A coffee with Art

Fur traders on Missouri 1845 Oil painting on canvas (74x92 cm) Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York ******* We find ourselves catapulted into a foggy and peaceful atmosphere, where two hunters in the company of their cat glide over the calm waters of Missouri. The image is pervaded by an unreal light that creates a dreamlike and timeless sensation. In his early works, Bingham was very careful to balance horizontal and diagonal lines, inserting figures at right angles to create a pleasantly solid structure. George Caleb Bingham was one of the most important painters of the early movement of the North American Frontier Painter, and in his art he represented the landscapes and settlers of the American West with great skill. The camera, in those days, was not yet widespread and it remained the artist's task to tell the rest of the world the beauties of this strange and new land. Gradually Bingham shifted his fondness for river scenes inland and held back his production for politics (...

Andrea del Sarto - Assumption of the Virgin (about 1526)

Assumption of the Virgin about 1526 Oil painting on canvas (379x222 cm) Palazzo Pitti, Florence ******* The painting is divided in a physical and spiritual way, two large rooms characterize it: sky and earth. The Virgin ascends to heaven, surrounded by angels, while on earth the apostles watch the scene with great amazement. St. Thomas is characterized by his scientific spirit: I must ascertain and prove that Mary is no longer in her tomb and that she is actually taken up into heaven even with her body. In front of the scene two important saints: Nicola and Margherita; the patrons of the donor and of the city for which the altarpiece was designed. The painting is somewhat rigid, a typical aspect of the Italian Renaissance. The Florentine painters enjoyed the fame of great draftsmen and Andrea del Sarto no less; there is no doubt that he made several preparatory drawings to achieve the desired balance. Andrea del Sarto received many commissions in life, especially frescoes and was known...

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...

Robert Campin - Madonna and Child (c. 1430)

The intimacy of everyday life between a mother and her child. A humanity accentuated by the hand of the Virgin who reaches out to the fire to warm up and then leans on the baby's bodice to warm it. An interior that dictates the rules of Flemish painting that prefers the interior of the houses as the setting for their representations, often with a window giving to the outside world. The tray and the basin make it possible to understand the perspective distortion to give greater depth and reality. Everything is tactile in this picture, it seems to be able to feel every texture under the fingertips.

William BLAKE - Pietà (1795 circa)

Pietà about 1795 Watercolor and ink on paper (42x54 cm) Tate Gallery, London ******* A woman who apparently seems to have recently become muddy (given the color still present on the vaults and arms) lies lifeless on the ground; above her we can see two female figures on horseback and with the wind in their hair. One of the two women looks down and holds a newborn in her arms. This work represents one of the most important scenes of the Shakespearean tragedy in which Macbeth meditates to assassinate Duncan: "Mercy, like a naked baby, riding the hurricane, or the celent cherubs, on horseback ...". These figures so precisely delineated by Blake, rejecting the ideal tradition of perspective composition, evoke enigmatic images of other worlds. His style reflects with great precision his personal mystical vision, in which image and reality are one. William Blake began his activity as an artist as an engraver but he was also able to express himself through poetry and painting, in ...

David BOMBERG - The mud bath (1914)

The mud bath 1914 Oil painting on canvas (152,5x224 cm) Tate Gallery, London ******* At first glance, it seems that this painting does not have the slightest figurative intention. In truth, the work is intended to represent a public bathroom frequented by the Jewish community of Whitechapel in London. The blue and white lines and figures make up the jumping figures that gather around the pool, represented by the red rectangle and seem to surround the dark central pillar. The angular forms are used by our painter to express the vitality and dynamism of the twentieth century and the enthusiasm for recent industrial development. Bomberg, the son of Polish immigrants, was one of the founders of the London Group, an association founded in 1913 for the organization of shows and exhibitions. Although Bomberg kept his distance from Cubists, Futurists and Vorticists, groups active at the time, his work can easily be identified with some of their theories. By 1920 Bomberg moved from geomet...

Carl ANDRE - Zinc and magnesium floor (1969)

Zinc and magnesium floor 1969 Zinc and magnesium (183x183 cm) Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimora (Maryland) ******* Classical sculpture had to be somehow revised and reconsidered. This work by the American Carl Andre is very simple in appearance and profound in meaning. We are faced with 36 square plates of pure zinc and magnesium, laid by the artist alternately on the floor. Sculpture requires that there are no empty spaces between materials and lines, sculpture wants and must recreate a body, a whole. Here, on the other hand, we only have the perception that the figure is unique, if we observe carefully we realize that between one square and another there is an empty space. First spontaneous question: how much does perception deceive us? Sculpture essentially develops vertically, imposing itself on our life. Here, however, we are faced with a structure that merges us with the floor, to be trampled on. Second spontaneous question: under what conditions do we evaluate and recogni...

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