these elemental forms as ‘bricks,’ suggesting the formal calculations of an architect. As he explained, “these relationships that I see in the street doorways, in windows between buildings, and in the traces of structures that were once full of life, I take for my work. I use these colors and forms and put them together in a way that perhaps reminds you of something, though you’re not sure of that” (David Carrier, Sean Scully, 2004, pg. 98). His approach is organic, less formulaic; intuitive painter’s choices are layering one color upon another so that contrasting hues and colors vibrate with subliminal energy. Diebenkorn comes to mind in his pursuit of radiant light. But here, the radiant bands of terracotta red, gray, taupe, and black of Grey Red resonate with deep, smoldering energy and evoke far more affecting passion than you would think it could impart. As his good friend, Bono wrote, “Sean approaches the canvas like a kickboxer, a plasterer, a builder. The quality of painting screams of a life being lived.”

שון סקאלי

עולמו של מארק שאגאל אינו יכול להיות מוכל או מוגבל על ידי התוויות שאנו מצמידים אליו. זהו עולם של דימויים ומשמעויות היוצרים שיח מיסטי להפליא משלהם. Les Mariés sous le baldaquin (החתן והכלה מתחת לחופה) החל עם כניסתו של האמן לשנתו ה-90, אדם שידע טרגדיה וסכסוכים, אך מעולם לא שכח את רגעי ההנאה של החיים. כאן, התענוגות החלומיים של חתונה כפרית רוסית עם סידורי המשתתפים השחוקים היטב מובאים אלינו בשנינות כה שמחה ותמימות עליזה, שאין התנגדות לקסמה. באמצעות תחליב בגוון זהוב המשלב שמן וגואש אטום על בסיס מים, החום, האושר והאופטימיות של הפוזיטיביזם הרגיל של שאגאל עטופים בזוהר זוהר המרמז על השפעתם של איקונות דתיות בעלות עלי זהב או ציורים מראשית הרנסנס שביקשו להקנות רושם של אור אלוהי או הארה רוחנית. שימוש בשילוב של שמן וגואש יכול להיות מאתגר. אבל כאן, ב-Les Mariés sous le baldaquin, שאגאל משתמש בו כדי להעניק לסצנה איכות אחרת, כמעט כאילו זה עתה התממשה מתוך עינו. עדינותו הטקסטואלית יוצרת את הרושם שהאור נובע מהיצירה עצמה ומעניקה איכות ספקטרלית לדמויות המרחפות בשמיים.

מארק שאגאל

Tom Wesselmann will undoubtedly be remembered for associating his erotic themes with the colors of the American flag. But Wesselmann had considerable gifts as a draftsman, and the line was his principal preoccupation, first as a cartoonist and later as an ardent admirer of Matisse. That he also pioneered a method of turning drawings into laser-cut steel wall reliefs proved a revelation. He began to focus ever more on drawing for the sake of drawing, enchanted that the new medium could be lifted and held: “It really is like being able to pick up a delicate line drawing from the paper.”<br><br>The Steel Drawings caused both excitement and confusion in the art world. After acquiring one of the ground-breaking works in 1985, the Whitney Museum of American Art wrote Wesselmann wondering if it should be cataloged as a drawing or a sculpture. The work had caused such a stir that when Eric Fischl visited Wesselmann at his studio and saw steel-cut works for the first time, he remembered feeling jealous. He wanted to try it but dared not. It was clear: ‘Tom owned the technique completely.’<br><br>Wesselmann owed much of that technique to his year-long collaboration with metalwork fabricator Alfred Lippincott. Together, in 1984 they honed a method for cutting the steel with a laser that provided the precision he needed to show the spontaneity of his sketches. Wesselmann called it ‘the best year of my life’, elated at the results that he never fully achieved with aluminum that required each shape be hand-cut. “I anticipated how exciting it would be for me to get a drawing back in steel. I could hold it in my hands. I could pick it up by the lines…it was so exciting…a kind of near ecstasy, anyway, but there’s really been something about the new work that grabbed me.”<br><br>Bedroom Brunette with Irises is a Steel Drawing masterwork that despite its uber-generous scale, utilizes tight cropping to provide an unimposing intimacy while maintaining a free and spontaneous quality. The figure’s outstretched arms and limbs and body intertwine with the petals and the interior elements providing a flowing investigative foray of black lines and white ‘drop out’ shapes provided by the wall. It recalls Matisse and any number of his reclining odalisque paintings. Wesselmann often tested monochromatic values to discover the extent to which color would transform his hybrid objects into newly developed Steel Drawing works and, in this case, continued with a color steel-cut version of the composition Bedroom Blonde with Irises (1987) and later still, in 1993 with a large-scale drawing in charcoal and pastel on paper.

טום ווסלמן

Shortly after arriving in Paris by April 1912, Marsden Hartley received an invitation. It had come from Gertrude Stein and what he saw at her 27 rue de Fleurus flat stunned him. Despite his presumptions and preparedness, “I had to get used to so much of everything all at once…a room full of staggering pictures, a room full of strangers and two remarkable looking women, Alice and Gertrude Stein…I went often I think after that on Saturday evenings — always thinking, in my reserved New England tone, ‘ how do people do things like that — let everyone in off the street to look at their pictures?… So one got to see a vast array of astounding pictures — all burning with life and new ideas — and as strange as the ideas seemed to be — all of them terrifically stimulating — a new kind of words for an old theme.” (Susan Elizabeth Ryan, The Autobiography of Marsden Hartley, pg. 77)<br><br>The repeated visits had a profound effect. Later that year, Hartley was clearly disappointed when Arthur B. Davies and Walt Kuhn chose two of his still-life paintings for the upcoming New York Armory show in February 1913. “He (Kuhn) speaks highly of them (but) I would not have chosen them myself chiefly because I am so interested at this time in the directly abstract things of the present. But Davies says that no American has done this kind of thing and they would (not) serve me and the exhibition best at this time.” (Correspondence, Marsden Hartley to Alfred Stieglitz, early November 1912) A month later, he announced his departure from formal representationalism in “favor of intuitive abstraction…a variety of expression I find to be closest to my temperament and ideals. It is not like anything here. It is not like Picasso, it is not like Kandinsky, not like any cubism. For want of a better name, subliminal or cosmic cubism.” (Correspondence, Marsden Hartley to Alfred Stieglitz, December 1912)<br><br>At the time, Hartley consumed Wassily Kandinsky’s recently published treatise Uber das Geistige in der Kunst (The Art of Spiritual Harmony) and Stieglitz followed the artist’s thoughts with great interest. For certain, they both embraced musical analogy as an opportunity for establishing a new visual language of abstraction. Their shared interest in the synergetic effects of music and art can be traced to at least 1909 when Hartley exhibited landscape paintings of Maine under titles such as “Songs of Autumn” and “Songs of Winter” at the 291 Gallery. The gravity of Hartley’s response to the treatise likely sparked Stieglitz’s determination to purchase Kandinsky’s seminal painting Improvisation no. 27 (Garden of Love II) at the Armory Show. As for Hartley, he announced to his niece his conviction that an aural/vision synesthetic pairing of art and music was a way forward for modern art. “Did you ever hear of anyone trying to paint music — or the equivalent of sound in color?…there is only one artist in Europe working on it (Wassily Kandinsky) and he is a pure theorist and his work is quite without feeling — whereas I work wholly from intuition and the subliminal.” (D. Cassidy, Painting the Musical City: Jazz and Cultural Identity in American Art, Washington, D.C., pg. 6)<br><br>In Paris, during 1912 and 1913 Hartley was inspired to create a series of six musically themed oil paintings, the first of which, Bach Preludes et Fugues, no. 1 (Musical Theme), incorporates strong Cubist elements as well as Kandinsky’s essential spirituality and synesthesia. Here, incorporating both elements seems particularly appropriate. Whereas Kandinsky’s concepts were inspired by Arnold Schoenberg’s twelve-tone method of composition whereby no note could be reused until the other eleven had been played, Hartley chose Bach’s highly structured, rigorously controlled twenty-four Preludes and Fugues from his Well-Tempered Clavier, each of which establishes an absolute tonality. The towering grid of Bach Preludes et Fugues, no. 1 suggests the formal structure of an organ, its pipes ever-rising under a high, vaulted church ceiling to which Hartley extends an invitation to stand within the lower portion of the picture plane amongst the triangular and circular ‘sound tesserae’ and absorb its essential sonority and deeply reverberating sound. All of it is cast with gradients of color that conjures an impression of Cézanne’s conceptual approach rather than Picasso’s, Analytic Cubism. Yet Bach Preludes et Fugues, no. 1, in its entirety suggests the formal structural of Picasso’s Maisons à Horta (Houses on the Hill, Horta de Ebro), one of the many Picasso paintings Gertrude Stein owned and presumably staged in her residence on the many occasions he came to visit.

מרסדן הארטלי

דיוקן סילבי לאקומב של תיאו ואן רייסלברגה, שצויר בשנת 1906, הוא יצירת מופת קלאסית של אחד מציירי הדיוקנאות המעודנים והעקביים ביותר של זמנו. הצבע הרמוני, עבודת המכחול נמרצת ומותאמת למשימתה החומרית, גופה וארשת פניה אמיתיים וחושפניים. היושבת היא בתו של חברו הטוב, הצייר ז'ורז' לאקומב, שחלק קשר הדוק עם גוגן, והיה חבר בלה-נאביס עם האמנים בונאר, דניס ווילאר, בין היתר. כיום אנו יודעים על סילבי לאקומב משום שואן ריסלברג מיומנת כל כך בעיבוד הבעות פנים עדינות ובאמצעות התבוננות זהירה ותשומת לב לפרטים, סיפקה תובנות על עולמה הפנימי. הוא בחר במבט ישיר, עיניה אליך, ברית בלתי נמנעת בין הסובייקט לצופה, ללא קשר ליחסנו הפיזי לציור. ואן ריסלברג נטש במידה רבה את הטכניקה הפוינטיליסטית כשצייר דיוקן זה. אבל הוא המשיך ליישם את הקווים המנחים של תורת הצבעים על ידי שימוש בגוונים של אדום - ורוד וסגול - כנגד ירוקים כדי ליצור פלטת צבעים הרמונית ומשופרת של צבעים משלימים, שאליהם הוסיף מבטא חזק כדי למשוך את העין - קשת אדומה רוויה מאוד המונחת באופן א-סימטרי בצד ראשה.

תיאו ואן רייסלברג

לא קשה להבין כיצד הסידור המבריק בן שתי השורות של רוברט אינדיאנה בן ארבע האותיות סייע להעצים תנועה בשנות השישים. מקורו בחשיפה עמוקה לדת ומהחבר והמנטור אלסוורת' קלי, שסגנונו הקשוח וצבעו החושני וחסר המבטא הותירו רושם עז. אבל כמו שאינדיאנה קרא, זה היה רגע של נשיקה שקרה בדיוק כש"אהבה נשכה אותי!" והעיצוב הגיע אליו חד וממוקד. אינדיאנה, כמובן, העבירה את העיצוב בצעדים רבים, ואז הלוגו החל לנבוט בכל מקום. המסר, המועבר בצורה הטובה ביותר בפיסול, עומד בערים ברחבי העולם ותורגם למספר שפות, שאחת מהן היא האיטרציה האיטלקית שלו, "אמור" עם האות "O" המקרית שלו גם היא מוטה ימינה. אבל במקום להיבעט ברגל של "L", גרסה זו מעניקה אפקט מתנודד מבוים להפליא ל "A" לעיל. זה נותן רושם חדש, אבל לא פחות עמוק, של אהבה וטבעה הטעון רגשית. בכל מקרה, האות O המוטה של לאב מקנה חוסר יציבות לעיצוב יציב אחרת, השלכה עמוקה של הביקורת המובלעת של אינדיאנה על "הסנטימנטליות החלולה לעתים קרובות הקשורה במילה, המרמזת באופן מטאפורי על כמיהה נכזבת ואכזבה במקום על חיבה סכרינית" (Robert Indiana's Best: A Mini Retrospective, New York Times, May 24, 2018). לחזרתיות, כמובן, יש הרגל מגונה להחליש את הערכתנו לגאונות של פשטות ועיצוב פורץ דרך. בשלב מאוחר בחייה, אינדיאנה קוננה על כך ש"זה היה רעיון נפלא, אבל גם טעות איומה. זה הפך פופולרי מדי. ויש אנשים שלא אוהבים פופולריות". אבל אנחנו, תושבי עולם רווי מחלוקות ולכודים במהומה, תודה. "אהבה" וגרסאותיה הרבות הן תזכורות חזקות ליכולתנו לאהוב, וזוהי תקוותנו הנצחית הטובה ביותר לעתיד טוב יותר.

רוברט אינדיאנה

סלומון ואן RUYSDAEL - נוף דיונה עם דמויות נחות זוג על סוסים, נוף של קתדרלת ניימגן מעבר - שמן על בד - 26 1/2 x 41 1/2 אינץ '.

סלומון ואן רוסדאל

JOAN MIRO - L'Oiseau - ברונזה ומחסום - 23 7/8 x 20 x 16 1/8 אינץ '.

ג'ואן מירו

יאן ג'וזפסון ואן גוין - נוף נהר עם טחנת רוח וקפלה - שמן על הלוח - 22 1/2 x 31 3/4 אינץ '.

יאן ג'וזפסון ואן גוין