The Friday Evening Nudes

Before the weather turns chilly, let's enjoy together a few nudes en plein air, shall we?

Just for fun, there is a one question quiz at the end of the post.

Have a lovely weekend!

Anders Zorn
Swedish painter and printmaker

Camille Pissaro
French Impressionist and post-Impressionist

 Donna Norine Schuster

American painter

Herbert James Draper 
The Kelpie

 British painter

Paul-Gustave-Fischer
Danish painter

Théo van Rysselberghe

Belgian painter

Suzanne Valadon
(a fascinating biography)
Suzanne Valadon (original name Marie-Clémentine Valadon) was born in 1865 at Bessines-sur-Gartempe, near Limoges, an illegitimate daughter of a French laundress. From age nine on she supported herself by doing odd jobs. One was as a circus acrobat. She did it until she fell off the trapeze when she was sixteen. Looking for a safer occupation, she became an artists' model. posing for such artists as Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir.

Anders Zorn

Henry- Edmond Cross
French painter and printmaker

Guess the painter

The first person to leave a comment identifying the artist of the above painting will receive an art-related gift in the mail.   :-)

The Friday Evening Nudes

The Nudes of Giovanni Boldini

Giovanni Boldini (31 December, 1842- 11 July, 1931)

The master of swish.

The Artistic Anatomy Blog - Various Works of Giovanni Boldini

Clark Museum 

OCAIW - The Nude in Art History

The Friday Evening Nudes

This week's nudes are a bit more direct and perhaps to some, racier than usual. The images you may see here are among the more tame. If you follow the links, you may find a lot of John Currin's work to be unacceptable for viewing with children, in the workplace or among the prudish.

 With that out of the way, let's discuss a question that is batted about a lot in society...

fine art or high pornography?

The New Yorker - Raw Art

Gagosian - John Currin Gallery

The Friday Evening Nudes

I recently posted this slideshow to both my fb and google+ pages and thought it was provocative enough to hopefully generate some opinions from my blog readers. Please don't be shy if you like skinny models but if you do, be prepared to be torn to shreds. ;-)  Seriously, I personally love a contrary opinion every now and then - it keeps me on my toes. 

Art's Classical Nudes Get Photoshopped

What's wrong with this picture?

If Anna Utopia Giordano dares to mess with my beloved Nymphs, I will track her down and force her to eat Italian pastries until she gains thirty pounds.

Happy weekend!

The Friday Evening Nudes

Tonight I feature (and quickly) the nudes of American figurative painter George Tooker, whose work is generally associated with the Magic Realism and Social Realism movements.

We're planning a trip to NYC and a visit to The Whitney Museum of American Art, where a sampling of Tooker's work will be featured in the exhibition Real/Surreal, along with other artists of the same bend.

A native of Brooklyn, New York, Tooker lived and worked in Windsor, Vermont. His religious panel works hang in the St. Francis of Assisi Parish, of which Tooker was an avid member. We're planning a visit there this weekend. That should provide enough material for a more comprehensive post on George Tooker.

Here you go and off I go to dinner! To my American friends and family, have a safe holiday weekend. To everyone peace and love and lots of sunshine. After a very long rainy spell, it looks like we're going to have fine weather in Western New England, finally!

~ Gina

The Friday Evening Nudes

Tonight, the nudes go skinny (or not so skinny) dipping.   ;-)

Stay cool!

Marie Auguste Emile Rene Menard

 

 Camille Pissaro

Anders Zorn

Frileuse

Swedish

Frederick Childe-Hassam

American

Renoir

Ignacio Pinazo Camarlench

Spanish

Hippolyte-Petijean

ABC Wednesday - I is for Ingres

 I is for Ingres

 Jean Augueste Dominique Ingres 

29 August 1780 – 14 January 1867

biography

 Self-portrait at age 24

 1804

Ingres was a French Neo-Classicism painter. He considered himself a painter of history but ultimately he is best known for his portrait paintings and drawings.

 

 Napoleon on his Throne
 1806

"Make copies, young man, many copies. You can only become a good artist by copying the masters." ~ Ingres

The Bather of Valpinçon

1808Oil on canvas. Louvre, Paris, France         

                                          

Portrait of Jean-Baptiste Desdéban. 

1810

Musée des Beaux-Arts, Besançon, France

"The way good inventions are made is to familiarize yourself with those of others. The men who cultivate letters and the arts are all sons of Homer."

Le Grande Odalisque

  1814

Oil on canvas. Louvre, Paris, France

Antiochus and Stratonice

 1840

Oil on canvas. Musée Condé, Chantilly, France

"As long as you do not hold a balance between your seeing of things and your execution, you will do nothing that is really good."

Portrait of Countess D'Haussonville

1845Frick Collection, New York City




Sources

Olga's Gallery

Art in the Picture


Participating in ABC Wednesday

ABC Wednesday - F

F is for Freud

 British painter, born 1922

Lucian Freud bio

"A painter's tastes must grow out of what so obsesses him in life that he never has to ask himself what it is suitable for him to do in art."

- Lucian Freud 

:

From Whitehot Magazine:

Lucian Freud’s tireless exploration of the human form, removed from the romantic pedestal, and examined in the most minute and disturbing detail, makes him the most interesting British painter of his generation.
Freud has produced stunning figurative paintings and portraits for over sixty years, but these lesser known etchings reveal a much more delicate approach to his subjects than his oil paintings. In this interesting mix of paintings and prints spanning six decades, Starr Figura, the curator, has engineered a fascinating glimpse at the bones behind Freud’s paintings. His first etchings were produced in the 1940’s after which he abandoned the technique for over thirty years, returning to the plates in the 1980’s. In spite of Freud’s use of color in his oil paintings, his subjects are always bleak. For Freud, the hard reality of an image is far more interesting than anything imagined. Etching, a process in which a reverse image is scratched with special needles on copper plates, is a technique that lends itself to Freud’s relentless eye. His vision is as exact and uncompromising as the hairline etches in these black and white prints. The result is powerful and a little disturbing, as though things are being magnified when we asked for no such thing. Freud is foremost a portraitist, and his unerring and often unflattering images speak of the immense depths behind the simplest objects and things. Few contemporary artists can claim the ability to capture a human emotion so precisely and so unflinchingly. His occasional forays into non human subjects show similar ability, whether it is the dense flora of his garden or the exquisite form of his dog, Pluto, which is one of the finest etchings on display.

Self-portrait with Black Eye 

c. 1978

(This self-portrait by Lucian Freud nursing a black eye after a brawl with a taxi driver has sold for £2.8 million at auction)

Lucian Freud's paintings are not easy met up-close and personal, as they mostly found in private collections. People appear to want to keep Freud's work close to them. They are profoundly personal and original images. Freud's viewpoint on the human figures he captures on canvas certainly makes him, in my book, one of the greatest living figurative painters in the world. PS

Girl With a White Dog
 1951-52

 Double Portrait
1985-86


"I paint people not because of what they are like, not exactly in spite of what they are like, but how they happen to be."
Lucian Freud

"Full, saturated colours have an emotional significance I want to avoid."
Lucian Freud

 Gaz
 1997

"I am only interested in painting the actual person, in doing a painting of them, not in using them to some ulterior end of art. For me, to use someone doing something not native to them would be wrong. "
Lucian Freud

Interior A


 "When I make a painting, I paint as if it is the only painting I am working on.  Or, further, I paint as if it is the only painting that I have ever made.  Or, even further still, I paint as if it is the only painting that anyone ever has made."
- Lucian Freud

 Two Men
  1987-88

Lying by the Rags1989-90

"The paintings that really excite me have an erotic element or side to them irrespective of subject matter. "
Lucian Freud

 The Artist's Daughter and her Husband

 Portrait of Bruce Bernard

'

"The aura given out by a person or object is as much a part of them as their flesh."  
Lucian Freud

 

Lucian Freud's paintings are not easy met up-close and personal, as they are mostly found in private collections. People appear to want to keep Freud's work close to them. They are profoundly personal and original images. Freud's viewpoint on the human figures he captures on canvas certainly makes him, in my book, one of the greatest living figurative painters in the world.

Sources

Art News Blog

The Telegraph

WhiteHot Magazine

The Artchive
Brainy Quotes
Transposition Blog
 Web Art Academy


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ABC Wednesday