ART “4”
“2”-DAY 13 July
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Died on 13 July (or any day until 16 September) 1530:
Quentin (or Quinten)
Metsys (or Massys, Matsys, Messys)
“de Smit”, of the plague, Flemish artist born
between 04 April and 10 September 1466. — Quinten Metsys was the son of a Leuven blacksmith, Joost Massys [–1483], and his wife, Katharina van Kinckem. About 1492 Quinten married Alyt van Tuylt [–1507], by whom he had three children: Quinten, Pawel and Katelijne. He was by then already living in Antwerp. In 1508 he married Catherina Heyns, with whom he had ten more children: Jan Massys [1509 – <08 Oct 1575] and Cornelis Massys [1510-1556], as well as Quinten II, Maria, Hubrecht, Abraham, Peternella, Katelijne II, Sara, and Susannah. Both Jan and Cornelis became artists — Metsys was the first important painter of the Antwerp school. Trained as a blacksmith in his native Leuven, Matsys is said to have studied painting after falling in love with an artist's daughter (or girlfriend). In 1491 he went to Antwerp and was admitted into the painters' guild. There are various stories about Quentin Metsys’s early training: according to Lampsonius, he was a blacksmith who took up painting in order to woo his sweetheart away from a painter she admired. Van Mander alleged that Metsys was entirely self-taught as a painter, having taken to hand-coloring woodcuts when severe illness prevented his being able to practise the blacksmith’s trade. Despite the unlikelihood of a young painter, however gifted, being permitted to ignore guild restrictions controlling the training of apprentices, there may be an element of truth to both stories. Metsys’s elder brother, Joost II, did join the family trade, and it is possible that their father, who died when Quinten was about 17, expected both sons to become partners. A consequent traditional attribution to Metsys is the late 15th-century wrought-iron housing of the so-called Massys Well in the Handschoenmarkt near the west front of Antwerp Cathedral Among Massys' early works are two pictures of the Virgin and Child. His most celebrated paintings are two large triptych altarpieces, The Holy Kinship, (or St Anne Altarpiece) ordered for the St. Pieterskerk in Leuven (1508), and The Entombment of the Lord (c. 1510), both of which exhibit strong religious feeling and precision of detail. His tendency to accentuate individual expression is demonstrated in such pictures as The Old Man and the Courtesan and The Moneylender and His Wife (detail). Christus Salvator Mundi and The Virgin in Prayer display serene dignity. Pictures with figures on a smaller scale are a polyptych, the scattered parts of which have been reassembled, and a later Virgin and Child. His landscape backgrounds are in the style of one of his contemporaries, the Flemish artist Joachim Patinier; the landscape depicted in Messys' The Crucifixion is believed to be the work of Patinier. Metsys painted many notable portraits, including one of his friend Erasmus. Although his portraiture is more subjective and personal than that of Albrecht Dürer or Hans Holbein, Matsys' painting may have been influenced by both German masters. Messys' lost St Jerome in His Study, of which a copy survives, is indebted to Dürer's St Jerome. Some Italian influence may also be detected, as in Virgin and Child, in which the figures are obviously copied from Leonardo da Vinci's Virgin of the Rocks — Joachim Patinir was a student of Massys. — LINKS — Erasmus of Rotterdam (1517, 59x46cm) — The Adoration by the Magi (1526) — Virgin and Child Surrounded by Angels _ In this undated early work can be detected the influence of earlier Flemish masters in their intense religious feeling, sumptuous colors, and lavish attention to detail. — Portrait of an Old Man (1517, 48x37cm; 172kb) _ Even more than in Massys's other portraits, this one shows the influence of Leonardo da Vinci in its unflinchingly honest, somewhat grotesque, physiognomy. — Money Changer and His Wife (1514, 71x68cm) _ The subtly hinted conflict between greed and prayer is seen in this couple. This satirical quality now enters Massys's paintings. — The Ugly Duchess (1530, 64x45cm) {I suspect that she was reincarnated in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (chapter 6)} _ This is probably not a portrait of an actual person but an illustration Massys created for The Praise of Folie, by Desiderius Erasmus. It raises Massys’s secular and satirical style to its culmination. — The Virgin Enthroned (1525, 135x90cm) kissing the baby Jesus; no angels. — Christ on the Cross with Donors (1520, 156x93cm triptych) — John the Baptist and Saint Agnes (1520, 48x13cm two panels) — Ecce Homo (1515, 160x120cm) |
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Died on 13 July 1954: Magdalena
Carmen Frida Kahlo
y Calderón, Mexico
City painter born on 06 July 1907. — She began to paint while recovering in bed from a bus accident in 1925 that left her seriously disabled. Although she made a partial recovery, she was never able to bear a child, and she underwent some 32 operations before her death in 1954. Her life’s work of about 200 paintings, mostly self-portraits, deals directly with her battle to survive. They are a kind of exorcism by which she projected her anguish on to another Frida, in order to separate herself from pain and at the same time confirm her hold on reality. Her international reputation dates from the 1970s; her work has a particular following among Latin Americans living in the US. — On a rainy day in September 1925, Frida Kahlo and her boyfriend Alejandro Gómez Arias were in Mexico City waiting for a bus that would take them to her home in Coyoacán, Mexico. The bus came, and they climbed on. As Frida and Alejandro chattered about her plans for medical school, the driver approached a risky intersection and decided to take his chances. Seconds later, an electric trolley rammed into the bus, destroying it and launching bodies everywhere. 18 year-old Frida disappeared in this confusion, and Alejandro, also injured, discovered her with a metal pole protruding from her abdomen. After someone pulled the pole out, an ambulance rushed her to the hospital, where doctors treated a fractured pelvis, a dislocated shoulder, two broken ribs, and shattered bones in the right leg and foot. This accident was the beginning of an unbearably painful series of physical ailments that would persist for the rest of Kahlo’s short life. Only two things would offer solace: painting and muralist Diego Rivera. Frida Kahlo was born in 1907 to two Jewish immigrants. A poster child for Freud’s theories, she adored her father and resented her mother. The family home in Coyoacán, Mexico was painted cobalt blue outside, and for this reason it became known as the Blue House. Frida had three sisters, and though her status as daddy’s favorite set her apart from the others, her affliction with polio beginning in 1913 would forever mark her as different. After she healed, Frida was left with a withered right leg that she covered with pants and long skirts. During her recuperation, her father lavished attention on his favorite child, who had once been an energetic tomboy. He helped Frida exercise and, in an attempt to find ways of entertaining her, he gave his daughter some paints. Guillermo Kahlo preferred Frida to his other children because she was the most intelligent. And in 1922, Frida made Guillermo even prouder when she became one of 35 women from a student body of 2,000 to be admitted to the prestigious National Preparatory School, or El Prepo, in Mexico City. She wanted to study medicine, but upon arriving to the vibrant intellectual center of her country, she discovered political activists, artists, communists, and other people who dared to dream and question. Lopping off her hair and switching to overalls from the drab outfits of a good Catholic girl, Frida fell in with the Cachets, a group of pranksters led by Alejandro Gómez. One of the Cachets’ victims of trickery was a tall and fat muralist, Diego Rivera, who was commissioned by the school to paint its auditorium. Spunky Frida stopped at nothing to annoy Rivera, 20 years her senior. She and the Cachets soaped the stairs so Diego would slip and fall, stole his lunch, and popped water balloons over his head. Only years later would her taunting and teasing of Diego evolve into a love affair. In 1925, Kahlo suffered the bus crash and turned to art during her recovery. During this period, Alejandro never returned her letters. After one frustrating year of prolific painting and painful progress, she encountered Diego again when he was working on a mural in Mexico City. Summoning him impetuously from his spot high near the roof, she asked his honest, unflattering opinion of her work. Rivera inspected her canvas and told her, "Keep it up, little girl." Then he asked if she had any more, and Kahlo seized the opportunity to invite him to the Blue House to show off the rest of her work. Critics have often said that the two artists had a lot in common, with their love of iconoclasm and Mexico being among the strongest bonds. In 1929, when Kahlo was 22 and Rivera 42, the two were married in the Coyoacán courthouse, though Kahlo’s mother did not attend the wedding because she hoped her daughter could find a more attractive, conventional match. Kahlo officially retained her own name, and the newlyweds moved into a stylish house in Mexico City shared by some other communists. Later that same year, Kahlo became pregnant, though she had an abortion because her damaged body could not handle the pregnancy without putting her own life at risk. Her repeated inability to have children was a source of pain for Kahlo, who expressed this frustration in her paintings through the major themes of childbirth, blood and fertility. In 1930, Kahlo went with her husband to America. During this time, and for much of her conjugal life with Rivera, Kahlo did not receive recognition as an artist in her own right. "Wife of the master mural painter gleefully dabbles in works of art," read one headline when the couple visited Detroit. Rivera was used to being the center of attention, and he often neglected Kahlo for his art — not to mention for numerous extramarital trysts (one of the cruelest affairs Rivera had was with his wife’s own sister, Cristina). When Kahlo saw that she was second in line, she abandoned her own artistic aspirations and became a good housewife, bringing lunch to Rivera’s workplace and devotedly hanging around him. Unfortunately, these years proved to be some of Kahlo’s loneliest and unhappiest. Though she was good at keeping up appearances, always witty and charming in public, Kahlo intensely hated America, with its extremes of poverty and wealth. In addition, her withered right leg also made it difficult for her to keep up with Diego, as he rushed about from commission to commission. Nonetheless, Kahlo produced some great works during this period, specifically her first fantasy or symbolist paintings, including Self-Portrait on the Border Line. The couple returned to Mexico in 1933, though not exactly in a state of marital bliss. Both Kahlo and Rivera had many extramarital affairs during this time. Among Kahlo’s many lovers — both male and female — was Leon Trotsky. Exiled from Russia by Stalin, Troktsy and his wife Natalia Sedova came to stay with Kahlo and Rivera at the Blue House in 1937 after the Mexican couple had moved back home. While Sedova and Rivera were in the hospital for various ailments, friendship, flirtation and ultimately romance grew between the spunky Kahlo and the older, gallant Trotsky. This romance inspired Kahlo to paint again, and she dedicated one of her numerous self-portraits to Trotsky. In 1938, Kahlo met André Breton, who helped arrange for some exhibits of her work. After a few minor exhibitions as well as one major solo exhibit at the Julian Levy Gallery of New York City, word about Kahlo’s art started to spread. Nickolas Muray, a photographer and future lover, set up the New York show for her, where she exhibited 25 paintings. She sold a number of them and returned to Mexico with jubilance. At 31, she was finally financially independent and established in her own career. Rivera called Kahlo’s art "agonized poetry," and Kahlo’s physical suffering and emotional loneliness provided material for her primitivistic, Surrealist paintings. At the core of this agonized poetry were Kahlo’s unhappiness with and adoration of Rivera. When Kahlo and Rivera ultimately divorced in 1940, the periods before and after their separation were among Kahlo’s most difficult and most productive. Turning to religious symbolism and themes of death, Kahlo solidified her position among the Surrealists with continued support from Breton, though she allegedly denied any affiliation with the Surrealists. Whatever her official artistic designation, Kahlo was at last cherished as a respected artist and no longer simply considered Rivera’s girlish wife. In the last decade of her life, Kahlo enjoyed a more peaceful existence, teaching for a while at the renowned Mexican art institute, La Esmeralda. Assailed by new health problems, this time with her spinal cord, Kahlo turned to her art as an outlet for her pain. Easel propped up, she painted directly from the hospital bed. In 1950, she returned to the Blue House, and a year later she and Rivera remarried. In 1953, Kahlo and her four poster bed were transported to Mexico City’s National Institute of Fine Arts for the first solo exhibit of her work in her homeland. While Diego Rivera had greatly influenced her life, Kahlo’s distinct style eliminated any doubts that he might have influenced her art. Fragile and sensitive, Kahlo developed her own themes, her own form of fierce nationalism, and her own social consciousness. When she died in 1957, hundreds of admirers came to see the diminutive woman of great importance asleep in her coffin, flowers woven into her hair. — Her Journal was published posthumously in 1980. It is definitely an artist’s journal. Upon turning page after page of fantastic, whorled patterns, sketches and drawings, the reader gets a feeling of the organized passion and the crazy processes that converged to produce Kahlo’s artwork. She kept the book from 1944 to 1954. The journal contains sketches and thoughts jumbled together often in different layers — words written over phrases written over sentences, all in different colors, so that the text itself forms a sort of visual picture of what was preoccupying Kahlo during the last years of her life. Included in the piece are visual and verbal memories of the bus accident, reflections on art, and scattered ideas that give outsiders a glimpse of the fantastic maze that constituted Kahlo’s mind. — Juan O’Gorman and Antonio Peláez were students of Kahlo. — LINKS — Self-portrait in a Velvet Dress half-length — Autorretrato con collar de espinas y colibrí — Autorretrato con el Doctor Juan Farill _ She is in a wheelchair; the doctor is a large head portrait on an easel. — Autorretrato con pelo corto — Autorretrato con un Retrato de Diego en el pecho y María entre las cejas — Diego en mi pensamiento aka Frida de Tehuana () — Diego y yo — My Nurse and I (1937) when she was a baby — Self-Portrait on the US-Mexico Border — Self-Portrait with Braid — Autorretrato con el pelo suelto — Autorretrato con mono — Autorretrato con monos = Self-Portrait with Monkeys — Autorretrato dedicado a Leon Trotsky — Autorretrato dedicado al Dr. Eloesser y a sus hijas — Me and my Parrots — Self-Portrait — Self-Portrait — Self-Portrait — Self-Portrait with Itzcuintli — Henry Ford Hospital (1932; 637x800pix, 104kb) _ Kahlo’s paintings are never comforting and rarely pleasant. Kahlo went to the Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit when she miscarried a baby, and this Surrealist painting shows Frida lying down naked in a hospital bed with six items floating around her, including a fetus, a pelvis, and a lower spinal chord. Blood and fertility, recurrent themes in her artwork, figure prominently in this piece. In the background, Detroit’s industrial skyline suggests Kahlo’s abhorrence for the city she considered metallic, polluted, and unfriendly. A tear is flowing down her cheek to reveal her sadness due to her inability to have children. — Las Dos Fridas (1940) _ This double self-portrait portrays the simultaneous disjunction and synthesis between the two essences comprising Kahlo. The two women, clad in long dresses with hair swept up in typical Kahlo fashion, sit on adjacent chairs and hold hands. They are connected by a joint circulatory system with hearts exposed. On the left side there is the "Victorian" Frida, who controls the blood flow with surgical clamps. On the right is classically Mexican "Tehuana" Frida, clasping a portrait of Diego Rivera. Which is the real Frida and which is the alter ego? This painting seems to say that the two are symbiotic, just as an object and its reflection become conjoined and inseparable on the plane of a mirror. — Frida y Diego Rivera –- Roots aka El Pedregal (1943, 30x50cm; 835x1400pix, 119kb) _ This is one of Frida Kahlo’s least anguished and most beautiful self-portraits. Like its counterpart, My Nurse and I (1937), it is a passionate expression of Kahlo’s deep identification with nature. In the earlier painting Frida is an infant suckling at her Mexican Indian wet nurse’s plant-like breast. From this earth mother, she imbibes not only her Indian heritage, but also the essence of her native land. In Roots, on the other hand, it is Frida who nourishes that land by giving birth to a vine. Curiouslythe vine's roots come out of its leaves and seem to be reaching out in vain for moisture. Yet the leaves look green and healthy. They must, therefore, draw their moisture from Frida. Frida, lying on a barren creviced landscape, and the vine which goes through an opening in her chest, are painted in a much larger scale than the landscape. The year she painted Roots, Kahlo was engrossed in a project that would bind her to her husband, Diego Rivera, and that would connect both spouses to the Mexican earth. In 1942, on a piece of land bought with Kahlo’s money in a section of Mexico City called the Pedregal (meaning stony ground), the Riveras began to build a temple for Rivera’s collection of pre-Columbian idols. They called it Anahuacalli, meaning house of gods. Rivera said that during the war years Anahuacalli was “home” for himself and Frida. Kahlo adored the Pedregal’s rough, uningratiating expanse of grey, pitted rocks, and it is this landscape that appears in Roots. A few years later, when the museum was finished, she wrote that, “like the magnificent terrain on which it is built, it embraces the earth with the firmness of a living and permanent plant.” So too, does Frida embrace the vast sea of dry, volcanic earth in Roots, which, a decade later, she titled El Pedregal. Creating bonds with Rivera, be they political, artistic, domestic or social, was crucial to Kahlo. Two years before she painted Roots she had remarried him after a painful year of separation. She remarried knowing that their relationship would remain difficult and that it would be based on the idea of mutual independence. As she put it, “Being the wife of Diego is the most marvelous thing in the world…. I let him play matrimony with other women. Diego is not anybody’s husband and never will be, but he is a great comrade.” But even as she insisted that Rivera should be free, Kahlo kept trying to hold him. Her need for possession can be seen in another work from 1943, Self-Portrait as a Tehuana. Here Kahlo has captured her husband as an obsessive thought represented as a miniature portrait in her forehead. As in Roots, strangely animate tendrils that could be veins or roots grow out of the tips of leaves, seeming to extend Frida’s life force out into space. A third 1943 self-portrait that gives insight into Kahlo’s state of mind at the time she painted Roots is Thinking About Death. She has placed a skull and bone set in a desert landscape upon her brow. To accentuate her despair, Kahlo closed in space with a wall of leaves, the serrated stems of which have blood-red thorns that echo the zigzag pattern on her Tehuana blouse. According to scholar Gannit Ankori, this is the same plant that Kahlo depicted in Roots. Called Calotropis procera, its large veins are filled with a poison that was once used by Latin American Indians to commit suicide. The stems of the vine in Roots, however, have no thorns. Instead this vine has thirteen cut off stems. These leafless stems might stand for Kahlo’s losses—her unborn children, her wounded body, her lost loves. The image recalls the truncated branches in Kahlo’s 1947 drawing, Ruin, which, she said, stood for Rivera’s infidelities. Roots can be seen as a straightforward image of a childless woman’s dream that her torso opens up to give birth to a vine through which her blood flows into the parched Mexican earth. Certainly Kahlo’s fascination with roots and her need to root herself in the earth became all the more intense in 1932, when she suffered a miscarriage and realized that she would never bear a child. In Self-Portrait Dreaming, drawn shortly after she miscarried, Kahlo lies naked in a hospital bed dreaming of rooted objects—a leaf, a hand—and of her long hair turning into roots. Like the veins, ribbons and strands of hair seen in so many of her self-portraits, roots express Kahlo’s longing for connection. In almost all of her self-portraits she is alone, disconnected from anything but herself. Her need for connection encompassed a vision of the interconnectedness of all things—animals, plants, rocks, sun, moon and human beings. In some of her late still lives Kahlo depicted the sun’s rays as roots linking the life-giving sun to the fruit of the earth. In Roots Kahlo’s vine grows right through the window in her womb-less body. All of the leaves move toward us as if we, the viewer, were the source of light. By means of her vine, Kahlo reaches out to us, demands our attention. As she fixes us with her steadfast but impassive gaze, she insists that we confront her predicament. If Roots is a dream of oneness with nature, it also has somber overtones. Kahlo could be dreaming of roots growing through her body after death. As her blood flows into the earth, she seems to accept mortality. Just in front of her the earth cracks open forming a dark ravine. At her feet a volcanic boulder that resembles a skull floats in a grave-like crater. Similarly, a ravine opens up in front of the skull in Thinking About Death, and in Tree of Hope, painted after Kahlo underwent a spinal fusion in 1946, Frida the heroic survivor and Frida the victim are trapped between a precipice and a grave. The ravines cut between waves of igneous rock in the backgrounds of Kahlo’s self-portraits suggest explosive feelings. But in Roots Frida levitates above the earth, refusing to be overwhelmed. In The Broken Column, painted the following year, the artist’s split torso is echoed by the crevassed land, and a broken ionic column replaces Roots’ vine. Here again, Kahlo refuses to capitulate to death or pain. For Frida Kahlo, there was no running away from mortality. Ever since her near fatal bus accident in 1925 she felt death as a constant companion. In The Dream (1940), yet another painting closely related to Roots, Frida lies dreaming of death while a vine that begins in the embroidery on her bedspread, sprouts roots at her feet and leaves around her head. Her counterpart, a paper mâché skeleton, is equally entwined. As we explore Roots’ many layers of meaning, we are brought back to everyday life by the reassuring bed pillow upon which she props her elbow. In Roots Frida dreams of fecundity even as she seems to relinquish life. She lets life go with equanimity, perhaps with the kind of pleasure we might feel during those moments when, embraced by nature’s beauty, we are not afraid to die. Roots holds in precarious balance themes of birth and death, contentment and pain, fulfillment and loss, connection and solitude. It may even hold a message of love. In one of the letters to Rivera that she wrote in her diary, Kahlo said, “my blood is the miracle that travels in the veins of the air from my heart to yours.” — 51 images at Ciudad de la Pintura —(090712) |
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No! not this
kind}, and in 1800 went to the Akademie der Bildenden Kunste in Vienna, where
in 1806 he won a prize. In the same year he made a portrait of Imre Marczibanyi.
When he had completed his studies he moved to Buda and worked in the Trattner
Press. In 1807 he advertised himself as an engraver, letter engraver and seal
engraver, and in 1809 he started dealing. In 1814 he engraved a picture of King
David, after a drawing by Johann Nepomuk Hoefel (1788/1864). He did portraits
of a number of important people in national political and cultural life, including
Johan Spissich, Jozsef Urmenyi, Miklos Wesselenyi, Laszlo
Kollonits, Archduchess Henrietta, Istvan Ferenczy, Ferdinand
Jakab Miller and Benedek Virag. He also engraved several illustrations
for the first Hungarian scientific periodical, the Tudomanyos Gyujtemeny
(1817, 1818, 1830). From 1823 until the early 1840s he undertook the huge task
of engraving over 100 portraits of Hungarian historical figures and famous contemporary
people; he called the collection Icones Principum. Although other engravers
also worked on this project, most of the portraits were made by Ehrenreich. The
engravings of historical figures were taken from portraits, while those of contemporary
figures were based on drawings and paintings by foreign and Hungarian artists.
The majority were made very precisely, and they vary in quality depending on the
artistic merit of the original drawing or painting. Although Ehrenreich moved
to Vienna in 1825, he continued the series. A book dealer in Pest {this Pest is
neither contagious nor vermin} republished them in 1904. From 1840 to 1842 he
was a dealer and publisher on Szervita Square in Pest, and in 1842-1843 he published
a series of lithographs about the history of Hungary and Transylvania with the
history painter Johann Geiger [1805-1870] and the historian Gusztav Wenzel [1812-1891].
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