Malcolm MacDougall III Welds and Casts Sculptural Spells

Whatever they are putting in the water supply for Ardsley, New York, I want some. First this Westchester County village's High School produces Mark Zuckerberg, the young Facebook bajillionaire, and now along comes another prodigy: sculptor Malcolm MacDougall III. I'll have you know that Malcolm is making a name for himself in leaps and bounds -- he is that talented and dedicated. Also? He is 22 years old. (Twenty-two, people! What were you doing when you were 22? I don't remember exactly, but believe it involved both hands, a flashlight and, ultimately, some form of epic failure.)

Beth Gersh-Nesic has a treat for us in her article about Malcolm MacDougall III, which you should read. Why? Besides learning about a hot new career, you are going to want to know who Malcolm is. Beth and I will both lay odds we'll be hearing his name (with increasing frequency) for years to come.

In Conversation She Spoke Just Like a Baroness

If we had seen her roaming Greenwich Village in the 1910s, would we have thought "baroness" or "bag lady?" When it comes to the Dadaist Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven (1874-1927), it's impossible to say. The only certainty is that we would have noticed her: tall with long, flat muscles; erect carriage; purposeful stride; hawkish nose balanced by receding chin; close to handsome and far from pretty; and the way she dressed! Have you known any woman in your life who wore two empty tomato soup cans instead of a bra? Teaspoons for earrings? A birthday cake for a hat? Yellow pancake makeup with black lipstick? A shaved head painted vermilion? Or -- how about nothing? The Baroness, you see, wore nudity as another costume. It was effective, too, when she was openly stalking her sexual prey.

I have long wondered how it is that flamboyant Baroness Elsa, the antithesis of Ideal Womanhood in an era where two piece undergarments were considered the zenith of female liberation, got swept into the dustbin of art history. Aside from the fact that her life was a years-long Performance Art piece, she was a sculptress and a poetess. She was Dada before Dada was Dada. Back in the day, everyone even peripherally involved with the New York Dada scene knew her name. Why don't we? Clearly (to me, at least) something had to be done. And so it has. Please enjoy meeting her in the biography of Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven -- even if you'll still have a hard time deciding between "baroness" and "bag lady."

Image: Jamaican-American poet Claude McKay (1889-1948) and Baroness von Freytag-Loringhoven, ca. 1915. Bain News Service, publisher. Photo: Library of Congress.

On Separating Funk Art from Junk Art

Before last week, I would have said one involved Soul Brother Number One James Brown, and the other non-recyclables. That would have worked, too, were it not for the word "art" tailgating both "funk" and "junk." So once again I sallied forth, armed only with an Inter-Library Loan card and a can-do attitude. Now that I know, you, too, can know how to compare and contrast Junk Art and Funk Art. I figure if "Doing It to Death" (the actual name of "Gonna Have a Funky Good Time") plays in your head the whole time, that's your business. ("In order for me to get down, I have to get down in D," is not the worst life motto when you think about it.)

Died in the 1918 Flu Pandemic

Memorial Day means cemetery visits and, occasionally, a question with an easily-found answer. For example, the next time you are visiting an older cemetery you may notice that many of the headstones show 1918 as the year of death. Yes, it was the end of World War I, but most of the headstones have no military markers -- and both genders are represented. This is because we had an influenza pandemic in 1918 that killed more Earthlings than all WWI civilian and soldier deaths combined. A handful of the millions of flu casualties were just hitting their strides in the visual arts world, too. We'll never know what they might have gone on to create, but I am able to tell you their names. If this piques your curiosity, have a look at Artists Who Were Killed by the 1918 Influenza Pandemic.

Guess the Artist

Your clues this week are purposefully vague:

• The artist was American.
• This work was created while the artist was undergoing psychoanalytic treatment.
• Though this is a work on paper, the artist is better known for a different medium.

And


• The artist probably isn't who you think it is, at least not at first glance.

Please email me your guesses over the coming week. I'll post the winner and correct answer with next week's guessing game. Good luck!

Last Week's Answer:

We were looking at Cleopatra's Feast (1653) by the life-long resident of Antwerp, Jacob Jordaens (1593-1678). You were all winners, sending so many correct answers so quickly. However, Julian emailed first, and I would also like to congratulate Clarice for including so many details in her answer. Everyone: take a bow!

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Guess the Artist

Your clues this week are:

• The artist was American, active in the 19th-century, and did not initially train to be a painter.
• Although best known today for pictures of water -- ocean shorelines, rivers, waterfalls, and lakes -- it was a monumental landscape that cemented the artist's reputation.
• The artist was a founding member and trustee of a museum whose original ground floor is now a Tommy Hilfiger store.

And


• The view here is part of what we call the Appalachian Trail, although neither the cows, the sheep, the dog, nor the boy are hiking its 2,184 miles. Why? The Appalachian Trail didn't exist yet. Not even as a euphemism for visiting one's mistress in Buenos Aires.

Please email me your guesses over the coming week. I'll post the winner and correct answer with next week's guessing game. Good luck!

Last Week's Answer:

One part of last week's clues seemed to throw readers off. Specifically, "The artist was an American, but wasn't born in the United States of America." Now, the artist was Charles Willson Peale (1741-1827) and the sitter was Henry Clay (1777-1852). The artist was born in Maryland, but you may note that his year of birth was 1741 ... when the Province of Maryland was still a British colony. Excellent detective work, Susan! You sent the first correct answer.

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Guess the Artist

Your clues this week are:

• The artist was American, active in the first third of the 20th-century, and had a knack for making friends with people who would later offer career advice, assistance, and patronage. The last part was purely accidental.
• Perhaps due to extended trips to Paris during 1906-07 (think: Fauvism, Expressionism, and Luminism) and 1912-14 (think: Cubism, Cubism, and Cubism), the artist was an early adopter of Modernism in the US.
• Never in robust health, the artist was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes when close to 40 years old. Though the metabolic disease would eventually win, the artist provided valuable scientific data for a decade by becoming one of the first people to undergo daily insulin injections.

And


• Apropos of nothing artistic, the eggplant seen here is your basic Purple Beauty. With which vegetable is flashy Miss Purple paired, my fellow gardening gastronomes? I'm looking for its varietal name.

Please email me your guesses over the coming week. I'll post the winner and correct answer with next week's guessing game. Good luck!

Last Week's Answer:

The clues last week pointed straight towards Aleksandr Deyneka (Russian, 1899-1969), a true "party" animal. We were looking at The Race (1932-33), which gives one the impressionism that the USSR was peopled with tall, muscular, blond men from whom tall, muscular women could choose worthy mates. Or something like that. Steve, who owns an iPad and may remember the Kursk explosion in the Barents Sea, was our timely winner. Поздравляю, Steve, and спасибо to all who participated!

Guess the Artist

Your clues this week are:

• The artist was born in Aragon, and became self-taught while recovering from tuberculosis as a teenager.
• Art and political activism often jockeyed for the most favorable post position in the artist's life. What started as opposition to the Franco regime grew into more global concerns with accompanying letters, essays, and manifestos. In fact, the artist was threatened with permanent expulsion from France at one point due to political statements.
• Most of the artist's personal papers (and a great deal of work) were destroyed in a suspicious house fire in 1979.

And


• The subject of this piece is an internationally famous French woman whose third husband, a millionaire playboy, champion bobsledder, documentary filmmaker and art collector, committed suicide last year. Incidentally, and in case you were wondering, this is not meant to be an accurate likeness.

Please email me your guesses over the coming week. I'll post the winner and correct answer with next week's guessing game. Good luck!

Last Week's Answer:

Quite a few of you knew that the clues pertained to George Herms and his appropriately beatnikky Greet the circus with a smile (1961). Llyn was first to email with the correct answer, however. Congratulations, Llyn!

Guess the Artist

Your clues this week are:

• The artist was French and active throughout the second half of the 19th-century.
• The artist's surname was also French, although it was derived from the name of an Italian Alpine village.
• The artist was legendary for quirky behavior: eating sans utensils at dinner parties; going to Mass every day though hating priests; exhibiting paranoia that other artists would steal techniques; avoiding the touch of other humans; and, most telling of all, experiencing wild bursts of activity in which many canvases would be started but not finished. Some have suggested autism, although a bi-polar disorder might be more fitting.

And


• The painting seen here was created during the early part of the artist's mid-career. This was a good thing because we can barely recognize early works -- they are strong and full of energy, but of a truly dark palette. Of course, this painting -- while light -- is also atypical of that which we expect from the artist. It wasn't until late-mid to early-late career that the artist settled on a unified theory that every organic shape in nature can be reduced to cylinders, spheres and cones. The geometry pusher ... now that is the artist we know and love.

Please email me your guesses over the coming week. I'll post the winner and correct answer with next week's guessing game. Good luck!

The Answer Two Weeks Ago:

The clues two weeks ago led straight to dear Samuel Palmer (English, 1805-1881) and his watercolor In a Shoreham Garden (ca. 1830). Corinne was the first reader to email with the correct answer, and neither she nor I know why Palmer's father-in-law, John Linnell (1792-1882), was such a pill towards him. These things are always a mystery to me, but in real life I believe thinking too hard about in-laws and their motivations is just asking for trouble. Anyway, congratulations to you, Corinne, and thank you to everyone who participated!

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Guess the Artist

Your clues this week are:

• The artist was Russian, and studied painting under the great Ilya Repin (1844-1930) at the Imperial Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg -- while concurrently studying sculpture and etching with two other masters.
• Although obviously a skilled portraitist, the artist had more fun designing stage sets and made more money as a book illustrator.
• For a brief time, the artist was a contributor to a journal called "Hell's Mail." I visualized "Hell's Mail" as a gigantic stack of bills due, but was incorrect.
  
  And
  
  
• In honor of Valentine's Day, a clue about the model, the dapper gent in the fur coat. He was an operatic bass who performed around the world, and whose best friend was Sergei Rachmaninoff. One of the singer's sons became an actor who did a lot of work in Hollywood although he lived in Italy. You may remember him from the 1987 love story Moonstruck, in which he exhorted the pack of dogs he was walking to look at the sky: "La bella luna! The moon brings the woman to the man. Capice?" For bonus bragging rights, who were these two entertaining men?

Please email me your guesses over the coming week. I'll post the winner and correct answer with next week's guessing game. Good luck!

Last Week's Answer:

Our born-in-Canada artist was Henrietta Shore (1880-1963), and we were looking at her California Data (ca. 1925). Incidentally, she and Edward Weston were indeed good friends, and only that (Weston was notorious for his extramarital affairs). Kudos to Lin, who emailed the correct answer first!

Some People Called Him Maurice

When illustrator Maurice Sendak died earlier this month, another light from my childhood ... well, mine and many millions of others ... was extinguished. I can honestly say that I loved his work all of my life, beginning with Ruth Krauss' A Hole Is to Dig (1952). Back in the day, we were eligible to buy books from The Weekly Reader program twice per year, and my first choice was What Do You Say, Dear? (1958) by Sesyle Joslin. Of course I had decent table manners (thank you, Mom), but what do you say when the Queen feeds you so much spaghetti that you don't fit in your chair anymore? And the illustrations were hysterically funny in the way that things are when one is six years old. That nailed it: I was Maurice's fan for life. So much so, and still, that I have written a humble biography of Maurice Sendak.

Decades later with children of my own, we revisited all of the Sendak titles I remembered and more. Do you think that he knew how much he meant to us? I hope so. I hope that as he slipped out of this world he sailed back over a year
and in and out of weeks
and through a day
and into the night of his very own room.
I hope he found his supper waiting for him. I hope it was still hot.

Guess the Artist

Your clues this week are:

• The artist was Indian, of the Mughal School, and active in the first half of the 17th Century.
• The European in the painting was a king whose mother and son were both killed by beheading.
• This is a detail from a larger painting that contains nine figures. The artist has painted a self-portrait at the bottom, as befit his social status.

And


• The main subject, not shown here, is a ruler to the right in the painting. Although you cannot see him, he is sitting on a fantastic throne. In real life, he had many, many European luxury items that were given to him in hopes of creating a commercial agreement. The gifts accomplished that goal, but the people behind them had designs on a much larger goal -- one that prove disastrous for India. For bonus points, who was the unseen ruler in this painting, and what was the collective name of the original gift givers?

Please email me your guesses over the coming week. I'll post the winner and correct answer with next week's guessing game. Good luck!

Last Week's Answer:

Judy M knew that last week's clues added up to Antonio Saura's Brigitte Bardot (1957). Great job, Judy!

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Guess the Artist

Your clues this week are:

• The artist was German and worked during both the High and Late Northern Renaissances, but stuck like cyanoacrylate glue to the Late Gothic style.
• A highly lucrative and prestigious career was flushed down the drain when our artist backed the wrong side in the German Peasants' War of 1524-26. In the aftermath, personal property including a plush house, vineyards, and a 40-employee workshop was confiscated. The artist, too, was confiscated for a bit: arrested, imprisoned, and as the story goes, tortured by having the bones of both hands thoroughly broken.
• This piece is alabaster, which is fairly easily worked but extremely easily "bruised" (struck by a tool with too much force, leaving an ugly mark). Our mystery artist was clearly Master enough to pay this delicate medium the respect it demands. However, alabaster -- or even those equally perfect marble, or regular and Solnhofen limestone -- sculptures are not why we remember the artist's name. In the art history canon, a towering limewood carving holds pride of place.

And


• The subject here is a Doctor of the Church, shown during a time in his life that he supposedly lived in a biblically-significant town presently governed by the Palestinian National Authority. His animal companion is not now and never has been native to this town, so there tends to be doubt that the subject ever laid eyes on it. It is impossible to believe our artist ever laid eyes on the animal, either. This looks like a clear-cut case of attempting to work from a written description and, as Strother Martin once drawled in Cool Hand Luke, "What we've got here is failure to communicate."

Please email me your guesses over the coming week. I'll post the winner and correct answer with next week's guessing game. Good luck!

Last Week's Answer:

The clues last week posed no problem to Sean. He knew that our artist was Henrietta Mary Ada Ward (English, 1832-1924), who became -- pay attention here -- Henrietta Mary Ada Ward Ward upon her marriage to the painter Edward Matthew Ward (English, 1816-1879). Her painting The Princes in the Tower (1861) was charming, wasn't it? Well ... except, of course, for the fact that it reminds us the boys mysteriously disappeared. Congratulations to you, Sean, and thanks to all who participated!

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Guess the Artist

Your clues this week are:

• The artist was an American, but wasn't born in the United States of America.
• A prolific painter and contributor to the gene pool, the artist created over 1,000 portraits and 16 offspring -- 11 of whom survived to adulthood.
• Besides art, our artist was also proficient in the areas of militia captain, saddler, taxidermist, political radical, watch maker, carpenter, legislative representative, silversmith, abolitionist, optometrist, upholsterer, museum founder, naturalist, sign painter, dentist, and spouse (by virtue of having married three times).

And


• The sitter in this portrait was elected to both houses of Congress, served as the Secretary of State, was the first person to lie in state in the United States Capitol, and, perhaps most importantly, introduced the mint julep to Washington, D.C.

Please email me your guesses over the coming week. I'll post the winner and correct answer with next week's guessing game. Good luck!

Last Week's Answer:

I was happy that Alain was the first to respond correctly to the clues last week. He knew that the artist was Melchor Perez de Holguin (Bolivian, ca. 1665-after 1732) and this painting, Saint Michael Archangel (1708), is supposed to show the War in Heaven. (I still think it would have been helpful if Holguin had painted ... oh, I don't know ... adult-sized legs on the sword-wielding Michael, since he is battting Satan, who is super powerful and probably fights dirty, but that's just me.) Bravo to you and your persistence, Alain!

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Guess the Artist

Your clues this week are:

• The artist is American and studied at Berkeley ... but not studio art. Engineering.
• Part of the 1950s Beat Generation, the artist's friends included Burroughs, Kerouac, Ferlinghetti, Ginsberg, Kienholz, and Rauschenberg.
• Sixty years later, the artist remains a staunch beatnik and continues to hold rent parties.

And


• You are looking at an assemblage here. If you were to look at any of the artist's other works, they, too, would be assemblages. Why? Because there is poetry in found objects, Daddy-O. (If you can dig it, snap your fingers.)

Please email me your guesses over the coming week. I'll post the winner and correct answer with next week's guessing game. Good luck!

Last Week's Answer:

No one answered last week's clues successfully. For extra credit, please head to Grace Crowley: Being Modern, a biographical essay from the National Gallery of Australia.

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Guess the Artist

Your clues this week are:

• The artist was a French Huguenot, born and raised in Switzerland following the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes.
• The artist was famous for portraiture ... a long time ago. Today the artist's name is fairly obscure.
• An inveterate traveler, the artist spent four years in Constantinople and wore Turkish clothing (including a fez) forever afterwards.
  
  And
  
  
• Among the artist's many sitters were: Pope Clement XII; Bonnie Prince Charlie; the Empress Maria Theresa; Madame de Pompadour; Augusta, Princess of Wales; the Earls of Sandwichand Bessborough; the French royal family; and the House of Orange.

Please email me your guesses over the coming week. I'll post the winner and correct answer with next week's guessing game. Good luck!

Last Week's Answer:

Last week's winning answer came courtesy of Jeanne, who knew that the artist's name was Jan Gossaert (Flemish, ca. 1472-1532), also known as Mabuse. His painting The Three Children of Christian II of Denmark (1526) depicts exactly that. The youngest child was Christina of Denmark (1521-1590), who actually had two marriages: first, by proxy, to Francesco II Sforza, Duke of Milan (1495-1535), who died before the couple even met, and second to Francis I, Duke of Lorraine (1517-1545). Well done, Jeanne!

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Guess the Artist

Your clues this week are:

• The artist was British, a member of the Royal Academy, and active in the second half of the 19th Century.
• The artist had five brothers, two of whom were noteworthy. One was a 13th (and end of the line) Baronet, and the other was assassinated in Dublin on May 6, 1882.
• The goats in this painting are truly an Old breed: they date back to the most recent "ice age," which hit its peak around 20,000 years ago. Unfortunately, the breed is very nearly extinct in 2012. One feral herd remains and, in a country that has been in financial crisis since 2008, funds for a captive breeding program are not high priority.

And


• The setting for this picture is an island. You may now be saying, "There are over 180,000 islands on Planet Earth, you fiend!" Not usually a sadist, moi, here are three hints to help you narrow things down. First, the place is lousy with heather, which is what the girl has rolled up in her apron. Second, it is rocky as all get out. So much so that the natives built dry stone walls around their plots of land, rather than planting hedgerows. Third, there is a pony named after one part of this island.

Please email me your guesses over the coming week. I'll post the winner and correct answer with next week's guessing game. Good luck!

Last Week's Answer:

The clues last week elicited three correct responses, each of which contributed a little something different. Tui knew that the artist was Martiros Saryan (or Sarian, or even Sar'yan), an Armenian who lived from 1880 to 1972, and gave the title of the painting. Natia sent a charming note that Mt. Ararat was so easy for her that she was compelled to play. Alison then chimed in after figuring out the Armenian village is Byurakan, hence the painting's title Ararat from Byurakan, 1957. (And by the way, I was not kidding about the overall ugliness of Սուրբ Յովհաննես եկեղեցի.) Thank you very much, ladies. Job well done!

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Guess the Artist

Your clues this week are:

• The artist was American, and became fiercely anti-Federalist, anti-British, anti-Catholic, and anti-immigration as an adult.
• The artist trained primarily in London, both under the tutelage of Benjamin West and Washington Allston, and at the Royal Academy.
• This is not the artist's most famous painting. In fact, even the most famous painting s/he created does not account for the artist's fame today. (Try being - .... . .. -. ...- . -. - --- .-. --- ..-. -- --- .-. ... . -.-. --- -.. . instead.)

And


• The sitter here was newly married, and would be dead within a decade after five full-term pregnancies. Both she and her husband came from well-connected and prosperous old South Carolinian families, but not so old that their ancestors hadn't immigrated to the Colonies from elsewhere. The sitter's husband was descended from people who fled France prior to the Edict of Nantes in 1598, and settled in the present-day Charleston area. Can you tell me the name by which those refugees are collectively known?

Please email me your guesses over the coming week. I'll post the winner and correct answer with next week's guessing game. Good luck!

Last Week's Answer:

Readers either knew the answer to last week's clues immediately or never. The artist was Vincent van Gogh, who attempted to make oil on canvas look exactly like a Japanese woodblock print. (It was a valiant effort, too ... if you examine this painting closely, he clamped down hard on his natural tendency towards impasto.) Of the slew of correct answers, Katzcando was first in with a text message. A big round of e-applause to you, Katzcando, and thanks to everyone else who played!

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Guess the Artist

Your clues this week are:

• The artist was not born in the US, but became a citizen in 1920.
• The Art Students League in New York, with instructors William Merritt Chase and Robert Henri, and Heatherly's Art School in London were where the artist was trained.
• The photographer Edward Weston (1886-1958) was a great friend of the artist's. They were both fascinated by capturing the art-nature connection, and wound up living near one another in the flora and fauna surrounding Carmel, California.
  
  And
  
  
• Some well-intentioned -- but criminally stupid -- friends had the artist committed to a mental institution after noticing the artist's studio was messy. (As if tidy artists' studios are the norm!) The friends then apparently forgot what they had done, because the artist languished there, forgotten, until death provided an escape. This incident may or may not have given rise to the expression, "With friends like that, who needs enemies?"

Please email me your guesses over the coming week. I'll post the winner and correct answer with next week's guessing game. Good luck!

Last Week's Answer:

Who knew how many of you are fans of Gaetano Previati (Italian, 1852 -1920)? I obviously did not, but quickly learned. Paola pounced on the correct answer in record time, well before Ms. Six-Time-Zones-Earlier-than-Rome could even drag herself out of bed. Very well done, Paola. After my brain finally woke up, it registered great admiration for your art-historic knowledge base!

Guess the Artist

Your clues this week are:

• The artist was American, born on a Midwestern farm towards the end of the 19th century. After spending years in a large metropolitan area, the artist was compelled to move to Northern New Mexico for the same reason so many other artists did: the quality of the sunlight.
• The artist and a friend were founders of a painting group based on a quote by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). WWII put a permanent end to the group, as it temporarily did to many other pleasant pursuits.
• The two pine trees tell us this is an early work. As a long career progressed, the artist shifted to completely nonobjective subject matter.

And


• Cliff dwellings in the American Southwest, like those seen here, were relatively easy to carve because the chosen rock was and is high in soft tuff (compressed volcanic ash). The Puebloan cliff dwellings in Northern New Mexico come from tuff deposited by one of only six supervolcanoes on the planet, and its caldera is "small" (as supervolcano calderas go). The United States can in fact boast(?) that it contains three of the six supervolcanoes. For bonus points: of those three, which one do we especially NOT want to blow its top for fear of Pompeii-izing a big chunk of the Lower 48?

Please email me your guesses over the coming week. I'll post the winner and correct answer with next week's guessing game. Good luck!

Last Week's Answer:

Mary in Moweaqua was the first reader to reassemble the clues last week into the correct answer: Augustus Nicholas Burke (1838-1891), whose 1868 Connemara Girl hangs in the National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin. Augustus' oldest brother, Theobald, was the 13th Baronet Burke of Glinsk, a title that became extinct with his death. Another brother, Thomas, was Permanent Under Secretary (essentially the Lt. Governor of Ireland) until the infamous Phoenix Park Murders of 1882.

The island, of course, is Ireland. Connemara, the western half of Co. Galway, is the region that contains the last of the Old Irish goats and the flourishing Connemara pony ... which is one of those "ponies" large enough for polo. Much applause to you, Mary, and many thanks to all who participated!

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Happy Us Day Mothers

Thomas Kinkade 19582012

Painter Thomas Kinkade died Friday, April 6, 2012. His work made many people happy, and that is all that truly needs to be said.

Image credit: Painter Thomas Kinkade poses at the 'We Are Family' recording session at the Chalice Recording Studios on November 22, 2005 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Michael Buckner/Getty Images)

Was Leonardo a Vegetarian

Since I recently read too many a lot of books about Leonardo, and it is Lent, AND some bloggers are beginning to assert that Leonardo was vegan (?!), it seemed like a good time to investigate the claim that Leonardo was a vegetarian. Big mistake! Although "Leonardo was a vegetarian" is all over the internet, trying to find factual evidence requires some serious digging. As in: two earth movers and a steam shovel tearing off the top of a mountain-type digging. Hours and hours of reading more books, only to find a handful of (mostly circumstantial) evidence. Not sure what I expected after 500 years, but, you know. It still felt like a failed expedition.

Anyhow, since the hard part was done, here are the facts laid out for you in "Was Leonardo a Vegetarian?" You will have to make up your own mind. The only things of which I am 100% certain are that (1) Leonardo absolutely, positively was not a vegan, and (2) my head is still throbbing from Kindle fatigue.

1812 A Nation Emerges

Say, look at this guy. His name is James Madison, he of the Virginia state legislature, the Philadelphia Convention, the Federalist Papers, the founding of the Democratic-Republican party, and, oh yes, the fourth President of the United States. When Gilbert Stuart painted this 1804 portrait, Madison was Thomas Jefferson's Secretary of State and had just supervised the Louisiana Purchase. Eight years into the future, on on June 18, 1812, then-President Madison would declare war on the British Empire. Which leads us to this image gallery from the exhibition 1812: A Nation Emerges. Please enjoy the featured works; this is a rare instance where the pictures are available long before the show closes ... and only then because I left myself sticky notes all over the teetering tons of art-historic stuff stacked on my desk. For once.

Image Caption:

Gilbert Stuart (American, 1755-1828)
James Madison, 1804
Oil on canvas
29 1/2 x 24 9/16 in. (74.9 x 62.4 cm)
G1945-23
The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation

Vasari Gets an Endoscopy

I caught the premiere of Finding The Lost da Vinci on the National Geographic Channel earlier, and urge you to tune in to one of its sure-to-be-many repeat airings. The lost work in question is Leonardo's mural The Battle of Anghiari (1505), long thought to exist on a wall behind the wall on which Giorgio Vasari painted the Battle of Marciano in Val di Chiana (1563) in Florence's Palazzo Vecchio. We know the Leonardo was there; supporting documentation abounds, and artists were able to copy it for over 50 years. What we don't know is whether it was destroyed and the area repainted, or if Vasari had it walled off. Enter scientist Dr. Maurizio Seracini, Director of the University of California San Diego's Center of Interdisciplinary Science for Art, Architecture and Archaeology.

Dr. Seracini has devoted nearly 40 years of his life trying to track down The Battle of Anghiari. He made many trips to Florence to scan the walls of the Hall of the 500, the area in the Palazzo Vecchio where the Leonardo mural was located. Armed with years of data, and a glaring anomaly in standard wall construction (a "dead" space behind part of the visible wall), Dr. Seracini was finally given the go-ahead to drill 14 very, very small holes through the Vasari mural in two weeks at the end of November 2011. Are you with me so far?

Well, what happened next perfectly illustrates the politics of the Art World. Dr. Seracini was given permission by

Infinite Jest

When a review of Infinite Jest - Caricature and Satire from Leonardo to Levine (on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art until March 4, 2012) begins with, "A particularly apt choice of subject for a museum special exhibition as we begin a presidential election year ..." I'm already anticipating the pleasure of a good, cleansing laugh. (Seriously. Hasn't it mostly seemed like caricature and satire so far? I keep checking the headlines to make sure they don't say, "From the Staff of The Onion.") Well, Gail S. Myhre does not disappoint. She walks us from the entrance at Gallery 691 to the exit at 693, pointing out those artists -- known and unknown -- who gleefully kicked the pedestals out from under the high and pompous. Look at the image above, for example. It's the pants-less, 1777 version of, "All hat and no cattle."

If you have the chance and a sense of humor, don't hesitate to visit this show while it lasts. If that proves impossible, you're sure to enjoy Gail's review of Infinite Jest in place of a trip.

Image Credit:

Anonymous, British
Top and Tail, 1777
Etching, hand colored
Plate: 12 3/4 x 7 7/8 in. (32.3 x 19.9 cm)
The Elisha Whittlesey Collection, The Elisha Whittlesey Fund, 1959
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York