THE MYSTERY OF THE MELUN DIPTYCH
Before we start the new Art Quiz, I want to invite Art lovers to view an old Art Mystery newly published on youtube. This is an Art Mystery that we solved on the pages of daily kos, and it is one of my favorites. The mystery revolves around the Melun Diptych, which is also one of my favorite paintings. The questions that we asked were: Who was the model for the Virgin Mary in the painting, and why was she painted like an alien or a statue?
Our solution to the mystery is now on youtube commercial free:
If you like it, then you might also like other videos in the Art Mystery collection such as An Art Mystery: Does a Fake Billionaire Have Enough Fake Money to Afford Two Fake Renoirs?, and An Art Mystery: Caravaggio’s Moving Hand. Both are also commercial-free on youtube.
YOUR NEW ART QUIZ
The title of this Art Quiz is the Square Root of Negative Van Gogh. The square root of a negative number is an imaginary number. If that holds true for paintings, then the square root of a negative Van Gogh is an imaginary Van Gogh painting.
There’s something wrong with the paintings and the photograph below. Usually, it is a mashup of two or more famous paintings or photographs. Your charge is to identify the two paintings or photographs and the Artists or Photographers of each.
There’s extra credit for anybody who can pick out all forty-two cats.
Pencils up!
You may begin.
ANSWER KEY
1. This is a mashup of Jacques-Louis David’s Napoleon Crossing the Alps and German Romanticist Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog. The portrait of Napoleon was pure propaganda, showing a wild-eyed horse and a brave general.
Most historians believe that Napoleon crossed the more dangerous portions of the Alps on the back of a donkey.
Of course, no successful propaganda involves depicting dear leader on the back of a lumbering beast of burden, so a beautiful rearing horse and a gallant pose was decided upon. This was such a great publicity tool for the emperor that Napoleon commissioned a number of these paintings with him riding on different horses.
He gave them away as gifts to heads of state and other notables.
This is the Charlottenburg version of Napoleon Crossing the Alps, as it is kept in the Charlottenburg Palace in Berlin. It found its way there because Prussian soldiers were superb ransackers. Jacques-Louis David painted it in 1801 in the Neoclassical style. There is a dusting of snow on the ground to make the effort seem more heroic. That touch doesn’t appear in the other versions. The picture is signed L. DAVID YEAR IX.
In 1818, Caspar David Friedrich painted Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog (below). It is about 37 x 29 inches. The painting is itself a mashup of various mountains and landmarks in Saxony and Bohemia. The Artist pursued his Romantic style, and his final image may have been conjured up to express this idea of Friedrich’s, "The artist should paint not only what he has in front of him but also what he sees inside himself."
2. The original painting by James McNeill Whistler did not have his mother sit for a portrait before a copy of The Venus of Urbino. Whistler painted his opus during the modest Victorian age, and, more importantly, the official title of this masterpiece is Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1.
There’s too much color in the Titian painting!
The scene in the painting is iconic. In fact, the United States Postal Service issued a stamp in 1934 with Whistler’s mother pictured in the same pose alongside the inscription, "In memory and in honor of the mothers of America."
Whistler never considered it to be a portrait of his mother; rather, he saw it as a study. Perhaps I’ve had too much fun with this one?
The original Whistler’s Mother is displayed at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. This would have made the Artist happy, as he was proud that it was exhibited in another museum during his lifetime.
The museum does not do much to describe its painting, but on higher magnification, the painting within the painting appears to be a Japanese print. (It could also be European ruins). But Japanese prints became very popular in Europe, especially among Artists, after 1860. Whistler painted Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1 in 1871.
Titian painted The Venus of Urbino (below) in 1534. It is now tenderly housed in the Galleria degli Uffizi in Florence, Italy. One Art critic described the painting as depicting “undisguised hedonism,” and, well, there isn’t much to say beyond that.
Unless you’re Mark Twain.
In his 1880 travelogue A Tramp Abroad, Mark Twain called the Venus of Urbino "the foulest, the vilest, the obscenest picture the world possesses.” He proposed that "it was painted for a [brothel], and it was probably refused because it was a trifle too strong," adding humorously that "in truth, it is a trifle too strong for any place but a public art gallery." … In the same passage, [though,] Twain also mocks the fig leaves placed in the 19th century on nude statues in Rome, which had "stood in innocent nakedness for ages."
3. I thought it would be interesting to see Goya’s Colossus rampaging through a Van Gogh surrealist landscape. It seemed coincidental that the clouds on the giant’s derriere almost matched the jet stream in the Van Gogh painting. That was a coincidence that I couldn’t pass up!
But, then again, what are clouds gonna do?
In my mind, at least, both paintings have something to say about war. Goya’s painting was representative of the primal brutality of man-against-man war, while Vincent van Gogh was dealing with a war himself: The pitched battle in his mind.
Van Gogh painted The Starry Night (below) in 1898 at the window of his asylum room. He wrote to an Artist friend that he had relapsed and started painting stars too big, not knowing that future generations would adore them. The painting hangs in the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.
We know that Van Gogh finished the painting in June 1889 because he wrote to his brother about it and included a croquis, or quick sketch, in his letter. As you can see in the snippet, the croquis did not show the town, which was imaginary and would not have been seen from the window of his asylum room in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence.
Francisco de Goya painted The Colossus from 1808 to 1812. The Museo de Prado in Madrid is the proud owner of this masterpiece. On the other hand, the Chief Curator at the Prado for this piece concluded that it may have been authored by one of Goya’s disciples. Most everybody disagrees.
4. A mashup of a Van Gogh self-portrait and Van Gogh’s Green Wheat Fields, Auvers but done in the style of René Magritte’s The Son of Man, including an eye poking out from behind the “apple.”
The apple is stolen from Van Gogh’s own Green Wheat Fields, Auvers. In that painting, which is reproduced below, you can see where the “apple” was in the lower-middle portion of the painting.
In fact, when I look at that painting now, I see an apple in it!
Van Gogh was not a Surrealist like Magritte, although some of his paintings inspired that school. If Van Gogh painted this, I suspect his apple would’ve been giant swirls or a big impasto blob.
What do you think?
The painting above, Green Wheat Fields, Auvers, recently entered the collection of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. They have done a magnificent job describing the treasure on their website.
Vincent van Gogh painted this Self-Portrait in September 1889. It was a gift to his brother, Theo. It hangs in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. This was either his last self portrait or his penultimate effort.
René Magritte’s The Son of Man is actually a self-portrait as well. It was completed in 1946, and is an icon of the Surrealism Movement. It is owned by a private collector.
5. This is a mashup of two very famous photographs. Both deal with a similar theme: The plight of female children. The color image of a young Afghan girl from 1984—perhaps one of the most famous photographs of all time—is superimposed onto another famous photograph of a South Carolina cotton mill circa 1908.
The Afghan child was in a war-torn country, while the cotton mill was the work environment for many young American girls.
Pre-teen children worked long hours in factories and mills until Progressives changed minds by exposing the practice.
Sadie Phifer was nine years old and working in a cotton mill in 1908 when she was photographed by Lewis Hine. By that time, she’d already been working eleven-hour shifts for eighteen months. It was around this time that Hine became a one-man National Geographic. He stormed around the country using ruses to sneak into factories to photograph children working long hours at all hours of the day.
Lewis Hine was an American Charles Dickens, using a camera in lieu of a pen.
He also took famous photographs of immigrants, and you’ve undoubtedly seen his breathtaking images of construction on the Empire State building. Hine was a member of the famed Photo League of New York, as well as an inspiration to the group, which received his photographs and negatives upon his passing.
There is a great mystery involving the photographs of Lewis Hine. That will be the subject of the new Art Mystery published tomorrow here on daily kos.
Called colloquially Afghan Girl, it is undoubtedly one of the most famous photographs ever taken. It first appeared to the public on the June 1985 cover of National Geographic magazine. At the time the photograph was taken in 1984, Sharbat Gula was a refugee from Afghanistan living in a camp in Pakistan.
“The image became ‘emblematic’ of ‘refugee girl/woman located in some distant camp’ deserving of the Western viewer's compassion. It became a symbol of Afghanistan to the west.”
6. In honor of daily kos’ fascination with furrbutts, I have created what I call Dog Hell. I needed the help of the marvelously talented Mary Cassatt for the doggo. You can see him on the ground, front and left-center, below what is said to be forty-two cats. I could find thirty-nine.
Below is My Wife’s Lovers by Carl Kahler. It is a painting of forty-two cats done by a very patient Artist. Can you find all forty-two? I gave up. Also, what’s up with the white cat near the middle? It looks like its wearing a cat mask from the musical Cats. All the other cats look like cats, but that cat looks like a person who wants to look like a cat.
It was painted in 1891, so I don’t think the musical had much to do with it.
Kate Birdsall Johnson, an American millionaire, loved Turkish Angora cats, and she commissioned this painting of some of her favorites. The painting is 6 x 8.5 feet and weighs over two hundred pounds.
Some say Johnson owned 350 cats that she housed in her summer house Buena Vista near Sonoma, California, and left them $500,000 in her will, but this is disputed…. Having never painted a cat before, Kahler spent three years studying cats' poses and learning their habits. He reportedly received around $5,000 for the painting (equivalent to $140,000 in 2020). The center of the painting shows her cat Sultan, bought by Johnson during a trip to Paris. Johnson lent the painting for the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, and in the next year it was acquired by [an Art dealer] … in San Francisco. While the salon was destroyed in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, the painting survived it.
My Wife’s Lovers was sold to a private collector in 2015 for over $800,000.00.
The doggo was stolen from Mary Cassatt’s marvelous Little Girl in a Blue Armchair (below), which the American painter completed in 1878. I’ve seen this remarkable painting in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.
The dog is a Brussels Griffon, and the girl was known to her friend Edgar Degas, the painter. This Cassatt painting has been called one of the most radical images of childhood of the time.
SOME OLD ART QUIZZES
If you enjoyed the Art quiz, perhaps you’d like to try your luck with some of the older ones? These were a lot of fun to make and include references to a bunch of paintings in each image. Some of the answers are easy; some are very hard.
Your job is to identify all of the paintings and Artists referenced. The Answer Key for the image above can be found linked here.
The Answer Key for the hot mess above is linked here. Please note that I never tag one of these bastardized images with the names of the real Artists. I hate it when I find Mr. Bean dressed up as Mona Lisa when I’m searching for Leonardo’s works, or Jennifer Aniston dressed up as the girl with the pearl earring while searching for Vermeer’s.
The Answer Key for the Art Quiz above is found here. This one is my favorite, as it contains my favorite paintings. The original painting shows a collection that belonged to Archduke Leopold Wilhelm. That painting is titled, The Archduke Leopold Wilhelm in his Painting Gallery in Brussels, and it was rendered by David Teniers the Younger. It hangs in the Prado Museum.
Teniers’ painting is a painting of other paintings, which fascinates me.
I have removed the Archduke’s paintings and inserted my favorites. Do you see Charles Dickens up there? He’s hanging on the wall next to George. Oops. That was a spoiler. Sorry.
JULY 4 KOS ART EXPO!
On July 4, the group KOS Art Expo will publish a Museum of the Beautiful and Curious. These talented folks have banded together to produce something quite spectacular. Below is one of the exhibits shown by Ralphdog. I hope you stop by and admire their work. Cheers!