For me this week it's Mondrian:



It is of course a thing of beauty but I wonder what impelled him to reduce the "painting" to these basic lines...

^^ inability to draw?

I love Rembrandt, particularly his portraits.

Call that a Rubik Cube? It's rubbish!

the few surrealist paintings i've seen up close have blown me away. also some fine old dutch masters in the victorian art gallery, the detail and depth is phenomenal. so i suppose i'm a fan of realism and surrealism, though i like abstract too.
this is a fave:

song of love by rene magritte.
i love galleries, me.

I like his trees:





Not wholly, but in part, because they actually look really like trees.

Oh the boy could paint for sure. And the abstracts work wonderfully well too.

Not directed at you NC but I do wonder why people who would be adventurous in their choice of music/books react so strongly to abstract art along the lines of "Hrumphh my chihahua could do that. And better too!".

The Blunt Children by Johann Zoffany. Dunno why really, I just love it.

They have all these progs on TV about art but the one that blew me away was the episode of Imagine where they focused on ordinary people who collected art, what they liked and why. There was some old mod on who had a picture commissioned.

It was just really inspiring to hear ordinary folk speak so lovingly and passionately about the art they loved, rather than some 'expert' go off on one.

Art galleries are wondeful places I agree.

I just borrowed a book about Lucien Freud from the library. He is an amazing painter and has worked a bit with Leigh bowery (very slight Fall connection).

Made me think of Gainsborough, who I much admire.

Hans Arp: 'Constellation According to the Laws of Chance', 1930ish.

(Painted wood, about three feet wide and it's in the Tate, if they've got it out.)

I'm obsessed with Turner at the moment - even though he was absolute pants at painting people.

Mondrian hated the colour green apparently, no place for it in his world.

The assumption that people like Mondrian do what they do because they can't paint is most often very wrong - the musical parallel to this is Diamanda Galas, who used to start off her concerts with a pitch-perfect rendition of an operatic aria accompanying herself at the piano, as if to say 'look you fuckers, I can sing you know, but instead I choose to do the following' and then screaming her head off for the next two hours :lol:

This seems to say everything that needs to be said about life in an entertaining and unpretentious way; plus it's by the greatest artist of the 20th century to boot...

:lol:





x

Thanks, that's given me an idea....

What I love about Turner is that even when he was doing commissioned work involving people in it, they only got the bottom third at most, the rest of it was given over to Nature.

Gerhard Richter is an another perennial favourite - always different, always different :rolleyes:

I'm calling your bluff on that :lol: :unsure:

There's a Paul Nash exhibition just opened at Dulwich, I'm gonna pop down this week. Anyone been?

Digging Chagall's stuff right now

No, but it's always worth a trip anyway, provided the weather's better than today.

Yes oh yes.

I find this one really Lynchian but then I suppose I would. :D

the thing is with Rothko, for example, I don't "get it" but I do quite like some of the paintings.

He did one of the stained-glass windows in Chichester Cathedral, which makes it well worth a visit.

The thing is I wonder what there is to get. Like the Mondrian in the first post do you need to worry about meaning (and is there any?) or just appreciate it for what it is.

I find Rothko's stuff has a tremendous physical effect when you see it in the flesh (sorry, prints and postcards don't count), Mondrian also. And any good painter really.

It's those ones where you have to know that a red shoe was symbolic of a failing marriage at the time etc. that are are "interesting" but don't really have that 'oomph'. On the other hand I love 18th Century stuff like Fragonard and Hogarth which is jam-packed with that sort of thing, so... :rolleyes:

Exactly.

It's there to be enjoyed.

But people search for meaning. It's a natural reaction. And then they crash into Abstract Art.

but people on The Review Show know what it all means..don't they?

:lol:

:applaud:

But they do, don't they? :unsure:

I think we first appreciate art on a very basic but fundemental level. We enjoy colours, the turn of a well crafted sentence, a melody. We then construct meaning which is fun, challenging and can, in certain circumstances, be very powerful.


Obvious, mundane even but people sometimes get it the wrong way round.

It's like your earlier comparison between 'difficult' music and painting, except maybe this is more a case of comparing music with meaningful/narrative lyrics and instrumental music. People don't freak out over Beethoven because they don't know what it means do they?

I'm agreeing with every word, and even the gaps and spaces between the words. The fact that he was utterly plagiarised by that goddam fraud Lichtenstein really gets my goat.

Hmm. I'll get shot here but I don't think there is that much 'meaning' to be had. Apart from perhaps the 'Pastoral', it's one of the reasons I love him. I don't ever imagine artists of the eighteenth century ever thought their works would be tirelessly poured over. I suspect it would have filled them with dread.

This, by Ribera, is breathtaking:

I agree. You may attach "meaning" to a piece of music but that does not imply there is meaning in the music.

Eggs-actly! :thumbsup:

This is my favourite portrait of all time, it moves me so much, I can't tell you .

Fuck, it won't load!..............

Lichtenstein isn't all funny books, ya know. :wub: