News Art Blog

“I am big,” Gloria Swanson’s fading film star Norma Desmond says in Sunset Boulevard. “It’s the pictures that got small.” Have we lost the “big” artist, the artist who tackled the big ideas of truth and life whose name stood on the tip of everyone’s tongue regardless of class or nationality? Franz von Stuck, known in the late 19^th century as Munich’s “painter prince,” belonged to the highest rank of artistic royalty at the time, yet today his name’s as faded as that of most silent film stars. If we’ve lost not just such “big” artists of the past, but also the capacity to allow such “big” artists in the future, what have we also lost in the exchange of big pictures for small? On the 150^th anniversary of von Stuck’s birth and the 120th anniversary of his American debut, the Frye Art Museum in Seattle, Washington, presents the exhibition Franz von Stuck (which runs through February 2, 2014), which recreates not just von Stuck’s art, but also the culturally charged atmosphere that powered the Gesamtkunstwerk—the total work of art that captures the total human condition.  Can Franz von Stuck bring the idea of the “big” artist back? Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Can Franz von Stuck Bring the Idea of the 'Big' Artist Back?"

You can’t pick your fans. If you could, nobody would pick Adolf Hitler. The frustrated painter turned Führer and genocidistenjoyed any art that embodied in some form for him the “blood and soil” values of German racial superiority rooted in close ties between the people and the land. Canonical German artists such as Albrect Durer, Lucas Cranach the Elder, and Johannes Vermeer(Dutch being close enough to Deutsche) met with Hitler’s approval, but among more modern artists, the Nazis deemed them mostly “Degenerate Art.” Among a few more modern yet traditional German artists, painter Hans Thoma, perhaps the most popular painter among the German people at the turn of the 20^thcentury, suited Hitler’s taste, too.  Hans Thoma: “The German People’s Favorite Painter,” which runs through September 29, 2013 at the Städel Museum in Frankfurt, Germany, aims to wash away any stains of guilt by association and restore while reevaluating Thoma’s place in German and general art history. The Thoma show exemplifies not only the writing and rewriting of art history specifically, but also serves as a telling microcosm of Germany’s overall struggle with its tragic past. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Hans Thoma: Hitler’s Favorite Artist?"




 

Whenever a holiday rolls around, I always try to match a work of art to it, the way a sommelier tries to match a fine wine to a meal. Halloween led me to a quest for the scariest painting of all time? What sends chills and thrills up your spine just by looking at it on a museum wall? Fright, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder, of course, but I think I’ve come up with a pretty good contender for the scariest, the Halloween-iest painting of them all. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Is This the Scariest Painting Ever?"

[Image: Arnold Böcklin. Isle of the Dead, 1880. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY. (Image source.)]