Liberal Arts Professors

'Man in underwear' rattles all-women's college.

A remarkably lifelike sculpture of a man sleepwalking in nothing but his underpants has made some Wellesley College students a bit uncomfortable, but the president of the prestigious women's school says that's all part of the intellectual process.
This is what happens when you have Liberal College Professor running our school system. This is what they call Art.
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2014/02/06/massachusetts-college-man-in-undies-sculpture-causes-stir/?intcmp=trending

(FOX NEWS) A remarkably lifelike sculpture of a man sleepwalking in nothing but his underpants has made some Wellesley College students a bit uncomfortable, but the president of the prestigious women’s school says that’s all part of the intellectual process.
The sculpture entitled “Sleepwalker” of a man in an eyes-closed, zombie-like trance is part of an exhibit by sculptor Tony Matelli at the college’s Davis Museum. It was placed at a busy area of campus on Monday, a few days before the official opening of the exhibit, and prompted an online student petition to have it removed.
The sculpture is a “source of apprehension, fear, and triggering thoughts regarding sexual assault” for many, according to the petition, which had nearly 300 signees on Wednesday.

Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2014/02/man-in-underwear-rattles-all-womens-college/#sKxz0u2fXLp5tWYY.99

'Man in underwear' rattles all-women's college

Petition circulating to remove 'inappropriate' statue

Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2014/02/man-in-underwear-rattles-all-womens-college/#sKxz0u2fXLp5tWYY.99

'Man in underwear' rattles all-women's college

Petition circulating to remove 'inappropriate' statue

Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2014/02/man-in-underwear-rattles-all-womens-college/#sKxz0u2fXLp5tWYY.99

'Man in underwear' rattles all-women's college

Petition circulating to remove 'inappropriate' statue

Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2014/02/man-in-underwear-rattles-all-womens-college/#sKxz0u2fXLp5tWYY.99

'Man in underwear' rattles all-women's college

Petition circulating to remove 'inappropriate' statue

Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2014/02/man-in-underwear-rattles-all-womens-college/#sKxz0u2fXLp5tWYY.99

Thomas Kinkade

Thomas Kinkade (January 19, 1958 – April 6, 2012) was an American painter of popular realistic, bucolic, and idyllic subjects.
Kinkade said he was placing emphasis on the value of simple pleasures and that his intent was to communicate inspirational, life-affirming messages through his work. A self-described "devout Christian" (all of his children have the middle name "Christian"), Kinkade said he gained his inspiration from his religious beliefs and that his work was intended to contain a larger moral dimension. He has also said that his goal as an artist was to touch people of all faiths, to bring peace and joy into their lives through the images he creates. Many pictures contain specific chapter-and-verse allusions to certain Bible passages.
On April 6, 2012, Thomas Kinkade died suddenly of natural causes while at home, according to his family. He was 54 years old.
Read more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Kinkade

Edvard Munch’s painting “The Scream”

Edvard Munch was an expressionist painter and print maker from Oslo Norway. He was regarded as the pioneer of the amazing Expressionist movement. His art work from the late 1800′s is the most well known, but his later work is gradually attracting more attention and is a worldwide inspiration.The sale will be handled through Sotheby’s auction house in New York, which has set a minimum bid equal to NOK 450 million (USD 80 million) when the painting goes on the block in May. Even at that level, it would set a new record for being the most expensive piece of art in Norwegian ownership, according to Knut Forsberg of Oslo auction house Blomqvist.

They call this type of so called Art an expressionist painting. I guess that is an early name for modern crap; I mean art. I think his painting along with paintings from artist like Picasso should be termed the 'era of the kindergarden' movement. What idiot would pay millions for this. I guess that's why it's now classified liberal arts. Children who became adults, but never became real artist with creative minds.
It's a far cry from the Early Renaissance. During the 15th century, there was a period of great creative and intellectual activity, during which artists broke away from the restrictions of Byzantine Art. Renaissance artists studied the natural world in order to perfect their understanding of such subjects as anatomy and perspective.Some of the great artists of this period were Sandro Botticelli, Domenico Ghirlandaio, Paolo Uccello and Piero della Francesca. The High Renaissance , during the Early 16th Century,was the culmination of the artistic developments of the Early Renaissance,and one of the great explosions of creative genius in history.High Renaissance is notable for three of the greatest artists in history,Michelangelo, Raphael ,and Leonardo da Vinci.

America and Christianity 3

Discovery of the Mississippi by De Soto

William Henry Powell’s dramatic and brilliantly colored canvas was the last of the eight large historical paintings in the Rotunda commissioned by the Congress. It shows Spanish conquistador and explorer Hernando De Soto (1500–1542), riding a white horse and dressed in Renaissance finery, arriving at the Mississippi River at a point below Natchez on May 8, 1541. De Soto was the first European documented to have seen the river.

As De Soto and his troops approach, the Native Americans watch warily but quietly before their tepees, and a chief holds out the pipe of peace. The central area of the painting is filled with light and color, set off in dramatic relief by the foreground figures in shadow, and the dark forest at the left contrasts strongly with the bright sky on the right. In the foreground, weapons, armor, artillerymen moving a cannon, and a soldier wrapping a wounded leg suggest the attack by Indians that took place the day before. To the right, a monk prays as men set a newly constructed crucifix in the ground. Above this group and fading to the horizon is the Mississippi River, dotted with native canoes, small islands, and a tree being borne downstream; the lightly forested opposite bank is visible along the skyline. Powell based his scene on published accounts and histories, including Theodore Irving’s 1835 The Conquest of Florida by Hernando de Soto. A year later, after De Soto died of a fever, his body was buried in the river, as shown in Constantino Brumidi’s frescoed Frieze of American History above the painting.

American painter William Henry Powell (1823–1879) was the last artist commissioned by the Congress to create a painting for the Capitol Rotunda. He replaced Henry Inman, his former teacher, who was commissioned to fill one of the frames in the Rotunda but who died in 1846 before completing his painting showing Daniel Boone emigrating to Kentucky. Powell, who chose a different subject, worked on the painting in Paris from 1848 to 1853, basing the Spaniards’ costumes and equipment on specimens in the Museum of Artillery. He had a color lithograph made of the painting and exhibited the canvas in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania; Baltimore, Maryland; and New York City before bringing it to Washington, D.C.

The painting has undergone various cleaning, revarnishing, repair, and restoration treatments since its installation. In 1982 the painting was lined to an aluminum panel to help it resist the effects of changes in temperature and humidity. All of the Rotunda paintings were most recently cleaned in 2008.

Engravings of Discovery of the Mississippi by De Soto have appeared on the reverse of two United States bank notes: a $10 note in the 1860s and a $500 note in the 1918 series.

William Henry Powell was born in New York City on February 14, 1823, and raised in Cincinnati, Ohio, from infancy. His youthful interest in art was encouraged by a local philanthropist, and he received instruction. At the age of seventeen he returned to New York, where he became a pupil of Henry Inman, and he later studied art in Italy for three years. Initially recognized for his portraits, he moved into the field of history painting, which led to his work for the Rotunda. The success of Discovery of the Mississippi by De Soto led the Ohio legislature to commission him to paint The Battle of Lake Erie (1873), a scene of Commodore Perry’s famous victory. This work, still displayed in the Ohio Statehouse, prompted the Congress to commission a larger version, which hangs in the east Senate Grand Staircase in the Capitol. Powell’s other history paintings include The Siege of Vera Cruz, The Landing of the Pilgrims, and Washington at Valley Forge. His portraits include depictions of Washington Irving, Peter Stuyvesant, and General George B. McClellan. He died in New York on October 6, 1879.

America and Christianity 2

Robert W. Weir
Oil on canvas, 12' x 18'
1843; placed 1843
Rotunda

Embarkation of the Pilgrims
This painting depicts the Pilgrims on the deck of the ship Speedwell on July 22, 1620, before they departed from Delfs Haven, Holland, for North America, where they sought religious freedom. They first sailed to Southampton, England, to join the Mayflower, which was also making the voyage. After leaks forced the Speedwell to make additional stops in Dartmouth and then Plymouth, its passengers boarded the Mayflower. Five months later the Pilgrims settled the Plymouth Colony in present-day Massachusetts.

The group appears solemn and contemplative of what they are about to undertake as they pray for divine protection through their voyage; the words “God with us” appear on the sail in the upper left corner. The figures at the center of the composition are William Brewster, holding the Bible; Governor Carver, kneeling with head bowed and hat in hand; and pastor John Robinson, with extended arms, looking Heavenward. Gathered around them are the men, women, and children going on the voyage. Some are dressed in traditional puritan attire while others wear more fanciful and bright garments. The armor, helmet, and musket in the foreground represent the tools that the Pilgrims will use for protection in the new and unfamiliar land. In the background on the right are the city and people the Pilgrims leave, and on the left a rainbow represents the hope and promise of what lies ahead.

Embarkation of the Pilgrims is Robert Weir’s most famous work. Initially, Weir had intended to paint a scene depicting the Mayflower Compact. However, the same subject was proposed by artist and inventor Samuel F. B. Morse, who also sought a commission for one the Rotunda paintings. While Morse did not receive a commission, Weir out of respect chose instead to the paint the embarkation from Delfts Haven. Weir’s depiction of the event was drawn from Nathaniel Morton’s New-England’s Memorial of 1669 and, perhaps, Cotton Mather’s Magnalia Christi Americana. The armor and costumes Weir collected in Europe were sources for the garments worn by those depicted. The painting was completed in July 1843 and was first seen by the Corps of Cadets at the United States Military Academy at West Point, where Weir was an instructor. The painting then traveled to Boston, New York, and Philadelphia and was hung in the Capitol in December that same year.

The painting has undergone various cleaning, repair, and restoration treatments. In November 1860, the painting was damaged by a falling beam during the construction of the new dome, scraping the painting and causing a hole near the foot of Miles Standish. The War Department detailed Weir from West Point to make the needed repairs. The painting has since undergone periodic cleaning and restoration, including relining and varnishing, with the most recent cleaning in 2008.

In 1857, Weir painted a smaller version of Embarkation of the Pilgrims, which is now in the Brooklyn Museum of Art. In the later work, Weir made changes in light and details and achieved greater focus on the three central figures by giving them fuller faces and broader shoulders. Engravings of this later painting have appeared on the reverses of several U. S. currency notes, including a $50 bank note and the $10,000 Federal Reserve note, the largest denomination ever issued to the general public.

Robert Walter Weir was born in New York City on June 18, 1803. He was a largely self-taught artist who had some formal instruction but developed his skills through first copying pictures and later traveling to Europe to study the art of Florence and Rome. He spent much of his career as an instructor at the United States Military Academy at West Point, where he was appointed Instructor of Drawing in 1834 and promoted to Professor in 1846; after forty-two years at the Academy, he retired in 1876 and set up a studio in New York City. He painted and exhibited portraits, landscapes, and genre scenes throughout his life—for example, Portrait of Walter Weir (1853), View of the Hudson River (1864), and The Greenwich Boat Club (1833). Weir married Louisa Ferguson in 1829 and later, after her death, married Susan Martha Bayard. He was the father of sixteen children, including artists John Ferguson Weir and Julian Alden Weir. Robert Weir died on May 1, 1889, and is buried at West Point.

America and Christianity

In United States Capitol is displayed an 1840 painting by John Gadsby Chapman, The Baptism of Pocahontas, in the Rotunda.
This painting depicts the ceremony in which Pocahontas, daughter of the influential Algonkian chief Powhatan, was baptized and given the name Rebecca in an Anglican church. It took place in 1613 or 1614 in the colony at Jamestown, Virginia, the first permanent English settlement on the North American continent. Pocahontas is thought to be the earliest native convert to Christianity in the English colonies; this ceremony and her subsequent marriage to John Rolfe helped to establish peaceful relations between the colonists and the Tidewater tribes.

The figures of Pocahontas and the officiating minister are given prominence by their placement, their bright white clothing, and the light that shines upon them. Pocahontas kneels on the top level of a stepped dais, her head bowed and her hands clasped before her. Reverend Alexander Whiteaker raises his eyes and his left hand, while his right hand rests on the baptismal font. John Rolfe, Pocahontas’s future husband, stands behind her.

Other colonists and members of Pocahontas’s family look on, displaying a range of emotions. At the left of the painting, Sir Thomas Dale, deputy governor of the colony, has risen from his chair near the font to observe the event. Pocahontas’s regally dressed brother, Nantequaus, turns away from the ceremony as her uncle Opachisco leans in from the right. The seated, brooding figure of another uncle, Opechankanough, turns completely away from the ceremony while Pocahontas’s sister, with an infant, watches from the floor.

Chapman received the commission for the Rotunda painting in 1837 and selected Pocahontas as its subject. He may have chosen to paint her baptism because he had already (in 1836) completed a scene that showed her more widely depicted rescue of John Smith. Seeking to depict the scene of this ceremony accurately, Chapman traveled in England and America to examine objects and buildings from the early seventeenth century. Because the Jamestown church had since been torn down, he based his setting on a church that he believed to be of similar age and incorporated features appropriate to the colony, such as the pine columns; many details were based on a written description by a Jamestown resident. Chapman created this painting in Washington, D.C., in the loft of a barn on G Street, N.W. His life during the time in which he worked on it was marked by great sadness and misfortune: his son died in February 1838, and two weeks later his daughter was born prematurely and survived only ten hours. He was also under mounting pressure from debts and worked quickly on the canvas to collect his payment; after completing it he noted in his day book that the money he received from the government for the painting was “barely equivalent to its cost” to him. The painting was delivered to the Capitol and installed in November 1840.

This painting has undergone various cleaning, repair, and restoration treatments. In 1925, it was relined because of the damage it suffered from currents of heated air rising from the floor registers. Finding a manufacturer in the United States to provide such a large canvas proved difficult, and the canvas was eventually ordered from a company in Brussels. In 1980 the painting was attached to an aluminum panel to help it resist the effects of changes in temperature and humidity. All of the Rotunda paintings were most recently surface cleaned in 2008.

An engraving of Chapman’s painting appeared on the reverse of the First Charter $20 National Bank Notes issued in 1863 and 1875.

John Gadsby Chapman was born on August 11, 1808, in Alexandria, Virginia. He received encouragement and instruction from history painter George Cooke and portraitist Charles Bird King, and he studied further in Philadelphia. In 1828 he traveled to Italy to study the Old Masters, and in 1831 he returned to America to create landscapes and portraits, which he exhibited in Washington, D.C.; Richmond; and Philadelphia. He moved in 1834 to New York City, where he became a member of the National Academy of Design and illustrated books and magazines. He also began a series of history paintings depicting events in colonial-era America, and their success led to the commission for Baptism of Pocahontas, his best-known work. In 1850 he and his family settled in Rome, where he prospered by selling his works to American tourists. In the 1860s, however, the Civil War curtailed tourist travel; in the 1870s his wife died and he relied on fellow Americans for charity. His health failing, he returned to the United States in 1884 and lived with his son in Brooklyn. He died on November 28, 1889.
http://www.aoc.gov/cc/art/index.cfm

Sebastiano Conca

Sebastiano Conca Italian, born circa 1676-1764. One of his greatest paintings was the one of 'Alexander the Great in the Temple of Jerusalem'.

Eugene Delacroix

Cleopatra and peasant

The greatest French painter of the Romantic movement. He was the son of a politician, Charles Delacroix, but there is some evidence to indicate that his real father was the diplomat Talleyrand, a friend of the family. His mother, Victoire Oeben, came of a family of notable craftsmen and designers.In 1816 Delacroix entered the studio of Pierre Guérin, who had earlier taught Géricault. His basic artistic education was obtained, however, by copying Old Masters at the Louvre, where he delighted in Rubens and the Venetian School. He met Bonington in the Louvre and was introduced by him to English watercolour painting. Constable's Hay Wain, exhibited in the 1824 Salon, also made a great impression on him and in 1825 he spent some months in England, admiring in particular Gainsborough, Lawrence, Etty, and Wilkie. In the Salon of 1822 he had his first public success with The Barque of Dante (Louvre, Paris). It was bought by the State (with Talleyrand perhaps pulling strings in the background), as was The Massacre at Chios (Louvre) two years later, ensuring the success of his career. Gros called this painting 'the massacre of painting', but Baudelaire wrote that it was a terrifying hymn in honour of doom and irremediable suffering.In 1832 Delacroix visited Morocco in the entourage of the Comte de Mornay and there acquired a fund of rich and exotic visual imagery which he exploited to the full in his later work (Sultan of Morocco, Musée, Toulouse, 1845). From the late 1830s his style and technique underwent a change. In place of luminous glazes and contrasted values he began to use a personal technique of vibrating adjacent tones and divisionist colour effects in a manner of which Watteau had been a master, making colour enter into the structure of the picture to an extent which had not previously been attempted. In spite of being hailed as the leader of the Romantic movement, his predilection for exotic and emotionally charged subject-matter, and his open enmity with Ingres, Delacroix always claimed allegiance to the classical tradition, and for his large works followed the traditional course of making numerous preparatory drawings.In his later career he became one of the most distinguished monumental mural painters in the history of French art. His public commissions included decorations in several major buildings in Paris: Palais Bourbon (Salon du roi, 1833-37; Library, 1838-47); the Library of the Luxembourg Palace (1841-46); and three paintings in the Chapelle des Anges of S. Sulpice (1853-61). In the last of these, his Jacob and the Angel and Heliodorus Expelled from the Temple are among the maturest expressions of his decorative richness of colour and grandiose structural integration. Baudelaire said of him that he was the only artist who 'in our faithless generation conceived religious pictures' and van Gogh wrote, 'only Rembrandt and Delacroix could paint the face of Christ.'Delacroix's output was enormous. After his death his executors found more than 9,000 paintings, pastels, and drawings in his studio and he prided himself on the speed at which he worked, declaring 'If you are not skilful enough to sketch a man falling out of a window during the time it takes him to get from the fifth storey to the ground, then you will never be able to produce monumental work.' Among great painters he was also one of the finest writers on art. He was a voluminous letter writer and kept a journal from 1822 to 1824 and again from 1847 until his death — a marvellously rich source of information and opinion on his life and times. His influence, particularly through his use of colour, was prodigious, inspiring Renoir, Seurat, and van Gogh among others. Delacroix's studio in Paris is now a museum devoted to his life and work, but the Louvre has the finest collection of his paintings.

The Destruction of Jerusalem by Titus

KAULBACH, Wilhelm von 1846. Cornelius, Schadow, and Schnorr were pioneering in monumental history painting, which was to play so great a role in the second half of the 19th century. Huge panoramic paintings were installed in nearly all the public buildings to make them centres of culture. They taught history and were intended to have a didactic influence as historical models Kaulbach's huge painting, The Destruction of Jerusalem by Titus, is the most mature example of the new theatrical history painting. The artist does not show the real event, rather this is idealistic didacticism. We are given an interpretation that transcends time and is intended to be of significance for the whole world.

Desolation

Third in a series by Thomas Cole

The End of the Empire

' The course of the Empire destruction' by Thomas Cole.

The Glory of the Roman Empire - Thomas Cole

Click on Image to enlarge

Thomas Cole (1801-1848)
See also: Hudson River School
VIEW IMAGE LIST
"Thomas Cole, born in Lancashire, England, was trained as an engraver of woodblocks used for printing calico. Because he did not have any formal education in art, his aesthetic ideas derived from poetry and literature, influences that were strongly to mark his paintings. The Cole family emigrated to America in 1818, but Thomas spent a year alone in Philadelphia before going on to Steubenville, Ohio, where his family had settled. He spent several years in Steubenville designing patterns and probably also engraving woodblocks for his father's wallpaper manufactory. He made his first attempts at landscape painting after learning the essentials of oil painting from a nebulous itinerant portraitist named Stein. In 1823, Cole followed his family to Pittsburgh and began to make detailed and systematic studies of that city's highly picturesque scenery, establishing a procedure of painstakingly detailed drawing that was to become the foundation of his landscape painting.
"During another stay in Philadelphia, from 1823 to 1824, Cole determined to become a painter and closely studied the landscapes of Thomas Doughty and Thomas Birch exhibited at the Pennsylvania Academy, His technique improved greatly and his thinking on the special qualities of American scenery began to crystallize. Cole next moved to New York, where the series of works he produced following a sketching trip up the Hudson River in the summer of 1825 brought him to the attention of the city's most important artists and patrons. From then on, his future as a landscape painter was assured. By 1829, when he decided to go to Europe to study firsthand the great works of the past, he had become one of the founding members of the National Academy of Design and was generally recognized as America's leading landscape painter.
"In Europe, Cole's visits to the great galleries of London and Paris and, more important, his stay in Italy from 1831 to 1832, filled his imagination with high-minded themes and ideas. A true Romantic spirit, he sought to express in his painting the elevated moral tone and concern with lofty themes previously the province of history painting. When he returned to America, he found an enlightened patron in the New York merchant Luman Reed, who commissioned from him The Course of Empire (1836), a five-canvas extravaganza depicting the progress of a society from the savage state to an apogee of luxury and, finally, to dissolution and extinction. Most New York patrons, however, preferred recognizable American views, which Cole, his technique further improved by his European experience, was able to paint with increased authority. Although he frequently complained that he would prefer not to have to paint those so-called realistic views, Cole's best efforts in the landscape genre reveal the same high-principled, intellectual content that informs his religious and allegorical works. A second trip to Europe, in 1841-42, resulted in even greater advances in the mastery of his art: his use of color showed greater virtuosity and his representation of atmosphere, especially the sky, became almost palpably luminous.
"Cole's remarkable oeuvre, in addition to naturalistic American and European views, consisted of Gothic fantasies (The Departure and The Return, 1837), religious allegories (Tbe Voyage of Life, 1840), and classicized pastorals (Tbe Dream of Arcadia, 1838). He consistently recorded his thoughts in a formidable body of writing: detailed journals, many poems, and an influential essay on American scenery. Further, he encouraged and fostered the careers of Asher B. Durand and Frederic E. Church, two artists who would most ably continue the painting tradition he had established. Though Cole's unexpected death after a short illness sent a shock through the New York art world, the many achievements that were his legacy provided a firm ground for the continued growth of the school of American landscape."

Evolution of Art

Above are great sculptures from the past. Below is; well, nothing.

Over a year ago, I started 'Art-of-Facts' with an article on sculpture in America. I think artistic sculptures reflect the state of the nation. When they become meaningless and lifeless, it reflects the soul of that nation. In the past, when you looked at a sculpture, it conveyed love, reverence, spirit or even greatness in an event or person, always uplifting. Today, America's art is more that of a pagan nation, lifeless, uninspired and meaningless.

An eye for Art

The great artist through history have produced beautiful painting with great realism. Paintings depicting a moment in time or the beauty of a place or subject, Exhibit 3. Now that communism has gotten control of our art critics and directors of art museums they pollute our youth with ugly, meaningless and sometimes repulsive art that I guess you have to be completely stoned to enjoy, Exhibit 4.

Meaningless Art - Exhibit 4

Good Art - Exhibit 3

Artistic Sculpture

Never in history has a society debased it's artistic sculpture until America in the 20th century. Compare Exhibit 1 (Paul Revere, Hamilton and Lincoln) with Exhibit 2 in the entries below. Which group do you find inspiration in? Communist goals is to attack American standards and values on all fronts. Great sculptures now consist of shapeless, awkward and meaningless forms.

Meaningless Sculpture - Exhibit 2

Good Sculpture - Exhibit 1