Visual Art; nothing more, nothing less.

streetsofcalcutta:

‘Blue Venus’ in International Klein Blue by Yves Klein

cavetocanvas:

Black granite, one of the hardest of stones, found now days as kitchen counter tops. Can you imagine it as a delicate, diaphanous gown? No?

In the hands of a master artist it can become sheer, light and filmy as the picture below shares.  This sculpture is of Arsinoe II, a great, great, great grandmother of Cleopatra and one of the most powerful and beautiful women in the world around 300 BCE.

This is one of my photos taken at a traveling exhibition of Egyptian Ptolemy art and objects rescued from the depths of the Mediterranean Sea around Alexandria Egypt.

(Submitted by savantml)

cavetocanvas:

Clarence John Laughlin, The Iron Shell, No. 4, 1949

cavetocanvas:

Georg Baselitz, Untitled, 1982-83

From the Tate Collection:

This imposing but abject figure was carved from the trunk of a lime tree using a chisel and chainsaw. The surface of the sculpture bears the gouged and hacked traces of the artist’s physical battle with the wood. The use of carving has many antecedents in German history, from the woodcuts of Albrecht Dürer in the sixteenth century, to the deliberately exaggerated and distorted Expressionist works of the early twentieth century.

cavetocanvas:

Paul Manship, Mankind Figure of Maiden, 1933

From the World Visit Guide:

Paul Manship created the heroic-sized bronze Mankind Figures of Maiden and Youth in 1933 to flank the golden Titan Prometheus. The 8-foot statues stood on the granite shelves on either side of Titan’s fountain, forming a sculptural group that depicted Prometheus giving mainkind the gift of fire. Manship was displeased with their placement and had them moved around a number of times, before they finally moved to storage on top of the British Empire Building where they remained for fifty years. In 1983, they were restored, given a traditional brown patina and placed in the skating rink on new pedestals. During a 2001 restoration, they were moved to the top of the staircase, where they symbolically “present” Prometheus. 

The figures are depicted in partial nudity without a hint of sexuality, formed with smooth planes, and standing next to exaggerated reptilian branches of vegetation symbolic of the Garden of Eden. Their expressions portray an ironic apathy given their role in the greater sculptural group. 

Rockefeller Center was designated a landmark by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission in 1985. 

cavetocanvas:

Jim Dine, Bedspring, 1960

From the Guggenheim:

During the early 1960s Jim Dine was part of a loosely affiliated group of artists—including Red Grooms, Claes Oldenburg, and Lucas Samaras—who extended the gestural and subjective implications of Abstract Expressionist painting into outrageous performances, subsequently known as Happenings. Inspired by John Cage’s radical approach to musical composition, which involved chance, indeterminacy, and an emphatic disregard for all artistic boundaries, they sought to transgress preexisting aesthetic values. Dine and Oldenburg brought this sensibility to bear on a two-artist exhibition called Ray-Gun, held at the Judson Gallery in New York in February and March 1960. For the show, each artist made an installation consisting of a chaotic configuration of found and manipulated objects. In Dine’s jumbled environment, The House, the walls and ceiling of the gallery were effaced by an agglomeration of painted cloth, fragmented domestic objects, scrawled slogans, crumbled paper, and suspended metal bedsprings. Scattered throughout were cardboard signs spelling out various household platitudes, such as BREAKFAST IS READY and GO TO WORK. Dine claimed that the juxtaposition of these and other banal phrases with the surrounding domestic wreckage revealed the potential violence inherent to a home. His critique of the myth of the happy home was amplified by anthropomorphic references—painted eyes, faces, and other body parts—that were hidden or lost amid the detritus. This accretion of fragmented figures, discarded articles, and tattered elements is present, albeit in abbreviated form, in Dine’s sculpture Bedspring, which may have been part of (or at least inspired by) The House.

cavetocanvas:

Yves Klein, Untitled Anthropometry (ANT 100), 1960

cavetocanvas:

Yves Klein, Large Blue Anthropometry (ANT 105), c. 1960

From the Guggenheim:

For his Anthropométries series, Klein famously used nude female models drenched in paint as “brushes.” His system of pressing bodies against the paper support (which was later mounted on canvas) rejected any illusion of a third dimension in the pictorial space. In these works, the subject, object, and medium become confused with one another to produce a trace of the body’s presence. Klein’s unconventional activities also included releasing thousands of blue balloons into the sky, and exhibiting an empty, white-walled room and then selling portions of the interior air, which he called “zones” of “immaterial pictorial sensibility.” His intentions remain perplexing thirty years after his sudden death. Whether Klein truly believed in the mystical capacity of the artist to capture cosmic particles in paint and to create aesthetic experiences out of thin air and then apportion them at whim is difficult to determine. The argument has also been made that he was essentially a parodist who mocked the metaphysical inclinations of many modern painters, while making a travesty of the art market.

cavetocanvas:

Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) - Felix Gonzalez-Torres, 1991

From the Art Institute of Chicago:

Felix Gonzalez-Torres produced work of uncompromising beauty and simplicity, transforming the everyday into profound meditations on love and loss. “Untitled” (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) is an allegorical representation of the artist’s partner, Ross Laycock, who died of an AIDS-related illness in 1991. The installation is comprised of 175 pounds of candy, corresponding to Ross’s ideal body weight. Viewers are encouraged to take a piece of candy, and the diminishing amount parallels Ross’s weight loss and suffering prior to his death. Gonzalez-Torres stipulated that the pile should be continuously replenished, thus metaphorically granting perpetual life.

(via artemariposa)

arthistoryx:

 

1. what’s an artwork you’ve never been able to see in real life that you wish you could?
2.  sleepingunderstatues answered: Remedios Varo’s triptych (including Embroidering the Earth’s Mantle) and one of Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ stacks
3. 
   

(via artemariposa)

Rietveld Chair or Red and Blue Chair (1917) by Gerrit Rietveld from the De Stijl movement.