"When you get off the freeway and head toward the Detroit Institute of Arts, you first notice the streets of boarded-up houses, cracked sidewalks and vacant lots sprouting weeds. But just a few ...blocks farther, you're cruising into an urban oasis of wide avenues, handsome buildings and the neo-classical museum itself, built in 1927, at the height of the city's prosperity. Detroit it really two cities. One is a shrunken metropolis with a battered economy and a big image problem...But the other Detroit is a city of wondrous treasures--the symphony, the vibrant jazz and hip-hop scene, examples of stunning architecture." (Newsweek) This article examines the state of the Detroit Institute of Arts, and draws direct correlations to the deteriorating city which surrounds it. "The art museum, known as the DIA, may be the greatest of all. It is stuffed with masterpieces--including Green and Roman antiquities, eight paintings by Rubens, Bruegel's 'The Wedding Dance,' the first van Gogh to enter an American museum (a self-portrait, bought in 1922) and the spectacular 1933 Diego Rivera mural cycle, 'Detroit Industry.'" Examples of attempts to sustain this city-owned museum are addressed, including the $158 million budget for expansion, new management, and the overall creation of a greater attraction within the Detroit.
DIFFERENT STROKES Schjeldahl, Peter
The New Yorker,
02/2007, Letnik:
82, Številka:
48
Magazine Article
"Vincent van Gogh's favorite color was yellow; Paul Gauguin's was red. It was not a trivial difference. It pertains to the clashing, deeply complementary temperaments of two painters whose ...idiosyncrasies, inseparable from their talents and ideas, became keynotes of modern art and templates of artistic personality. Little about either man fails to fascinate...In October of 1888, Gauguin left the art colony of Pont-Aven, in Brittany, where he was the leading light, to stay in isolation with van Gogh in the humdrum town of Arles, in Provence. It was a dramatic sojourn." (New Yorker) This review of Martin Gayford's "The Yellow House: Van Gogh, Gauguin, and Nine Turbulent Weeks in Arles" chronicles events and tensions leading to the climax when "van Gogh razors off all or part of his left ear...and ceremoniously presents it to a prostitute named Rachel. She faints. He is hospitalized. Gauguin flees." The relationship between van Gogh and Gauguin in Arles is explored.
Fresh looks at van Gogh Wilkin, Karen
The New criterion (New York, N.Y.),
05/2001, Letnik:
19, Številka:
9
Magazine Article
Examines the tendency for van Gogh's true artistic merit to be obscured through accumulated fame and familiarity because of mechanical reproductions of his best-known works. The author relates this ...phenomenon to Walter Benjamin's description of a similar process in his 1936 essay `The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction', and considers the nature of `aura as signifier of artistic value. He describes two exhibitions of van Gogh's work - Van Gogh's Postman: the portraits of Joseph Roulin at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (1 Feb.-15 May 2001) and Vincent van Gogh and the Painters of the Petit Boulevard at the St. Louis Museum of Art in Saint Louis, Missouri (see this edition of ABM for abstract of catalogue) - which present less `hackneyed' works, and provide a truer insight into van Gogh's development as an artist and affinities between his work and that of his contemporaries Emile Bernard, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and Paul Gauguin.
Letters from Vincent Lubow, Arthur
Smithsonian,
01/2008, Letnik:
38, Številka:
10
Magazine Article
"The image of Vincent van Gogh daubing paint onto canvas to record the ecstatic visions of his untutored mind is so entrenched that perhaps no amount of contradictory evidence can dislodge it. But in ...an unusual exhibition at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York City, a different van Gogh emerges--a cultivated artist who discoursed knowledgeably about the novels of Zola and Balzac, the paintings in Paris' Louvre and Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum, and the color theories of artists Eugene Delacroix and Paul Signac." (Smithsonian) Details of the exhibition, which showcases "never-before-exhibited correspondence from van Gogh to a protege" and reveals "a thoughtful, exacting side of the artist," are related.
Deborah Silverman discusses van Vincent van Gogh's "anger" at Paul Gauguin and at their friend and fellow artist Emile Bernard for returning to painting typical biblical scenes such as the nativity, ...or Christ in the Garden of Olives. I think a closer reading makes clear that van Gogh finally separates the work of Bernard and Gauguin, faulting Bernard for returning to "medieval tapestries" that lead the public to re-identify religious art with biblical settings.
This article examines the mysteries behind missing artwork such as Van Gogh's PORTRAIT OF DR. GACHET and the famed Amber Room given to Czar Peter the Great by the King of Prussia. The author also ...explores mysteries such as the identity of Beethoven's lover and cannibalism among ancient Native American tribes.
Art critic Roger Fry notes that this masterpiece conciliates "die opposing claims of design and the total vision of nature," demonstrating Cezanne's singular approach to organizing and articulating a ...landscape on the canvas, built up through S-shaped composition, beginning with die row of trees in the foreground and winding up through die dam to the iconic blue peak of Mont Saint Victoire in the distance. First owned by artist Paul Gaugin, who called it "quite simply a marvel," it was purchased in 1918 by Gwendoline Davies.
