Cleaning the Ceiling

As a result of the Second World War, many of the art treasures of Italy were in imminent danger of collapse. During the 1950s art conservation became much more than a "cottage industry" in a nation claiming to have up to 50% of the worlds great art. Experts from all over the art world flooded the country and as a result, preservation and conservation techniques made remarkably strides in the decades to follow. Major efforts were underway in Florence, Venice, and Milan. Whereas up until this time, art conservation work had largely been devoted to canvas painting, now, workers had to undertake the far more difficult tasks of preserving whole walls and even worse, ceilings. Fortunately, technology and chemistry came to their rescue providing hardware such as X-rays and solvents never before used for such purposes.   
   
During the late 1950s Impressed by the efforts going on in other cities, the Vatican in Rome took a deep breath and commissioned the cleaning of several minor frescoes from the 1400s one of which had been all but obscured by centuries of accumulated dirt and grime. The results were impressive, if not astounding, at least enough so as to encourage them to move on to bigger game. In 1960, work began on the side wall frescoes of the Sistine Chapel. It was a learning process and the church initially had hoped to train an in-house corps of conservation/restoration workers and experts. However the effort was far more complex, more time-consuming, and more expensive than anyone had ever guessed. Work on the side walls took most of twenty years.  
    

Daniel: Sistine Chapel Ceiling,
before and after restoration


In 1980, a single lunette of Michelangelo's famous ceiling was cleaned as a test.  In a massive room where for over 500 years, the only source of lighting for evening services had been candles, the resulting soot and smoke had so disguised the technical and coloristic brilliance of Michelangelo's work that the uncovered area was nothing short of breathtaking in comparison to the dull, long-accepted, brownish appearance of the rest of the ceiling. The next year, Vatican officials summoned up their courage and proposed the cleaning of the entire ceiling. A Japanese media firm offered to pay for it in return for exclusive television and photographic rights to the finished work. And, although restorers proceeded with great caution and consulted with other art and conservation experts, the effort was not without controversy.  The major fear was that the work was proceeding too fast. After having spent twenty years on the walls, the ceiling took only eight years.  It was finished in 1994. Not just the Vatican, but the whole world had to step back, take another deep breath, and seriously reevaluate their previous conceptions of Michelangelo the painter. The verdict: WOW! 

Sistine Chapel Ceiling,
1994, after cleaning

            

Claude Lorrain



The Voyage of Life: Youth,
1842, Thomas Cole

 Art historians, exercising their proclivity toward over analyzing all things bold and beautiful, have divided the art of landscape painting into four categories: symbolic, factual, fantasy, and ideal. The symbolic landscape is rare, serving to teach a moral such as in the work of Thomas Cole's The Voyage of Life: Youth. The factual landscape renders nature without regard to beauty or perfection, but with an eye toward an almost scientific depiction. Just the opposite, the fantasy landscape tends to come from an amalgamation served up from the artist's imagination. And the Ideal landscape falls somewhere between these last two. Here the artist sketches an actual landscape on location, then seeks to "improve" upon nature in his studio. Undoubtedly, the master of this latter category was the seventeenth century landscape painter, Claude Lorrain.

Technically, Claude Lorrain was a Frenchman, having been born in the village of Chamagne near Nancy in the Duchy of Lorrain. Both his parents died when he was a small child so the boy made his way to Rome where he lived the rest of his life, which would seem to make him a defacto Italian. In Rome, the young boy worked as a pastry cook, a childhood of poverty instilling in him the qualities of shrewdness and hard work that caused him to accumulate considerable wealth over his lifetime. Self-educated in all things, including his painting, his inspiration came from the countryside near Rome, specializing in those conditions of nature that allowed him to paint natural scenery more harmonious and beautiful than nature.

The Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba,
1648, Claude Lorrain

There tends to be a loose formula to most of Claude Lorrain's work. A tall, feathery tree usually occupies one side or the other of the painting with its shadow falling toward the center. In the background are usually groups of trees and some architectural feature, often painted a misty blue, directly from nature. In most cases, the foreground contains some allegorical, religious, or mythological happening. The artist was as much at home painting architectural features into his landscapes as nature. Though working in obscurity until he was 30, by the time he was 38, he was the leading landscape painter in Italy. Ever the shrewd businessman, he documented each of his paintings in what he called The Book of Truth, drawing exact copies with names of his patrons, dates, sizes, and titles. In so doing, he was able to protect himself from forgers. Today, the book is an art historian's dream come true, serving as an invaluable document chronicling in detail his artistic development. Some 250 paintings and over 1000 of his drawings are known to survive, serving as a point of departure for later generations of landscape painters such as Corot, Constable, Turner, Boudin, and Courbet.

Circus Art

When we think of things "all-American" the phrase, "mom, baseball, and apple pie" comes to mind. Well, one out of three ain't bad. Moms and sweetened apples in pastry go back considerable before there ever was a United States of America. Other things come to mind too, popcorn, the hula hoop, the circus perhaps?  Okay, I'll allow the first two, but the Circus is an import as well. The term actually dates back to Roman times while the popular images we have of the circus are almost 230 years old, dating back to England in the 1770s when jugglers and trick horsemanship were the main attractions. When the show crossed the English Channel, the French added clowns, mimes, and acrobats, moving the whole thing indoors to giant, rotundas designed specifically for such entertainment. The train-traveling extravaganzas with huge tents and wild animals acts is largely an American adaptation demanded by the immense size of the country it sought to entertain.

Cirque Fernando: the Equestrian, 1887-88
Henri Toulouse-Lautrec.  The Cirque Fernando
was the English predecessor to the Cirque
Medrano.

One of the most outstanding French circuses was the Medrano Circus. Its home was a large, round, stadium-like theater in the Paris neighborhood of Montmartre. Montmartre was likewise the favored venue for artists shortly after the turn of the century, and the artist who lived there most responsible for integrating the circus into art was Pablo Picasso. He wasn't the first to discover circus performers as suitable painting subjects. Toulouse-Lautrec, for instance, had painted circus equestirans as early as 1887. But like us all, Picasso loved the circus. More than that, he loved the vagabond people who performed there. Around 1905-06, he seems entirely preoccupied with them in fact. This coincides with his Rose Period, and it would seem the circus may have been responsible for lifting him out of the melancholy funk of his Blue Period, not that there isn't a certain dismal quality to some of his circus subjects, but it seems to be that of a sweeter sort.
 

The Acrobat's Family
with a Monkey,m 1905,
Pablo Picasso



The Acrobat's Family with a Monkey, a mixed-media painting/drawing on cardboard, is typical of what I mean.  It would almost seem to be a circus version of the holy family as seen by Picasso except for the almost comic simian squatting in the lower right-hand corner, gazing up at the loving couple with their squirming boy-child. 

Family of Saltimbanques, 1905,
Pablo Picasso

Considered his masterpiece from this period, The Family of Saltimbanques, is a much deeper probing into the circus psyche. A group of five circus performers stand in a desolate, desert setting, gazing wistfully upon an attractive young woman posed softly in the lower right corner of the painting. The harlequin and the jester in the group seem to symbolize the buffoon element in all artists with which Picasso so identified himself. The work was painted and repainted over the course of more than a year in which he rearranged the figural elements quite a number of times, perhaps trying to capture the perplexing perpetual motion so much a part of the circus he may well have wanted to run off and join.

Cimabue

Artists who accept commissions, usually portraits, or perhaps a commemorative painting of some sort, tend to price their work with regard to size first, then the nature and complexity of the subject matter (how long it will take) as primary considerations, followed by how busy they are at the moment or how badly they need the money. Imagine, if you will, pricing work by what color it will be. This was typical during the Gothic period in painting which was basically a couple hundred years sandwich between Medieval times and the Renaissance. Three colors dominated most painting from this period--gold, red, and blue. The price of a painting was determined by how much gold leaf was used and by how much blue pigment would be consumed in the work.  We all know about gold of course, but most blue pigments of that time were based upon ultramarine, which even today is a semiprecious stone. Back during the thirteenth century, it seems to have been even more precious because of the three, it was the most difficult for artists to obtain and use. Reds, usually iron oxides, were relatively inexpensive. Thus there was a direct connection between the colors used in a painting and the prestige of owning it.



Maestra, 1280-85,
Cimabue

 The church was the primary benefactor of artists of the time and, being an institution built of the need for prestige, we see lots of gold, somewhat less blue and somewhat more red in the dozens of altarpieces dating from this time.  In terms of artists from the Gothic period, it's easy to begin and end our thinking with Giotto.  However the Florentine painter, Cimabue (pronounced CHEE-ma-BOO-ee) makes a much better point of departure in looking at Gothic painting. And while, to our eyes, his Madonna and Child enthroned Maesta (Majesty) painted in 1280-85 looks stiff and architectural,  there is at least some semblance of human warmth and emotional interaction between the two figures as compared to the mosaic qualities of Byzantine painting. Art historians usually categorize Cimabue as a Byzantine painter but in reality, he is much more a bridge between that period and Gothic art.

Cimabue was born around 1240 in Florence. His real name was Ceni di Peppi, and aside from his painted altarpieces, his other claim to fame was to have been Giotto's art teacher. Actually so many works have been attributed to him that it's quite possible what we're seeing in his painting may well have been done by a group of artists, possibly working under his direction, but perhaps working independently, but in close association. Whatever the case, we see in his work the first attempts to render a shallow perspective, a fascination with angels, and a fair degree of competence in what at the time passed for portrait painting. The massive altarpieces were totally dominated by the gold leaf over wooden, gessoed panels and only rarely is any pigment lighter than gold used. The gold, being a metal, has come down to use relatively unchanged while unfortunately, the precious blue pigments all seem to have darkened to such a degree that rarely can we now see more than very subtle gradations within them.

Chromolithography



Moulin Rouge--La Gouloue,
1891, Henri de Toulous-Lautrec

A tour of popular art galleries today will reveal dozens, perhaps hundreds of fine art prints among the original oil/acrylic paintings. In fact, in some galleries, you'll hardly find any original work at all. The originals are too expensive. Even the prints often sell for prices well into the hundreds of dollars. Prints have always been a way artist could cater to the market for inexpensive, framable art. Etchings go back well into the 17th-century and in later years, were a means of bringing reproductions of famous masterpieces to the attention of the general public. Of course these were always black and white reproductions (unless in rare instances when they were hand-colored).   
    
Color reproductions were largely the product of the last decades of the nineteenth century when there developed a fondness on the part of the public for advertising posters designed by artists such as Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. These posters often disappeared from the walls of the city almost as soon as they were put up. They were, in a sense, "free" artwork--instant collectibles. And, of course, even today, collectors relish posters, advertising everything from movies to art exhibits. There is a certain "chic" quality to the well-chosen, well-mounted poster that somehow seems less pretentious than an original oil painting.   


Love or Duty, 1873,
Gabriele Castagnola

   
Art collectors of color reproductions are indebted to a French artist by the name of Jules Cheret for his invention of Chromolithography around 1866. Initially his work was largely commercial--menus, a few book illustrations, and especially posters. By 1884 however, his posters were being chronicled by art historians such as Joris-Karl Huysman who advised his readers to collect them rather than paintings. Soon, however, they could, in a sense, do both, as established painters began creating works of art specifically for Cheret's printing process. And, like those before them who had used the medium of etching to bring reproductions of works by famous artists to the general public, so artists such as Cezanne, Renoir, Whistler, Gauguin, Pissarro, Bonnard and Edouard Vuillard found themselves creating lithographic copies of famous paintings, as well as their own.   

Importing Impression

From time to time in reading various art-related articles a name pops up that is totally foreign to me.  I ask myself, "Why haven't I heard of this artist before?"  Usually it's because of the individual's obscurity. Sometimes, the reason is much more inexplicable. Recently the name Childe Hassam showed up on a list of the most expensive paintings ever sold at auction by American artists. The first four on the list, as one might expect, were instantly recognizable.  Hassam, number five, was not.  His floral still-life was listed at something over six million dollars if memory serves me right. Any painter whoes work is capable of bringing that kind of price at auction I want to know about.   
 

Washington Arch,
1893, Childe Hassam

  
Childe Hassam was born in 1859 in Dorchester, Massachusetts. He began his career drawing and cutting woodblocks for commercial illustrations. He attended Boston Art club and the Lowell Institute. By the 1880s he had his own studio in Boston. His palette was somber, his vignettes of city anecdotal and loaded with interesting details.  During the late 1880s he toured Europe for three years, bringing back the prevailing Impressionist style to this country. His painting Washington Arch, 1893 looks like how Pissarro might have painted Washington Square Park. There are tiny brushstrokes and light, bright, flickering colors full of gaiety and lighthearted city life at a time when living in cities was still a pleasant, fun-filled experience. Later in life, his work took on a more expressionistic tone as seen in Church at Old Lyme from 1905, perhaps as a result of exposure to the work of Van Gogh and Gauguin.   


Church at Old Lyme, 1905,
Childe Hassam

   
However, lest you think Hassam was one of the first to bring Impressionism to this country, the fact of the matter is he was only one of several. Paris and Munich were must-see landmarks for the American painter on a Grand Tour of Europe, as the old tradition was known in the late 1800s. It was sort of a capstone encounter for every educated gentleman and painters were no exception. American art is decidedly richer for it. Among the earliest to import Impressionism to these shores was Julian Alden Weir who returned again and again to Paris, studying under masters as diverse as Gerome and Monet. Theodore Robinson followed a similar course, painting with Monet in Giverny. So did Ohio Artist John Twachtman and Cecilia Beaux. Though there were others, this handful was the most responsible for the importation and distribution of that heady French Impressionist vintage art collectors pay so dearly to imbibe today.  

Child Prodigies

The term "child prodigy" is tossed around today to the point that any child not so labeled comes across as almost mentally defective.  In music circles it means becoming a concert pianist by age six. In art it means the ability to draw stick men by age one. Perhaps one of the few bonafide child prodigies in art in recent times was Pablo Picasso. Under the tutelage of his father, who was also a painter, Picasso at 15,  was rendering full-length portraits in a Norman Rockwell style before Norman Rockwell was even born.


Self-portrait with Uncombed Hair,
1896, age 15,
Pablo Picasso


Picasso is said to have claimed that it took him fifteen years to learn to paint like a man and the rest of his life to learn to paint as a child. And, certainly, there is a childlike quality to Picasso's work. There is a playfulness and an obnoxious disregard for "rules" that we find both delightful, yet disturbing. Even though he's now been dead for 37 years and his life's work stands as a whole, we still have the uneasy feeling we're not sure what he might do next. Yet, despite his seeking after childishness, there was never a man who explored art more seriously.

Picasso's exploration of art was surprisingly straight-forward. He learned all the rules, then he systematically explored all the ways to break them. He learned to create the illusion of volume then he deliberately learned how to flatten it. If you study his work, you can trace very nearly a step-by-step progression from realism through Cubism, stopping just short of non-representational abstract expressionism. When people think of Picasso, abstraction comes to mind, but with abstraction comes a lack of rules, and Picasso loved rules, for without the "rules" of art, he had nothing to bend or break.