I semi-recently had the Rothko thing happen for the first time, looking at one in person.

I really like the Filippo Lippi / Botticelli thread in early Renaissance art, in part for irreducible "it's pretty" reasons, in part because it seems like there was a fairly sharp break from past more stylized ways of depicting people into something with a lot more personality in all the faces.

There was some earlier thread where someone was touting Fra Angelico as being a highlight of art in Florence, IIRC. I went to the San Marco museum last time I was there and it's good stuff but didn't hit me the same way.

I really like Diego Velázquez. I'm not terribly good at talking about art, but what I like is that his paintings are very realistic (almost photo-like) and very detailed.

Botticelli thread

Briefly confused here.

Recently a lot of stuff at the Jay DeFeo exhibit at SFMOMA really struck me as beautiful. I've been thinking about trying to catch it at the Whitney as well, but I probably won't manage to (if I were going to, it would probably have to be this Saturday, but I'll probably be too tired to bother).

I like the guy who painted youngish women with long hair and the habit of wearing gauzy or little clothing.

Another painting that kind of unexpectedly knocked me for a loop when I saw it was Goya's black painting with the dog.

I really like sixteenth-century European painters, especially El Greco and Bosch. That sort of balance of naturalistic and stylized representation particularly appeals to me.

T-I-T-I-A-N

Is that Mannerism, or am I confused? And does Armsmasher still lurk, because he should be schooling us.

Oh hell, everything. There is a guy who has been posting to rec.fine-arts for over a decade, whenever he gets a complete set

Currently in 30 min rotation as wallpaper:

Anna Chromy (100)
Stuart Davis (355)
Maynard Dixon
Dufy (155)
Laura Knight
Levitan
Richard Lindner (109)
Maija Tabaka
Morandi
Guy Rose
Dali
Enrique Grau
Tisnikar
Thiebaud (110)
Tom Mielko
George Tooker
Joyce Treiman
Ambrose Webster
And a fuckton of captures and Japanese Landscapes and maps

7500 jpgs loaded

Oh, also Vienna Secession stuff (Klimt, Schiele, etc.) for pretty much the same reason.

And recently there was an Yves Klein fire painting at MOCA that really hit me too. Only one of them, though; the others I could take or leave.

The trouble with commenting on this thread is, I have a lot of strong opinions/feelings about art but no words that are very useful for talking about them.

My untrained tastes tend towards representational paintings: scenes from everyday life, people at work, cities/streets/buildings, some kinds of landscapes and portraits. I tend not to like courtly-looking stuff or still lives of flowers and fruits, or many of the versions of the biblical scenes you see over and over in Renaissance art (museums).

And this applies pretty much only to European traditions. I don't know anything about and haven't seen enough of other kinds of painting to even try to be specific. It's basically a lot of snap choose one: [like | don't like] judgments on a case by case basis.

Is that Mannerism, or am I confused?

El Greco yes, Bosch no. And I think of Bosch as mostly fifteenth-century although I guess he overlapped both. Comparing the two seems odd to me, but I guess whatever works for teo.

Oh hey can anyone tell me what art I should be looking at when I'm skipping out on the conference I'm going to in Barcelona in a few weeks?

There's this Picasso guy...

I like me some Turner.

Actually, I'm not a huge fan of Picasso, but IIRC the Barcelona museum is chronological so you can see his work develop/change over time.

The Míro museum is spiffy. And in case it hadn't occurred to you maybe give the sagrada familia a visit.

Park Güell and La Sagrada Família are on my list, but aside from that I know nothing. On refresh: oh, I guess there is a Picasso museum. Somehow I feel like I've already seen all the most interesting Picasso stuff elsewhere and most of it hasn't really done much for me? Sounds philistinish, I know. Guernica was pretty damned impressive.

If I went back I'd probably try to see as much Gaudi stuff as I could find/be allowed to see.

Vermeer painting brick (View of Delft, The Little Street).

I like Turner a whole lot. Rfts is into Lucien Freud. Together, we fight crime!

I'm in Barnett Newman's camp.

Miró sounds like more fun than Picasso.

Also endorse the Miro museum. I think I spent more time on history stuff when I visited. Also, just walking around.

22 is true.

Oh, and the 1999 Champions League final was on when I was there. Pretty sure there were more cops around than in Watertown.

I think I don't relate to visual art quite as I'm supposed to. I like it, but I get what I get out of it very quickly and I don't have a lot to say about it.

That said, I suppose I like early modernist stuff, same as in other arts, post-impressionist on up through I don't know what exactly, and I know very little about the last half century. No real through-line to my likes that I can think of. Gaugin, Kandinsky and Malevich, Mondrian, DiChirico and other surrealists...sort of high school art history stuff.

And other severe-but-not-too-severe AbEx stuff; Elegies to the Spanish Republic, e.g. I got a book called Abstraction and the Holocaust a few years ago which is pretty interesting.

I like the Italian Futurists, too.

I wish I had noted, when I saw it, the name of a gigantic, nearly all black, textured painting at the Art Institute of Chicago. But I didn't!

I know and recommend this artist. I like this one.

14 And this applies pretty much only to European traditions.

I wish knew more about others. I <3 the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco but despite spending an inordinate amount of time there (not much time, really, but a surprisingly large fraction of the time I've ever spent within SF city limits) I don't think I can name any of the artists whose work impressed me and I can't really intelligently place any of it in any context.

El Greco yes, Bosch no. And I think of Bosch as mostly fifteenth-century although I guess he overlapped both. Comparing the two seems odd to me, but I guess whatever works for teo.

Yeah, some poking around on Wikipedia just now reveals that El Greco is considered Mannerist, while Bosch is more associated with the earlier Netherlandish styles (which I also like). I think I may associate them largely because most examples of both that I've seen in person were at the Prado, and I was very impressed with them there.

Oh, yeah, Turner. Prior to udcon 2 (or ... 1?) Armsmasher took several persons around a Turner show at one of those museums they've got over there.

I suspect I'd enjoy looking at "Portrait of Madame X" if I had the chance.

31.3 is going to drive me nuts now because I feel like I should know what it is.

32: That's a lot of viscera.

23: I like Vermeer a lot, although one show I really enjoyed was a collection of urban scenes by Dutch Golden Age painters, most of whom I had never heard of, and many of which had that ridiculous level of minute brick-detail which was common to the era.

There are too many great painters to list. Richter is not overrated. Frank Stella. Agnes Martin.

I suspect I'd enjoy looking at "Portrait of Madame X" if I had the chance.

Such chances are not so hard to come by.

I thought I'd learn more about Chinese paintings when I went to the palace museum in Taipei (full of stuff the GMD took out of mainland China) but the main thing I learned was that the paintings were in storage during the building renovation. The jade cabbage was pretty cool, though. Also, the similar sculpture of a piece of meat.

Also, in the American division, Edward Hopper and Winslow Homer.

21: I liked that the Picasso museum had a pretty big collection of relatively unimportant things and arranged them chronologically. I also loved that.

And Bob Ross. Can't forget the happy little trees.

The "artistic community" really rated those artists (mentioned in the OP) in the 1860s (or at least one artistic community did...)

(Also: yes, it does make you a Norman Rockwell fan and also arguably some kind of moral monster.)

Personally, fuck, Gerhard Richter's slick. Bacon. Auerbach. 20th century European high modernist painting is kinda inexorably astonishing as, like, this apotheosis of a tradition. (I know, I know. Me and Clem in the corner.)

I go to galleries and museums for the articles.

On my recent trip to Philadelphia I went to the new Barnes, which was interesting but most of that French Impressionist stuff doesn't do much for me. Also most of the antiquities were fake, which was kind of hilarious.

46: Objets d'art?

More broadly: I enjoy looking at paintings that hold my attention. Usually they don't hold my attention with narrative or particular details; they demand it with their overall visual effect, and then they maintain it because there is something going on that I can't understand. (Some critic, maybe Jerry Saltz, called this the "Whoa. What?" effect.) I also love portraits, which at their best have similar effects for me as an Agnes Martin.

And the guy with the Jesus brings the Constitution paintings, can't forget him.

44 is right.

(Agnes Martin is so so nice.)

nosflow: is this your nearly all black textured painting? Google image search turns up some other photos of it that look less like solid black squares. I think this is the one I remember as being pretty striking.

Francis Bacon before 1970, painting not reproduction. Gerhard Richter, also does not reproduce.

Egon Schiele, this Klimt

Yuan paintings, bamboo and wildlife, not so much landscapes. Zhao Mengfu, Guan Daosheng. Hard to find good reproductions, and the actual paintings are hostaged in basements, incredible hassle to see them.

Northern renaissance, Breugel pere until 1620. Caravaggio's nice.

Vermeer for me. I used to visit this one relatively often on free admission days. In college I really liked Max Beckmann, but he doesn't speak to me as much any more. I still like Gerhard Richter a lot, but I prefer different pieces than I used to.

Bob lists Thiebaud. I once spent hours in a haze of delight at a Thiebaud show in DC; emerged extremely hungry. Really nice.

53: May be! I sort of remember some red in a lower corner, and more protuberant paint (you know, owing to many layers, or something, though that may not be coming through in the image), but I may be conflating things; anyway, I definitely esteem that image.

Always worth going to look at a Vermeer.

Ah, "A vertical white line to the right of center and a thin streak of red-orange along the left side provide the sole interruptions in the black fiel", I didn't notice that at first because of the grey patch in the lower right. That must be it.

Thanks!

So, for those keep track at home, essear's powers include identifying either (a) abstract artworks or (b) Veronica Mars episodes based on very sketchy descriptions.

Just read the thread-- concur on El Greco, the later the better as his eyes got worse.

Here is a landscape, 500 years before French impressionism:
http://www.asia.si.edu/collections/zoomObject.cfm?ObjectId=4612

Stuart Pearson Wright does nice portraits. Julian Schnabel is pretty good.

http://www.andydenzler.com/html/paintings-01.html
http://www.wissenskunst.ch/uk/bibliography/35/

60: Yet he persists in working in science, wasting his life.

Over ten years ago I read a fascinating article in some art magazine (Frieze, I think?) in which they had polled different people about what piece of art they would most like to own. They had divided the results into responses from gallerists, artists, and people not professionally involved in the art world. Most of the responses weren't particular pieces but rather "a painting by [artist]" or more specific categories like "a Warhol screen print." The most curious thing was how very many gallerists mentioned Gerhard Richter's Betty.

"Betty" would be an amazing piece to live with. I think of recent artists, I would most want to own a Richter, but I would have a hard time deciding between a figurative one (Nude on Staircase or a Baader-Meinhof one or the Sonic Youth candle one) and a squeegee painting. Although apparently with a bit of experimentation you can make your own squeegee Richter painting.

"Betty" has something for everyone. Figurative and something interesting is going on!

Is Apo here or do I have to find a link to the guy who paints by with his asshole?

By numbers or by candlelight?

Like a spray gun.

What painters' paintings do you enjoy looking at?

John Singer Sargent.

I like that we now have an opportunity to gauge whether the Unfoggetariat is, on average, more interested in art or toilets. I think toilets are marginally ahead.

I'd like to own this.

70: Duchamp for comity?

72: Or maybe?

If I had to own one painting and stare at it, it would probably be something from this period of Gauguin

This is another favorite

But I like variety

Barcelona! Yes, the Sagrada Familia is in-comp-ar-a-ble, not just for Gaudí, but for the modern contributions by Subirachs and others - unusual to get such a stark sense of a cathedral as something made by a collective, over centuries. Casa Mila is another great Gaudí. The Fundació Antoni Tàpies was closed when I was there, but if you like abstract canvases with rope and wire and paint globs (I really do), check it out.

Of Sargent, I so much like
this.

Also, Girl With a Pearl Earring is in SF right now and they've splashed it all over the city buses and every single bulletin board in every single coffee shop and eight different kinds of tote bag, and I thought, Jesus Christ; but then last month I went to see it displayed in its shrine-like exhibit room, and the blue headband against the black field left me completely thick of tongue. Remembering one's youth on one's deathbed must be a little like that. My mom burst into tears.

I'm weirdly fond of Daybreak. Original copies are common enough that actually owning one wouldn't be out of the question.

Revealed preference suggests I'm with nosflow - the background on my desktop at work is an Italian Futurist painting I haven't found online yet - but I think it's only a subset of Futurist work that I have in mind, and that has exemplars in other movements too. Depictions of light or motion over time, several moments layered rather than a snapshot, are the key - the one I use at the office operates on a principle similar to the one that produced this painting, but is more humanized, with pedestrians and a streetlamp.

49 sounds right. You look at it because it seems like you know what it's doing, but then there's something surprising. Turner is also like this.

I asked because I started looking through Wikipedia to get a course in art history, which movements occurred when, which were considered advances and which regressive, and so forth. Some people just hit me with how unpredictable they are, and some amaze with how formulaic they are. This doesn't seem to be correlated with their reputation. As Teo suggests above, the Barnes Foundation has about 400,000 Auguste Renoir paintings that all look the same and all feature young women with vaguely misshapen spherical heads.

What also hit me: There are so many painters with Wikipedia pages, and they painted so much stuff! I could get a real painting with real provenance, which also looks really nice and rewards extended study, by someone who was considered the poor man's John Constable, or someone who was really really famous in Sweden 120 years ago, for only like $4,000 at a Christie's auction. And if you have real money, why would you buy trendy stuff you don't understand for $100,000 when you could get something historically significant?

For Barcelona, definitely the Miro museum. They had a series of his sketches, labeled in English, Spanish and Catalan, in one room: the Catalan information on one said something like "llapis, sense data." I was still a bit jetlagged and pondered it for a long time before I realized it was all written in the same language, one that I can't read all that well.

The big art museum on Montjuïc has a fantastic medieval cartoon painting of a martyr getting sawed in half. It is a little sad that that's my firmest memory of the museum.

Oh yeah, those martyrs! Them are four terrible ways to go.

Wait, you're two different people? Did I know this?

81.2: For a long time my most prominent memory from the Cloisters was of a panel depicting the Harrowing of Hell, strictly because I relished the comic-book-ness of Jesus' kicking down a door and squashing demons.

As Teo suggests above, the Barnes Foundation has about 400,000 Auguste Renoir paintings that all look the same and all feature young women with vaguely misshapen spherical heads.

This is exactly right. The women are all naked, too.

A look at Renoir's Wikipedia page reveals that he painted lots of other stuff in addition to female nudes, so the abundance of the latter at the Barnes may say more about Barnes than about Renoir.

We've been married a while, and we have a bit of a hive mind about Barcelona. Also, we're sitting next to each other typing right now.

In fact, when I saw the first "lourdes kayak" comment on the sidebar my blood froze, because I was sure I had made an idiot of myself and was being viciously mocked by the locals. I am slowly getting used to it.

essear should dress in red and walk around, drunk, singing "taking over, taking over, taking over Barcelona".

You know what the best purchase, including bikes, was that I've made in recent years? A painting by mcmc, that's what. I love it. And nearly every time I walk by it, I stop to look at it.

For the articles, I mean.

Actually, I like mcmc's paintings too!

lk and lk are married? I missed that completely.

This is a good thread: keep it coming with the links to paintings you like, o commenters. I enjoy sampling various things.

A little surprised to see a Maxfield Parrish fan upthread. He was probably my first love, when I first liked something enough to start collecting images.

Further to the complaint about Renoir, I have a book of Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood paintings, and basically everything in it is great except the things by Millais. It's like I've deemed him to be a phony. Why is he the most famous one of the bunch? (other than Rossetti)

And this weird offering is one of those that stands out as self-evidently great.

It depresses me that all the art books are about the same brand-name artists. Especially nowadays when it's easy to publish things with full-color illustrations, as all the websites based on blogs in the Cheezburger network can testify. Why can't I buy a barebones book of the 50 greatest paintings of Carel Willink? (to cite one of the people I'd never heard of a couple weeks ago, who now seems to be amazing)

Taschen should expand its product line by a hundredfold.

Other admirers of Vermeer: what do you make of the The Allegory of Faith? I find it sort of amazing, in a completely different way than Vermeer usually amazes, but the last time I saw it with someone at the Met she snorted, and it's not like I can't understand the impulse.

Allegory paintings in general tend to befuddle me. They're often kind of interesting but also usually cluttered and hard to make sense of.

Look at these paintings by Arkhip Kuinji. Dark landscapes! Why did none of those guys in the Hudson River School think to paint DARK landscapes. Their stuff all looks the same. The Peredvishniki, they were far more interesting.

Like this one, where I never really figured out how the different characters were relating to each other and what it was supposed to convey.

I don't know what work I'd want to own. Oh I thought of something I found very gripping lately, but I'm not going to be able to remember the name of the artist, and anyway it was a particularly silly answer for "art you'd like to own" on account of being an installation.

I'd love to have Robert Wilson's video portrait of Princess Caroline but one might eventually tire of even the Vertigo score.

98: Yeah, that one is multiply oriented in a way one isn't used to. I like Salvator Rosa's The Genius of Salvator Rosa, because of the title obvs, but also because the composition is much more accessible: here are a bunch of allegorized temperamental traits, all ministering to my half-clad, laureled Genius.

||

OpenSSH sure is puritanical, what with its warning that "IT IS POSSIBLE THAT SOMEONE IS DOING SOMETHING NASTY!".

|>

I've always loved Goya's war paintings, which motivated me to read Robert Hughes's biography; the biography, spent a lot of time explaining the visual language of his *formal portraits*, which was my way in to enjoying the sort of galleries I used to speed-walk through.

In the staid and old-fashioned category, I have a soft spot for Caspar David Friedrich.

Favorite contemporary painters, in terms of pure visual enjoyment: Pierre Soulages, Howard Hodgkin, Barnett Newman, Pollack, Rothko. Rothko is so good he makes it seem too easy---"ho hum, here's another mystical sensory experience"---while Pollack somehow feels like he's worked hard to create my mystical sensory experience. Running across an "unsuccessful" Rothko can be kind of jarring, while an unsuccessful Pollack puts me in the mood of "interesting try, old chap, keep it up".

Also good: Jasper Johns and Paul Klee (both visually ugly, I think, but somehow rewarding in small doses), Louis Morris, Richter. LB: Franz Kline may work with your "walk it back to representational" thing.

The canonical Francisco Goya is a hell of a painting.

104 posted before I saw 103.

I thought that was going to be Saturn.

I found a lot to like in the Hughes Goya book, though I wish he'd tried harder to find a word other than "perky" for La maja desnuda.

I think all the Goya was the highlight of my visit to Madrid.

80 -- the art history on Wikipedia is kinda atrocious, to be fair. I wouldn't trust it very far, especially because it's quite overrun with people who have, uh, crank views on art history. Also quality of reproductions is quite bad often.

94 -- two issues I guess. The first is that even a bare bones book can be both quite expensive AND bad enough to damage a reputation, and secondly I just don't think you'd sell enough to cover the costs.

Artworks I'd like to own? A tabletop Caro would be nice to actually own, I think.

Ohh! McCahons. They're really nice to look at. Victory Over Death & Practical Religion II are stunning.

104: My parents had framed reproductions of "3rd of May 1808" and "The Snowstorm (Winter)", and they hung both on the same wall in the study. When my little sister was born, that's where the crib went, right under the Goyas.

I saw one of the Antony Gormley "Field" installations once. Someone went to enough effort to photograph it and put it on a large-format postcard in the museum gift shop, which makes it sound like the 109.3 bar isn't hard to clear.

Failing to buy this postcard is the worst negative two euros I ever spent; there's no way to obtain a printed image of this artwork without buying a $50 book and cutting it up sacrilegiously. But, I mean, Gormley (like most major artists these days) has a web page---how hard would it be to have an e-commerce section to sell me a poster or coffee mug or something? There must be some sense that "Unlike Thomas Kinkade, my art is pure and only intended for highbrow museum viewing. Or museum gift shops! Postcards are 2€."

Mostly two kinds of art in the house: Native silk screen prints from the PNW & Monte Dolack posters. Also two commissioned pieces: a buffalo hide with a Plains design (this requires a space 9 feet square), etched glass (not yet complete) for a kitchen window.

Out on the loose, I tend towards the 17th century Dutch, but can be talked into Albert Bierstadt pretty easily. Fiat lux.

The wife likes odd looking sticks, and tree bark, and stuff like that. Of which we have plenty.

Vermeer and Cassatt, though the latter only in person.

Many of the surrealists.

I find Mondrian boring as hell in museums but would love to have one on my wall at home. Same with Rothko.

By "in person" I mean the painting, not the artist.

how hard would it be to have an e-commerce section to sell me a poster or coffee mug or something?

I think it would be pretty tricky, mostly for the reasons Keir describes in 109. Your Gormley example doesn't really answer the concern -- Field is not a painting or a photo, so that there's no chance of confusion that a photograph of the installation is a reproduction of the installation itself. You can tell at a glance that it's not the piece, it's at best a visual description of the piece.

I had a conversation this afternoon with someone who is a visual artist, working on collaboration involving numerous drawings printed on large format fiber paper. The printing process takes hours and hours per print, and it's an integral part of the piece. The end result is very beautiful, and the piece would be totally diminished by mass reproduction on cheap paper and on a small scale. That's fine for Rubens or Degas or whomever -- their reputations are already made, and anyway they're dead and their gallerists can't protest. But you can imagine that it would be really important, for a contemporary artist, that viewers first become acquainted with their work in the format in which they are intended to be seen.

109: Crappy Wikipedia pages don't just happen, you know.

I think if an artist is running into the problem of people first being acquainted with their art from coffee mugs, then pretty much they've already made their reputation.

What everybody says about Gaudí. If you're in a hurry La Pedrera and La Casa Batlló are on the same street.

If I was forced to pick one painter, it would probably have to be Goya, because he's so damn various (you could say the same of Picasso, who would be another candidate). That said, I once viewed all the Misfortunes of War in the same visit, and I was ready to slit my wrists.

The only style I really don't much care for is Impressionism/Post-Impressionism. Don't know why, it always seems clunky to me.

re: 2 - I was never a fan of that style [much more of a modernist] until I saw the big 'blockbuster' Botticellis (and Lippis, for that matter) in the flesh, a couple of years ago, and saw them in a completely new light. Much more interesting both in terms of technique and in terms of subject than I would have expected from seeing small reproductions. Same with Giotto and Fra Angelico and others of the same sort of period, although more Botticelli.

Also, as per Smearcases's 30, I like a lot of early 20th century stuff. When in Florence a couple of years ago (same trip as above) we stumbled on a small temporary exhibition of Russian stuff, largely Suprematist and Constructivist stuff, and it was like a cool drink after all the acres of Renaissance stuff.

The other that blew me away and which was a surprise (as I'm generally 'modernist' in taste) was Caravaggio.

Also, I agree with Chris Y re: Impressionism and Post-Impressionism. Although I did go through a (late teenage) phase of like some Fauvist stuff I've sort of gone off that, too.

If you're going to the Sagrada Familia, BOOK IN ADVANCE because the queue is unbelievable.

Goya, definitely. His portrait of Wellington is great and the sketch is even better; Wellington staring out of the painting, eyes wide with exhaustion.
Breughel.
Raeburn (for patriotic reasons, of course).
Turner.

122. IMHO if you want Scottish portrait painters, Allan Ramsay > Raeburn.

re: Turner

Only the later stuff, though. All the interminable faux-Claude stuff is a bit tedious.

124: yeah. But the Temeraire, and "Rain, Steam and Speed" are terrific.

re: 125

Yeah. We went to the big Tate Britain Turner ('... and the Masters') exhibition a year or so back. I really like the very late stuff, but everything earlier is a bit crap. His tributes to, say, Rembrandt or Claude tended to show up as a bit shit by comparison to the paintings that inspired them.

Painters:

Turner
Caravaggio
Canaletto
Van Gogh
Most Futurism (horrible worldview, but I love the aesthetic anyway)
Braque

Oh, and Lowry.

Yeah, I liked the Lowry museum in Salford much more than I thought I was going to.

Ugh, I always feel so uncultured. When I am old and live by myself I will have time to wander round galleries at my own fucking pace, and pontificate about art. I do like stuff, but I'm not very interested in knowing who did it or remembering any details about it (ditto actors, films, music, etc - am I history's greatest monster?).

I like Lucian Freud (like rfts) and Kid D watched a documentary about him with me last year and then we went to an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery of his stuff. She loved it - towards the end we were looking through some books about him, and there was a photo of him painting himself by looking in a mirror, and she gazed at it and then breathed, "he's just magnificent". So what else should I take her to see given that she loves Freud, and clearly has a far more visual response than my other kids?

Other admirers of Vermeer: what do you make of the The Allegory of Faith?

I find it difficult to like the same way as other Vermeers, because I don't get any sense of the woman's inner life, or not one I can relate to, anyway. I've not seen it in person, though.

In terms of photography, I tend to like the pre-WWII 'modernist' stuff a great deal. Moholy-Nagy, Munkacsi, Rodchenko, and the like. The Royal Academy had an exhibition a year or so back of Hungarian photography. The Hungarians seem to have been everywhere. So Brassais, Robert Capa, Moholy-Nagy, Munkacsi, et al were all Hungarian. Some of that stuff was amazing.

And also I like a lot of the post-WWII American and British stuff that was more rooted in portrait and commercial/fashion photography. So people like Saul Leiter, Irving Penn, Avedon, etc. And also people with more a 'reportage' style, like Salgado. I'm much less a fan of conceptual 'art' photography as it has evolved since the 1970s. Not because it's conceptual -- so were Moholy-Nagy, and the like -- but because it seems (to me) to be lazy and glib.

I do like stuff, but I'm not very interested in knowing who did it or remembering any details about it (ditto actors, films, music, etc - am I history's greatest monster?).

I can't really help doing that. My brain seems to work that way. I just remember trivia or facts of that nature, without any effort. I'll remember who the assistant producer was on an album I sort of like, or who was the cinematographer on some shitty film, and so on. All without making much effort to think about it at all. My wife, who is much better read in art history than I am, and who is more knowledgeable about most pre-20th c. art than I am, gets irritated by it.

Looking around our apartment, I find that the most represented artists are Tweety's grandmother (two watercolors), Bernd and Hilla Becher (a big mounted poster and a panel I tore out of an exhibit brochure and framed), and mcmc (a print and a small painting). Someday we'll buy a big mcmc painting, and then she'll be the most represented artist!

Blume wasn't counting my office, which would put Beefo Meaty solidly in the lead with two drawings and a painting.

I really love painting, as a form, but it was because my mother was an art student and kept her sanity during a hard stretch of motherhood, when I was little, taking us to museums a lot. Later, she volunteered at our school to come in with big giant prints of famous paintings from the library to lecture about them. I have favorite painters, but way, way too many to list.

I suspect everyone has an art medium they just don't "get"--poetry, orchestral music, or something. For me, it's architecture. I feel like I know a lot of people who can't even stand to be in our campus;s brutalist library because it's unappealing to them on the outside, and I really don't have strong reactions that way.

Dear Italian Renaissance:

I like paintings of the Baby Jesus. Do you have any?

Keep on rockin',

Flippanter

Also, Chardin. I went to the big Chardin exhibit at the Met several years ago four or five times.

135

I suspect everyone has an art medium they just don't "get"-- ...

Things like literature and music have popular forms with wide exposure. Painting not so much leaving me with basically no knowledge or opinions at all.

Things like literature and music have popular forms with wide exposure. Painting not so much leaving me with basically no knowledge or opinions at all.

Sounds like you're blessedly unexposed to Thomas Kinkade.

Things like literature and music have popular forms with wide exposure. Painting not so much

Display advertising?

140

Display advertising?

Not really. With popular music or fiction I know the names of some of the artists. With display ads I have no idea. Are there famous display ad artists?

Somebody writes the copy for print ads but that is quite a bit farther from literature than popular fiction is.

Who is painting's E.L. James or Taylor Swift, is Shearer's question.

That is an interesting question. Popular visual art seems to slide into kitsch a lot faster than literature or pop music. Thomas Kinkade, as mentioned above? Precious Moments, inspirational posters, paintings of Jesus?

With popular music or fiction I know the names of some of the artists. With display ads I have no idea

I bet you don't know the names of the songwriters, though.

Things like literature and music have popular forms with wide exposure. Painting not so much

Maybe you could peruse more graffiti.

I suspect everyone has an art medium they just don't "get"...

I feel like I miss a lot in a bunch of different artistic fields. Architecture works best for me in terms of gut-punchiness, though I hate a lot of things that get rave reviews from the cognoscenti. I've never encountered opera I could stand to listen to for more than a few seconds. Painting is right in the middle, though I have a very strong negative reaction to Picasso.

Maybe you could peruse more graffiti.

Good point. There's always Banksy.

Popular visual art seems to slide into kitsch a lot faster than literature or pop music. Thomas Kinkade, as mentioned above?

This was my initial concern. One of the painters I like the best is James Tissot. The paintings seem to contain a story. Is James Tissot the Victorian equivalent of Thomas Kinkade? I'm pretty sure Lawrence Alma-Tadema is, and I like his stuff too.

But these things aren't popular at all anymore. What is popular from that era now is, like, Cezanne. Which seems to me like it wouldn't appeal to the mass audience at all, instead it appeals to the purists.

Against better judgement, as 138 is almost certainly trolling:

Photography and the mechanical reproduction of images both had a lot of influence on painting. Compare J-L David or Gainsborough, maybe Hogarth, with Monet to see how painters responded to photography. Compare TL Lautrec's paintings with his incredibly accomplished (commercial) lithographs or read Walter Benjamin for early reproduction.

There shouldn't be a negative reaction to 138, assuming we're talking about current painters. Who is there that people should be highly aware of? Murakami? Gerhard Richter? There's no middlebrow culture anymore, these people aren't on the front page of Yahoo News.

I agree: whether or not 138 was meant as trolling, it's an interesting question.

150. Patrick Nagel or Anne Geddes for instance, maybe not to know them by name. A physical painting changed meaning pretty drastically with lithography and mass production.

I wonder about illustrators, too. Ludwig Bemelmans isn't exactly a household name, but lots of people know the Madeline books. Maurice Sendak?

And interesting across media.

This is not a thesis I'm going to put forward with any degree of confidence, but it seems to me that 150 is right: in literature, maybe as well as in graphic arts, somewhere around Modernism a sharper division opened up between popular entertainment and serious Art than had previously existed. Like, there's no popular poetry anymore outside of song lyrics -- people who read anything at all used to read poetry; bad poetry, competent poetry, genuinely good poetry, but there was a continuum from popular nonsense up to the stuff that's survived as serious literature. While there may be good contemporary poetry, no one much reads it except other poets.

Visual arts seem to me to be similar -- largely limited to a conversation between people seriously involved in the art world, and once you get outside of that small circle of intense interest, there's nothing but commercial design.

TV is really the only place I can think of (well, prose fiction I suppose as well, but the split I talked about above is going on there too) where there's some volume of material that's aiming at that middle-brow space where it's clearly the same thing as popular entertainment but it also has serious ambitions as art -- stuff like The Wire. I don't watch much of it, but it seems to exist.

There's no middlebrow culture anymore

Not sure about this. The annual Royal Academy exhibition, frex, is always rammed and I dare say its American equivalent is too. I've no idea who all those people are, or whether they know the names under the pictures they're looking at, but they're the apotheosis of middlebrow. That public must get its information somewhere.

154: comics.

Murakami did sorta make the news in NYC once.
"You snooze, you lose, buddy. Forget it."

Popular visual art seems to slide into kitsch a lot faster than literature or pop music. Thomas Kinkade, as mentioned above? Precious Moments, inspirational posters, paintings of Jesus?

I get coffee from a place that calls itself a gallery several times a week. In my opinion, everything I've seen there has been shit. Not in a kitschy-like-Kinkade way, though.

Yeah, I don't think in the UK at least you can assume that "high art" painting isn't also popular. Probably helped by the fact that most of the big museums are free (at least for permanent collections). The big name exhibits, your Monets, Picassos, Turners, etc are always jam packed and it's not all toffs.

158.link: Isn't David Lynch already David Lynch meets Leave it to Beaver?

153: I recommend the Bemelmans Bar to all comers.

154.3: I get the sense that 'serious' art is a bit of a circlejerk, deliberately alienating to people not part of the club.

159: But that's not really what I'm talking about -- not that the public's lost interest in high art, but that contemporary art has changed to be less connected to popular entertainment. People going to see Monet, Picasso, and Turner are looking back to before that split happened. (I really shouldn't be arguing this, I honestly don't know what I'm talking about.)

154. The images that people care about now are mass-produced, usually anonymously, and are seen as disposable. "Clever" T-shirts, posters, tumblr backrounds, a video with a particular visual style are all examples of what I am thinking of. Most middling-stable people that I know have photographs or reproductions of old works on their walls.

Much of their literary culture is also anonymously produced and disposable-- sitcoms, DK illustrated books, magazine articles.

I was thinking about this the other day-- the death of the author was once a theoretical construction, an abstraction that took some work to percieve. Conicidentally also a power fantasy of the early communists, but is now a boring everyday reality under high capitalism.

What chris and Ginger Yellow said. Big galleries in Britain are busy, and Tate Modern is wildly popular. Big new exhibitions sell out to a mass audience.

154:Film.

162: Well, yeah.

163:Remember, the impressionists barely sold before say 1900, so 25-50 years for greatness to get widely recognized is not unusual.

163. I don't think what happens at the RA really qualifies as "high art", or not most of it. Aspirational, maybe?

Hrm. In NY, while big exhibitions are crowded, I wouldn't think of that as meaning much -- the city's big enough that you can do an awful lot of crowding with a very very tiny percentage of the population. But it could obviously be totally different in the UK.

168. OK. In Malaga, a smallish town, the Picasso Museum (it's his birthplace) is elbow to elbow tourists of all nationalities

163. I do not think that Jeff Koons or other bullshit superstar artists are worth thinking about, there's a lot of worthwhile contemporary art which is worthwhile and is not alienating. Banksy's already been mentioned, film and video directors are another place where carefully constructed images are created for an attentive audience.

Museums and galleries don't mean what they used to, but I see that as a direct consequence of mechanical reproduction of images rather than anything stemming from modernism.

154:We vastly overrate our long-form TV series in America because our artfilm culture is horrible. This is not as much the case overseas, and I think an appreciation of artfilm in say Germany makes their best television better that America's. Heimat and BerlinAlexanderplatz.

America really sucks.

Can't find the article at Tyler Cowen's about how the vast Chinese film market is now getting bored with American action blockbusters and watching domestic made personal dramas instead.

168: Big exhibitions are always super-popular here, too. As are evening hours st the art museums.

Ahh Here NYT

When "Iron Man 3," an action heavyweight from Disney's Marvel Entertainment, opens in coming days, it will slug it out with a small, domestically made romance called "So Young," about a Chinese woman who reconnects with her college sweethearts. It is hard to be certain which film will be the underdog.

Now "So Young" may be pablum. But that there is a viable market for such movies means that good artfilms with such subject matter can get financed and distributed, which is barely the case in America. It is the case in China, Japan, Korea. Movies for and about women get made. Quality TV for and about women gets made.

Hell, we barely have any decent long-form tv series for and about women, without a high-concept fantasy hook.

Fuck off, bob

I suspect everyone has an art medium they just don't "get"--poetry, orchestral music, or something.

Poetry, yep. I like this and that but on the whole I don't enjoy it and don't feel enriched by it.

?? bob's coherent and nearly relevant. Wrong about the sexism (I draw your attention to the Lifetime channel, bob, and let me also say that Dallas and its hideous spinoffs ran a lot of perfume and depilatory ads), but otherwise fine. bob's worthwhile on film and TV.

173 -- the art film market abroad isn't more viable because Americans are uniquely unsophisticated, it's because foreign governments abroad sponsor and pay for art movies. Which, to be clear, the US should also do.

I don't see how "America sucks for the following reasons" is relevant to the question "What visual art do you like".

Now, posts 11 and 74, those are great.

I think an appreciation of artfilm in say Germany makes their best television better that America's. Heimat and BerlinAlexanderplatz.

While crazy things exist on German television now and then (I'm thinking more of things like Alexander Kluge's show than of your examples), it's mostly crap like Tatort and Gute Zeiten, schlechte Zeiten.

Anybody, so long as they painted on black velvet.

First Friday of every month, most of the art galleries, and a number of spaces that aren't art galleries at all, open from 5-8. Local artists mostly, with a broad definition of local. Counting the places that aren't signed up with the cultural council, we're talking maybe 20-25 venues. All packed. As are the sidewalks between venues.

And not just for the wine, and the growlers of local beer -- my artist friends tell me some stuff actually gets sold.

Suggesting that somebody wakes hung over and in bed with a painting they can't stand sober.

re: 175

Yup, me too. There's the occasional thing I like (sometimes quite a bit), but I've never really gotten it as an art form, except when sung. I've a few big blockbuster poetry anthologies that I dip into now and again, but I rarely find much that is much better than passably OK.

Opera, ditto. Although in the case of opera, there are lots of individual arias I like, and some whole operas that are pretty good, but as a form I find it largely irritating. Or the hit-to-miss ratio is unusually poor for me compared to most other art forms.

I get coffee from a place that calls itself a gallery several times a week. In my opinion, everything I've seen there has been shit.

Oh god, you should(n't) see some of the "galleries" around here. Nigh suicide-inducing.

I don't see how "America sucks for the following reasons" is relevant to the question "What visual art do you like".

How could I possibly approach that latter question without referencing the cinematic and electronic?

Walter Benjamin rules, and we have moved two stages past oils and watercolors on the walls, and one stage past mass reproduction into god-knows-what. Mass distribution? Obviously the world-of-available-and-accessed-images on the Internets is a quantitative become qualitative change for all of us, so catastrophic (in radical change sense) as to mark, I think, a change in consciousness, a phenomenological disruption.

There are many many paintings I love, but somehow I find it hard to imagine hanging the kinds of paintings I love* in my house -- so many are just of a scale and weight that would overwhelm any living space I would actually inhabit.

*Many watercolors, for me, feel more like drawings than like paintings, or at least they class more naturally with drawings than with oils.

It's interesting, I've long liked but known next to nothing, really, about contemporary painting and sculpture. I've had a lot of contact with that world recently, and sort of like being ignorant -- it keeps me from being a blowhard or have an overly conditioned response and makes the appreciation feel more pure. The downside is that I really don't know anything and can barely remember artists' names.

I presume everyone of us could easily loop the last minutes of L'Eclisse and have it repeatedly playing in wide screen on our living-room walls.

We don't. Why not?

Or any of a billion other clips.

185:I have a personal problem with exclusively possessing any art I would think worth looking at. Not so much in keeping others from it, as in what enjoying that power or privilege would say and mean about, and do to, me. "Mine" damages me, I think.

If I had the last minutes of L'Eclisse playing, we couldn't play Lego Star Wars on the Wii.

We don't. Why not?

Because it's really different to loop a part of a narrative than to look at a still picture?

Also, I have definitely told here before of the Italian restaurant in the jetBlue terminal at JFK, where their art is just that: a bunch of flatscreens playing a loop of parts of Roman Holiday, 8 1/2, and... the final scene of La Notte?!!*

*marital rape

I went once to a house of a rich dude who had bought some video art and had it on display. It was ... kind of annoying in the context of a private home, and I like a lot of video art when seen in galleries. For example, this.

There's the occasional thing I like (sometimes quite a bit), but I've never really gotten it as an art form, except when sung.

Right, yeah. T. S. Eliot...Evgenii Onegin...some e.e. cummings. Some of it is hard to resist but mostly I just don't have a use for it. Unless it's sung, as you say.

As to opera, yeah, it's rarely all that good. I just find it exceptionally exciting when it is. The worst thing about it is the culture around it, which is to say the people who like it.

Italian/French artfilm is my blind genre. If I'm a loop something on my wall, it's Paradjanov or Preston Sturges and betwixt lies an abyss.

Re: 154, high/low is complicated but of course Bob's right to point to moving pictures as our current medium gluing the two together. Prose fiction had that job for about a century; in 1811 you have Coleridge convinced that novel-reading "occasions in time the entire destruction of the powers of the mind," but by the 1830s or so Schlegel and Walter Scott have convinced everybody otherwise. Or to be less history-of-ideas about it, once technological change has given printed narrative a wider reach, people make use of it who might once have been snooty.

I think there might be a story to tell about a new high/low split in the vernacular tongue emerging right when everyone stopped learning the classical languages.

Opera, ditto. Although in the case of opera, there are lots of individual arias I like, and some whole operas that are pretty good, but as a form I find it largely irritating. Or the hit-to-miss ratio is unusually poor for me compared to most other art forms.

Pretty much word for word. I love most Mozart operas, and almost nothing else. I find in most cases the narrative and the musical form are dissonant in a way that I can't get over.

If only there was a way to commision a golf- and football-themed opera. Maybe as a can't-fail way to lose money for some tax advantage.

Ben Elton would probably write one if asked.

192 last -- I have never heard such homophobia on this blog!

I like opera a lot (though in my general "no desire to be a superfan/collector/connoisseur" way) but it definitely requires basically ignoring the plots except in maybe a kinda squinting way that pretends that they are hinting at something good. A lot like rock lyrics, which are necessary but mostly terrible.

Maybe as a can't-fail way to lose money for some tax advantage.

Never put your own money in the show!

I am something of a superfan who ignores the plot most of the time. I couldn't tell you in any great detail what happens in some of my very favorites. Not all libretti are bad, though. I think that gets overstated.

Not at all irrelevant to this thread: we used to fund high art in this country through the CIA.

Next we'll be funding CIA spy work through Kickstarter.

|| Meanwhile the carnival that is the Montana legislature continues to entertain. The House has gone home, and won't be back until 2015. Not before congratulating themselves on not expanding Medicaid, which would have extended coverage to 70,000 people and created a thousands of jobs. Take that, Obama! They did pass a budget, though, with the gov, R moderates, and Ds putting together a deal late last night. So, over to the Senate, which has to have a 2/3 procedural vote to suspend the rules and consider the budget. And keeps falling short, with R extremists unable to support the thing. And just barely fell short on a motion to go home without a budget. (Note, this isn't like the feds where budget is just a formality. This is the real deal.) So maybe we can have our own little shutdown. |>

"Hey, I'm [name elided], and me and my friends were thinking: what if we got off the couch and assassinated Salvador Allende? Pretty cool, right? Problem is, assassination is pretty expensive and we're still paying off our loans, living on Avenue D, and eating at Dojo. So I had this idea--I said 'I bet there are people out there who would chip in to see a cutting-edge assassination.' That's where you come in. Response to our previous assassinations has gone totally viral. This is gonna be big, and you can be a part of it. Chip in five bucks and cover some photocopies; chip in a hundred and we're that much closer to funding the weapons part of this crazy dream! Friends have told us we've got our heads in the clouds. Here's your chance to help us prove them wrong."

Given the CIA's use of militias hostile to the US's perceived enemies, and allowing these groups to do their won fundraising, kickstarter, where donors write their names down, would actually be a big step forward.

Thread has slowed down. From Beach Beneath the Street

Jorn's antipathy for Bill's new Bauhaus prompted him to revise and elaborate his own writings on form, eventually published by the Situationist International as For Form. Jorn is not as optimistic about postwar culture as Bill. "Culture no longer takes place in a situation, because we can only speak of a situation when there is an event, and an act only becomes an event at the moment it is able to trigger sensation." Jorn's own art, like his collective actions, are attempts to reignite sensation through experiments in emergent form. Jorn thinks of movement and matter rather like Lautréamont's starlings, where discernible form emerges out of random movements of definite proportions. "This new view of the whole leads us to the awareness of a new dynamic method in formal and artistic creation. But this also teaches us that we must throw ourselves into the confusion and act directly on the contradictions by creating new ones, if we want to fertilize development."

1) You can google Asger Jorn and Bill Max for the oppositional nature of their art

2) First quote: An "event" demands a narrative, history and consequences, embedding in social time and space, to become part of the culture. Not something inherent, but added to it, in a panic mode. See Obsidian Wings today on the Boston Bombings.

3) I don't think emergent form needs technically random movements. A large enough data set or informational base becomes incomprehensible and choices from within it become arbitrary and unjustifiable. Synthetic reason is crowd-sourced.

4) Revolution emerges when we abandon choice and identity. Like the starlings. Or something.

I Like This A Lot

144

I bet you don't know the names of the songwriters, though.

Mostly not except when they are also the performer.

If I had the last minutes of L'Eclisse playing, we couldn't play Lego Star Wars on the Wii.

I don't have the last minutes of L'Eclisse playing, and Lego Star Wars still confuses the hell out of me. I think I may hate it even more than I hated Lego Indiana Jones.

I've never tried Lego Indiana Jones, but Halo seems a bit much for a first grader. We compromised.

Lego Halo can't be that far behind, right?

My first grader is obsessed with Skylanders Giants. He doesn't even have it, but he has friends that do.

Its a cool concept - toys that are used to interface with the video game. But I don't want to pay through the nose for each additional toy/game character.

It isn't a cool concept, it's a fucking racket and I hate them so much.

Parts of it are cool, I suppose. You hardly ever have to make tricky jumps and it is set up so you can play without falling over the edge even if you're four (which is when we started with the original). Also, Puddy is one of the voices.

Gormley is a superstar. Like, fuck-off super star. I'd say that most adult Britons have a vague knowledge of at least one of his works. (Which kinda replies to 111, but also to the "how popular is contemporary art" and I think the short answer to that is: massively. I mean, look at the YBAs.)

214 is right. Everyone would know the Angel of the North, probably the statues on Corby beach (Another Place), and maybe some others. The YBAs remain huge, and Saatchi is much more famous as a collector of art than as a Tory-enabling ad man.

Similarly, Grayson Perry is a genuinely famous.

Still reading about Debord, still thinking:

Because it's really different to loop a part of a narrative than to look at a still picture?

I chose the last minutes of L'Eclisse for its lack of narrative. It could be Phillip Glass, or a travelogue through Yosemite, of a live-cam of an urban space. Or a clip that is indeed narrative, with people talking, maybe muted.

Well, we have aquariums. But movement on our walls might be too distracting? Why?

But okay, we want our interior private spaces to be static and well-defined (y'all have kids, I have dogs, so I won't say quiet, but the roles are predictable), but are reasonably comfortable ignoring movement, people, surprises in public or semi-private spaces. Are we different there? I know my identity is different in the parks, there is less around that is mine, that defines me.

Are most people's homes/interior spaces relatively fixed and static? Do very few of us change the wall decorations or object arrangements daily or weekly? Why?

I like that Smearcase overlooks the words and plot in opera. I was so excited to see Ainadamar a few years ago and then couldn't make my brain stop gabbing about how awful the lyrics were and how easy it would be to improve them into something lyrical and then I felt bad about that.

I don't think I've ever been in a museum room where I couldn't find anything that held my interest, but I'm also not sure what consistently takes my breath away. I generally get so much more emotionally involved in material culture, all the pitchers and tiny stitches and ancient musical instruments and so on.

215: Not to put too fine a point on it, but I thought Saatchi's greatest claim to notoriety was being so bald in his pursuit of Nigella Lawson that her then-dying-of-cancer husband was moved to comment if not approvingly, at least fatalistically.

It could be Phillip Glass
It could get some wind for the sailboat.

It could be Phillip Glass
It could get some wind for the sailboat.
It puts the lotion in the basket.

Or else it gets thirty minutes of minimalist composition again.

WTF? Someone just erased the future!

The future can never be known within any clarity, MAE. Any glimpses we think we see are just hopes, illusions, vague impressions of what may be.

I detect the omniscient and omnipresent Hand of Neb.

?!?!?!

I blame my comet comment, which stopped the thread from achieving circularity.

Just as we were approaching the singularity.

I detect the omniscient and omnipresent Hand of Neb.

That's right, laydeez.

Well, MAE will always have the satisfaction of having left the highest ever comment, even if the record has been erased.

For the rest of you, I offer low hanging fruit.

Gormley is a superstar. Like, fuck-off super star. I'd say that most adult Britons have a vague knowledge of at least one of his works

ISTR this coming up before and suggesting the definition that a well-known artist should have these things be true about themselves:
1) a random member of the public has a good chance of naming one work by them
2) a random member of the public, shown their most famous work, has a good chance of naming the artist

So that gets you Banksy and Damien Hirst, I think. Not sure it gets you Gormley though: everyone knows the Angel of the North, but how many people know who it's by?

What's Hirst's most famous work? The pickled cow?

That or the shark, I reckon.

See, I know those things, but I can't remember (if I ever knew) what they're actually called in the catalogue, so to speak. Does that count?

Most of Banky's work doesn't even have formal names AFAIK.

The shark is called something like 'The impossibility of death in the mind of someone living.' (Deliberately not googling to check)

I went to the big Hirst exhibition last year and liked it more than I was expecting. Some dreadful crap but some of the pieces really worked.

Speaking of popular visual art, I went to the Light Show at the Hayward last night. Great stuff, and a wider variety of artists than I was expecting. I had got it into my head that it was going to be Flavin and a handful of others, but it's basically one work by each artist, for a total of a couple dozen. I was particularly impressed/struck by Eliasson's Model For A Timeless Garden and Jim Campbell's Exploded View (Commuters).

See, I know those things, but I can't remember (if I ever knew) what they're actually called in the catalogue, so to speak. Does that count?

Oh, I think so. No one knows the real name of a lot of famous paintings: Rembrant's Night Watch is called something like "The TA Unit Of Mynheer Someone van Other Having a Quijet Pijnt" and the Laughing Cavalier has a real name that completely escapes me.

"The Shooting Company of Frans Banning Cocq" apparently, which probably explains why it's known in English as something else. Wikipedia also says that when it was cleaned in the 1940s it turned out to depict a scene in broad daylight and it was only the darkened varnish that made people think it was a night scene.

Also, rather than a bunch of men in hats, it turned out to be a still life centered on a dead pheasant.

"The Shooting Company of Frans Banning Cocq" apparently,

Also, rather than a bunch of men in hats, it turned out to be a still life centered on a bunch of very low hanging fruit.

I'm sure there's another good cocq joke in there somewhere if someone cares to find it.

If only Frans hadn't Banned Cocq we could find out.

Le Cocq Sportif

The physical impossibility of death in the mind of someone living.

Didn't Frans just liberate Cocq? Matrimonially speaking.

Hirst's butterfly "stained-glass" windows are astonishingly beautiful. And of course quite violent.