Photographer Vanessa Dualib makes animals out of vegetables and fruit.
(via Illusion)
kittivanilli
Apr 19
Apr 06
Botticelli’s Venus updated by Anna Utopia Giordano to reflect modern day’s “ideals” of beauty. In this recreation, she reduced Venus’ hips, thighs, and tummy. It’s a very interesting look at some of art history’s great nudes. The differences are quite striking in some of the samples.
(via kissuponhershoulder)
Mar 21
167. 2011 85x90cm
Well if that’s not a painting for the ages, I don’t know what is.
O_O
Mar 20
A work once thought to be by Vincent van Gogh but later dismissed has now been confirmed as an authentic painting by the Dutch master.
Still Life With Meadow Flowers and Roses has belonged to a Dutch museum since 1974, but doubts crept in due to the painting style and the unusual canvas size, and it was discredited in 2003.
However, experts have now authenticated the painting using an X-ray technique. Van Gogh originally painted a canvas of two wrestlers and then painted Still Life With Meadows and Roses over it, which experts say accounts for the “uncharacteristic exuberance” of the floral still life.
Mar 07
A painting thought to be the earliest copy of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa and painted alongside the original has been discovered in Madrid’s Prado museum. The discovery, hailed as one of the most remarkable in recent times, was made during conservation work and is believed to reveal how the famous sitter would have looked at the time.
The Prado painting was long thought to be one of dozens surviving replicas of the masterpiece made after Leonardo’s death but it is now believed to have been painted by one of his key pupils working alongside the master.
The Louvre original, displayed behind glass, is obscured by cracked darkened varnish, making the woman appear much older than her true age. Because of its fragility, cleaning and restoration is thought to be too risky.
(Left, the Prado copy; right, the Louvre)
Feb 07
“Over the River,” the $50 million project by the artist Christo, would drape nearly six miles of the Arkansas River in southern Colorado with suspended bank-to-bank fabric. Opponents have filed a federal lawsuit aiming to block construction, which Christo had hoped to begin this summer. The suit argues that land managers violated federal law in approving the plan and gauging its environmental impacts. (Photo: Matthew Staver/The New York Times)
Feb 06
“Almond Blossom,” by Vincent Van Gogh (1890)
Jan 26
Claudio Parmiggiani, L’Isola del Silenzio (one hundred thousand books, soot, & church bell)
» The New French Hacker-Artist Underground
Thirty years ago, in the dead of night, a group of six Parisian teenagers pulled off what would prove to be a fateful theft. Lifting a grate from the street, they descended a ladder to a tunnel, an unlit concrete passageway carrying a cable off into the void. They followed the cable to its source: the basement of the ministry of telecommunications. Horizontal bars blocked their way, but the skinny teens all managed to wedge themselves through and ascend to the building’s ground floor. There they found three key rings in the security office and a logbook indicating that the guards were on their rounds.
But the guards were nowhere to be seen. The six interlopers combed the building for hours, encountering no one, until they found what they were looking for at the bottom of a desk drawer—maps of the ministry’s citywide network of tunnels. They took one copy of each map, then returned the keys to the security office. Heaving the ministry’s grand front door ajar, they peeked outside; no police, no passersby, no problem. They exited onto the empty Avenue de Ségur and walked home as the sun rose.
This stealthy undertaking was not an act of robbery or espionage but rather a crucial operation in what would become an association called UX, for “Urban eXperiment.” UX is sort of like an artist’s collective, but far from being avant-garde—confronting audiences by pushing the boundaries of the new—its only audience is itself. More surprising still, its work is often radically conservative, intemperate in its devotion to the old. Through meticulous infiltration, UX members have carried out shocking acts of cultural preservation and repair, with an ethos of “restoring those invisible parts of our patrimony that the government has abandoned or doesn’t have the means to maintain.” The group claims to have conducted 15 such covert restorations, often in centuries-old spaces, all over Paris.
UX’s most sensational caper (to be revealed so far, at least) was completed in 2006. A cadre spent months infiltrating the Pantheon, the grand structure in Paris that houses the remains of France’s most cherished citizens. Eight restorers built their own secret workshop in a storeroom, which they wired for electricity and Internet access and outfitted with armchairs, tools, a fridge, and a hot plate. During the course of a year, they painstakingly restored the Pantheon’s 19th-century clock, which had not chimed since the 1960s.
More than 30 years after it was stolen from a French museum, Camille Pissarro’s “Le Marche aux Poissons” (“The Fish Market”) was handed over to the French ambassador by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement on Wednesday.
The roughly greeting-card-size work is a color monotype, a one-of-a-kind print made by painting on glass and then transferring the wet paint to a piece of paper.
Wednesday’s return was staged in a hall of a Washington museum filled with other French impressionist works, including some by artists who were inspired by Pissarro.
The customs bureau said that since 2007 it has returned more than 2,500 items to more than 22 countries.
Jan 13
Interior of an Imaginary Catholic Church in Classical Style (1638-40); oil on panel, by Gerard Houckgeest
Jan 06
The American painting galleries at the Met will reopen on Jan. 16 after a four-year renovation. It is the third and final phase of a $100 million project that includes new galleries dedicated to the neo-Classical arts of America and an overhaul of the period rooms and the Charles Engelhard Court, a light-filled pavilion punctuated by the Greek Revival limestone facade of Martin E. Thompson’s Branch Bank of the United States.
1) Sequences of fish-eye-lens images create equirectangular panoramas of the new galleries for painting, sculpture, and decorative arts. 2) John Singer Sargent’s much-loved “Madame X,” far left, is among the paintings newly installed on the second floor of the American Wing. (Photos: Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times)
(Source: The New York Times)
Dec 06
1) “Polka Dots,” 1976, 2) “Caryatid,” 1980, 3) “Space2,” 1976
The first major American museum exhibition of her work in 25 years, “Francesca Woodman,” had its debut last month at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where it will remain until Feb. 20. The show, which features 176 vintage photographs along with 5 videos, will open in March at the Guggenheim Museum in New York.
Working in black and white, Woodman frequently took self-portraits or depicted other young women, sometimes nude. Often the figures are only partly visible or blurry, as if trying to escape the frame. She committed suicide in 1981, at the age of 22. (Credit: Courtesy George and Betty Woodman)
(Source: The New York Times)
Nov 22
![By comparing the DNA of modern horses and those that lived during the Stone Age, scientists have determined that the spotted horse drawings of Pech-Merle are a realistic depiction of an animal that coexisted with the artists, rather than a symbolic illustration.
[Photo: Drawings of horses from the Chauvet cave in France, right, and a horse from the Lascaux cave, also in France. (French Ministry of Culture and Communication)]](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lv1tc5ytc11qzygpco1_500.jpg)
By comparing the DNA of modern horses and those that lived during the Stone Age, scientists have determined that the spotted horse drawings of Pech-Merle are a realistic depiction of an animal that coexisted with the artists, rather than a symbolic illustration.
[Photo: Drawings of horses from the Chauvet cave in France, right, and a horse from the Lascaux cave, also in France. (French Ministry of Culture and Communication)]
Nov 12
(Source: sandinlungs, via randomitus)
