A coffee with Art

Sit down with me, just for the time of a good black espresso. Let's have a quick chat about Art.

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Alessandro ALGARDI - Bust of Cardinal Paolo Emilio Zacchia (about 1625-30)

on May 11, 2022

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Jean-Baptiste Greuze - The spoiled child (1765)

An Enlightenment painter who conveyed through his brush all the ideas of the century, so loved as to become one of the best known painters in France. Appreciated by Diderot who paved the way for him in Russia by making him known to Catherine II, a great collector who created the heart of the Hermitage. A portrait painter of great skill, as we can see. That it is a training framework, with a teaching content is easy to understand.

Claude Lorrain - The Gulf of Baia with Apollo and the Cumana Sibyl (1650-1660)

Pictorial whims, which combine a truly existing landscape with true ancient ruins but not exactly where they are painted. All this creates an image of grandeur of a past that no longer exists but that we can continue to forget. A past that is made even more unstable by the human / divine figures present. Apollo (who often lent his image to the Christian Jesus) reminds us that his beauty will never be a vanitas because it does not decay. Death, immortality and the passage of time ...

Alexander ARCHIPENKO - Walking woman (1912)

Walking woman 1912 Bronze (67 cm) Private collection ******* By superficially observing this work, one runs the risk of considering it abstract. Obviously this is not the case. The figure of a walking woman is easy to recognize. Archipenko plays with voids to compose her image: her head is made up of the lines that surround and limit the void. We are facing an epochal change, he is probably the first to have interrupted the path of sculpture by introducing the concept of spatial construction. No more lines that create figures and faces but lines that create figures thanks to space. Archipenko adhered to the Cubist method and the work shown here clearly demonstrates this. The characteristics of this new movement that has redefined the art have been declined in a personal way by Alexander Archipenko. Not images seen simultaneously from multiple points of view but the contemporary use of full and empty spaces. His Art of him will undergo an evolution with the use of different materi...

Christian BOLTANSKI - Reserve of dead Swiss (1990)

Reserve of dead Swiss 1990 Photographs, metal boxes and electric spotlights (203 cm) Marian Goodman Gallery, New York ******* The work is a real construction of metal boxes for biscuits against a background of black and white photographs taken from obituaries of a local newspaper, dimly lit by electric spotlights. It is a real shrine to memory that arouses strong feelings of life and death, over which an atmosphere of peace hovers that borders on the religious and the eternal. In one of his previous works, Boltanski had used photographs of Jewish children, but here he wanted to investigate the theme of the inevitability of death, choosing photos of people belonging to an openly neutral country. Death is undoubtedly the most universal aspect of life. Boltanski is one of the most acclaimed artists of our time, thanks to his unique style, materials and subjects focused on the themes of death. Other works by him, very important and impactful, are composed of glass cases where childho...

El Greco - Saints Peter and Paul (1587-1592)

Greek painting is hard, square, between Michelangelo and Caravaggio. The portrait of the two saints is a Sacred Conversation, some have speculated that it was their meeting in Antioch, where the most learned and storyteller Paul manages to get the better of the theological disquisition. They don't look at each other, apparently they don't move their mouths but their hands speak. The gestures tell us all about the two personalities and mentalities.

Peter BLAKE - On the balcony (1955-1957)

On the balcony 1955-1957 Oil painting on canvas (121x91 cm) Tate Gallery, London ******* The figures sitting on a park bench are surrounded by four paintings by some of Blake's companions and various commercial objects, including packets of cigarettes, newspapers and food packages. The structure of the painting is very simple and the attention to perspective is somewhat lacking; the real interest is to be found in the attention to the representation of the objects, which are the most important elements of the composition. At the time of its creation it was considered Blake's masterpiece for its strong visual impact and now communicates the full sense of cultural growth in the 1950s, putting the observer in front of a messy crowd of popular images. This representation of commercial objects paved the way for another great artistic movement: Pop Art. In the 1970s, Blake moved towards a more naturalistic style and by 1975 he also became a founding member of the Brotherhood of Rur...

Hans BELLMER - The spinning top (about 1937-1956)

The spinning top about 1937-1956 Oil painting on canvas (65x65 cm) Tate Gallery, London ******* The subject of the work is a skeletal female figure spinning a top, held in her bony hands. Bellmer's idea was to make a sculpture that symbolized the woman's power to turn men's heads and hearts, while she herself whirls in zero gravity. Undoubtedly, we are faced with a work with a strong disturbing character. This painting has undergone many reworkings by the author, who only signed the painting in 1956 when he found an interested buyer. Bellmer was of Polish descent and moved to Paris in 1938, a time when she joined Surrealism. This work represents many features of Surrealism, such as the distortion of the image that appears to float in a space that could represent the artist's subconscious. The reference point of Hans Bellmer's art is the female body, very often treated in an erotic way, almost obsessively. By the same artist, we usually know his articulated female ...