Color in our World: August 2012

Wednesday, August 29, 2012

Marilyn Monroe Redux

This picture of MM is made entirely of candy. The hair is made of licorice, the face of gummy bears and the background from other candy. Pretty sweet!

When I was a kid, I started collecting pictures of Marilyn Monroe in a scrapbook. A folder of six or so was sold at the quick-stop type gas station in Sweetwater, Texas for less than a dollar. Eventually, I had two scrapbooks full of pictures and articles about Marilyn. I was too young to understand sex appeal, but I liked her in comic roles. She seemed innocent, sweet, and funny. When our family moved to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in 1957, my scrapbooks disappeared. The movers must have stolen them. Today, they would probably be worth several dollars on eBay.

Fifty years have elapsed since Marilyn's death, and she is a "hot property" again in the media world. If you see two large scrapbooks of MM pictures for sale, please inform me ASAP!

LOS ANGELES (AP).- There is a career after death, at least if while alive you wielded star power like Marilyn Monroe.

The bombshell actress continues to be a successful celebrity brand even 50 years after she died on Aug. 5, 1962, with a new digital emphasis to complement the wealth of photos, fashion, films and other cultural touchstones she left behind.

Monroe ranked third last year in Forbes' annual list of top deceased celebrity earners, generating $27 million and coming in behind Michael Jackson and Elvis Presley. It was a comeback for the actress, who had fallen off the list the previous two years.

When the list is updated in the fall, it will likely show it has been another lucrative year for the actress' estate, which was purchased in 2010 by Authentic Brands Group and its partner, NECA. The company is in the midst of upgrading Monroe offerings from trinkets to cosmetic lines, spas, salons and apparel.

From beyond the grave, Monroe tweets at nearly 54,000 followers from (at)marilynmonroe and has a website and official Facebook page with more than 3.3 million fans. The messages often focus on fashion, body image and other musings recorded while she was alive, as well as interacting with current celebrities who express adoration for Monroe.

The digital efforts expose a new generation to not only the actress' fashion and trivia about her life, but also promote sales of Monroe's memorabilia and the NBC drama "Smash," which follows fictional efforts to create a Broadway show based on Monroe's life.

"In some ways, she's more popular and well-known today than she was even then," said Lawrence Schiller, a photographer who knew Monroe in the final months of her life and photographed her last on-set photo shoot and author of the memoir "Marilyn & Me."

Authentic Brands CEO Jamie Salter said his company is making Monroe products more in line with the elegance of a star who famously sang, "Diamonds Are a Girl's best Friend."

"Our aim has been to clean up the brand," Salter said, with a shift away from "souvenir-type stuff" and toward what he calls the mid-tier luxury business. Current partners include Dior, Dolce & Gabbana, MAC Cosmetics and Marilyn Monroe Cafes, a group of high-end coffee shops.

The estate also draws upon a wealth of Monroe photographs, which continue to attract admirers and customers.

"It's women that have kept Marilyn alive, not men," Schiller said.

Schiller said that whenever a gallery exhibit of Monroe photos opens, it's often teenage girls who come in the greatest numbers. They continue to be fascinated with Monroe, but he said he's seen an evolution in the images that people are interested in.

"In the '70s the pictures that were selling were the ones that were very, very sexy," Schiller said. Since the early 2000s, he said the top sellers haven't been Monroe's nudes but rather images that accentuated her humanity.

"I think people want to see her now as a real person," Schiller said. "They want to see her in a simpler way."

Asked if he sees the fascination with Monroe enduring for another 50 years, Schiller said a lot depends on whether communications remain a visual medium much as it has in recent decades. "Our interests may change drastically," he said.

"It isn't that she's going to be replaced," he said. "No Lindsay Lohan or Madonna or Lady Gaga is going to replace her."

_____

AP National Writer Jocelyn Noveck contributed to this report.

This photo of MM is from the cute movie, "Seven Year Itch," one of my favorites. BL

Wednesday, August 22, 2012

Yellow's A Sunny Treat

It's warm, inviting and cheerful. What's not to love about yellow? Yet, Interior Designers say, somewhat surprisingly, considering how widely it is used, that yellow can be a tricky color on a wall.

"Yellow is the hardest color to get right, without question," says New York designer Alexa Hampton. "As mellow a yellow you think you select, it may turn out much louder than you think it will be."

I say, if your heart is set on adding the warmth and energy yellow imparts, stick with the topmost choice on the paint decks or cards available wherever paint is sold I say; from lemon to honey shades, yellows always lift the spirits. You can always tint it lighter with your trim color added.

"Above all other colors, it's included to get more intense on the wall. Yellows with even the slightest green undertone can go greenish on the wall, especially if the room has lots of windows. Perhaps the safest way to commit to yellow in a room is with a cheery fabric or patterned pillow, an area rug or a floral lampshade. Even these subtle touches are sunny," recommends Leatrice Eiseman, executive director of the Pantone Color Institute.

Yellow's opposite on the color wheel is violet or purple; they work magically together in nature.

In paintings, yellows "set off" violet shadows beautifully.

Yellow-golds always connote that the subject in a portrait is high-status, celestial, precious, or royal.

And, on a sunny day, it would be fun to ride around in this yellow beauty to contrast with the blue sky. Van Gogh knew what he was doing when he mixed yellow and blue in the same paintings. And, he was a color genius in my opinion.

Wednesday, August 15, 2012

How to Become a Famous Artist

Marion Boddy-Evans from about.com gives her (tongue in cheek ) list of ideas for how to become a famous artist.

To be remembered down the centuries, for your work to be admired and studied, your name to be in every art reference book ... who hasn't dreamed about being that famous a painter? If you're going to get serious about achieving it, then here are some things you should be doing now already.
Reuse Canvasses
Don’t toss out your failed paintings, but paint over what’s there and start again. When, decades after your death, an art conservator discovers that a painting is covering over another, you’ll be providing a career highlight for them.
Another possibility: paint on the back of a canvas, so both paintings are saved for posterity and displaying both simultaneously creates a challenge for art curators. If the paintings were done on paper, tear them up and use pieces as collage elements in new works.
"During his two years spent in Paris (1886-1888) Van Gogh recycled many paintings. At first he painted new pictures on top of existing ones. Later on, he also painted new works on the reverse of earlier canvases , creating ‘double-sided’" paintings."¹
Change the Names of Paintings
Don’t title a painting once and then leave it at that. Create excitement and confusion amongst art historians by changing what you decided to call a work when exhibiting it at different venues and in the accompanying documentation. The longer the titles, the better. Alternatively, write a poem to go with the painting, as Turner was want, so your qualities as a poet can be debated alongside your artistic merit.
Forget to Sign
Was it by you or was it not? Is it an original or a forgery? Such mysteries and the reclassification of paintings as authentic (or not) make for high drama in the art world.

Another possibility: paint several versions of a piece yourself, such as Munch and his Scream. Or when you write to your friends refer to paintings that you haven't actually painted. Give a bit of a description so that forgers in the future can earn a living making these 'extra' authentic paintings for the public.
Borrow Bits
Forget about fair use, the world is your muse. Incorporate parts of other artist’s work into your own by appropriating a bit of composition here and a figure pose there to give future art writers hours of research work to unpick and discover what came from whom.
"Far from being plagiarism, as the ignorant would claim, such ‘borrowing or stealing’ is a ‘perpetual exercise of the mind, a continual invention’."²
That father figure of modern painting, Manet, borrowed. His famous Luncheon on the Grass painting “is a virtual copy of a figure group in Marcantonio’s engraving of Raphael’s Judgement of Paris ... The Olympia is a version of Titain’s Venus of Urbino."³
Anticipate the Museum
Ensure you create a unique workspace that will be turned into a museum, or meticulously documented, packed up and relocated into a museum. Fill the shelves with a collection of eclectic items (or endless bottles, as in Morandi’s studio, being sure to include some that are red herrings. Don’t forget to flick waste paint on the walls and choose a salubrious part of town close to drinking establishments and alternative culture if at all possible (ala Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon).
Anticipate the Biography
The lives of famous painters will, inevitably, be turned into art biography by some writer at some point. Give them plenty to read and research by keeping your correspondence, documentation, sketchbooks, studies, reference photos, and so on. Remember in the last years of your life to leave a number of unfinished canvasses so lesser museums can afford to buy something. The more museums and galleries that have your work, the more museum shops the biographies on you can be sold in.
Another idea: create two conflicting piles of documentation, give biographers something to argue about. Or be contentious by placing in a secret storage spot, to be found only much later when the publicity will be good for auction sales, a stash of dubious paintings, along with never-implemented instructions for this body of work to be destroyed upon your death. If that famous pastellist Degas could do it, why not you?
_{References:
1. Two for the Price of One by Bob Bouwman, Van Gogh’s Studio Practice blog, 21 June 2011 (accessed 24 July 2012).
2. Eighteenth-century artist and president of the Royal Academy, Joshua Reynolds, quoted in Teaching Art, page 124.
3. Ibid, page 126.}

All these were painters except one. 1-name them all? 2-did not achieve recognition/status/patrons/money during their lifetimes. 3- which one sold the least number of paintings while living?

Show off your answers in the comments below:

Wednesday, August 8, 2012

The Golden Career of Gustav Klimt

Gustav Klimt ( 1862-1918) painted Adele Bloch-Bauer's portrait with oil and gold on canvas in 1907. She is posed with her hands clasped; she had a deformed finger. Her clothes as well as the background are predominantly luxe, making this a striking and unforgettable portrait.

By DAVID LITTLEJOHN

Los Angeles
On June 18, 2006, the art market confirmed the established judgment of Austrian painter Gustav Klimt as one of the most important artists of modern times, and overnight transformed him into the most newsworthy. That day, his "Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I" (1907)—for which three tantalizing sketches are now on view in Los Angeles—was sold to the Neue Galerie in New York for $135 million, then the highest price ever paid for a painting.

Gustav Klimt:
The Magic of Line
The Getty Center
Through Sept. 23

The Albertina, Vienna

'Half-Length of a Lady in Black Wearing a Hat With a Feather' (1907-08).

"Gustav Klimt: The Magic of Line," an impressive, well-chosen exhibition at the Getty Museum, contains none of his paintings, except for a single oil sketch. The curators (Marian Bizanz-Prakken, who created the original show for the Albertina Museum in Vienna; Lee Hendrix and Edouard Kopp at the Getty) decided to focus on Klimt's drawings, which they regard as "the font of his creative process."
Although most of the 111 drawings at the Getty (there were 170 at the Albertina) were preliminary sketches for paintings, many of the more impressive existed for their own sake. Of his unidentified, autonomous early-chalk portraits, the finest are two realistic, delicately drawn, melancholy-looking women of 1897-98, one of them belonging to the Getty. The best of his early, traditionally shaded preliminary drawings for wall and ceiling paintings are of the heads of two actors portraying the dead Romeo and Juliet and four audience members gazing at them, drawn for his depiction of a 16th-century production for the Globe Theater in London. The painting was one of 10 commissioned from the 24-year-old Klimt and two partners for the ceilings of the new Vienna Burgtheater in 1886.
By his next three big mural commissions, Klimt had rejected traditional painting and drawing, and embraced the sinuous, symbolist, often irrational and erotic styles of the European fin-de-siècle.
The first commission was a trio of epic, symbolic and bewildering 14-by-20-foot paintings ("Philosophy," "Medicine" and "Jurisprudence") commissioned in 1894 (completed 1901, altered 1907) for the ceiling of the Great Hall of the University of Vienna. All three suffered the double indignity of being rejected by the university, then burned by retreating Nazis in 1945. The second commission is a 97-by-7-foot processional frieze set high on three walls of one gallery for a 1902 exhibition honoring the 75th anniversary of Beethoven's death at the Vienna Secession building, where it returned in 1975. It has been marvelously reproduced at the Getty by Olson Visual, where it fills three comparable walls. The third is a 6-by-50-foot mosaic wall, made of white marble plaques inset with gold and stones in 1911, which still stands in the banqueting hall of the Palais Stoclet, a famous (but inaccessible) Art Nouveau mansion in Brussels.
The 29-by-22-inch oil sketch for "Medicine" (from the rejected University series) tells us almost all we need to know about this vanished work. Most of the pencil sketches here for this painting refer either to the collaged pile-up of bodies on the right (old and young, well and ill, living and dead), and one female nude floating in space apart from the rest. The drawings for the Beethoven Frieze show characters from episodes of the Ninth Symphony (as interpreted by Wagner), concluding with a nude couple embracing and conveying (in Schiller's and Beethoven's words) "the kiss to the whole world," amid a symmetrical choir of upright angels. This is the first of several drawings here leading towards Klimt's most famous painting, "The Kiss" of 1907-08.
After 1900, Klimt became the preferred portrait painter for the wives and daughters of Vienna's wealthy bankers and industrialists, many of them Jewish. Margarethe Wittgenstein and her powerhouse family never liked Klimt's finished painting of her. But the black chalk drawing for it here—the dark eyes looking at us, the perfect curve of her shoulders wrapped in a figured flowing shawl, the soft parallel chalk lines that define the fall of her skirt—may well lead one to prefer the drawing to the painting.
Of the 19 drawings of 11 identified models at the Getty, at least three are more interesting than their corresponding oils and two are their equals, even with the loss of the rich millefiori color of backgrounds and gowns. What you lose in the paintings are strikingly black eyes and lips; the quick, instinctively drawn curves of perfect profiles; the dozens of parallel, writhing lines by which Klimt creates a gown; the sense of a figure floating in space or growing out of the curve of a chair.
Thirty-two of the Klimt drawings at the Getty are of female nudes, not including male-female couples. After 1902—more explicitly after 1910—most of Klimt's drawings of female nudes were erotic, in some cases pornographic. The Albertina catalog includes at least a dozen female nudes that—however exquisite as drawings—I can only call pornographic. Five of them are at the Getty. There are no doubt hundreds more. In conversation and in the catalog, Ms. Bizanz-Prakken defends all this as part of Klimt's fascination with the "cycle of life." But in an essay she wrote for the Neue Galerie's 2008 Klimt catalog (to celebrate its new acquisition) she wrote more openly about his sexual mania (he is supposed to have fathered at least 14 children, mostly by his models), and his probable dependence on the tidal wave of pornographic photographs for sale to respectable Viennese gentlemen of the time.
Is the "Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I" worth $135 million? I have no idea. But after looking at three of his preliminary, independent drawings for the work at the Getty (and, earlier, those surrounding golden Adele in her handsome new home on Fifth Avenue), one is easily persuaded that Gustav Klimt (however unconventional his personal life) could, on occasion, be one of the most instinctively wise and deft draftsmen of the 20th century.

Mr. Littlejohn writes about West Coast cultural events for the Journal.

Klimt's style drew from an eclectic range of sources: classical Greek, Byzantine, Egyptian, and Minoan art; late-medieval painting and the woodcuts of Albrect Durer; photography and symbolist painting, and more. In symbolizing these diverse inspirations, Klimt's art achieved both individuality and extreme elegance. BBLoyd

Monday, August 6, 2012

Is the Sky Blue?

Is the sky blue? Read the following article to find out the answer.

Is the Sky Blue?

by Lisa Wade, Jul 30, 2012, at 11:20 am

A recent episode of Radiolab centered on questions about colors. It profiled a British man who, in the 1800s, noticed that neither The Odyssey nor The Iliad included any references to the color blue. In fact, it turns out that, as languages evolve words for color, blue is always last. Red is always first. This is the case in every language ever studied.
Scholars theorize that this is because red is very common in nature, but blue is extremely rare. The flowers we think of as blue, for example, are usually more violet than blue; very few foods are blue. Most of the blue we see today is part of artificial colors produced by humans through manufacturing processes. So, blue is the last color to be noticed and named.
An exception to the rarity of blue in nature, of course — one that might undermine this theory — is the sky. The sky is blue, right?

Well, it turns out that seeing blue when we look up is dependent on already knowing that the sky is blue. To illustrate, the hosts of Radiolab interviewed a linguist named Guy Deutscher who did a little experiment on his daughter, Alma. Deutscher taught her all the colors, including blue, in the typical way: pointing to objects and asking what color they were. In the typical way, Alma mastered her colors quite easily.
But Deutscher and his wife avoided ever telling Alma that the sky was blue. Then, one day, he pointed to a clear sky and asked her, “What color is that?”
Alma, at first, was puzzled. To Alma, the sky was a void, not an object with properties like color. It was nothing. There simply wasn’t a “that” there at all. She had no answer. The idea that the sky is a thing at all, then, is not immediately obvious.
Deutscher kept asking on “sky blue” days and one day she answered: the sky was white. White was her answer for some time and she only later suggested that maybe it was blue. Then blue and white took turns for a while, and she finally settled on blue.
The story is a wonderful example of the role of culture in shaping perception. Even things that seem objectively true may only seem so if we’ve been given a framework with which to see it; even the idea that a thing is a thing at all, in fact, is partly a cultural construction. There are other examples of this phenomenon. What we call “red onions” in the U.S., for another example, are seen as blue in parts of Germany. Likewise, optical illusions that consistently trick people in some cultures — such as the Müller-Lyer illusion — don’t often trick people in others.
So, next time you look into the sky, ask yourself what you might see if you didn’t see blue.

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

P.S. I read recently that the Iliad and The Odyssey only mention five colors. The "wine dark sea" appears more than once. More research will reveal which five are mentioned and I will report back. I am betting white, black and red are mentioned. BL