Category: Uncategorized

“During the years of the Jewish holocaust, Chagall painted numerous religious scenes taken from the Christian tradition…In 1940, while living temporarily in the Provencal town of Gordes, to which he had fled to escape the menacing Nazi advance through Holland and Belgium towards France, he continued working on this ambitious canvas and repainted some of the areas that were already sketched. The painting was not entirely completed until 1942, while the painter was staying in New York.

The painting in its final state shows a Madonna holding the Child in her arms, surrounded by angels singing and playing music accompanied by a flying cow with a violin. The scene is set near a small village. The Madonna, rendered on a monumental scale and wearing a bridal gown…

This weekend I’m celebrating the life and art of one France’s least-known and most prolific Neo-Impressionists, Maximilien-Jules-Constant Luce (1858-1941). His paintings are in galleries and museums around the world: the Musée d’Orsay holds quite a few of his very best, but seldom do they appear in special exhibitions, or in prominent places. In his long lifetime, he painted more than 2,000 works in oils, rather more than Cézanne, and was an accomplished Impressionist, Neo-Impressionist, and Post-Impressionist. But memory of him has faded badly.

He was born to a working class family in Paris, and started his apprenticeship to a wood engraver in 1872, just after the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1). This fired his enthusiasm for art, and he attended evening school, first in drawing, then starting to paint in oils. In 1876 he moved to work for Eugène Froment, who made woodcut prints for a wider range of clients. He pursued…

“Degas depicted the ballet in more than 1,000 paintings, prints, pastels, and sculptures. He preferred private, offstage moments to glamorous curtain calls or artfully constructed compositions. Here, three dancers stretch together in the wings, unaware of the viewer’s presence. Powdery layers of yellow, orange, and pink pastel create a rough surface characteristic of Degas’s late work in the medium. He invented special techniques that allowed him to build layer upon layer of color with varying degrees of opacity and transparency. This pastel’s rich surface and intense, vibrating palette is the result of such innovative methods.”

Cleveland Museum of Art

Thanks for Visiting…

I hadn’t come across this classic of children’s literature until my son was assigned it as a year 8 (age 12-13) text. Published in 1968, The Endless Steppe is a memoir of Esther Hautzig’s childhood experiences during WWII, when she and her family were exiled to Siberia.

Hautzig was born in what is now Vilnius, Lithuania (then part of Poland). She had a comfortable early childhood in a large, upper middle-class, happy Jewish family on a tree-lined avenue and, as she recalls later, her wardrobe was bursting with pretty dresses.

In 1941 Vilnius was annexed by Soviet troops, and Hautzig was transported to exile in Siberia, along with her parents and paternal grandparents, leaving behind her extended family of aunts, uncles and cousins – a fact that would haunt the family thereafter.

After a gruelling train journey in cattle trucks, and months imprisoned in a labour camp as ‘capitalists’, amnesty…

Read More

Konstantin Gorbatov at wikiwand

Konstantin Ivanovich Gorbatov | Artnet

See More

Tag: Konstantin Gorbatov At Sunnyside

Konstantin Gorbatov at wikimedia

Happy Friday! 🙂

~Sunnyside