Eve Babitz (1943- ) parents were friends with the composer Igor Stravinsky who was her godfather. Her first brush with notoriety came through Julian Wasser’s photo of a nude, twenty-year-old Babitz playing chess with the artist Marcel Duchamp on the occasion of his landmark retrospective at the Pasadena Museum of Art (since absorbed into the Norton Simon) curated by Walter Hopps, with whom incidentally Babitz was having an affair.
John Singer Sargent’s “An Interior in Venice” (1899) was rejected by the Curtis family it depicts for its unbecoming portrayal of the redoubtable matron, Ariana Curtis. It was intended as a gift for Mrs Curtis in appreciation for the times Sargent stayed & worked in the house as his ‘Venetian base’.
This group portrait shows the grand saloon of the Palazzo Barbaro on the Grand Canal in Venice during the heyday of its ownership by the expatriate Americans Daniel Sargent Curtis (1825–1908), who was the artists first cousin once removed, & his wife Ariana Wormeley (1833–1922), who are seen on the right. Their son Ralph (1854–1922) & his wife Lisa De Wolfe Colt are at the tea table on the left.
Sargent presented it to the Royal Academy in London as his diploma work in December 1899, withdrawing his painting Professor Johannes Wolff which he submitted the previous year.
Henry James, who, on one of his extended visits to the Palazzo, wrote The Great Condition, commented in a letter to Mrs. Curtis: “The Barbaro Saloon … I absolutely & unreservedly adored…. I’ve seen few things of S’s that I’ve ever craved more to possess!” James included a description of the room in his novel The Wings of the Dove.
Palazzo Barbaro became the hub of American life in Venice with visits not only from Sargent & James, but Whistler, along with Robert Browning & Claude Monet. Other members of the “Barbaro Circle” included Bernard Berenson, William Merritt Chase, Isabella Stewart Gardner, Charles Eliot Norton & Edith Wharton. The Palazzi Barbaro are a pair of adjoining palaces. The first of the two palaces, the one owned by the Curtises, is in the Venetian Gothic style built in 1425. The second structure was executed in the Baroque style at the turn of the 18th century.
Alexander, Sandra “Beyond ‘Cézanne’s Doubt’,” Journal of Visual Art Practice 4 (2005) 2
Bond, Bruce “An Essay on ‘Homage to Paul Cézanne’,” The Point Where All Things Meet: Essays on Charles Wright. Ed. Tom Andrews. Oberlin College Press, 1995
“I would love to believe the world is Platonic, but I think it’s Aristotelean” (Wright, Charles. Halflife. Ann Arbor: Univ of Michigan Press, 1988, p.130).
Pissarro, Joachim “Cézanne’s Very Particular Truth,” Cézanne’s Provence, National Gallery of Art lecture May 6, 2006
Shortly before his death in 1906, Cézanne said to Émile Bernard: “I owe you truth in painting, and I will communicate it to you” (Je vous dois la vérité en peinture, et je vous la dirai)…. In fact, the question of “truth” (or of the “ideal formula”) for painting had long been on Cézanne’s mind. This had even been the subject of a fierce battle (that almost ended in a physical fight) between Cézanne & Paul Gauguin in 1881… In the end, Cézanne can be described as having coined a new conception of “truth”… the sources of this conception of truth originally derived from the group of Jena artists, critics, and philosophers who worked together in Germany in the 1790s (the Schlegel brothers, Novalis, Schelling, etc.).
Tuma, Kathryn A. “Cézanne’s Failure,” Cézanne’s Provence, National Gallery of Art lecture May 6, 2006
Jiminez, Jill Berk (ed) Dictionary of Artists’ Models London: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 2001
Prose, Francine The Lives of the Muses: Nine Women & the Artists They Inspired. Harper Perennial 2003
Claude Monet & Camille Doncieux ― Gedo, Mary Mathews Monet & His Muse: Camille Monet in the Artist’s Life Chicago: Univ. of Chicago, 2010
Monet, Camille & Alice
Victorine Meurent (1844-1927) Manet’s model in Déjeuner sur l’herbe (The Luncheon on the Grass); Olympia; Gare Saint-Lazare (The Railway); (and even the boy in The Fifer). Also modeled for Degas & the Belgian painter Alfred Stevens
Renoir & His Models. Aline Charigot http://www.artistsandart.org/2010/05/renoir-and-his-models-aline-charigot.html
Suzanne Valadon (1865–1938) Marie-Clémentine Valadon, Bessines-sur-Gartempe, Haute-Vienne, France. In 1894, became the first woman painter admitted to the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts. “A free spirit, she would wear a corsage of carrots, kept a goat at her studio to “eat up her bad drawings”, & fed caviar to her “good Catholic” cats on Fridays.” became a circus acrobat at the age of 15; She modeled for Edgar Degas, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, (Young Woman at a Table), Pierre-Auguste Renoir & Pierre Puvis de Chavannes; she also had affairs with all of them. In 1889 Toulouse-Lautrec would paint: “The Hangover.”
Valadon ― Miles, Margaret R. “Nakedness, Gender, & Religious Meaning,” in Carnal Knowing: Female Nakedness & Religious Meaning in the Christian West NY: Vintage, 1989 pp.169-85
Renoir (1841-1919) ‘las grandes banhistas’– (1884-1887) Phila Museum of Art (Aline Charigot, Senhora Renoir, Suzanne Valadon)
http://bjws.blogspot.com/2010/07/henri-de-toulouse-lautrec-1864-1901_29.html
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901) one of his favorite models, in addition to Suzanne Valadon, was another laundress named Carmen Gaudin (1866?–1920).(La blanchisseuse) La Rousse (the redhead)
http://www.davidrumsey.com/amica/amico935317-19344.html
Klimt & His Women – document. Alma Maria Mahler-Werfel, (nee Schindler) (1879-1964) Viennese-born socialite. wife, successively, of composer Gustav Mahler, architect Walter Gropius, & novelist Franz Werfel, as well as the consort of several other prominent men, e.g., affair with the artist Oskar Kokoschka, Bride of the Wind
In 1911, Egon Schiele (1890-1918) met the seventeen-year-old Valerie (Wally) Neuzil, who lived with him in Vienna & served as model, Woman in Black Stockings (1913). Very little is known of her, except that she had previously modelled for Gustav Klimt & might have been one of his mistresses.
Julia Prinsep Stephen (nee Jackson) (1846–95), mother of Virginia Woolf, model for Pre-Raphaelite painters such as Edward Burne-Jones
Lytton Strachey & Dora Carrington
Elizabeth Siddal ― John Everett Millais, Ophelia; Rossetti, Beata Beatrix
Annie Miller — Holman Hunt, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, et.al
Jane Burden (later Jane Morris, 1839–1914)
Gray, Euphemia (“Effie”) Chalmers (1828-97) wife of Ruskin, but later left her husband to marry his protege, the Pre-Raphaelite painter John Everett Millais
Edward Burne-Jones & Maria Zambaco she appears in some of his most inspired pictures—as the sorceress in the Wine of Circe, the witch in The Beguiling of Merlin, & the demonic sprite in Phyllis & Demophoön.
Corder, Rosa Frances (1853-93) model & lover of Charles Augustus Howell unscrupulous agent of both Ruskin (eventually Edward Burne-Jones persuaded Ruskin to sever his connection with Howell) & Rossetti (persuaded Rossetti to dig up the poems he buried with his wife Elizabeth Siddal). alleged to have persuaded Corder to create fake Rossetti drawings
John Singer Sargent (1856–1925) “Madame X (Madame Pierre Gautreau)” 1883–84
Butler, Ruth Hidden in the Shadow of the Master: The Model, Wives of Cézanne, Monet, & Rodin. New Haven: Yale, 2008 Hortense Fiquet & Paul Cézanne; Camille Doncieux & Claude Monet; Rose Beuret & Auguste Rodin
Rousseau’s portrait of Guillaume Apollinaire with his mistress Marie Laurencin, The Muse Inspiring the Poet (1909)
Joanna “Jo” Hiffernan (Heffernan) – Whistler’s mistress & model & Courbet’s favorite model
Evelyn Nesbit Uruburu, Paula “Evelyn Nesbit: ‘American Eve,’ Excerpt”; Nesbit, White & Madison Square Garden; Murder of the Century PBS American Experience; http://www.americaneve.com/homepage.html
Barney, Natalie Clifford (1876-1972) & Brooks, Romaine 1874-1970
Diego Rivera & Frida Kahlo
George Sand, novelist, muse to Chopin and Alfred de Musset
Anais Nin, author, muse to Henry Miller
Amanda Lear, singer, muse to Salvador Dali; Salvador & Gala Dali
Man Ray & Lee Miller
Catherine Deneuve, actress, muse to Bunuel, André Téchiné and Yves Saint Laurent
Camille Claudel (1864–1943)sculptor, muse, model, confidante & lover of Rodin; she never lived with Rodin, who was reluctant to end his 20-year relationship with Rose Beuret.
Alice B. Toklas, author, muse to Gertrude Stein
Leonora Carrington, artist, muse to Max Ernst
Augustus John & model, mistress, wife, Dorelia McNeill
Gwen John model & mistress to Auguste Rodin (33 years her senior)
Pierre Bonnard – Renée Monchaty (model, lover, suicide), Marthe de Méligny (model, wife, muse)
“Misia” Marie Sophie Olga Zénaïde Godebska (1872-1950) muse & model to Toulouse-Lautrec, Bonnard, Vuillard, Renoir, Diaghilev, Cocteau, & Vallaton
Matisse & Lydia Delectorskaya; model Loulou Brouty; model Caroline Joblau, with whom he had a daughter, Marguerite, born in 1894
Between Dec. 1916 & the close of 1917, Matisse painted at least 25 pictures of an Italian model named Laurette. She also posed with her sister & a woman named Aïcha for some 15 additional works by the artist. Laurette in a Green Robe (Black Background), 1916 [Met Museum]
Jeanne Hebuterne, model and painter, muse to Amadeo Modigliani
Loulou de la Falaise, designer, muse to Yves Saint Laurent
Francisco Goya and his mistress Leocadia Weiss,La Leocadia (1819 to 1823)
Lise Trehot & Auguste Renoir
Seurat’s model & common law wife, Madeleine Knobloch
Picasso & Dora Maar; Fernande Olivier, Olga Koklova, Marie Thérèse Walter, Françoise Gilot, Jacqueline Roque, et.al
Jessie Macauley Olssen The Annunciation (1898) wife & model of Henry Ossawa Tanner
Raphael & Margherita Luti La Fornarina & “Woman with a Veil (La Donna Velata)” 1516
Botticelli & Simonetta Vespucci
Godley, Kathleen (Kitty) Epstein Freud (1926-2011) ― Artist & muse, daughter of Jacob Epstein & first wife/model of Lucian Freud. Her second marriage was to musician & Cambridge economist Wynne Godley (Epstein’s model for the head of the figure of Saint Michael spearing the devil in the sculpture at Coventry Cathedral).
Beverly Whitney Kean (1921-2011) died aged 89
Her book All the Empty Palaces: The Merchant Patrons of Modern Art in Pre-Revolutionary Russia is still the definitive account of the two great Moscow collectors (Sergei Shchukin & Ivan Morozov) who put together before 1914 the finest collection of impressionist & modern French painters.
Early in her career she sang with the San Francisco Light Opera Company; starring roles in two Hollywood movies (Ladies of Washington & Irish Eyes Are Smiling, both with Anthony Quinn in 1944); appeared as a guest star in a dozen TV series in the early 1950s; made commercials (notably as the Marlboro Girl); & was even licensed to trade on the NY stock exchange; with her first husband, she was friends with the likes of the Shah of Iran & composer Richard Rodgers.
By the time Lenin & the Bolsheviks swept to power in Russia in 1917, the Moscow textile merchant Sergei Shchukin had managed to assemble the most important collection in the world of modern Western art. On the walls of his home, the Trubetskoy Palace, were eight canvases by Cezanne, 16 by Gauguin, 39 by Matisse, 13 by Monet, & 51 works by Picasso. Today, these works hang in the Hermitage Museum in Leningrad & the Pushkin Museum in Moscow.
Louis Anquetin (1861–1932)
Fernand Cormon’s atelier, 1885 Toulouse-Lautrec, Emile Bernard & van Gogh; “cloisonnism” [term coined by Dujardin) use of black contour outlines & flat areas of color
Van Gogh’s Les Cafe a Arles (1888) is almost a copy of Anquetin’s L’Avenue de Clichy, Picasso used Anquetin’s Madeline (1892) as a model for his portrait Gertrude Stein (1905)
abandoned the modern art movement began to study technique & materials of great northern masters, esp. Rubens.
Jacques Maroger (1884–1962) student of Anquetin; The “secret formula” of the great masters included white lead. Emigrated to US in 1939, Parsons & Maryland Inst.; Baltimore Realists
Édouard Dujardin (1861–1949) – along with Anquetin educated at the Lycée Pierre Corneille in Rouen; James Joyce claimed his style of interior monologue (stream of consciousness technique) owed its influence to works by Dujardin; editor of the journal Revue Indépendente a “voice for the symbolists”; featured with Jane Avril in Toulouse-Lautrec poster for the night club Le Divan Japonisme, watching a performance by Yvette Guilbert
H.W. Janson’s History of Art first published in 1962 contained neither the name nor work of a single woman artist. “I have not been able to find a woman artist who clearly belongs in a one-volume history of art.” (Janson, 1979)
Not surprisingly, following a course she taught while at Vassar in the Spring of 1970, entitled “The Image of Women in the Eighteenth & Nineteenth Centuries,” Linda Nochlin published, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” (ARTnews January 1971: 22-39, 67-71 [reprinted in Women, Art, & Power & Other Essays {Harper & Row, 1988}]).
However, over 100 years prior to Nochlin’s ‘groundbreaking’ essay, the critic & historian Elizabeth Fries Lummis Ellet, responded to what she perceived as a lacuna in contemporary intellectual history: ‘I do not know that any work on Female Artists – either grouping them or giving a general history of their productions – has ever been published’ when she wrote Women Artists in All Ages & Countries
Ellet (1818–77), also wrote about the founding “mothers” – women who contributed to the American Revolutionary War, The Women of the American Revolution, published in 1845
Wettlaufer, Alexandra K. Portraits of the Artist as a Young Woman: Painting & the Novel in France & Britain, 1800–1860 Columbus, OH: Ohio State, 2011
Linda Nochlin “Consider the Difference: American Women Artists,” (YouTube) Smithsonian American Art Museum
“Neither Model Nor Muse: Women as Artists” – 2010 exhibition at the McNay, San Antonio
Marra, Michael F. “Aesthetic Categories Past & Present”
…in the second half of the 19th century, at the very same time when the Impressionists were experimenting with shapes & colors in Paris & in Provence, the academic painters schooled in techniques that went back to the Renaissance… were still winning the major artistic competitions in Paris…
When the World’s Columbian Exposition took place in Chicago in 1893, the French official pavilion displayed only official artists such as Bouguereau, Jean-Léon Gérôme, & the military painter Edouard Detaille, but none of the impressionists.
The word “catégorie esthétique” entered the French vocabulary in 1896 with the publication of Critical Essay on Kant’s Aesthetics by Victor Basch (1865-1944), the holder of the first Chair of Aesthetics in Europe that was established in Paris in 1919
ekphrasis from ekphrazein “to recount,” “describe,” from ex– “out” + phrazein “to point out,” “explain”
The goal of this literary form is to make the reader envision the thing described as if it were physically present. In many cases, however, the subject never actually existed, making the ekphrastic description a demonstration of both the creative imagination & the skill of the writer. Munsterberg, Marjorie “Writing about Art”
Homer’s description of Achilles’ shield in Book 18 of the Iliad stands at the beginning of the ekphrastic tradition [The Infinity of Lists by Umberto Eco]. John Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” (1819); John Ruskin’s description of J.M.W. Turner’s “Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying – Typhoon Coming On,” also known as “The Slave Ship” in Modern Painters (1843) [compared to a review by novelist William Thackeray]; Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Grey (1890)
Donoghue, Denis “Ruskin, Venice, & the Fate of Beauty,” Southern Review 37 (Summer 2001) 3:588-614
Leight, Michele “Ruskin, Turner & the Pre-Raphaelites”
Barry Bauman
After receiving his Bachelor’s Degree in 1969 from Beloit College, Bauman attended Graduate School at the University of Chicago. In 1971, he received his Master’s Degree in Art History with a specialization in Dutch Baroque painting. One year later he joined the Conservation Department at The Art Institute of Chicago & served the museum for eleven years leaving as the Associate Conservator of Paintings. He has been a visiting conservator with the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. In 1982, he was elected a Fellow of the American Institute for Conservation.
http://www.baumanconservation.com/homefs.html
2009 Historical Rewards: A Dutch and a Flemish Discovery.
2008 Sir Joshua Reynolds: Original, Copy, or Studio Version.
2007 Thomas Sully’s, “Portrait of George Washington”
2006 John Singer Sargent’s 1887, “Port. of Lucius Fairchild”
Baldwin, Robert “Thoughts on the Slaughtered Pig in Renaissance & Baroque Art: From Courtly Cosmos to Burgher Prosperity” (March 29, 2009)
Baldwin, Robert “An Outline of Shared Values Before & After 1700” (12/8/2010)
From the late Middle Ages through the 17th century, European society maintained a common culture anchored around the stable institutions of the church & the hereditary monarchy & the newer social reality of urban commerce
social groups who defined the world of material culture: the church, the court, & the burgher class
Baldwin, Robert “Thoughts on the Slaughtered Pig in Renaissance & Baroque Art: From Courtly Cosmos to Burgher Prosperity” (March 29, 2009)
Baldwin, Robert “Anti-Semitism in Giotto’s Scrovegni Chapel”
Winckelman, Johann Joachim (1717-1768)
The History of Art of Antiquity (1763) – The pinnacle of ancient art had been achieved in the “noble simplicity & tranquil grandeur” of 5th century Athens
Kaufmann, Thomas DaCosta “Antiquarianism, the History of Objects, & the History of Art before Winckelmann,” Journal of the History of Ideas 62 (July 2001) 3:523-41
Manasseh, Cyrus “The Art Museum in the 19th Century: J. J. Winckelmann’s Influence on the Establishing of the Classical Paradigm of the Art Museum,” Anistoriton Journal 11 (2008-09)
the rigid classicism & hierarchising contained within Winckelmann’s theories would be influential for the invention of a system of curatorship that strongly would shape the institutional framework of the Louvre as the first real public art museum
curatorial plan ― By situating Classical art at the beginning of its curatorial narrative the Louvre would define the Classical structure of the 19th century or traditional art museum model.
Preceding his ideas, art galleries had “…juxtaposed works by different artists & of different genres”. After Winckelmann, however, during the 19th century, this method was replaced by a system of hanging paintings which could reveal the “… historical evolution within national schools”.
Miyasaki, Donovan “Art as Self-Origination in Winckelmann & Hegel,” Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 27 (2006) 1
Alexander Baumgarten (1714–1762)
Meditationes philosophicae de nonullis ad poema pertinentibus (Philosophical Meditations on Some Requirements of the Poem), (1735)
Hammermeister, Kai “Baumgarten, Mendelssohn,” in The German Aesthetic Tradition Cambridge: CUP, 2002
Here we find for the first time in the history of philosophy the notion of aesthetics as an independent philosophical discipline. Yet the meaning of the term is far from our understanding of aesthetics as a philosophical investigation of art & a theory of beauty & ugliness. Baumgarten’s aesthetics refers to a theory of sensibility as a gnoseological faculty, that is, a faculty that produces a certain type of knowledge. Aesthetics is taken very literally as a defense of the relevance of sensual perception. Philosophical aesthetics originated as advocacy of sensibility, not as a theory of art…. to claim epistemological relevance for sensual perception. This was no small task, since Descartes (1596–1650) had just renewed the Platonic devaluation of the objects of the senses in favor of a rationality cleansed of sensibility
To a large extent, Enlightenment philosophy of art can be read as an ongoing renegotiation of the polarization of reason & sensibility, of thought & taste.
Gracyk, Theodore “Philosophy of Art: Hume & Kant: Summary & Comparison”
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