Round Midnite: 0 through 9
Jasper Johns: 0 through 9
A slow news day, at least historically, so I had this painting in mind for just such a rainy day, and thought I'd take this opportunity to share it. Jasper Johns, an American icon. (Of course, he did the American Flags, too, but this one is less well-known.) And, while we're at it, here's another artist with whom Johns is often linked, Marcel Duchamp, and the Nude Descending A Staircase, perhaps my own personal favorite painting of this period.
Marcel Duchamp: Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2), 1912
Click for Philadelphia Museum of Art's Duchamp Webpage
"This painting created a sensation when it was exhibited in New York in February 1913 at the historic Armory Show of contemporary art, where perplexed Americans saw it as representing all the tricks they felt European artists were playing at their expense. The picture's outrageousness surely lay in its seemingly mechanical portrayal of a subject at once so sensual and time-honored. The Nude's destiny as a symbol also stemmed from its remarkable aggregation of avant-garde concerns: the birth of cinema; the Cubists' fracturing of form; the Futurists' depiction of movement; the chromophotography of Etienne-Jules Marey, Eadweard Muybridge, and Thomas Eakins; and the redefinitions of time and space by scientists and philosophers. The painting was bought directly from the Armory Show for three hundred dollars by a San Francisco dealer. Marcel Duchamp's great collector-friend Walter Arensberg was able to buy the work in 1927, eleven years after Duchamp had obligingly made him a hand-colored, actual-size photographic copy. Today both the copy and the original, together with a preparatory study, are owned by the Museum." (From the Philadelphia Museum of Art)
Posted by cronish at August 23, 2002 01:20 AM