▲Visual Arts▼

Director and choreographer: Pina Bausch (also playing the first figure). This important piece was featured in the recent Wim Wenders' film "Pina." \\ Cast: Malou Airaudo, Domenique Mercy, Jan Minarik, Nazareth Panadero, Jean Laurent Sasportes. \\ "Her parents owned a café attached to a small hotel. The little girl learned to amuse herself sitting quietly under the café tables watching the customers or entertaining them with impromptu dances. Early on her parents sent Pina to ballet classes, where, she recalled in an interview, "I loved to dance because I was scared to speak. When I was moving I could feel."" see Choreographer whose seminal work gave an unsettling view of the human condition, http://www.independent.co.uk/news... - Adriano

"The drawings of butterflies done by Vladimir Nabokov were intended for “family use.” He made these on title pages of various editions of his works as a gift to his wife and son and sometimes to other relatives. In Brian Boyd’s words, “in these highly personal and affectionately playful drawings the scientific accuracy Nabokov needed in thousands of illustrations of the specimens he studied under the microscope was no longer relevant, and his imagination could take flight. In the butterflies Nabokov devised and labeled for Vera he mingles fact and fancy even more sportively than in his fiction.” None of these drawings portray real butterflies, both the images and the names he assigns to them are his invention." - Adriano

Love these! - Jenny H.

Beautiful ...!! - Sepi ⌘ سپی

Image retouched and color-corrected (click on it to enlarge). One of my favorite rooms in the world :-) - Adriano

this is a rare treat: Monet photographed painting water lilies on giant canvas, http://ff.im/1dyzVh - Adriano

"The cycle of water lily paintings on the ground floor is utterly unforgettable. This museum is a beautiful example of the environment and presentation of the piece adding substantially to the experience of viewing a great work of art. I've rarely felt as emotionally overwhelmed by a piece of art as I did when sitting on one of the benches and staring at the huge panoramic murals." http://www.quora.com/Paris... \\ The most beautiful gallery captured as wide-angle photo: http://www.punctumsaliens.ch/habitat... - Adriano

"The below aerial picture of a cloud-shrouded Dubai by Wijnand Van Till, a Dutch citizen living in Dubai, won the first prize in a National Geographic photography contest Oct 26, 2011 in Amsterdam ahead of 20,000 other entries." - Adriano

"Kelly has been experimenting with painted relief since 1949 after he moved to Paris and was influenced by Constantin Brancusi‘s simplified sculptural forms. Kelly adamantly creates all his work himself without the aid of studio hands, although he admits at 88 that he may need help if his health fails. In the meantime, he constantly sketches his ideas, and finds inspiration in even the subtlest everyday shapes. As dealer Matthew Marks told the NYT, “A shape for a painting could come from the shadow a leaf casts on a branch. He’ll draw it over and over again and use it in a painting, a print, a sculpture.”" - Adriano

"Anabelle Kienle argues, with Van Gogh's many letters as evidence, that the greatest Dutch painter since Rembrandt managed to survive, in part, by employing a kind of self-hypnosis, sessions of superhuman focus that helped Van Gogh put down the fires in his head. He brings a landscape right up to the viewer's toes, painting with painstaking detail the bark of trees, the twists of vines, the striving thistle. His landscape style was in part inspired by the high horizon lines of Japanese art, which Van Gogh deeply admired. The exhibit brings together a sampling of Japanese prints to provide counterpoint." - Adriano

I love Van Gogh's work. - Jenny H.

That one is rarely seen, even in the Dutch and French museums. Also couples seldom appear in Van Gogh's work. Interestingly, there's no clear path in view. - Adriano

"Warhol’s assistant Ronnie Cutrone said: Andy had a burning desire to do abstract art… and I said, “you’re Andy Warhol; you should paint something that is something, but it’s not… you should paint shadows. You love shadows anyway. They’re all in your work”… I had 150 shadow photographs on contact sheets twelve days later. We picked some of them out and then he asked me to mix the colors for them." - Adriano

There are three rules: 1) Write and direct original screenplays, 2) make them with the most modern technology available, and 3) self-finance them. \\ "Every time I made a film, I always knew what I thought the theme was, the core, in one word. In “The Godfather,” it was succession. In “The Conversation,” it was privacy. In “Apocalypse,” it was morality. A screenplay has to be like a haiku. It has to be very concise and very clear, minimal. You’re going to listen to the actors because they have great ideas. You’re going to listen to the photographer because he will have a great idea. You can make the decision that you feel is best, but listen to everyone, because cinema is collaboration." - Adriano

"Ai uses China’s most common mode of transportation to create a spiraling, labyrinthine space for viewers to walk through in his gigantic installation, Forever Bicycles. Winding through the stacked bikes, the lines and shapes of the spokes, tires, and handlebars become more important than the bicycles themselves: the bicycle’s functionality has been replaced with its form. The 1,000 bicycles seem to move as the viewer walks among them, illustrating China’s shifting social environment." - Adriano

"Sigmund Freud contemplates a bust of himself, sculpted for his 75th birthday by Oscar Nemon." - Adriano

"Thomas Edison is responsible for some of the most significant, and is even credited as the inventor of the movie industry itself. But besides his visionary take on technology, he also had a keen eye for what audiences wanted. It comes as no surprise that Edison is also responsible for the very first on-screen kiss in cinema, featuring Canadian actress May Irwin. A mere 23 seconds in length, it was filmed in his Black Maria studio in New Jersey in 1896, at a time when public kissing was greatly frowned upon by Victorian society." http://www.brainpickings.org/index... - Adriano

nice :-) - Maitani

"Lavinia Fontana (1552-1614) was an Italian painter, born in Bologna, the daughter of the painter Prospero Fontana, who was a prominent painter of the School of Bologna at the time and served as her teacher. Antonietta Gonsalus was a woman who suffered from hepatoerythropoietic porphyria; a disease characterized by severe facial hypertrichosis (excessive hair growth)." - Adriano

"The painting, a version of Titian’s Venetian Annunciation, a blurred impression of the original, represents a comment on the fact that it was "impossible to paint like Titian today, and that the ‘beautiful culture’ of Old Master painting was irretrievable." In an interview (with Michele Leight, in the City Review), Richter had explained, disarmingly, that he had copied the painting from a postcard, "simply because I liked it so much and thought I’d like to have that for myself. To start with I only meant to make a copy, so that I could have a beautiful painting at home and with it a piece of that period, all that potential beauty and sublimity."" http://timescolumns.typepad.com/stothar... - Adriano

"The Louvre is facing accusations that it overcleaned a masterpiece by Leonardo da Vinci, leaving it with a brightness that the Renaissance master never intended. Two of France's top art experts have voiced their protest by resigning from the Paris museum's advisory committee responsible for its "restoration." Such was their concern for the 500-year-old painting that Ségolène Bergeon Langle and Jean-Pierre Cuzin – eminent former specialists in conservation and painting respectively at the Louvre – could no longer associate themselves with its treatment." - Adriano

Perhaps useful in recreating current mathematics if stranded on a desert island... (but I would settle for an imprinted t-shirt :-) "In _Science Ink: Tattoos of the Science Obsessed_, author Carl Zimmer shares an assortment of more than 300 tattoos in categories like neuroscience, physics, astronomy and evolution, with notes on the science behind each one." \\ The interview video is interesting as well. - Adriano

Will never forget that chemical smell of fixer in the darkroom... \\ see also Amira's wonderful post, http://ff.im/OG1TH - Adriano

Your too young to remember the excitement of getting your first camera, a box brownie and threading your very own film that first time... yeah thats how life long love affairs start ;) - WarLord

"Photographers in order: 0:03 Robert Doisneau, 0:10 Horst P. Horst, 0:16 Robert Capa, 0:23 André Kertész, 0:30 Ruth Bernhard, 0:37 Brassaï, 0:44 Werner Bischof, 0:50 Edward Steichen, 0:57 Weegee, 1:04 Irving Penn, 1:11 Henri Cartier-Bresson, 1:17 Harry Callahan, 1:24 Man Ray, 1:31 Don McCullin, 1:38 Paul Strand, 1:45 Cecil Beaton, 1:52 Elliot Erwitt, 1:59 Gordon Parks, 2:05 Shigeichi Nagano, 2:12 Edward Weston, 2:18 Manuel Álvarez Bravo, 2:26 Clarence John Laughlin, 2:32 Ed van der Elsken, 2:39 Margaret Bourke-White, 2:46 Arnold Newman, 2:53 Berenice Abbott, 3:00 Bruce Davidson, 3:06 Ansel Adams, 3:13 Walker Evans, 3:20 Imogen Cunningham, 3:27 Richard Avedon, 3:33 Dorthea Lange." - Adriano

"The place is inspired by the deeply strange Club Silencio in Mulholland Drive. Everything from the toilet bowls – black on black – to the saltiness of the nuts on the bar was decided on by the master himself. He even created the 1950s-inspired furniture, the chairs designed to "induce and sustain a specific state of alertness and openness to the unknown". This is Lynch's answer to Warhol's Factory, the existentialists' Café Flore, the dadaists' Cabaret Voltaire. Molière is supposed to have been buried there, and Zola printed J'Accuse in the basement." - Adriano

"In the 1630s, Bernini began a tempestuous affair with Costanza Bonarelli, the wife of an assistant. But their idyll was ruined when Bernini caught his brother Luigi sneaking away from her quarters and exploded with rage. The artist sent his servant to her with orders to slash her face. Thus when Bernini carved "Medusa," he viewed her as the mythical creature, a Gorgon, who had been caught having an affair with Neptune. Medusa is being punished -- with her hair transformed into writhing snakes and crying out with anguish. This is Bernini pushing to the limits what he could do with sculpture [Carrara marble]. The mythical Medusa turned onlookers into stone, and he turns stone into living flesh. That's the quality that made him famous." http://online.wsj.com/article... - Adriano

Don't blink - Alez☭

Amazing pictures!! - Sepi ⌘ سپی

"The new museum artfully traces his vivid path from ambitious provincial to renegade Parisian luminary to the political outcast he became in his final years. It also locates the artist securely within his native locale. One can glimpse from its windows the same chalky, limestone cliffs that Courbet painted with a palette knife and thick slabs of pigment. \\ In the aftermath of the French Commune (1871), the artist fell into disgrace. Implicated in the infamous destruction of the Vendome Column in Paris, Courbet was imprisoned. In the final galleries, Courbet's tragic last chapter is poignantly set forth. His "Self Portrait at St. Pélagie" (c. 1872), one of the true treasures given to Ornans by his sister, Juliette, depicts the artist in prison—emaciated, melancholic but still youthful and sporting the symbolic red scarf of a Communard." http://online.wsj.com/article... - Adriano