Rembrandt Van Rijn pt 1

self portrait

Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn (15 July 1606 – 4 October 1669) was a Dutch painter and etcher. He is generally considered one of the greatest painters and printmakers in European art history and the most important in Dutch history. His contributions to art came in a period of great wealth and cultural achievement that historians call the Dutch Golden Age, when Dutch Golden Age painting, although in many ways antithetical to the Baroque style that dominated Europe, was extremely prolific and innovative.

Having achieved youthful success as a portrait painter, Rembrandt's later years were marked by personal tragedy and financial hardships. Yet his etchings and paintings were popular throughout his lifetime, his reputation as an artist remained high, and for twenty years he taught many important Dutch painters. Rembrandt's greatest creative triumphs are exemplified especially in his portraits of his contemporaries, self-portraits and illustrations of scenes from the Bible. His self-portraits form a unique and intimate biography, in which the artist surveyed himself without vanity and with the utmost sincerity.

In his paintings and prints he exhibited knowledge of classical iconography, which he molded to fit the requirements of his own experience; thus, the depiction of a biblical scene was informed by Rembrandt's knowledge of the specific text, his assimilation of classical composition, and his observations of Amsterdam's Jewish population. Because of his empathy for the human condition, he has been called "one of the great prophets of civilization."

Australia: Art's a steal at Christmas time

From Adelaide Now: Art's a steal at Christmas time
INSTEAD of considering what they've got for Christmas, some art collectors discover just what they've lost.

Christmas has proved an excellent season for great art thefts over the years, prompting the Art Loss Register to put together a list of treasures stolen while everyone was celebrating Christmas. The register is an international agency that tracks down missing artworks.

On Christmas Eve 1985, in Mexico City's National Museum of Anthropology, 140 Mayan and Aztec objects were stolen. That was when the museum discovered its alarm system had not been working for three years. About $40 million of gold and objects are still missing.

On New Year's Eve 1999, a thief cut a hole in the roof of the Ashmolean museum in Oxford, England, and climbed down a rope ladder, timing his break-in with celebratory fireworks for the new millennium to drown out any sounds. The thief made off with a $5 million painting by Paul Cezanne entitled View of Auvers-sur-Oise.

In 2002, Christmas thieves at Amsterdam's Van Gogh Museum stole a pair of his paintings after entering through the roof. They set off the alarm system but were gone by the time police arrived. The paintings have never been recovered.

Thieves in La Paz, Bolivia, decided to strip more than 100 religious artefacts from the Church of San Andres De Machaca on Christmas Eve. Art Loss Register has recovered two of the most valuable paintings.

Lord Elgin at Christmas 1798 set in motion a plan to record the Parthenon Marbles by taking plaster casts of them. When he discovered originals that fell off the Parthenon were being used for lime burning, he decided he would take the originals instead. The Elgin Marbles ended up in the British Museum, and the Greek Government is still arguing for their return.

The Art Loss Register says notable examples of stolen Christmas-themed artworks include Caravaggio's Nativity from a Palermo church in 1969. The painting, by one of Italy's greatest old masters, is valued in the tens of millions of dollars and never has been found. It is believed to be in the hands of the Mafia, although one informer says it was eaten by rats and pigs while hidden on a farm.

England: Barbara Hepworth Sculpture Stolen from Dulwich Park

From Sudan Vision: Barbara Hepworth Sculpture Stolen from Dulwich Park

A Barbara Hepworth sculpture which is insured for £500,000 has been stolen by suspected scrap metal thieves from Dulwich Park in south London.
The bronze piece, called Two Forms (Divided Circle), was cut from its plinth overnight, Trevor Moore of Dulwich Park Friends said.

The price it could fetch as scrap metal would only be a tiny fraction of its value as a complete work.

Southwark Council is offering a reward for the thieves' arrest and conviction.
Mr Moore said it was thought they broke into the park through a gate off the South Circular.

'Sickening epidemic'
The piece was designed in 1969 and has been in the park since 1970.

A Southwark Council spokesman said it had been insured for £500,000.

A Hepworth piece from a collection in Bangor, north-west Wales, sold at Sotheby's last year for £445,250, nearly three times its pre-sale estimate.

Peter John, leader of Southwark Council, said: "The theft of this important piece of 20th Century public art from Dulwich Park is devastating.

"The theft of public art and metal is becoming a sickening epidemic.

"I would ask the Met Police and their metal theft task force to investigate this theft as a matter of urgency and would ask anyone with any information about the whereabouts of the sculpture to contact us or the police."

Barbara Hepworth was one of the 20th Century's most accomplished sculptors.

After meeting fellow artist Henry Moore at art college in Leeds, the two young students went on to create an international alliance with some of the world's leading artists including Pablo Picasso and Constantin Brancusi. This led to the moment when British sculpture joined the international avant-garde.

Hepworth's modernist abstract sculptures were inspired by the rolling hills of the West Riding where she was brought up. Her great innovation was to pierce the sculptural form; to make a hole right through the body of the sculpture.

Within months, Moore was doing the same and a new language for sculpture was created which continues to reverberate today.

The work that has been taken is a very good example of the revolutionary aesthetic style she developed.

Simon Wallis, director of the Hepworth Wakefield, a gallery which celebrates the work of the renowned sculptor, said: "There's no doubt it is a very significant work from the latter part of her career.

"This piece from 1970 was one of those powerful monumental late bronzes.
"It's an important piece and a very beautiful piece, and beautiful to see it in that outdoor setting.

"That's one of the reasons it's so sad that someone's whipped it for the scrap metal. It will be irreplaceable."

Southwark Council is offering a reward of £1,000 for any information leading to the arrest and conviction of the thieves.

The theft comes a day after Scotland Yard launched its first dedicated unit to tackle the growing problem of metal thefts.

The crime is believed to cost about £700m a year.

Dame Barbara Hepworth, who died in 1975 in a fire at her studio in St Ives, Cornwall, is considered to be one of the UK's most important modern sculptors, with her work displayed in museums and public spaces around the world.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year

Regular blog postings begin on DECEMBER 26, Monday.

The man who saved The Resurrection

From BBC News: The man who saved The Resurrection
A chance discovery has brought to light the little-known story of how a British Army officer risked a court martial in wartime Italy to save a painting the author Aldous Huxley once described as "the greatest picture in the world".

I opened a dead man's suitcase in Cape Town and was transported from today's Africa, via World War II Italy, to Renaissance Tuscany.

Inside I found a story of high art, bravery and love, all the more powerful because it is a story not widely known.

I was on Long Street, a boisterous city-centre shopping artery, exploring the upper floors of Clarke's, a venerable bookshop staffed by bibliophiles who lovingly tend roof-high displays of new titles.

Climb up the stairs at the back and you enter a booky world almost extinct in today's era of online, search-engine rigour.

Here second-hand works await discovery, all meticulously catalogued, some preciously protected in glass-fronted cabinets.

Staff walk to and fro across creaking floorboards and up half sets-of-stairs linking a maze of attics, all crowded with books.

Graham Greene was my research target, more specifically his links with Tony Clarke, founder in 1956 of what is arguably Africa's finest bookshop.

Clarke died in the 1980s but his effervescent successor, Henrietta Dax, allowed me to look through his remaining papers, higgledy-piggledy in a brown leather case.
Fighting tradition
Tony Clarke After WWII Tony Clarke founded what is arguably Africa's finest bookshop

Of Greene I found nothing but, as so often with research, the letters, notebooks, diaries and photographs drew me off down another thrillingly unexpected by-way.

The records were of a man who came of age in WWII.

There were doodled maps of El Alamein and photographs of Clarke as a young subaltern sitting smartly to attention in the Middle East in 1942 alongside fellow members of the Royal Horse Artillery.

The RHA is one of the army's smartest units - its gunners fire the ceremonial salutes in Hyde Park - and Clarke belonged to its oldest battery, the Chestnut Troop.

Its fighting tradition is proud, no more so than against Rommel's Afrika Korps and later on the long Allied slog up Italy.

The snapshots of Clarke's campaign are framed in black and white: here lean, sun-tanned Tommies lark about on a Mediterranean beach, there stones ring the grave of a fellow officer, a chum, on an Italian hillside.

A reconnaissance photograph of Monte Cassino shocked me.

Clarke was not involved in the fight to dislodge the Germans from its hilltop monastery but in his diary he describes how shocked he was as he drove underneath ancient walls hideously disfigured by bombardment.

It may have influenced what Clarke went on to do.

As the Allied advance continued, his unit took up a firing position near the town of Sansepolcro.

Unlike other famous Tuscan towns that are perched on hilltops, it lies down in a valley. I went there myself in the 90s and found its location memorably unmemorable.

It was standard then for allied artillery to soften up towns before ground troops went in, and Clarke was the officer responsible for Sansepolcro. His guns dug themselves into their firing pits, his gunners prepared their ammunition stocks.

But then some faint bell rang in his mind, a bell belonging to an age far from the madness of war.

Clarke - English, gay, art-loving - remembered an essay by Aldous Huxley. The author had not been shy with his superlatives, saying he had discovered what he called the world's "best picture".

In fulsome terms, the essay described the incredible power of The Resurrection, a fresco masterpiece by the Renaissance maestro Piero della Francesca.

"We need no imagination to help us figure forth its beauty,'' Huxley wrote. "It stands there before us in entire and actual splendour, the greatest picture in the world."

Clarke may not have remembered every detail of the essay but, just as his guns started firing, he remembered one key fact.

The Resurrection was located in Sansepolcro.

I can only imagine the risk he then took by withholding his order to fire.

He later said his commanding officer had come on the radio urging him to get on with it so he had to stall for time, peering at the town through binoculars and assuring his commander that he could see no German targets to go after.

It was a brave action. Had Allied infantry been ambushed as they advanced on Sansepolcro, his court martial would have been brutal.

But, for the love of art, he kept the guns silent. The Germans fled and the town was liberated the following day without any damage to the 500-year-old work of art.

As I left his shop, I thought of Clarke. Nowadays such an act would be spread across newspapers and picked over by script-writers.

But all that remains today is a Sansepolcro suburban street named in his honour, a few references in travelogues written long after the war and a suitcase of memories at the foot of Africa.

Oil painting stolen from art gallery

From WPRI.com: Oil painting stolen from art gallery
NEW BEDFORD, Mass. (WPRI) - An oil painting was stolen from an art gallery in New Bedford on Friday.

Sometime between the hours of 11 a.m. and 1 p.m. someone quietly walked into Crowell's Fine Art Galley and Fine Framing Studio on Acushnet Avenue in New Bedford and stole a painting off the front wall.

Police are now investigating the theft and are asking for anyone who may have seen the painting between the time of the robbery and now to contact the New Bedford Detectives Division.

The painting was done this year and is a 20-by-20-inch oil on canvas titled "The Fist, Adamsville, R.I." It's part of an exhibition by artist Evan Laporte; the exhibit is on display until January 31st of next year.

Police had no value for the stolen work of art, and calls to the gallery have gone unreturned; the gallery is closed on Sundays.

The day of outdoor art exhibits is over

It used to be all an outdoor statue had to worry about was some bratty kid climbing on it and breaking off an arm accidently.

Now, the breaks are being done deliberately.

Thieves - organized thieves - have been going around stealing manhole covers (never mind that leaving a great hole in a street means not a few people have fallen in them and broken legs or even died), lead from roofs, and even entire statues - from where ever they may be - in graveyards, on federal land, anywhere.

And there's probably no way to stop them. The cost to place a guard on every piece of bronze or metal statuary everywhere in the country....unless they're willing to take minimum wage and work day and night....

Camera systems installed might help identify the thieves - but by the time the thief is arrested the priceless work of art (priceless in the sense that the original is the original and can never be replaced!) will be destroyed, melted down for its metal.

Sad days indeed.