Category Archives: Miscellanea

Salmagundi

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Weddings in the Renaissance

The scholars Silvana Seidel Menchi and Diego Quaglion…provide startling information demonstrating just how informal the act of marriage could be and how it could take place in almost any location. “With the assistance of a ladder, the groom, flanked by witnesses, reached the bride, and facing each other they pronounced the formula of the ritual, balanced in an equilibrium as unstable as the tie that thus bound them.” Indeed, before the edicts of The Council of Trent systematized the requirements of a proper wedding in 1563, only mutual consent was an absolute necessity for marriage. FROM Art and Love in Renaissance Italy / MetPublications /
The Metropolitan Museum of Art

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Salmagundi

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Sir Winston Churchill by Ernest Hamlin Baker
[War]

1949 / Gouache, ink and graphite pencil on paperboard / 11 3/4”x10 1/2″

Ernest Baker, born in 1889 in Rhode Island, was a self-taught illustrator. Most of his works were covers for Time magazine, although he was responsible for eleven covers for Fortune magazine between 1929 and 1941.

Beginning in 1939, Baker produced over 300 covers for Time during his seventeen-year tenure with the magazine. He was described by Time publisher, Ralph Ingersoll, as an artist who could do anything.
http://www.askart.com/artist_bio/Ernest_Hamlin_Baker/28830/Ernest_Hamlin_Baker.aspx

In December of 1949, Winston Churchill was chosen by Time magazine as the “Man of the Half-Century”, celebrated in a 16-page supplement which was contained in the January 2nd issue of 1950. Baker did the cover illustration for that issue.

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Salmagundi

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Hannah Höch: Love

Liebe [Love] / 1931 / Drawing, collage / 8.5”x8.25” / National Gallery of Australia

Hannah Höch was a German Dada artist. She is best known for her work of the Weimar period, when she was one of the originators of photomontage.  FROM monoskop.org

While she may have been remembered by her bombastic Dada colleagues for her “sandwiches, beer and coffee”, her lifetime of artistic practice reveals a vital and critical woman who could magically collide disparate reproductions of needlepoint patterns, political figures, film stars, animal life and non-Western artifacts into explorations of androgyny, Aryan activity, gender roles, imperialism, race and lesbianism.  FROM frieze.com

The Coquette I (1923-1925)

Hoch began the Love series as early as 1923, and worked on it intermittently through about 1931. Each of the six or seven works in this series depict sexuality in some way. My understanding is that the following pieces were in this series:

Love in the Bush (1925)
Peasant Wedding Couple (1931)
Love (1926)
Love (1931)
The Coquette I (1923-1925)
The Coquette II (c.1925)
The Large Step (1931)

MoMA’s catalog for their 1997 exhibition “The photomontages of Hannah Höch” is available to download in pdf format~
https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/241

Love (1926)

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Salmagundi

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Vietnam Veterans Memorial

Maya Lin’s original competition submission for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. Architectural drawings and a one-page written summary, 1980 or 1981.

In 1979, Congress grants a Vietnam War veterans’ committee the right to build a memorial on the Mall in Washington, D.C., dedicated to American soldiers killed in the conflict in Vietnam…When the winner is announced, no one is more surprised than the student architect herself, Maya Lin, a 20-year-old Yale undergraduate…Lin describes the Memorial thus: “I went to see the site. I had a general idea that I wanted to describe a journey…a journey that would make you experience death and where you’d have to be an observer, where you could never really fully be with the dead. It wasn’t going to be something that was going to say, ‘It’s all right, it’s all over,’ because it’s not.”
FROM http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/cultureshock/flashpoints/visualarts/thewall_a.html

Spotlight: Maya Lin~ https://www.archdaily.com/774717/spotlight-maya-lin

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Salmagundi

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Windsor Castle: The Quire of St George’s Chapel by Charles Wild

1818 / Watercolor and bodycolour over pencil / 9.8”x8.3” / Royal Collection

Prince Harry and Meghan Markle at St. George’s Chapel in Windsor Castle in Windsor, near London, England, Saturday, May 19, 2018. (Danny Lawson/pool photo via AP)

On May 19, 2018, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s wedding took place in St George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle. Prince Harry was baptised in St George’s Chapel in December, 1984.
FROM https://www.stgeorges-windsor.org/news/royal-wedding-2/

Engraved illustration from Harper’s Weekly newspaper of the wedding of the Prince of Wales (later King Edward VII) and Alexandra of Denmark / Harper’s Weekly newspaper dated 11 April 1863 / Artist unknown

St. George’s Chapel was built in the 15th century and is a towering piece of Gothic architecture. It is lauded for its stone fan-vault ceilings, but the intricate stained glasswork along each of its walls, and the tall arched windows, intricate woodwork, and ironwork doorframes add to the historic feel of the grand room. The tombs of ten sovereigns also lie within the chapel, including Henry VIII and Charles I. FROM https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/prince-harry-and-meghan-markle-will-marry-at-st-georges-chapel-at-windsor-castle-this-may

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Salmagundi

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Mathew Brady [War]

Mathew Brady is often referred to as the father of photojournalism and is most well known for his documentation of the Civil War. His photographs, and those he commissioned, had a tremendous impact on society at the time of the war, and continue to do so today. He and his employees photographed thousands of images including battlefields, camp life, and portraits of some of the most famous citizens of his time including Abraham Lincoln and Robert E. Lee.
https://www.battlefields.org/learn/biographies/mathew-brady

The Civil War as Photographed by Mathew Brady~
http://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/brady-photos/


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Salmagundi

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Paul A. Juley/Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution

Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera: Love and War

Two years after [her] accident, in 1927, [Kahlo] met the painter Diego Rivera, whose work she’d come to admire and who became her mentor. In 1929, despite the vocal protestations of Kahlo’s mother, Frida and Diego were wedded and one of art history’s most notoriously tumultuous marriages commenced. 
FROM https://www.brainpickings.org/2013/04/19/frida-kahlo-diary-love-letters/

Kahlo…believed that her relationship with Rivera transcended the bodily, physical, even painterly world. “It’s not love, or tenderness, or affection, it’s life itself, my life, that I found when I saw it in your hands, in your mouth and in your breasts,” she [wrote] to him. “I have the taste of almonds from your lips in my mouth. Our worlds have never gone outside. Only one mountain can know the core of another mountain.”
FROM https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-frida-kahlos-love-letters-diego-rivera-reveal-volatile-relationship

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Salmagundi

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The Death of General Wolfe by Benjamin West

On September 13, 1759, during the Seven Years’ War (1756-63) [known in the United States as the French and Indian War], the British General James Wolfe achieved a dramatic victory; Wolfe was fatally wounded during the battle, but his victory ensured British supremacy in Canada.
https://www.history.com/topics/native-american-history/battle-of-quebec-1759

Benjamin West, Self-portrait 1770

Besides the original, at least four other additional versions of The Death of General Wolfe were also produced by West. The primary copy of The Death of General Wolfe is currently in the collection of the National Gallery of Canada, with further examples at the Royal Ontario Museum (Canadiana art collection), as well as the University of Michigan Museum of Art. The fourth copy produced resides at Ickworth House, Suffolk, England. Each reproduction had its own variation in the depiction of Wolfe’s death. A fifth autograph copy was commissioned by George III in 1771 and is still in the Royal Collection.
FROM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_General_Wolfe

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Salmagundi

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Venus de Milo / Musée du Louvre

Venus de Milo, the ancient statue commonly thought to represent Aphrodite…was carved from marble by the artist Alexandros* about 150 BCE. It was found in pieces on the Aegean island of Melos on April 8, 1820, and was subsequently presented to Louis XVIII (who then donated it to the Louvre in 1821).  ~https://www.britannica.com/topic/Venus-de-Milo

*Alexandros of Antioch (2nd-1st century BC) was a Greek sculptor of the Hellenistic age. His dates of birth and death are unknown. ~https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandros_of_Antioch

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What Happened to the Venus De Milo’s Arms?
http://mentalfloss.com/article/62722/what-happened-venus-de-milos-arms
The Mystery of What Venus de Milo Was Once Holding
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/3-d-printing-offers-guess-what-venus-de-milo-might-have-been-holding-180955176/

Salmagundi

Posted in African American Visual Artists, Black American Visual Artists, Miscellanea, Women Artists by

Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller
“Peace Halting the Ruthlessness of War”

1917 / Bronze cast sculpture / 14”x16 3/4”x9”/ Private collection

Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller (June 9, 1877-March 18, 1968) was…a multi-talented artist who wrote poetry, painted, and sculpted but was most noted for her sculpture. Warrick was a protegé of Auguste Rodin…Warrick is considered a forerunner of the Harlem Renaissance. ~FROM Wikipedia

In May, 1917, Meta Warrick Fuller took second prize in a competition under the auspices of the Massachusetts Branch of the Woman’s Peace Party, her subject being “Peace Halting the Ruthlessness of War.” War is personified as on a mighty steed and trampling to death numberless human beings. In one hand he holds a spear on which he has transfixed the head of one of his victims. ~FROM Documenting the American South

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In the Studio: The Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller Collection~ https://danforth.framingham.edu/exhibition/meta-fuller/