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The painting with two gloomy boys carrying an angel on a stretcher with bandaged forehead and a bloodied wing makes people curious in a second. And the direct gaze of the boy to the right touches the viewers ‘soul.
The composition is still considered as one of the finest work of art since 1903, and it is in the same year it was produced by Finnish symbolist painter Hugo Simberg.
The painting was a source of strength for Simberg, as he had been suffering from meningitis from a very long time. In 2006, the painting was voted Finland’s “National Painting” through a contest organized by the Ateneum art museum.
Painted in 1886 “Our daily bread” by Anders zorn from Sweden, depicts his mother sitting at the edge of a ditch, and cooking potatoes for the harvesters. The painting is from his private collection and shows his mother’s sacrifices.
He was in his mid 20s when he painted it to pay a tribute to his mother’s love for him and his big joint family. The composition came in public domain, after the artist’s death in 1920. After that it was purchased by National museum Stockholm.
"The Ladies-in-waiting"
"The Ladies-in-waiting" is a 1656 painting in the Museo del Prado in Madrid, by Diego Velázquez, the leading artist of the Spanish Golden Age. Its complex and enigmatic composition raises questions about reality and illusion, and creates an uncertain relationship between the viewer and the figures depicted. Because of these complexities, Las Meninas has been one of the most widely analyzed works in Western painting.
The painting is believed by F. J. Sánchez Cantón to depict the main chamber in the Royal Alcazar of Madrid during the reign of King Philip IV of Spain, and presents several figures, most identifiable from the Spanish court, captured, according to some commentators, in a particular moment as if in a snapshot. Some look out of the canvas towards the viewer, while others interact among themselves. The young Infanta Margaret Theresa is surrounded by her entourage of maids of honour, chaperone, bodyguard, two dwarfs and a dog. Just behind them, Velázquez portrays himself working at a large canvas. Velázquez looks outwards, beyond the pictorial space to where a viewer of the painting would stand.
In the background there is a mirror that reflects the upper bodies of the king and queen. They appear to be placed outside the picture space in a position similar to that of the viewer, although some scholars have speculated that their image is a reflection from the painting Velázquez is shown working on.
Detail showing Philip IV's daughter, the Infanta Margaret Theresa. Most of her left cheek was repainted after being damaged in the fire of 1734.
Detail of doña María de Sotomayor, showing Velázquez's free brushwork on her dress
(Absinthe Drinker)
Picasso produced this work in the autumn of 1901, during his second trip to Paris, when he was just 22 years old.
The theme of man's loneliness in a cafe, of isolation and emptiness, was not new to French art in the second half of the 19th century and could be found in the works of Degas and of Picasso's much-admired Toulouse-Lautrec. But in the paintings by the young Spaniard the theme acquired a previously unknown sense of drama.
Our lonely heroine sits at a table in a cafe, the background a dirty-red wall which reinforces the sense of discomfort. Emphasizing the flatness of the canvas, the colour of the walls and the bluish tone of the marble table seem to press the space inwards, around the woman, enclosing her in her hopeless loneliness. In the pose of the absinthe brinker, in her face, we can identify the outcast: the totally enclosed space of her body, the expressive distortion of the right hand, seem to indicate the tension of a coiled spring.
Picasso strictly boxed in the immobile face - the hand acts as a support, its precise perpendicular running through the imperfect oval of the figure, while a protecting hand clasps the shoulder. Everything reinforces the sense of inner tension and cuts the figure off from the world around. On the basis of real observations in a cafe Picasso created a generalised and timeless symbol of the tragedy of life.
On the back of the painting, concealed beneath heavy overpainting in blue and yellow, is a woman's head, probably a fragment of a work which did not satisfy the artist.
It is now in Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg, Russia
Three Musicians
Pablo Picasso, 1921, Three Musicians, oil on canvas, 200.7 × 222.9 cm, Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Pablo Picasso, 1921, (Three Musicians), oil on canvas, 204.5 × 188.3 cm, Philadelphia Museum of Art
Three Musicians is the title of two similar collage and oil paintings by Spanish artist Pablo Picasso. They were both completed in 1921 in Fontainebleau near Paris, France, and exemplify the Synthetic Cubist style; the flat planes of color and "intricate puzzle-like composition" echoing the arrangements of cutout paper with which the style originated. These paintings each colorfully represent three musicians wearing masks in the tradition of the popular Italian theater Commedia dell'arte.
Each painting features a Harlequin, a Pierrot, and a monk, who are generally believed to represent Picasso, Guillaume Apollinaire, and Max Jacob, respectively. Apollinaire and Jacob, both poets, had been close friends of Picasso during the 1910s. However, Apollinaire died of the Spanish flu in 1918, while Jacob decided to enter a monastery in 1921.
One version is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City; the other version is in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
The Night Café
The Night Café is an oil painting created by Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh in September 1888 in Arles. Its title is inscribed lower right beneath the signature. The painting is owned by Yale University and is currently held at the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven, Connecticut.
Flower Beds in Holland
Bulb Fields, also known as Flower Beds in Holland, is an oil painting created by Vincent van Gogh in early 1883. It was donated to the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC in 1983.
It depicts the rectangular plots of blue, yellow, pink and red hyacinths grown by a Dutch bulb merchant. The low vantage point creates a panoramic view of the field of colourful spring flowers, with thatched cottages and leafless trees in the background. The regular composition allows Van Gogh to explore his interest in perspective.
Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I
Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I also called The Lady in Gold or The Woman in Gold) is a painting by Gustav Klimt, completed between 1903 and 1907.
The portrait is the final and most fully representative work of Klimt's golden phase. It was the first of two depictions of Adele by Klimt - the second was completed in 1912.
Detail