Arts & Paintings

A World

In the early 1890s Maximilian Lenz worked as a designer of banknotes in Buenos Aires. In 1897, after returning home, he became one of the founding members of the Secession in Vienna, and participated several times in its exhibitions. His One World, painted in 1899, recalls the typical stylistic features,intensified color harmony, and dream like fantasy of the world of the period. The Secession's periodical Ver Sacrum featured the work in same year.

                                  -Ferenc Tóth

Creator: Maximilian Lenz

Publisher: Muesum of Fine Arts, Budapest

Type: Painting

Medium: Oil on canvas

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Return From Fishing

The "Return From Fishing" painting can be said to be a part of Hendra's biography. It turned out that as a child Hendra enjoyed walking along the river to look for fish. He developed a deep admiration for the same small fish with their array of extraordinary colors.

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Creator: Hendra Gunawan, 1960

Publisher: Ciputra Artpreneur

Painting Description: Agus Dermawan T.

Type: Painting

Medium: Oil on canvas

Circe Invidiosa

Circe Invidiosa is a painting by an English painter, John William Waterhouse completed in 1892. It is his second painting, after " Circe Offering The Cup To Ulysses, 1891 " of the classical mythological character Circe. Circe Invidiosa is a mythological portrayal based on Ovid's tale in Metamorphoses, where Circe turns Scylla into a sea monster, solely because Glaucus mocked the enchantress romantic advances in hopes of attaining Scylla's love instead. Circe Invidiosa is now a part of the Art Gallery Of South Australia Collections.

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Title: Circe Invidiosa

Creator: John William Waterhouse

Date Created: 1892

Location: London

Physical Dimension: 87.4x180.7cm

Type: Painting

Medium: Oil On Canvas

Courtesy: South Australian Government Grant 1892 / Art Gallery Of South Australia

Sita Vanvas

Depicting Sita lost in reverie in an ashram, Ravi Varma touches upon his favorite subject, the feminine form lost in thought. It could be missing a beloved, longing for a quick reunion or just being melancholic in loneliness. However, if It's Sita, then the presence of a sage, in the background, who appears to have arrived at the ashram, throws up several pointers, it could be that the artist is teasing the viewer with his version or it could be that he has juxtaposed some other character into this work. Broadly naming it vanvas (exile) gives a spin to the effect.

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Title: Sita Vanvas

Creator: Ravi Varma Press

Date Created: 1880

Location: Bengaluru, India

Physical Dimension: 35x50 cm

Type: Reproduction

Rights: The Raja Ravi Varma Heritage Foundation, Bengaluru

Labels And Inscriptions: Ravi Varma Press, Malavli, Lonavala

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Ravana Carrying Off Sita and Opposed by Jatayu

One of the paintings by Raja Ravi Varma that depicts bloodshed, this scene is taken from the India Indian epic Ramayana. Ravana cuts off the wing of divine bird, Jatayu when he was fighting valiantly with Ravana to rescue Sita from his evil clutches. The scene is set in a desert, or a dry, arid area.

Title: Ravana Carrying Off Sita and Opposed by Jatayu

Creator: Raja Ravi Varma

Date Created: 1890

Physical Location: Mysore, Karnataka

Location Created: India

Medium: Oil Paint

Type: Painting

The Dream

The Dream is the largest of the jungle paintings, measuring 204.5 x 298.5 cm. It features an almost voluptuous portrait of a young woman on a French sofa in the jungle surrounded by lush jungle foliage, including lotus flowers, and animals including birds, monkeys, an elephant, a lion and lioness, and a snake. The stylized forms of the jungle plants are based on Rousseau's observations at the Paris Museum of Natural History and its Jardin des Plantes. The nude's left arm reaches towards the lions and a black snake charmer who faces the viewer playing his flute, barely visible in the gloom of the jungle under the dim light of the full moon. A pink-bellied snake slithers through the undergrowth, its sinuous form reflecting the curves of the woman's hips and leg.

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Creator: Henri Rousseau

Date Created: 1910

Physical Dimensions: 204.5 cm x 298.5 cm

Original Title: Le Rêve

Credit Line: The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Nelson A.Rockefeller

Type: Painting

Medium: Oil on canvas

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Grand Canal, Venice

Thomas Moran who is best known for his panoramic views of the American West, he also applied the same romantic sensibility to his series of Venetian landscape produced for the American commercial market. In this particular painting of the Grand Canal, likely inspired from a British landscape J.M.W Turner, Moran included well known touristic highlights in his painting like the Doge's Palace, and a local Flavor in the form of the foreground merchants. Yet the painting is blazing Crimson, Orange, and yellow-gold sky, and the rainbow hued canal that cover most of the canvas's surface area.

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Title: Grand Canal, Venice

Creator: Thomas Moran

Date Created: 1898

Location Created: Venice, Italy

Physical Dimension: 35.9 x 51.4 cm

Type: Painting

Medium: Oil On Canvas

Courtesy: Oklahoma City Museum of Art

A Storm in the Rocky Mountains, Mt. Rosalie

Albert Bierstadt was a skilled showman. Here, he reorganized Rocky Mountain landmarks, exaggerated their scale, and introduced dramatic weather to thrill audiences at a moment when the North American continent was under rapid development. Bierstadt’s display for profit of theatrically lit large canvases like this one was a forerunner of today’s movies. In 1863 Bierstadt made on-site studies for the work, which he completed in his New York studio. The painting had a personal significance, for “Mt. Rosalie” (now Mount Evans) was named by the artist in honor of his traveling companion’s wife, Rosalie Osborne Ludlow, whom Bierstadt would marry in 1866 following her divorce.

Title: A Storm in the Rocky Mountains, Mt. Rosalie

Creator: Albert Bierstadt

Date Created: 1866

Museum Location: Brooklyn Museum

Physical Dimension: 210.8 x 361.3 cm

Type: Painting

Medium: Oil on Canvas

Courtesy: Brooklyn Museum

Collection: American Art

Signed: Signed lower right: "ABierstadt / N.Y. 1866"

Credit Line : Dick S. Ramsay Fund, Healy Purchase Fund B, Frank L. Babbott Fund, A. Augustus Healy Fund, Ella C. Woodward Memorial Fund, Carll H. de Silver Fund, Charles Stewart Smith Memorial Fund, Caroline A.L. Pratt Fund, Frederick Loeser Fund, Augustus Graham School of Design Fund, Museum Collection Fund, Special Subscription, and John B. Woodward Memorial Fund; Purchased with funds given by Daniel M. Kelly and Charles Simon; Bequest of Mrs. William T. Brewster, Gift of Mrs. W. Woodward Phelps in memory of her mother and father, Ella M. and John C. Southwick, Gift of Seymour Barnard, Bequest of Laura L. Barnes, Gift of J.A.H. Bell, and Bequest of Mark Finley, by exchange

Exhibitions

· Albert Bierstadt, Art & Enterprise

· American Identities: A New Look

· American Art

Sand Dunes, Cape Cod

A watercolor specialist for virtually his entire career, the Boston artist Dodge MacKnight pushed the medium’s potential for high key color and the summary description of form in transparent washes. Brilliant, airy landscapes like this one were highly prized by his primary audience in Boston—a public that by 1900 was exceptionally receptive to the progressive Impressionist aesthetic. In the eyes of his admirers, MacKnight was no less than an equal to the revered John Singer Sargent.

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Title: Sand Dunes, Cape Cod

Creator: Dodge MacKnight

Date Created: 1866

Physical Dimension: 43.8 x 61.1 cm

Type: Painting

Medium: Transparent watercolor with touches of opaque watercolor over graphite on white, moderately thick, rough-textured wove paper

Courtesy: Brooklyn Museum

Collection: American Art

Signed: Signed lower right: "Dodge Macknight"

Credit Line : Frank Sherman Benson Fund and Frederick Loeser Fund

Ambulance Call

In Ambulance Call, an ailing man is carried away on a stretcher as a crowd gathers. The artist painted blocky forms in a bold but limited palette, creating a rhythmic pattern. Lawrence conveyed the sense of community in his Harlem neighborhood by grouping the figures closely together, their individual expressions communicating sadness and concern. He emphasized that his paintings had a universal quality, conveying the human experiences of joy, pain, and community through a focus on African American urban life.

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Title: Ambulance Call

Creator: Jacob Lawrence(1917 - 2000)

Date Created: 1948

Physical Dimension: 61 x 50.8 cm

Type: Painting

Medium: Tempera on board

Courtesy: Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art

Signed: Jacob Lawrence / 48

Museum Location: Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art

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ECLIPSE OF THE SUNFLOWER, 1945

With Solstice of the Sunflower (1945), this is one of the artist’s final two oil paintings. The year after it was made, Nash, who had been diagnosed with bronchial asthma in 1933, caught pneumonia and died on the 11th July, aged only 57.

He had long been fascinated by the mysteries of landscape and man’s involvement with it. As an official War Artist in World War I, he witnessed the near annihilation of both, and painted it in We Are Making a New World(1918)[1]. Over the desolate craters and shattered trees, however, shafts of sunlight seem to promise nature’s ability to renew itself. A similar promise seems to be inherent in the heavenly body looming through the clouds above the WWII commission Totes Meer (1940-1), [2] providing a reassuring reference point over a landscape created by a mass of smashed German aircraft that, as Nash’s title points out, appear at first to be a dead sea.

In 1943, Nash had discovered James George Frazer’s The Golden Bough [3], a study of religious myth which argues that fertility cults the world over underpin the Christian promise of renewal through death. Nash assimilated this into his own personal mythology alongside the lifelong influence of the more devout William Blake; particularly ‘Ah Sunflower’ from Songs of Experience (1794). It’s not hard to imagine the motives behind Nash’s deepening spiritual interests as he faced death, so soon after that of so many others in the war. The flowers themselves, irresistibly iconic to visual artists both before and after, grew at his friend Hilda Harrisson’s house in Boar’s Hill, Oxfordshire, and his own garden in nearby Banbury. [4] With both visual and imaginative stimulus, he began

“Four pictures in which the image of the Sunflower is exalted to take the part of the Sun. In three of the pictures the flower stands in the sky in place of the Sun. But in the ‘Solstice’ the spent sun shines from its zenith encouraging the sunflower in the dual role of sun and firewheel to perform its mythological purpose. The sun appears to be whipping the sunflower like a top. The Sunflower Wheel tears over the hill cutting a path through the standing corn and bounding into the air as it gathers momentum. This is the blessing of the Midsummer Fire.” [5]