Dali House

Charles X hands out the honours at the 1824 Salon at the Louvre in this painting of paintings by Francois-Joseph Heim. You can see it at the Louvre today, which isn’t nearly this crowded anymore.

Online murmurs of approval over a 2005 exhibition at New York’s Jewish Museum might leave one thinking that modern art and gossip have always been kissing cousins, or at least snuggle bunnies. I found the reviews of “The Power of Conversation: Jewish Women and Their Salons” inadvertently chuckle-worthy, though, of course, my mirth wasn’t exactly politically correct.

There’s something about salons anyway that reeks of absurdity. The most famous art salons – in Paris during the 19th century – were nothing more than droll competitions, with exclusion often far more damaging to an artist’s self-esteem than inclusion was any benefit. At best the salons were a shot at stardom, at worst a corrupt tool of elitist social climbers and hidden-agenda fat cats.

Leaving aside Leninist dialectic, though, the big Parisian salons were very much the Oscars of their time. All juried art competitions are risky sprints with dodgy rationales, but for generations, the Académie des beaux-arts’ official Salon de Paris involved major suck-up time, a fevered popularity campaign and, with the prize in hand, more viewers coming through the box office and thus more money in the bank, the better to mount next year’s entry. See the rest.

If this really is the death mask of James Dean, he looked a lot like Brad Pitt, wouldn’t you say?

I was thinking about having a death mask done (after I’m dead, of course) when all of a sudden I heard some horrifying news: JMW Turner’s death mask had been stolen!
Well, actually, the “news” was that it still hasn’t been recovered four years after it was reported missing, and furthermore, it probably went missing sometime in the mid-1980s, and anyway, there’s another one in safe keeping.

If all this sounds stupid, don’t blame me, because the Royal Academy of Arts in London started it. It finally dawned on the people who run the place – where old Turner once held sway as president 150-odd years earlier – that they hadn’t seen his ugly mug in ages. See the rest.

Theodore Géricault’s “The Raft of the Medusa”, 1819
Click the image to see it much larger.

Most compelling in history? Those are my words. There is monstrous magic in this huge argument in oil, in the public reaction to it, in the political ramifications, in the vast creative influence it had in its time, in the echoes that resonate to this day … and that’s all before you get to the chilling story behind it.

Prick a hole in the Internet and so much commentary about Theodore Géricault’s “The Raft of the Medusa” flows out that you find yourself afloat at sea as well. The words fly in all directions. One neocon has an elaborate thesis on the web that uses the artwork to scoff at enemies of economic globalisation. I think it deserves more respect. See the rest.

“Une âme au ciel” (”A Soul in Heaven”) by William Bouguereau, 1878
Click the image to see it much larger.

Pretty feisty bunch down at the Art Renewal Centre, where they’re giddily passionate about the 19th-century realists and won’t spare a poop for anything more modern. Cantankerously building barricades in preparation for an anticipated jihad against the Establishment is Fred Ross, the centre’s chairman, who’s got a major rant going on that seems almost perverse in the way it’s trying to turn art history upside down. But, he has his points (and some terrific art to back him up). See the rest.

This is a companion piece to my Google Earth travelogue about the great English impressionist. The GE post is here.

“The painter of light”, “the great pyrotechnist”, one of the finest landscape artists in English history, if not the best, Joseph Mallord William Turner produced more than 20,000 paintings and drawings in his lifetime, and his frequent rambles across Europe happen to make him a perfect subject for Google Earth.

JMW Turner was celebrated in his own time, and deluged with commissions, but he was also the Jackson Pollock of his day, scathingly reviled for “hurling soapsuds and whitewash” at canvases with a mop – even Queen Victoria thought him mad – and his foul temper and reclusiveness lost him many friends. Just five foot four inches tall, he was hobbit-like in size, but he was the artistic giant of the early 19th century. See the rest.