A Fabergé egg (Russian: Яйца Фаберже́; yaytsa faberzhe) is one of a limited number of jeweled eggs created by Peter Carl Fabergé and his company between ...
The House of Fabergé (Russian: Дом Фаберже) is a jewellery firm founded in 1842 in St. Petersburg, Imperial Russia, by Gustav Faberge, using the accented ...
Happy birthday to Peter Carl Fabergé, who was a visionary and talented artisan and jeweler. In 1872, he took over his father's small jewelry atelier in Saint Petersburg and within forty years had transformed it into the world's largest enterprise of its kind, employing some five hundred craftsmen and designers. http://met.org/1OSunQ4
House of Carl Fabergé | Imperial Caucasus Egg | Maker: Workmaster: Mikhail Evlampievich Perkhin (Russian, 1860–1903) | Artist:Miniatures by Konstantin Yakovlevich Krijitski (died 1911) | 1893
Did you know today is World Egg Day? Celebrate by visiting a selection of works by Fabergé, including Imperial Easter Eggs, on long-term loan. http://met.org/1skQjeN
At Venice Biennale, Germany Makes a Case for Welcoming Refugees
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The German pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale. The curators knocked out large openings, shown at left and at rear, as part of their exhibit focusing on housing and integration of refugees and asylum-seekers.CreditFelix Torkar
An interior view of the installation at the German pavilion. The curators worked with the author Doug Saunders, whose 2011 book “Arrival City” studied the effects of migration.CreditFelix Torkar
American artist Ellsworth Kelly was born on this day in 1923. In his work Kelly abstracts the forms in his paintings from observations of the real world, such as shadows cast by trees or the spaces between architectural elements. In 1996 the Guggenheim hosted his career retrospective, which filled our rotunda with color. Learn more:http://gu.gg/2YHi300L6qe
The artist Ellsworth Kelly died on Sunday, at the age of ninety-two.CREDITPHOTOGRAPH BY ALEX MAJOLI AND DARIA BIRANG
The paintings of Ellsworth Kelly, who died on Sunday, at the age of ninety-two, have the suddenness of miracles, and the improbability. Their emphatic shapes and clarion colors, in myriad formats, are unreasonably rational and ascetically luxuriant. No modern movement or general style—not minimalism, Pop, or Op, not geometric or hard-edge or color-field abstraction—usefully contains them. You are on your own when you look at them. I think that their open secret is innocence, maintained at fantastic levels of talent, dedication, and savoir-faire.
Like a lot of people over the seven-decade course of Kelly’s career, I came to appreciate his greatness slowly, even grudgingly, and then all at once, and permanently. His independence was a problem for me as a tyro aesthete in the sixties. It was hipness-proof. His paintings weren’t a kind of art. They seemed to present themselves as art in essence, immaculately conceived. They made me feel, precisely, dumb, with nothing to say.
My epiphany occurred thirty-some years ago, in a now defunct uptown gallery, with a white, shaped canvas—an elongated fan shape, gently curved along the top. It was probably about ten or twelve feet long, though in my memory it feels very much longer. The unhurried curve got me. It was like the horizon of a world that made a non-world of all of the space outside it. While my eye was tracing it, I felt a brief, intense flash of something that I can’t name: a perception of perception, perhaps. A short circuit in the brain. And yet the curve was just a contour of a wall-hung object. I wasn’t surprised, though a little spooked and lonely, to observe the apparent obliviousness of other people in the gallery.
Who could make such a thing happen?
Kelly’s story is now a legend: the art-smitten, bird-watching, shy, gay kid from Newburgh, New York, who served in the “Ghost Army”—camouflage experts who dissembled Allied military deployments before and after D-Day—and was staked by the G.I. Bill to six years in Paris, from 1948 to 1954. There he absorbed Matisse’s mergers of drawing and color, Arp’s methods of composing by chance, and other modern-art innovations. He distilled them into a mode of chaste abstraction based on observed fact: details of architecture, happenstances of light and shadow. Call it Ghost Art, a translation from reality into something fully real, itself, only different.
Being in Paris—where his chagrin at his bad French made him decline a chance to talk with Picasso—Kelly missed out on the glory years of Abstract Expressionism in New York. How lucky was that, for him and us? When finally he moved here, to indigent digs on the downtown waterfront, it was with faint hope of fitting into an art scene dominated by the painterly rhetoric of Pollock, de Kooning, and Rothko, which would surely have distracted him if he had encountered it earlier. Even when emerging Pop art and minimalism made him seem, retrospectively, a prophet of their audacious and reductive ways, he stood apart. He had French taste on the chassis of a pragmatic American soul.
Some great art enfolds us in sensuous pleasures, making us happier, and some snaps us to rigorous attention, making us better. Kelly’s does both at once, if you let it.
In honor of Water a Flower Day, enjoy Georges Seurat’s vibrant painting of a gardener. By 1882–83, the date of this work, he had begun to abandon earth tones in favor of brighter hues.http://met.org/1P4OfVE
Georges Seurat (French, 1859–1891) | The Gardener | 1882–83
Happy birthday to Georges Seurat, born on this day in 1859. Celebrate by learning about Neo-Impressionism and viewing a slideshow of his works on the Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History.
"Having absorbed the colour theories of scientists, he was covering his paintings with carefully positioned dabs of pure colour that would take form only through the eyes of viewers . . . . Unintentionally, he invented the pixel."
This oil sketch (above) is one of several Seurat made for his monumental painting, 'Bathers at Asnières', of 1884 (below). He's focused on the figures rather than the landscape setting.
Seurat's 'Bathers at Asnières' was painted before he invented his famous pointillist technique, but he did later rework parts of this picture using dots of colour. For example, dots of orange and blue were added to the boy's hat. Find out more: http://bit.ly/1CB0eSR
'A lively and most readable account of Seurat's life and artistic development... Mr. Russell contributes some important original insights.' -- The Burlington Magazine
Georges-Pierre Seurat was a French Post-Impressionist painter and draftsman. He is noted for his innovative use of drawing media and for devising the painting techniques known as chromoluminarism and pointillism. Wikipedia
Neoimpressionist painter Georges Seurat was born on this date in 1859. Leader of the movement that used pointillism to create richer colors, Seurat applied his interest in science to his art. He used a method that he referred to as "chromoluminarism," dabbing short strokes of contrasting colors on the canvas so that, from a distance, they would appear as a fuller palette of colors. Seurat's masterpiece, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, took two years to complete. Today, it hangs in the Art Institute of Chicago.
哲學與詩之戰爭
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"Some say they see poetry in my paintings; I see only science." — Georges Seurat
The atmospheric quality of George Seurat’s “The Lighthouse at Honfleur” is the result of an optical illusion. Seurat meticulously juxtaposed minute touches of unmixed pigments that combine visually when viewed from a distance. This technique, called pointillism or divisionism, was invented by Seurat as an objective, scientific form of impressionism. He selected hues corresponding to the perceived local color, the color of light, the complement of the local color (for shadows), and the color of nearby areas.
Seurat debuted his masterpiece, “A Sunday on La Grande Jatte,” in the 1886 Impressionist exhibition in Paris amid great controversy. Following the event, Seurat spent the summer relaxing at Honfleur, a coastal resort near La Havre, where he painted this placid scene of the local lighthouse.
Take a closer look at Seurat’s technique using the zoom feature on our website: http://1.usa.gov/1DBBVkM
Georges Seurat, “The Lighthouse at Honfleur,” 1886, oil on canvas, Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon
OVERVIEW
Seurat showed works similar to The Lighthouse at Honfleur in 1886 at the eighth and last impressionist exhibition, an event that established him as a leading modernist. Based on new theories about optical characteristics of light and color, Seurat invented a technique called pointillism, or divisionism, as a scientifically objective form of impressionism. Seurat juxtaposed minute touches of unmixed pigments in hues corresponding to the perceived local color, the color of light, the complement of the local color for shadow, and reflected color of nearby areas, which in principle will combine visually when viewed from the proper distance. This meticulous technique, less random than impressionism, enabled Seurat to record appearances more accurately while preserving the fresh, natural qualities he admired in impressionist works.
Following the intensive studio campaign leading to the exhibition of Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande-Jatte (Art Institute of Chicago), a controversial work also shown at the 1886 exhibition, Seurat spent the summer at Honfleur, a coastal resort near Le Havre. He relaxed by painting local landmarks such as the hospice and lighthouse in The Lighthouse at Honfleur. Balancing warm blond tones in the sand and lighthouse with cool blues in the sky and water and constructing a stable composition around the horizontals of the jetty and horizon crossed by the vertical tower, Seurat created a work of majestic serenity.
![Georges Seurat, born today in 1859, only lived to be 32. He painted this work when he was 27. http://bit.ly/1zJiUeA
[Georges-Pierre Seurat. "Evening, Honfleur." 1886]](https://fbcdn-sphotos-f-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-xfp1/t31.0-8/q88/s720x720/10620007_10153644893647281_8128112524394955446_o.jpg)
