a blind flaneur

Francisco Goya. The Third of May 1808. Oil on canvas, 1814. Museo del Prado, Madrid. [Source: Wikimedia Commons]
Babu Kuriakose  left a comment recently noting congruencies in Goya’s famous painting and Spartan Girls Provoking Boys by Edgar Degas. Babu has a discerning eye, and his website documents many resonances in contemporary visual rhetoric. His comment led [...]

In Montreal, for my birthday, we took a stroll after dinner through the flaneur’s paradise on Rue Prince Arthur, a pedestrian mall between Avenue Laval and Boulevard Saint-Laurent. Ms. Modigliani agreed to sit for her portrait by street artist Marie-claude Journault. Earlier in the evening, at Maestro S.V.P., Ms. M sat in the chair [...]

Paul Cézanne. The Artist’s Father, Reading “L’Événement”. 1866. Oil on canvas. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
When I stood before this painting last month at the NGA, it happened to be the day that would have been my father’s 88th birthday. It reminded me of his devotion to reading newspapers, his pride when I [...]

No, this isn’t the Rebirth Brass Band. It isn’t New Orleans, either, , but it could be. You can go ahead and second-line. Don’t sit down.
This brass band is  Tarace Boulba from Paris. Their 2006 and 2008 concert clips prove that neither side of the pond has a monopoly when it comes to funk. According [...]

Vincent van Gogh. Roses. 1890. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Roses was painted shortly before Van Gogh’s release from the asylum at St.-Rémy. He felt he was coming to terms with his illness—and himself. In this healing process, painting was all-important. In those final three weeks, he wrote Theo, he “worked as in a frenzy. [...]

Google is celebrating the birth of Mary Cassatt today with a Cassatt-inspired  logo (left) on its main search page. Cassatt was born on May 22, 1844 in Allegheny City, Pennsylvania. She died near Paris on June 14, 1926. The Google Doodle is based on Cassatt’s painting, The Child’s Bath (below), now in the collection of [...]

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot. Forest of Fontainebleau. 1834. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

John Ward of Hull. The Northern Whale Fishery: the “Swan” and “Isabella”. ca. 1840. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
The National Gallery of Art – Recent Acquisitions says:
The city of Hull, an important British port for commercial and fishing fleets, was a center for whaling until the middle of the nineteenth century. During the eighteenth [...]

Vik Muniz. Mona Lisa in Peanut Butter & Jelly. [Source: Divulgação/globo.com]
Call it synchronicity. I’d just read the Mona Lisa chapter in Charles Nicholl’s biography of Leonardo da Vinci
before falling asleep, then I awoke to a BBC interview with artist Vik Muniz describing his rendition of La Giaconda in peanut butter and jelly. Talk about licking [...]

Leonardo da Vinci. Lady with an Ermine (Portrait of Cecilia Gallerani). 1489-1490. Czartoryski Museum, Kraków. [Source: Wikimedia Comons]
… Can sua picture
La fa che par che ascolti e non favella.
“’By his art he makes her look as if she’s listening, and not talking.” So says an Italian sonnet of the time when Leonardo painted the portrait [...]