Fine Arts News

The oil painting Cider Making by William Sidney Mount is on display at The Met Fifth Avenue in Gallery 758.

At first glance, Broken Eggs, a 1756 oil painting by Jean-Baptiste Greuze, seems to depict a fairly innocuous domestic scene of a young woman on the floor next to a basket of broken eggs while a young man is being scolded by the family matriarch. The subtext, however, is a little different, because the broken eggs symbolize the loss of the young woman's virginity.
"Eighteenth-century people would've found this painting very funny," says culinary tour guide Angelis Nannos. "Food can symbolize many things in art."

more...

Heihachiro Fukuda (福田平八郎, Fukuda Heihachirō) (1892-1974)
Irises 1934

These April Showers by Alex Howitt

From left: Aladdin Sane, Thin White Duke, Ziggy Stardust, Major Tom, The Man Who Fell to Earth, and Halloween Jack are Bowie-inspired cocktails made by BKW by Brooklyn Winery.

Matthew Yokobosky finds food inspirational - which is perhaps not entirely surprising, considering that as an art curator, it's his job to make connections between seemingly disparate objects, just as a chef creates a cohesive dish out of contrasting ingredients.

So when New York City restaurateur and chef Saul Bolton suggested developing a themed menu and a series of dinners around the "David Bowie Is" exhibition now on view at the Brooklyn Museum, Yokobosky was intrigued.
"I was knee-deep in research for the show," says Yokobosky, who selected 100 additional items for the collection's final stop in Brooklyn. The exhibition has been traveling the world since starting its journey at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London in 2013. "I had just added a menu that Bowie drew by hand for a New Year's dinner in Berlin in 1978, so it was really perfect timing when Saul suggested the idea. And we actually know a lot about some of Bowie's favorite foods."

more...

The new exhibition Moundverse Infants at Temple Contemporary in Philadelphia centers around artist Trenton Doyle Hancock's toy dolls. Torpedo Man, the superhero of his artistic cosmology, is portrayed on the left.

When Trenton Doyle Hancock was 10 years old, he made up a superhero: Torpedo Boy. The character has become the center of a complicated cosmos Hancock has developed obsessively for more than 30 years. There are drawings, paintings, sculptures — and now, a plush stuffed doll.

"Well, he looks like me," Hancock says. "He's a black guy. His face is basically my face."

more...

Fifty years after his LOVE painting made Robert Indiana a sensation, the artist has died at the age of 89.



Indiana's two-row rendering of the word, with its tilted "O," became one of the most recognizable works of modern art in the world. The famous design emerged from deep influences in Indiana's life, from his early exposure to religion to his father's career.

Indiana died Saturday at his home in Vinalhaven, Maine. His death came a day after a controversy emerged over control of his work, with a federal lawsuit alleging that Indiana had been isolated from his loved ones, and that his art had been exploited for profit. The case involves an art publisher and a caretaker who had been granted power of attorney, as The New York Times reports.


more...

Laurent Parcelier painting

PARCELIER Laurent was born in 1962 in Auvergne. After studying Applied Arts Duperré in Paris, he started in the comic. He published 8 albums at Casterman. Meanwhile he began to devote himself to painting. It exclusively since 1996. Since that date, after several shows and exhibitions he exhibited in several galleries in France and the USA.

If we had two words, not one more set for the work of Laurent PARCELIER, it would be poetry and light. Which might be added, luxury, calm and voluptuousness, love of nature, quiet places and warm family atmosphere.

Poet of light, the poet is assured. Blink eyes slightly, place in front of one of his paintings and watch it at your leisure, you will only see sparks of light everywhere.

The exhibition "Beyond the Streets" focuses on the studio work street artists created later in their careers. It has more 40,000-square feet of paintings, murals, photos, installations and even old video games. (NPR gave "Beyond the Streets" a small amount of support as a media partner.)
"This is vandalism as contemporary art, or contemporary art as vandalism, depending on how you want to look at it," says curator Roger Gastman, co-author of The History of American Graffiti. "Street art has become such a buzzword, and lot of the motivation for doing a show like this was to show who the true artists respected by people inside the culture are."

more...

Musicians and music from South Asia have influenced contemporary music for generations. Norwegian Wood, anyone?

But do the people from a specific culture own it? Who can and should use this music? And where is the line between appreciation and appropriation in art?

What should we make of practices when people who are not of South Asian descent put on a bindi, like pop star Selena Gomez did during a 2013 performance of her song “Come and Get It?”

more...

Jackson Pollock's painting Number 1, 1949, is a swirl of multi-colored, spaghettied paint, dripped, flung and slung across a 5-by-8-foot canvas. It's a textured work — including nails and a bee (we'll get to that later) — and in the nearly 70 years since its creation, it's attracted a fair bit of dust, dirt and grime.

That's where conservator Chris Stavroudis comes in: His job is to clean the painting using swabs, solvents, and tiny brushes. For the last several months, he's been hard at work, once a week, in full view of the public, in a gallery at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.


more...