News Art Blog

The best way to learn any language is total immersion. If you live in a place long enough and open yourself up to the experience, then you’ll come away not just with a new tongue, but also with the flavor of the culture in which that language is expressed. For many people, art museums feel like a foreboding foreign nation with a language all its own. Frederick Wiseman’s new documentary, National Gallery, finally offers an immersion class in how to speak fluent “museum.” Wiseman’s 39^th documentary, National Gallery takes you inside London’s National Gallery to eavesdrop on the docents leading tours, spy on the early morning floor waxers, look over the shoulders of conservators, and even join executive meetings behind closed doors all in the name of learning what really happens in an art museum and how the very voice of the modern museum is changing with the times. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "How to Speak Fluent 'Museum.'"

Mark Rothko only got as far as his sophomore year at Yale before fleeing that WASP nest of anti-Semitism and elitism. Forty-six years later, Yale awarded him an honorary degree in philosophy, but in the meantime the artist wielded his philosophy as much as his paintbrush in pursuit of a kind of painting that matched his kind of thinking. In the exhibitionand companion catalog Mark Rothko: The Decisive Decade 1940-1950, we follow Rothko’s path through ten years that saw no less than six distinctive styles of painting, but that resulted in one of the most recognizable signature styles in all of modern art. If you’ve ever wondered how Rothko became Rothko, “to understand Rothko—to see his artistic evolution, comprehend his goals and the means he used to realize them, to live his internal struggle to manifest the human soul and chart that manifestation,” writes Rothko’s son Christopher in the catalog, “one need only study the 1940s.” Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "When (and How) Rothko Became Rothko."



[Image: Mark Rothko, American (born Russia), 1903−1970. Untitled (Man and Two Women in a Pastoral Setting), c. 1940. Oil on canvas. National Gallery of Art, Washington. Gift of The Mark Rothko Foundation, Inc. 1986.43.53. ©1998 Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko /Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.]

His statue has stood outside the York Art Gallery for a century now, but most passersby don’t know the name of William Etty or the works that once made him York’s most famous and infamous native artist. In the exhibition, William Etty: Art and Controversy, which runs through January 22, 2012 at the York Art Gallery, the nudes that brought lavish praise and vicious criticism upon Etty’s head stand for inspection before a new generation. As the curators and essayists of the catalog revisit the old controversies that seem quaint now, they also reveal a different side of Etty that makes him a controversial figure for today. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "William Etty: The Most Controversial Artist You’ve Never Heard of."

[Image: William Etty. Candaules King of Lydia, Shews His Wife by Stealth. Exh. R.A. 1830, Oil on Canvas, Copyright Tate, 2011.]

[Many thanks to the York Art Gallery for providing me with the image above and a review copy of the catalog to the exhibition, William Etty: Art and Controversy, which runs through January 22, 2012.]