Gothic Art: Eclectic and Modern

Giotto di Bondone - Madonna Enthroned (Ognissanti Madonna) - c. 1310 - Tempera on panel - 325 cm × 204 cm (128 in × 80 in) - Uffizi Gallery, Florence (click photo for larger image)With towering cathedrals, resplendent stained glass windows, brilliantly decorated illuminated manuscripts, and iconic paintings embodying shimmering gold leaf, Gothic art attempted to recreate a heaven on earth.

Renaissance artists and writers in the 16th century coined the term “Gothic” and the early art historian Giorgio Vasari infamously reinforced the unfavorable connotations when he referred to Gothic art as “monstrous and barbaric” since it did not conform to classical ideals. It was not until the mid-1700s that the style shed its negative associations. 

Combining aspects of numerous styles and borrowing from numerous traditions (some of them non-western) Gothic art is truly eclectic (like modernism), and was readily adapted to suit regional tastes and tendencies. By the end of the Middle Ages, the Gothic style had become “international” in its spread across Europe, and its emphasis on naturalism sparked the revolution in painting that flourished during the Renaissance, even though Renaissance art would appear to be very different. Even Giotto (who is widely regarded as a Proto-Renaissance painter) followed the Gothic ethic in the work featured here (“Madonna Enthroned”).

Don’t forget to learn more about medieval and Gothic art at Dr. Jill’s upcoming art history class, beginning April 12th and running for six week. Click HERE for more info and to Register!

Frank Stella: Austere and Monumental

Frank Stella - Harran II - 1967 - Polymer and fluorescent polymer paint on canvas - 10 x 20 feet (304.8 x 609.6 cm) - The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, New York (click photo for larger image)American Artist Frank Stella (born 1936) is best known for his achievements in Minimalist art and Post-Painterly Abstraction.

In 1959, Frank Stella was one of those rare artists who gained early, immediate recognition in his career with black striped paintings that turned the gestural brushwork and existential angst of Abstract Expressionism upside down. “Focusing on the formal elements of art-making, Stella went on to create increasingly complicated work that seemed to follow a natural progression of dynamism, tactility, and scale: first, by expanding his initial monochrome palette to bright colors, and, later, moving painting into the third dimension through the incorporation of other, non-painterly elements onto the canvas. He ultimately went on to create large-scale freestanding sculptures, architectural structures, and the most complex work ever realized in the medium of printmaking. Stella's virtually relentless experimentation has made him a key figure in American modernism.” (The ArtStory)

Modern art historian and critic Clement Greenberg famously said, "Where the Old Masters created an illusion of space into which one could imagine walking, the illusion created by a Modernist is one into which one can look, can travel through, only with the eye." The significance of flatness, the integrity of the picture plane, and the optical integrity that Greenberg noted as being essential to modern art derived from the work of Stella and other modernists of the time. Stella's ideas also inspired other major theorists of the period.

Dr. Jill will be holding an online single-session program on Frank Stella. Click HERE for info and to Register.

J.M.W. Turner: Turbulent Abstraction

J.M.W. Turner - Hannibal and his Men Crossing the Alps - 1810-1812 - Oil on canvas - Tate Britain, London (click photo for larger image)Joseph Mallard William (J.M.W.) Turner (1775-1851) was a Romantic landscape painter whose expressionistic studies of light, color, and atmosphere were unmatched in their range and sublimity. Perhaps the greatest landscapist of the 19th century, he became a pioneer in the study of light, color, and atmosphere. He anticipated the French Impressionists in breaking down conventional formulas of representation; but, unlike them, he believed that his works should always express significant historical, mythological, literary, or other narrative themes. 

His representation of the confrontation humans experienced upon encountering the effects of their own machine inventions in the modern era was an early attempt to engage with the world-changing Industrial Revolution. Even more influential was his mode of representation. Turner’s impressionistic renderings of the effects of nature that expressed inner psychological states, are essentially examples of early abstraction—before that experimentation even began in visual art.

Turner's work, especially his late work, was deeply admired by the abstract painter Mark Rothko. One can see the influence in Rothko's large canvases of subtly shifting layers of color. In 1966, when Rothko saw a Turner exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, he was quoted as saying, "This guy Turner, he learnt a lot from me.”

Dr. Jill will be holding a single-session ONLINE class on Turner this Friday, March 25th from 11am - 12pm. Click HERE to Register.

Kees van Dongen: Pointing the Way to the Future

Kees van Dongen - The Woman in the Green Hat - 1910 - Oil on canvas - 73.51 cm × 92.3 cm - Private Collection (click photo for larger image)Dutch-born French painter and printmaker Kees van Dongen (1877-1968) was one of the leading Fauvists, particularly renowned for his stylized, sensuously rendered portrayals of women. Moving from Impressionism into Fauvism, Van Dongen’s candid, colorful portrait style became immensely fashionable by the end of WWI, and thereafter it remained his main focus. The figure of a glamorous woman with large eyes and red lips became his archetype.

In addition to portrait paintings, Van Dongen also produced lithographs and painted richly colored seascapes, as well as scenes of Paris in an assured, economical style. He absorbed all the styles that converged ni Paris in the early 1900s and made out of them something new. 

His approach to the female body as a sensuous surface, devoid of psychic depth, gave later painters, including Willem de Kooning, Tom Wesselmann, and Yves Klein permission to treat the female body as a metaphor for the painted canvas. In addition, van Dongen's path as a portraitist prefigures the interaction between art and commerce that would become central to art after the 1950s. Painting all that glitters with a mixture of appreciation and disdain, his cultivated irony paved the way for Andy Warhol.

Van Dongen has never received the critical acclaim afforded other Fauves, and whether or not he deserves it is still an open question. What is certain is that modern art would not be the same without him. His oeuvre sits squarely at the intersection between Fauvism and Expressionism and, as an artist, he took risks that pointed the way to the future.

Dr. Jill will be holding a single-session ONLINE class on Van Dongen on Friday, April 1st from 11am - 12pm. Click HERE to Register.

Early Netherlandish Painting

Rogier van der Weyden - Portrait of a Lady, c. 1460, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. 34 × 25.5 cm (13 × 10 in) (click photo for larger image)The period from about 1420 to 1550 was one of astonishing and almost uninterrupted artistic achievement in the Burgundian Netherlands (Low Countries).

Taking "all-bearing nature" as their guide, early Netherlandish artists extended the boundaries of painting until they seemed as limitless as the blue-tinged mountains of the distant horizons in their pictures. Jan van Eyck and Rogier van der Weyden became the most renowned painters in Europe, Van Eyck acquiring legendary status as the purported inventor of oil painting.

Works by these masters were sought by princes and merchants throughout Europe, who prized them for their remarkable realistic qualities, their technical and coloristic virtuosity, and their heightened expressive power. REGISTER NOW to join us to explore this outstanding artistic tradition.