Art

Much as Degas was fascinated by the movements of dancers, he was also intrigued by the repetitive, specialized gestures made by laundresses as they worked. This painting, the first of three versions of the composition, is distinguished by its dramatic chiaroscuro, with the woman silhouetted against a luminous white backdrop. Purchased by the singer and collector Jean-Baptiste Faure, the canvas was returned so that Degas could rework it. The artist, however, kept the picture and lent it to the 1876 Impressionist exhibition, receiving praise for his "rapidly done silhouettes of laundresses."

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In this pastel and another of 1885–86 (Musée d'Orsay, Paris) Degas explored the expressive potential of a bather doubled-up, snail-like, drying her foot. The blue, yellow, and green harmonies in the two works are typical of many of his bather pastels, but the hues here are more high-keyed.

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My own eye for composition is very heavily influenced by degas. The fascination with figures facing away is one we share. Similarly find interesting the meaning in the mundane. Love Degas.

Degas sensitively conveyed the union of a musician with his instrument in this work. It represents an intermediary stage in the development of the violinist featured in "The Dance Lesson" (1971.185). Based on a more preliminary sketch, Degas worked up the composition in pastel and squared it for transfer. Curiously, he executed it on the back of a bookseller's advertisement; however, the green tone of the paper perfectly suited the use of pastel.

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Hecate, the Greek goddess who presided over witchcraft and magical rites, was historically known as the “Night-Hag,” hence the title that the artist gave this work. It illustrates a passage from Paradise Lost by the English poet John Milton, in which hellhounds are compared to those who “follow the night-hag when, called, / In secret, riding through the air she comes, Lured with the smell of infant blood, to dance / With Lapland witches, while the laboring moon Eclipses at their charms.” Fuseli and Goya did not know each other, but they both captured the psychological impact of the turmoil and war experienced by many during the age of revolution and Napoleonic expansion.

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Smith’s mezzotint reproduces Fuseli’s striking conception of the witches as first encountered by Macbeth and Banquo in Shakespeare’s play (act 1, scene 3), prompting Banquo to ask: "What are these
So wither’d and wild in their attire, That look not like the inhabitants o’ the earth,
And yet are on’t?.../ You seem to understand me, By each at once her chappy finger laying /
Upon her skinny lips . . ." After a seven-year sojourn in Rome, Fuseli settled in London in 1779 and became known for painting imaginative and disturbing subjects. The overlapping, profile presentation of the witches echoes classical reliefs, but their features, gestures, and flying skull-headed companion demonstrate an equal familiarity with macabre precedents in the work of Italian painters such as Domenico Veneziano and Salvator Rosa.

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The extreme familiarity of this image today makes it hard to realize how shocking it and other works by Munch were when they were created slightly over a hundred years ago. Munch's art represented his own emotions, mostly the darker ones of fear, dread, loneliness, and sexual longing, with extraordinary expressiveness. The screaming figure personifies existential horror. A precursor of this image is a drawing of a man (Munch himself) on a similar bridge, with a blood-red sky above. A text accompanying this drawing states: "I walked with two friends. Then the sun sank. Suddenly the sky turned as red as blood ... My friends walked on, and I was left alone, trembling with fear. I felt as if all nature were filled with one mighty unending shriek."

Vogel worked for the Graphic Arts Division of the Federal Art Project, a New Deal initiative that put artists to work during the Great Depression. The Division’s New York workshop fostered a vibrant community of leftist printmakers. There, Vogel created Vision, a Surrealist montage of abstracted figures that conveys the horrors of an impending world war. A prophetic figure at left faces figures, including a horse, whose ribcages are exposed; at right, a figure hangs from a noose. Vogel made Vision after returning from Spain, where he had moved for a brief period to support the Popular Front during the Spanish Civil War. While in Spain, Vogel saw Picasso’s mural Guernica (1937), whose blend of abstract style and political subject matter made a profound impact on the artist.

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By: Adrien Tournachon , Guillaume-Benjamin-Amand Duchenne de Boulogne. 1854–56, printed 1862

In compiling a scientific treatise to aid artists, the physiologist Duchenne de Boulogne used electrical stimulation of the facial muscles to elicit expressions of the principal emotions. Wanting his transcriptions to be exact, he collaborated with Adrien Tournachon (brother of the famous Nadar), a photographer who specialized in portraiture. From the negatives they made together in 1854, Adrien produced a single set of carefully crafted prints that the doctor mounted in a large album (now École des Beaux-Arts, Paris). Later, on his own, Duchenne copied and cropped the images to create illustrations for his book Mécanisme de la physionomie humaine; ou, Analyse électro-physiologique de l’expression des passions applicable à la pratique des arts plastiques (1862). In the volume, Duchenne wrote that the subject of this image seems terrified of the idea of imminent death or torture: “This expression must be that of the damned.”

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This painting’s title refers to Dante Alighieri’s medieval epic of a journey through hell. Although Stuck employed traditional symbols of the underworld—a snake, a demon, and a flaming pit—the dissonant colors and stylized, exaggerated poses are strikingly modern. He designed the complementary frame. Stuck’s imagery was likely inspired by Auguste Rodin’s The Gates of Hell, particularly the figure of The Thinker. When Inferno debuted in an exhibition of contemporary German art at The Met in 1909, critics praised its "sovereign brutality." The picture bolstered Stuck’s reputation as a visionary artist unafraid to explore the dark side of the psyche.

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After seeing the 1877 French Impressionist exhibition in Paris, Weir grumbled that it was “worse than the Chamber of Horrors.” Much later, working in the Connecticut countryside under the influence of friends such as Theodore Robinson and inspired by Japanese woodblock prints, he converted to Impressionism. In this canvas, he captured the severe industrial form of a new iron truss bridge, covered with red priming paint, over the Shetucket River in Windham. The fundamentally solid forms and restrained veneer of broken brushwork epitomize Weir’s conservative brand of Impressionism.

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This is a fragment of a full-length sculpture portraying the ferocious Hindu goddess Kali in the form of Chamunda, an epithet derived from her act of decapitating the demons Chanda and Munda. Chamunda embodies bareness and decay. Her hair is piled up into a chignon decorated with a tiara of skulls and a crescent moon. She scowls, baring her teeth, and enormous eyeballs protrude menacingly from sunken sockets in her skeletal face. As a necklace, she wears a snake whose coils echo the rings of decaying flesh that sag beneath her collarbone. Just above her navel on her emaciated torso is a scorpion, a symbol of sickness and death. She presumably once held lethal objects in the hands of her twelve missing arms.

Chamunda is naked except for a short diaphanous dhoti partially covering the two tiger skins complete with heads that hang from her waist to her knees. Although her extremities are missing, it is clear from comparison with related images that this Chamunda stood with legs straight, the right turned outward. The starkness and uncompromising horror of this sculpture are representative of one aspect of Indian theology.

Like images of Shiva in his dark form of Bhairava, such macabre images of the Goddess are common occupants of the exterior walls of temples. They appear both on shrines dedicated to Shiva and those to the Goddess herself.

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Kiefer based this watercolor on a photograph of refugees in a picture book dating from World War II. It was an unusual subject for him, as his interest was not so much in the subject per se as in the image— a mass of people. The title, a Latin term meaning "fear of empty space," is inscribed in gouache within the form of a palette. In this and a number of small drawings, the artist painted dots and drips like snow ("another kind of horror vacui," according to Kiefer) across the surface, much like an Abstract Expressionist allover composition. The image demonstrates the artist’s black humor, connecting wartime hardship, natural phenomena, and art.

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Between the two world wars, Renger-Patzsch was one of the champions of straight photography in Germany and an advocate for a modern aesthetic style known as Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity). He believed that photography’s chief value lay in its ability to render the texture and detail of physical objects with absolute precision. This close-up of the suffering face of Christ from a German Gothic Pietà was reproduced in the artist’s landmark book Die Welt ist Schön (The World Is Beautiful), published in 1928. The book’s sequence of one hundred tightly cropped and sharply focused images of plants, animals, landscapes, and industrial subjects suggested that the camera could disclose aspects of the essential nature of objects that were otherwise invisible to the naked eye.

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