Fuck Yeah, Art History!

saltdragon:

nodamncatnodamncradle:

Can we all take a minute and appreciate that hundreds of years ago a person poured hours of hard work into painting cherubs making human fart bubbles. 

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So, this image has crossed my dash several times today, and each time I have been increasingly suspicious. At first glance this looks like a baroque painting – the nude, the putti, the ambiguous interior/exterior space are conventional baroque elements – but several aspects are off. First, the light looks artificial, there is no indication of the reds, oranges, or yellows one associates with an oil lamp, a candle, or the sun as one would have in a baroque painting. Second, the figures are rendered with almost photographic clarity, in a linear style out of step with baroque painting (think Rubens). Third, baroque and humor certainly aren’t mutually exclusive terms, but I have never seen scatalogical varieties employed in baroque painting (prints are a whole other game). Finally, the bubble wand strikes me as anachronistic (though I suppose 16th century bubble wands are not impossible).

A reverse image search later, and I find myself here, at the website of Latvian artist Arthur Berzinsh. A brief perusal of his portfolio pages confirms my suspicion that he is indeed some variant on the postmodern pop-surrealist. [TW “artistic portrayals” of rape] Additionally he is a gross misogynist, no doubt moments away from being championed by Hi-Fructose magazine. Also, he is an antisemite (romantic portrayals of Nazis are gross).

Can we all take a minute and consider that today, a man poured hours into painting a sexualized nude woman being groped by children who also happen to be making human fart bubbles in a style meant to look as if it had been created hundreds of years ago and that this reflects something about gendered power relations as produced in the West?

Your Friendly Neighborhood Art Historian,

Saltdragon

[Edit] Can we take a minute and consider that, at this time, nearly 40,000 tumblr users were taken in by this image?

[Edit] I feel silly in learning that this image looks photographic, because, in fact it is a photograph (well, a photomanipulation). Doesn’t change anything though.

Coming out of semi-permanent seclusion to reblog this. That this work has over 60,000 notes, the vast majority of which reflect ignorance, is shameful.

(Source: uglyrenaissancebabies)

Le Comte Robert de Montesquiou, Giovanni Boldini (Italian), 1897, oil on canvas, 116 x 82.5 cm, Musée d’Orsay

You’re just mad ‘cause I’m styling on you.

Often the dialogue of art history concentrates on theory, the grand ideas behind art works put forth both by their creators and the observers that came after them, and the actual craftsmanship, the materials and process of creating the piece, merely becomes part of the citation. When visiting a museum or art gallery how many people (outside of trained artists or craftsmen) really think about the countless hours of labor it took for the artists to transform the mundane—paper, pigments, canvas, clay, stone—into what you see before you? Of course, many artists seek to create the illusion that the viewer is not looking at art supplies, but a magical,  living, breathing representative of imagination. And the subject of this TED Talk, a life-size horse puppet created by the Handspring Puppet Company that breathes, gallops, and can even be ridden, is certainly art creating the illusion of life.

In this video Adrian Kohler and Basil Jones of the Handspring Puppet Company not only demonstrate “Joey” the incredibly life-like horse puppet created for the National Theatre of Great Britain, but show you the incredible amount of work it took to create and operate him. And even when you know exactly how he works, you’ll still have a hard time distinguishing a wooden puppet operated by three men from an actual horse.

Angel with American Flag (Detail), Henry Darger (American), 107” x 24”, carbon transfer and watercolor on paper, © Carl Hammer Gallery 2000

Oh Henry Darger, what can we say about you? He was truly an outsider artist—he created a body of work spanning thousands and thousands of pages of drawings and text—in a small room in Chicago, almost completely isolated from the world around him. After escaping from an asylum at the age of sixteen, he took up work as a janitor and eventually began to create the manuscripts, illustrations, and painting that make up In the Realms of the Unreal, a story that took him six decades to tell.

As to what In the Realms of the Unreal is actually about…well, it lives up to its name. Set on a fictional planet (around which the Earth rotates, no less) during a rebellion of child slaves. The main characters are the seven Vivian sisters, righteous princesses of a Christian nation who assist the child rebels against their enslavers, the Glandelinians. There are also a race of winged and horned creatures called Blengins that take on partly-human forms to assist the children. The illustrations he did for In the Realms of the Unreal are hypnotic nightmares. Sickingly-sweet little girls—based on commercial images of children from magazines and books—run through stormy battlefields pursued by an evil army of adult men. They hide behind gigantic flowers and shoot their oversized rifles at their attackers. They wear cute fashionable dresses or nothing at all, and Darger seemed to have treated male and female genitalia as interchangeable. And sometimes they are caught and tortured like Catholic martyrs, with all the gruesomeness you would expect from a man who attended mass up to five times a day.

Unfortunately there aren’t many decent galleries of his work online, but if you’re interested I would encourage you to check your local library for book with reproductions of his work. And you should be interested, because the sheer transfixing madness of In the Realms of the Unreal cannot be contained in a single blog post.

Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting, Artemisia Gentileschi (Italian), 1638-9, oil on canvas, 39 x 29”, Royal Collection, London

In celebration of the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day, we’ll be posting works by female artists all day. Get ready to smash a few holes in the patriarchal notion that there have been no great women artists

While her place in the mainstream world of art history has yet to be secured (though it is certainly getting better) baroque painter Artemisia Gentileschi is well-known to people with an interest in the feminist side of art. She is particularly infamous for her experience during the trial of Agostino Tassi, an assistant of her father’s, who raped her. To make sure she was telling the truth about the rape, she was tortured with thumbscrews during her testimony. Her rapist was convicted, but never served his prison sentence. Her experience is unfortunately disturbingly familiar to many women today go through when trying to seek legal justice against those that have perpetrated sexual violence against them; it is no wonder she has become popular in feminist circles. Many observers see her violent paintings of biblical heroines as an expression of the anger she felt towards the men that mistreated her.

But this painting is not about anger. This painting is about being an artist. Her brush is posed at the very edge of the canvas, ready to create a new world outside the boundaries. She stares not at the viewer, but intently into the void, the gears of her mind whirring into action as she contemplates her first brush stroke. She is a gifted painter, and despite the oppressive sexism she faced, she was well-regarded in her time and patronized by dukes and kings. She did not let her artistic gifts get crushed under the heels of the patriarchal society in which she lived. 

Oedipus and the Sphinx, Gustave Moreau (French), 1864, oil on canvas, 206.4 x 104.8 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art (link)

Dude she isn’t even the same species as you.

Awkwaaaaard. 

Hey remember that comic about art history I mentioned awhile back? I didn’t forget about showing it to you guys, it’s just going to be a little bit of a challenge to get ready for internet viewing (basically, the assignment was to create a comic that when reproduced on a piece of paper, would need to be folded up into a little rectangle, which would then be read by unfolding the paper) so I need to set up something that mimicks that process and also put up a file for downloading so you can print your own. Complicated! Not to mention getting nice scans and cleaning them up, unlike the raw photograph you see here. But enjoy the preview!

I’ve also got a non-fiction comic explaining how The Unicorn Tapestries are simultaneously sexy and Jesus-y that will be posted to this blog as well as soon as possible.

Sorry for the lack of postings, this may be unknown to the general public, but art school is really a hazing process designed to kill off the weak of the herd so we don’t end up with too many artists for society to support (hahahaha like society supports artists). Thus, I am constantly working until the muscles in my hand lock up and my brain fries and I pass out until the sun comes up and then I start the process all over again. This leaves little time for posting to this blog, unfortunately. But now I’m on Spring Break so I’m planning to get lots of stuff queued up for my lovely cats & kittens because I just might end up with some free time!

~Love, Fox-Teeth

The Three Graces, Roman copy of Greek original, 2nd cent., marble, 123 x 100 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

The Farnese Hercules, Roman copy of Greek original, 216, marble, Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Naples

Your humble  Fuck Yeah, Art Historians visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York this past Friday, and we found ourselves strolling through the Classical Antiquity galleries. We paused a moment to consider the derriere of a bearded Hercules (here I have substituted a picture of the Farnese Hercules for the bearded Hercules at the Met, as I could not find a suitable photo of the Met’s Hercules, but fear not, the elements important to this post are thoroughly comparable) and then passed behind a statue of the Three Graces (shown above). We were struck by something- whoever had made the Hercules put a great deal more time, effort, and care into carving his buttocks than whoever had carved the asses of the Graces. This is really too small a sample to say anything about the Romans who copied these statues or the Greeks who made the bronze originals, but it is indicative of the lens through which Fuck Yeah, Art History! views and presents Art History. And it certainly says something about all you lovely Art History perverts following us. What I’m getting at is it’s Tumblr Tuesday and we’d be delighted if you would spread the buttocks in the historical directory.

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