Cezanne's Apple

"With an apple I will astonish Paris" - Paul Cezanne.

Cézanne demonstrates that still life—considered the lowliest genre of its day—could be a vehicle for faithfully representing the appearance of light and space. “Painting from nature is not copying the object,” he wrote, “it is realizing one’s sensations.”

He used planes of colour and small brushstrokes that build up to form complex fields. The paintings convey Cézanne's intense study of his subjects.

The Basket of Apples by Paul Cezanne is an 1893 still-life oil painting, popularly known for its disjointed point of view. The painting has been portrayed as an impartial composition for its unbalanced parts. It consists of a bottle at the center, an inclined basket with green and red-colored apples, a plate with stacked biscuits and a tablecloth with several apples which seem to have rolled from the inclined basket.

The disjointed perspective of the painting can be noted after examining it closely. Although Cezanne never aimed at illusionism in most of his paintings, in the Basket of Apples it seems as if he completed the piece using 2 different points of view. The right and left sides of the table are not in the same plane as if the table had split into two.
This is a technique which Cezanne used to integrate the distinction of viewpoints into an impressionistic still life. With this technique, Cezanne helped in bridging the gap between Cubism and Impressionism.

World's Most Expensive Paintings

Very good BBC documentary about the world of leading art pieces and high art auctions.

$90,000 Art Oops

Le Rêve (The Dream)

Pablo Picasso

1932

Oil on Canvas

Steve Wynn, CEO of Wynn Resorts Limited, purchased the Picasso's Le Reve in 1997 for $48.4 million at the Christie's auction of the Ganz-collection on November 11, 1997. In 2006 he reportedly was to sell it to Steven A. Cohen for $139 million, which would at that time have been the highest price paid for any piece of art. However, he put his elbow through the canvas while showing it to his guests, including the screenwriter Nora Ephron and her husband Nick Pileggi, the broadcaster Barbara Walters, the art dealer Serge Sorokko and his wife, the model Tatiana Sorokko, the New York socialite Louise Grunwald and the lawyer David Boies and his wife, Mary. 

This canceled the sale, and after a $90,000 repair, the painting was estimated to be worth $85 million. Wynn sued his insurance company over the $54 million difference with the virtual selling price, possibly exceeding his own buying price.

Mona Lisa's Seven Smiles

In 1911, Argentine con man Eduardo de Valfierno found a way to steal the Mona Lisa six times over at no risk to himself.

First he made private deals with six separate buyers to steal and deliver the priceless painting. Then he hired a professional art restorer to make six fakes, and shipped them in advance to the buyers’ locales (to avoid later trouble with customs).

In August he paid thief to steal the original from the Louvre. 

On August 21, 1911, Vincenzo Peruggia calmly walked out of the Louvre with the painting tucked under his workman's smock. An immigrant carpenter and decorator born 1881 in Dumenza, a small town on Lake Como, Peruggia worked at the museum. Having planned the burglary, he spent Sunday night there, hiding in a storeroom. On Monday morning, the day the museum was closed, he unhooked the painting, took it out of its heavy frame, which he abandoned under a staircase and, unscrewing the knob of a locked door, let himself out of the building.

When news of the theft had spread Valfierno delivered the six fakes to their recipients, exacting a high price for each. Then he quietly disappeared. The flummoxed thief Peruggia was soon caught trying to sell the red-hot original, and it was returned to the museum in 1913.

Manet's LOL Quote

Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Luncheon of the Boating Party

1881

Oil on Canvas

“He has no talent at all, that boy! You, who are his friend, tell him, please, to give up painting.”

– Manet to Monet, on Renoir

Rare Van Gogh in President Kennedy's Suite

You have a rare opportunity to see this particular painting by Vincent Van Gogh at the Dallas Museum of Art until September 2013. It is currently being shown in a special exhibit about President John F. Kennedy's stay in Dallas. This painting was one of the several valuable works placed in the suite of the Texas Hotel in Fort Worth, Texas for the night of November 21, 1963. The last known outside personal phone call President John F. Kennedy ever made was to thank those responsible for arranging for the art to be placed in his suite. I saw the exhibit and it is a notable and moving exhibit worth the trip. All of the pieces that were placed in Kennedy's hotel room are in the exhibit.

The painting is on loan for the exhibition from a private collection. This is one of Van Gogh's pointillism pieces, a technique of painting in which small, distinct dots of pure color are applied in patterns to form an image. Pointillism was developed in 1886 by Georges Seurat and Paul Signac who branched it from Impressionism. Van Gogh adopted pointillism for a short while when he was in Paris, but soon found out the process was not suitable for his temperament and used it and its bright, unmixed colors to find his own style.

Hotel Texas Exhibit at the Dallas Museum of Art about Kennedy's stay in Dallas.

Some of the rare art pieces placed in President and Mrs. Kennedy's suite when 

they stayed at the Texas Hotel in Dallas.

I am what I am

Composition 10

by Piet Mondrian

1939-42

Oil on Canvas.

I construct lines and color combinations on a flat surface, in order to express general beauty with the utmost awareness. Nature (or, that which I see) inspires me, puts me, as with any painter, in an emotional state so that an urge comes about to make something, but I want to come as close as possible to the truth and abstract everything from that, until I reach the foundation (still just an external foundation!) of things… I believe it is possible that, through horizontal and vertical lines constructed with awareness, but not with calculation, led by high intuition, and brought to harmony and rhythm, these basic forms of beauty, supplemented if necessary by other direct lines or curves, can become a work of art, as strong as it is true. Piet Mondrian 1914

PIET MONDRIAN is an anagram of I PAINT MODERN.

I find this rather curious in relation to my own name, Venus. I was named after the Frankie Avalon song "Venus" which is about Venus de Milo, the Goddess of Love and one of the most recognized art sculptures. I never intended on becoming an artist. I was kind of drawn into it. Perhaps you could dub it a 'calling'. And my most well known painting has been my modern reproduction of Botticelli's The Birth Of Venus. In my painting Venus is being "born" into color, as an awakening. In a lot of my photographs I happen to unconsciously tilt my head just like Botticelli's Venus.

Is it destiny? Perhaps we become what we were born to be.

Aphrodite of Milos, Venus de Milo

Between 130 and 100 BC

Marble

Louvre Museum, Paris, France

The Birth of Venus

by Sandro Botticelli

c. 1486

Tempera on Canvas

The Birth of Venus

by Venus

2008

Oil on Canvas Panel

TheArtofVenus.com

A King's Ransom

10 Most expensive paintings (sale prices expressed in dollars and adjusted for inflation):

1. The Card Players, Paul Cezanne $268.1 million (2011)
2. No. 5, 1948, Jackson Pollock: $161.7 million (2006)
3. Woman III, Willem de Kooning: $158.8 million (2006)
4. Le Rêve, Pablo Picasso $155.0 million (2013)
5. Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I, Gustav Klimt: $154.9 million (2006)
6. Portrait of Dr. Gachet, Vincent van Gogh: $148.6 million (1990)
7. Bal au moulin de la Galette, Montmartre, Pierre-Auguste Renoir: $140.7 million (1990)
8. Garçon à la pipe, Pablo Picasso: $128.2 million (2004)
9. The Scream, Edvard Munch: $121.4 million (2012)
10. Flag, Jasper Johns $117.6 (2010)

Ryoei Saito, a Japanese businessman who purchased the Renoir and Van Gogh casually remarked he wanted the paintings to be put in his coffin and cremated with him when he died. He retracted the comment when it caused an international uproar, saying it was only a joke for the tax authorities, but few people thought it was funny. He had already locked the two paintings away from the public in a warehouse like the fabled ark in the movie "Raiders of the Lost Ark,", invisible to those who might appreciate its power. Although he made a vague commitment to put them on show 'in about 10 years' time'. Saito died in 1996 and it unclear who the current owner is but representatives of Saito's company assured the world that they are still around.

Paradox

Gertrude Stein, 1905–6

Pablo Picasso

Oil on canvas

Metropolitan Museum of Art

Picasso said of his portrait of Gertrude Stein, “Everybody thinks that the portrait is not like her, but never mind, in the end she will look like the portrait.”. He began the portrait in 1905. She posed for this portrait ninety times. One day as described by Gertrude he said "I can't see you anymore when I look", he said irritably, and so the picture was left like that. He completed the head after a trip to Spain in fall 1906. His reduction of the figure to simple masses and the face to a mask with heavy lidded eyes reflects his recent encounter with African, Roman, and Iberian sculpture and foreshadows his adoption of Cubism. He painted the head, which differs in style from the body and hands, without the sitter, testimony to the fact that it was his personal vision, rather than empirical reality, that guided his work. When someone commented that Stein did not look like her portrait, Picasso replied, "She will."
When you look at her photographs, I see that the portrait carries her mood, and being that the painting foretells of his up and coming cubist style, it is enough to say it is her. 

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