Tag Archives: Art

Stockholm Subway System, The Craziest Underground Art Gallery

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The Stockholm subway system is filled with eye popping art and bright colors. Each stop presents riders with a different visual feast as if they have been transported to a new magical underworld. The metro has 100 stations of which 47 are underground. Construction of the large system began in 1941 with the last station opening in 1994. Some of the cavernous interiors where left with crude bedrock exposed, others have been tiled or even embedded with Romanesque statues. See the photo gallery of the craziest underground art gallery.


Inspiring Street Art by Alice Pasquini

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Rome-based artist Alice Pasquini is a talented visual artist who also works as an illustrator, set designer and painter. Her street art projects were implemented in countries like U.K., France and Spain, with spectacular results.

The artistic works of Alice Pasquini are strongly inspired by reality: “I create art about people and their relationships, I’m interested in representing human feelings and exploring different points of view”-explains the artist. Even though some of the children portrays are very expressive, her favorite subjects are independent, strong woman. Using only color spray paint and acrylics, Alice Pasquini implements wonderful life scenes that have to ability to create a disruption in the minds of the passers-by. Her unconventional works adorn various buildings and street furniture items, adding a bit of personality to the neighborhood. You can check out the entire portfolio of the artist here.


Out of the blue: why Titian’s clouds are central to the drama of his paintings

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Powered by Guardian.co.ukThis article titled “Out of the blue: why Titian’s clouds are central to the drama of his paintings” was written by Jonathan Jones, for guardian.co.uk on Monday 16th January 2012 15.00 UTC

I would like to say a word in praise of Titian’s clouds. The Victorian critic John Ruskin claimed his contemporary hero, JMW Turner, painted the atmosphere and weather much better than those old European masters, although he did concede some points to Venetian artists for natural observation. In fact, the skies of Venetian Renaissance art are ever-changing, strongly nuanced, swagged with tempestuous power.

You can breathe some of these paintings. The works of Giovanni Bellini are very vivid: his portrait of Doge Leonardo Loredan seems infused with the calm, warm air of Venice; it has tangible atmosphere, it is oxygenated. Nature gets more dynamic with Giorgione’s Tempest. In Titian’s paintings, the clouds play fantastic roles in elusive dramas of the spirit and senses.

In Titian’s Sacred and Profane Love, in the Borghese Gallery in Rome, two women – one richly dressed, the other nude – meet by a classical monument in the countryside. Their relationship is deeply mysterious and suggestive. Is the woman in a dress the “earthly Venus”? Is her naked companion a more spiritual, heavenly figure? Either way, the work is intensely poetic, and the landscape and sky raise it to sublime heights.

In The Bacchanal of the Andrians, the poised ambiguity depicted by Titian in Sacred and Profane Love gives way to revel and joy. A shepherd and hunters populate the green valley behind the marble basin. Beyond them, a village twinkles by a blue lake; above it all, silken clouds erupt over a band of yellow sky. Silver light catches these massing clouds, illuminating them like a flash of emotion or truth. Again and again, that kind of heart-stopping incandescence catches Titian’s clouds. Boozers cavort. Nudes disport. Yet above their pastoral party, great piled columns of white vapour are caught by the sun and set alight as if by inner fire.

Titian must have watched the skies continually. He grew up in the countryside, near mountains where storms and heavy atmospherics would have coloured the Adriatic azure. In his early painting Concert Champetre (which used to be attributed to his mentor and rival Giorgione), the sky is brooding and smoky with cloud, while two men in courtly dress and two naked women relax in a meadow. Love and freedom perfume Titian’s paintings, but the changing skies warn that nothing is forever.

Perhaps it was the mutability of Titian’s skies that deepened his appeal for British art collectors. Is any other Renaissance painter quite so abundantly represented in our galleries? His works were coveted by, and bought for, English and Scottish country houses for centuries. His landscapes might be classically Italian, but they have so many ripenesses of sky and cloud, such a sense of weather, that it fits a northern European setting. British collectors would have looked from their rainswept estates to their Titians, and seen similarities. Only when it rains for Titian – as in his painting, Danae – it rains gold.

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Picasso, Cocteau and Chagall paintings to be exhibited at Lightbox in Woking

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Powered by Guardian.co.ukThis article titled “Picasso, Cocteau and Chagall paintings to be exhibited at Lightbox in Woking” was written by Maev Kennedy, for The Guardian on Tuesday 10th January 2012 00.08 UTC

The former owners smile down at a table covered in treasures including sparkling lithographs and lino cuts by Picasso, Cocteau and Chagall, which used to hang on the walls of their home. “Very nice to see them again,” Lewis Elton, father of the comedian Ben Elton, said. “They really are quite good, aren’t they?” his wife Mary agreed.

The collection now owned by the University of Surrey goes on display for the first time at the Lightbox in Woking this week, and has a poignant history. Most of the pictures were bought by his parents using reparation paid to Jews by Germany. Elton continued both the collecting and the family academic tradition, becoming professor of physics and then of higher education at Surrey, while his brother Geoffrey became regius professor of history at Cambridge.

The family survived the Holocaust thanks to a casual piece of anti-semitism which probably saved all their lives. He spent much of his childhood in Prague, where his father Victor Ehrenberg was professor of ancient history. Ehrenberg always intended to return to Germany, but failed to get a post in Tubingen. Years later they discovered somebody had scrawled across his file “Wir haben genug Juden” – we have enough Jews – in 1931, two years before Hitler came to power. It seemed a devastating rejection, but as a result the whole family managed to escape Prague in 1939 a month before Hitler invaded, and were classed as “friendly” Czechs rather than “enemy aliens” and so avoided the internment which became the fate of many refugees to Britain. The family name changed on advice when his brother served in the armed forces in the war, so he and the children, including the youngest, the comedian Ben,, became Eltons.

His parents loved music and art, and the pictures they collected included many by artists such as Paul Klee and Jean Cocteau damned as “degenerate” by the Nazis. Elton started mounting exhibitions in the university using the proceeds of the physics department coffee machine– which he insisted on moving when the campus transferred to Guildford – when he saw the shoulders of a Tahitian lovely in a Gauguin print on the wall dripping with spilled coffee: “We must have some real art on the walls, and teach them to appreciate it,” he determined on the spot. “There was never any problem getting artists,” he recalled, “you just had to ask them, they were queueing up to exhibit with us.” He and his wife, a teacher, bought works by many exhibitors very cheaply, and he now wonders if he should have acquired something by a promising young painter called David Hockney.

The Eltons intended to bequeath the collection, but have given it now after moving from a large family home. While a permanent home is being prepared at the university, it is on display at Lightbox in Woking. There hasn’t been so much as a whimper from their children at losing the chance of inheriting a Picasso, they insist: “They’re glad that so many more people will now see and enjoy them as we have.”

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Margarita Gluzberg at Paradise Row, London

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Powered by Guardian.co.ukThis article titled “Artist of the week 171: Margarita Gluzberg” was written by Skye Sherwin, for guardian.co.uk on Thursday 5th January 2012 10.58 UTC

You can’t help but get lost in Margarita Gluzberg‘s art. Take her vast, poster-sized drawings where pin-up girls, sports stars and haute couture creations overlap and dissolve into each other. Or the dark paintings, as glossy as high-end magazines or polished boutique windows, with carefully arranged plates of food disappearing as light reflects off their shiny surfaces. Covetable items come in and out of focus, creating a light-headed haze of consumer cravings.

Gluzberg was born in Moscow in 1968, and her early years were dominated by a longing for all things western, from jeans to bubble gum. When she moved to London aged 11, the new cityscape full of bright billboards and shops bore a stark contrast to the ad-free, bare concrete landscape of the declining USSR. It was an impression that stuck. From one of her earliest projects (photographing window-shoppers on Bond Street back in 1992) Gluzberg’s work has channelled capitalism’s mysterious pull on the public.

While her drawings might recall Surrealist photography or the collisions of early montage, her latest exhibition (spookily titled Avenue des Gobelins after Atget‘s famous shop-windows series) marks the first serious showing of her photography. Her black and white images, created with an old Pentax camera, turn the calculated allure of department store displays into a world of irrational wants.

In these double- and triple-exposed platinum prints, the faces of fashion models from makeup counter advertising become spectral sirens, emerging from escalators or jumbled piles of stripy clothing – traditionally the devil’s cloth – to lure shoppers to their inevitable fate. Meanwhile, glimpses of lingerie, jewellery and designer handbags sparkle elusively in slide projections on graphite-dusted screens.

What emerges is the sense that it’s not the diamond necklaces or snakeskin clutches that matter. (As that Barbara Kruger Selfridges campaign pronounced: “You want it, you buy it, you forget it.”) Instead, Gluzberg’s work depicts what we’re always left with: the endless fug of desire itself.

Why we like her: For Hairstyles for the Great Depression from 2009. Gluzberg has been making hair drawings since the 1990s, exploring this luscious surface beyond which lies the unknowable brain. Here we get textured depictions of round, crimped and curled bobs suspended in a soft, pencilled halo.

Camera obscura: True to their subject’s voyeuristic nature, Gluzberg’s photos of shops and shopping are taken clandestinely, with a hidden lens.

Where can I see her? At Paradise Row, London W1, until 21 January 2012.

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Renaissance art: a matter of perspective

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Powered by Guardian.co.ukThis article titled “Renaissance art: a matter of perspective” was written by Jonathan Jones, for guardian.co.uk on Tuesday 27th December 2011 08.00 UTC

“And perspective it is best painter’s art”, wrote Shakespeare in his 24th sonnet (OUP text), “For through the painter must you see his skill / To find where your true image pictured lies …”

The word “perspective” is being used here in an unfamiliar way. We associate perspective with logic and sense, as well as with the art of the Renaissance. To get things in perspective is to get a balanced and accurate view. But Shakespeare uses perspective to mean something more mysterious. The perspective painter, he suggests, uses skill to create a mystery picture that must be looked “through” to find your “true image”.

This is a fascinating reference to art in Shakespeare. It is not hard to find Tudor paintings that match his image of “perspective” as optical trickery, the hiding of the truth in a difficult image. In the National Portrait Gallery you can see a painting of Edward VI that is deliberately distorted. In 1546 the artist William Scrots portrayed Edward as a stretched face suspended over a landscape: you have to stand to the side, close to the wall, to get a more realistic view of the young Tudor.

This is a “special effect” whose most famous example is next door, in the National Gallery, in Hans Holbein the Younger’s painting The Ambassadors. Holbein shows two gentlemen and their attributes of science and learning in mesmerising detail, but across the surface of the painting erupts a black and white smear or stain. Once again, only when you stand at the side will it resolve itself into the stark image of a skull.

Was it Holbein who brought this technique to Britain? This German painter who worked at the court of Henry VIII was far in advance of homegrown artists as a master of Renaissance techniques. Distorted perspective is a tricksy variation on the skills and science that evolved in 15th- and 16th-century Europe to depict the real world: it is therefore a show-off stunt by masters of technique. It’s because Holbein can paint faces so realistically that he can also distort an object while including within that distortion the “true” appearance of the thing.

Renaissance courts loved trick art. In the gallery of Prague Castle hangs a portrait cut into strips, which shows you alternating faces of three Habsburgs according to where you stand. Another famous portrait of Rudolf II, the eccentric Prague dynast, by Arcimboldo shows him as a collection of fruit and vegetables. Were such tricks more popular the further you got from the centre of art and learning in Italy?

There’s something raw and naive about the Tudor culture that was amazed by trick paintings. But out of this northern outpost of the Renaissance comes Shakespeare, effortlessly including an image of painterly curiosity in his intricate labyrinth of words.

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Carlo Crivelli’s The Annunciation with Saint Emidius

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In European paintings, the Christmas story begins with the Annunciation. This is one of the most captivating, along with versions by Simone Martini and Leonardo da Vinci. But where all those painters make the angel’s message to Mary a moment of mystic rhapsody, Carlo Crivelli is gorgeously distracted by the setting – an ideal version of Ascoli in Italy, where he painted this in 1486. He includes the figure of Ascoli’s patron saint holding a model of the town. This painting shows why the popularity of the Nativity grew in the middle ages: it was because people loved to imagine it all happening in their own towns and villages, their own homes – in this case among Crivelli’s potted herbs, peacock and fruits.

Picture: The National Gallery


For sale: Tony Bennett’s nude sketch of Lady Gaga

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Powered by Guardian.co.ukThis article titled “For sale: Tony Bennett’s nude sketch of Lady Gaga” was written by Sean Michaels, for guardian.co.uk on Tuesday 13th December 2011 12.29 UTC

If your living room is missing that certain je ne sais quoi, perhaps you would like a nude portrait of Lady Gaga? Drawn by Tony Bennett. The crooner’s charcoal rendition of Gaga is now up for auction, with proceeds to benefit an arts charity.

“I walked in and said, ‘Well Tony, here we are’, and I dropped my robe and I got into position,” Gaga said during her Thanksgiving TV special. She and Bennett previously collaborated on Lady Is a Tramp, a song from his recent duets album. “I felt shy and thought, ‘It’s Tony Bennett, why am I naked?’”

The sitting was part of a Vanity Fair photoshoot: Bennett stands with his sketch pad while Gaga poses in her birthday suit. “She is the most beautiful person I ever met,” Bennett said later, “but there is something special about her.”

That “but” is a little peculiar. Certainly Bennett’s sketch makes Gaga look sinister and vaguely, er, wrong. Still, if we set aside the wonky eye and weirdly oblong breast, it more or less resembles the Poker Face star. Bennett signed the portrait with his given name, Benedetto, and he is also offering a print of one of his Venice paintings.

Bidding on the Lady Gaga nude sketch begins at ,000 (£3,200).


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Lost Leonardo Da Vinci sparks battle

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Powered by Guardian.co.ukThis article titled “Lost Leonardo Da Vinci battle scene sparks row between art historians” was written by Tom Kington in Rome, for The Guardian on Monday 5th December 2011 20.08 UTC

A 35-year hunt for a lost masterpiece by Leonardo Da Vinci now reaching its hi-tech climax in Florence is facing a backlash from more than 100 art historians on both sides of the Atlantic who have signed a petition seeking to stop the work that could uncover it.

The row centres on a wall in Florence’s Palazzo Vecchio bearing a 16th century fresco which, according to researcher Maurizio Seracini, conceals another wall on which Da Vinci started painting The Battle of Anghiari, a monumental battle scene considered by some his finest work.

Seracini, who works at the University of California, San Diego, and is featured in Dan Brown’s mystery The Da Vinci Code, inserted tiny cameras through drilled holes in the main wall a week ago and found a 2cm cavity. Traces of an organic pigment were located on the back wall, convincing some that the Da Vinci masterpiece exists. With full results expected in the new year, Florence’s mayor, Matteo Renzi claimed: “We are finally there – after five centuries we are able finally to resolve this mystery.”

But 150 art historians from museums including the New York Met and the National Gallery in London have signed a petition to stop the work, angry at the holes being drilled in the wall which bears its own fresco, Giorgio Vasari’s The Battle of Marciano in Val di Chiana, painted in 1563.

“Seracini just doesn’t know his art history,” said Tomaso Montanari, the Italian art history professor who started the petition. Backing the experts, the Italian heritage group Italia Nostra has complained to Florence magistrates, who have opened an investigation.

“This is a wasted expense when we need every penny for restoring the art we have,” said Italia Nostra president Alessandra Mottola Molfino. “Instead of restoring the Vasari fresco we are drilling holes in it.”

Da Vinci started work in 1504 on his battle scene using an experimental oil paint technique that failed miserably, dripping before it dried and prompting him to abandon the work.

Scenes he completed were however widely copied, including by Rubens, whose drawing of one scene hangs in the Louvre.

After 1555 the room was renovated and Da Vinci’s half-finished painting was lost.

Seracini’s suspicions that Vasari was loth to destroy Da Vinci’s work, preferring to brick it up and add his own fresco, were stoked when he found Vasari had painted a soldier in his fresco holding a flag on which was written: “He who seeks, finds.”

Using a radar he revealed the cavity behind the fresco.

But Montanari is not convinced. “Vasari knew how to remove works by other people while keeping them intact. What sense would there have been sealing up the Da Vinci unless you get into childish Dan Brown logic?”

Montanari launched the petition last week after Cecilia Frosinone, an expert from a Florence art restoration institute working with Seracini, resigned on “ethical” grounds after permission was given by Italy’s culture minister to drill seven holes in the Vasari fresco.

“We don’t have external controls on the work any more and that is what we want restored,” he said.

On Monday Seracini fought back, describing the petition as a bid “by the excluded to block extraordinary research”, adding: “This demagogic attack risks Italy being derided around the world.”

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Jane Austen biographer discovers ‘lost portrait’

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Powered by Guardian.co.ukThis article titled “Jane Austen biographer discovers ‘lost portrait’” was written by Alison Flood, for guardian.co.uk on Monday 5th December 2011 15.34 UTC

Jane Austen scholar Dr Paula Byrne claims to have discovered a lost portrait of the author which, far from depicting a grumpy spinster, shows a writer at the height of her powers and a woman comfortable in her own skin.

The only accepted portraits of Austen to date are her sister Cassandra’s 1810 sketch, in which she looks cross, and an 1870 adaptation of that picture. But when Byrne, biographer of Evelyn Waugh and Mary “Perdita” Robinson and with an Austen biography due out in 2013, was given a portrait of a female author acquired by her husband, Shakespeare scholar Jonathan Bate, at auction, she was immediately struck by the possibility that it could be a lost drawing of Austen.

The portrait drawing, in graphite on vellum, had been in a private collection for years, and was being auctioned as an “imaginary portrait” of Austen, with “Miss Jane Austin” written on the back. “When my husband bought it he thought it was a reasonable portrait of a nice lady writer, but I instantly had a visceral reaction to it. I thought it looks like her family. I recognised the Austen nose, to be honest, I thought it was so striking, so familiar,” Byrne told the Guardian. “The idea that it was an imaginary portrait – that seemed to me to be a crazy theory. That genre doesn’t exist, and this looks too specific, too like the rest of her family, to have been drawn from imagination.”

Byrne pointed out that Austen did not become famous until 1870, 50 years after her death, and the portrait has been dated to the early 19th century, around 1815, on the basis of the subject’s clothes. “Why would someone have wanted to draw her from their imagination, when she was not popular at that time?” she asked.

She approached the BBC, and together they put together a documentary on the portrait, working with various experts including art historians, fashion experts and forensic analysts on the picture’s background. “We approached it with an open mind,” said Byrne. “We tried to cover all leads, and in the end we put our findings to three top Jane Austen scholars, and two out of three thought it was her.” The scholars were Professor Kathryn Sutherland from Oxford University, Professor Claudia Johnson from Princeton and Austen expert Deirdre Le Faye. Sutherland and Johnson both agreed the picture was Austen; Le Faye did not. “She thinks it is an imaginary portrait. I did try so hard to find one single example of an imaginary portrait, but nobody could find one – they just don’t exist,” said Byrne. “But it’s great to have the debate – it opens up a very interesting question about who Jane Austen was and who we want her to be.”

If, as Byrne believes it is, the portrait is indeed Austen, then it shows a “very, very different” version of the writer than she has been seen as in the past, she said.

“The previous portrait is a very sentimentalised Victorian view of ‘Aunt Jane’, someone who played spillikins, who just lurked in the shadows with her scribbling. But it seems to me that it’s very clear from her letters that Jane Austen took great pride in her writing, that she was desperate to be taken seriously,” said Byrne. “This new picture first roots her in a London setting – by Westminster Abbey. And second, it presents her as a professional woman writer; there are pens on the table, a sheaf of paper. She seems to be a woman very confident in her own skin, very happy to be presented as a professional woman writer and a novelist, which does fly in the face of the cutesy, heritage spinster view.”

The documentary, Jane Austen: The Unseen Portrait?, is due to air on BBC2 on Boxing Day.

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