Faves

    Bay of Baiae, JMW Turner, 1823, Tate Gallery

Turner is often said to be a precursor of the Impressionists.  There is some truth to this, but not much.  The Impressionists were literalists.  They did not paint what they could not see.  Turner, on the other hand, while perfectly capable of the most literal interpretations, loved injecting imaginary figures, geography and events into his paintings.  In the exquisite painting above, that's no fashionable picnic party on the left, its Apollo and the Sibyl.  You don't see classical Gods cavorting across the canvases of Monet or Renoir. The idealized landscape was what they fought against.

Turner was one of a kind.  His early work was very much in the tradition of Claude, but after he visited Italy in 1817, Turner struck out on his own path. 

In any case, Turner doesn't really reproduce.  I've seen the painting at the Tate and it has a lightness and color you don't see here.

Faves: Hiroshige

    Swimming carp - Utagawa Hiroshige - click the image for big version

Hiroshige is my favorite of the great 19th century Japanese artists.  His paintings and woodblocks have a unique delicacy and balance.  Others, like Hokusai, are better known, but I like Hiroshige best.

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      Henry VIII 1536 by Holbein - click image for large size

Henry VIII 1494 - 1547.  A great king of the kind nations cannot afford to have too often.  He had the great luck to sit for Holbein, one of the best portrait painters in European history.

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This man is a brilliant genius.  He does vector renderings of military aircraft.  These two statements may seem contradictory.  I assure you the characterization is not made lightly. WS_Clave can somehow bring out the inner beauty of airplanes in a way that's rare to see in any type of technical illustration.  His illustrations remind me of Haeckel and other great nature illustrators from the 18th and 19th centuries.  Pages of F-16s in various colour schemes may not be your thing, but that doesn't lessen his achievement.  These pictures, to me at least, have the same magic stillness as Renaissance alter pieces.  

Faves: Marylin

       click image for a printable size
It took me a long time to get Warhol.  Robert Hughes helpfully explained that this is not a portrait of Marylin Monroe, its a sign that says Marylin Monroe.  The industrial quality of the image makes sense in this context.  Iconic is the point, and that's what its become. 

Faves: The Birth of Venus

There isn't much left to say about this painting.  I think entire books have been written about it.  There are two things I like about it.  First is that it is almost perfect.  Perfect is death.  A blank canvas is perfect.  Its that zone near perfection that's exciting.  When the artist holds something back, or doesn't explain a key point.  Most artists never get there, or can't stay long if they do make it.  I know this from experience.  Not all great art inhabits this zone.  But most art that does is very special.

The other thing I like is the stillness and balance.  Its kind of hypnotic, mystical.  I don't have the words to describe it, but its very rare in Western art.  There was a lot of it in 15th & 16th century Italian painting, but whatever the spell, it wore off by 1600.  You can see it in Giotto, Masaccio, Fra Angelico, Botticelli, Raphael, and Da Vinci.  But not in all their works.  Curiously, not at all in Michaelangelo.  The only other large body of Western art that has it  is classical Greek sculpture.  Other than that, it appears only sporadically.  Turner had a bit of it in some paintings.  So did Van Eyck, Holbein, Rembrandt, Van Gogh and Rothko.  I'm sure there are others that just don't come to mind.

Unfortunately, I've never been to Florence and so have never actually seen the painting.  I don't know what it actually looks like.  So I made the image above look like what I think it should look like.

Here is the key detail.  Her expression is as inscrutable to me as the Mona Lisa's.  I like that.