Anatomica Aesthetica

I just came across a 2010 exhibition called Anatomica Aesthetica featuring the drawings of Hamlet Frederick Aitken (1872 - 1939) and his awesome collection.

And the blog I found it on is great: http://dittrick.blogspot.com/search?updated-max=2010-12-27T06:25:00-08:00&max-results=7&start=7&by-date=false#uds-search-results

Something for the Memoirs

So circa 2010, little old me found myself hanging out with some fun ladies who were working at fashion week, then hanging out for drinks after at a swanky bar. We were all convinced to go to a members only club with another fashionister (that is the male version, right?). The whole place is black with various forms of lighting in different colors. And the only image anywhere was this:

Weird, right? But not just this. Pictured here is the first in a series of prints by William Hogarth, from 1732, called A Harlot's Progress. The series shows a woman descending into prostitution and eventually dying of venereal disease. On the wall of this club, though, was a GIANT DETAIL--blown up way beyond the original size of the engraving--of just the woman with her boob hanging out.

As a sidenote, the last in the series shows that the woman has syphilis according to the shading on her nose.

Braingasms and Hanging Hand Gardens

Weirdly unvisceral for showing viscera. Gives a whole new feel to those insides of ours:

All images from www.katie-scott.com

A Rare Pre-Etsy Vesalius Collage

via The Art Students League of New York

An untitled collage by feminist and erotic artist Anita Steckel, who died recently. Click here for her obituary.

Some quotes:

“If the erect penis is not wholesome enough to go into museums...it should not be considered wholesome enough to go into women.”

“Good taste is the enemy of art... It’s wonderful for curtains, but in art it’s suffocating.”

Van Gogh, Up Close-ish

Funniest thing about the exhibition Van Gogh Up Close at the PMA is that a whole section of paintings from a private collection had to have spacers to keep the audience a certain distance away.

There were also a couple of cheap side-galleries with relatively weak excuses for their existence, i.e. Van Gogh hated photography, so let's show you what he probably hated. The one on Japanese influences and Hiroshige was awesome, and also taken almost directly from the Van Gogh Museum's section on it. But it's worth seeing stuff like this:

Ando Hiroshige, Kameido Ume (Japanese apricot) Garden, 1857

See here for Van Gogh's version.

Nonetheless, lots of other good stuff going on with the paintings themselves:

Cut Sunflowers, 1887, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City

It's difficult to find some of the works from the show, since they didn't show many of his most famous works but had a whole slew of studies of underbrush and grasses--the grasses actually being my favorite and reminding me of Leonardo's study of hair, but with a greater sense of how he uses color and texture in light of visual movement.

Almond Blossom, 1890, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

This is the final piece of the show, showing an immense sense of control--it fully displays his chosen style, but also shows an amazing amount of restraint in the coloring of the background in contrast to his much more motley scenes in the rest of the show.

Unfortunately, it is impossible to get a sense of the color of this painting without seeing it in person. Going through the gift shop afterwards made this painfully obvious. A google search is even worse: Ouch. +1 points for Wikimedia, who did the best job by far.

Oh, and just to add some Van Goghnatomy:

Fluxus Reliquary

Photo Credit : (C) Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI, Dist. RMN-GP / Philippe Migeat

I can barely read the captions, but according to NYU's Grey Art Gallery, 'Hendricks’s satirical “Flux Relics” include “Sweat of Lucifer from the heat of Hell,” “Fragment of rope by which Judas Iscariot hung himself,” “Holy Shit from diners at the Last Supper,” and other objects not that far removed from the relics found in churches around the world.'

A Pride of Peacocks

We have all, I think, been fascinated at one point or another with the naming of animal groupings, if only briefly. I like to think that there were a bunch of British men on a committee somewhere smoking pipes and pontificating on the subject, like the committee on French vocabulary. It's probably not that far from the truth.

The first relatively comprehensive list of names was from the Book of St. Albans, which was actually a sort of hunting manual/book of general zoological interest from the 15th century, and was attributed to a woman who likely just made a compendium of things invented by aristocrats of the day.

Favorites:

A SEETHING of eels.

A FLAMBOYANCE of flamingoes.

An IMPLAUSIBILITY of gnus.

A BLOAT of hippopotami.

A LOVELINESS of ladybirds.

A PARLIAMENT of owls.

A DAZZLE of zebras.

Slade lecture insight

"Toward the middle of the 9^th century a provincial governor of al-Ma’mūn sent to a caliph a hundred loads of saffron on a hundred asses. The gift arrived while al-Ma’mūn was with his haram, the female members of his household, and was much disturbed by the thought that the asses, as the text puts it, would present “something inappropriate for the women to look at.” So the caliph asked whether the beasts of burden were she-asses or males. Being told that they were all female, and thus without conspicuous genitalia, he relaxed, remarking that the governor was too clever to send the gift with anything but she-asses [Qāddūmi p. 78 § 32]."

Anthony Cutler, Slade lecture series, Oxford University, Spring 2012

Santiago Caltrava

This guy started as a sculptor, then went to train as an architect and realized to get what he wanted done, he would have to be an engineer. And you can see it in his buildings.

"For myself, I venerate the human body, which I keep drawing and drawing and drawing."

This is most evident in Turning Torso:

Gaudi reprise: Strings and Stuff

Gaudi (mentioned in previous posts) not only used zoological illustrations for inspiration, but was also inherently interested in the properties of gravity as they play on earthly structures. He devised a method whereby he set up elaborate sets of weighted strings. The curve of the string would show where gravity placed its force, and thereby indicated the most efficient structure if those angles were to be used upright. He also was known to freeze cloth to come up with such natural lines of force. I imagine his house looked like a giant ropey chandelier.

PMA

Rubens' Prometheus

A liver's got to look like something, right?

Mutter Museum

La Specola

Click to see "My Favorite Museum Exhibit" article on BoingBoing

And then there are BUTTERFLIES FEEDING OFF A PIRANHA!

Oh, right, and an ANTIQUE CONDOM.

More Renaissance Erotica, this time further South

In September 1544, a papal nuncio visited Titian's studio where the 'Danaë' nude was in progress. He later wrote to Cardinal Farnese to say that the female nude was so erotically entrancing, she made 'The Venus of Urbino' look like 'a Theatine nun'. (from Studio International)

Pietro Aretino added his own views, in the manner he is best known, in his Dialogues: "My God, her neck! And her breasts...those two tits would have corrupted virgins and made martyrs unfrock themselves." (from Wikipedia, citing Titian by Hope, Fletcher & Dunkerton, 132).

For the record, I think Goltzius's Danae is one of the most beautiful paintings I've ever not seen yet.

And Klimt's version is unforgettable.

A new article on Rembrant and the erotic:

http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/752959/rembrandts-raunchy-side-see-rare-titillating-works-by-the-old-master-at-the-world-erotic-art-museum

Right after I bought this book from the Erotische Skizzen series:

Science About Town in Oxford

History of Science Museum

Okay, this is actually London. Seen at Blythe House

Antiques on High

Khalili Research Centre

High Street

The Natural History Museum

The Unicorn and His Flowers

Damien Hirst and Dead Stuff

Quotes from a Guardian article on his mid-career retrospective:

As a teenager, he made regular visits to Leeds University's Anatomy Museum to practise drawing, and it was there he found inspiration for his first piece of shock art: a photograph mounted on a steel frame called With Dead Head, first exhibited in 1991, in which his 16-year-old self poses, grinning, beside the severed head of a middle-aged man which sits on a mortuary table. It set the scene, if not the tone, for much of what was to follow.

Having been bought by Saatchi for £50,000, the shark in the formaldehyde-filled vitrine became an icon of contemporary art of the 1990s and perhaps the defining work of what would come to be known as the YBA movement...In 2006, the original shark, having deteriorated, was replaced at Hirst's insistence by a new formaldehyde-injected one, which was then loaned to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. It is that shark that visitors to the Tate Modern show will see. (Both Hirst and Cohen seem unfazed by the big art-historical question of whether a replacement can ever have the import of the original art work. Only time will answer that one.)

"It's what Jeff Koons once referred to as a high-maintenance piece of art," says Hirst, when I ask him about the practicalities of owning a shark in a tank. "The formaldehyde works are guaranteed for 200 years. I would like it to always look as fresh as the day I made it, so part of the contract is: if the glass breaks, we mend it; if the tank gets dirty, we clean it; if the shark rots, we find you a new shark." At 22 tons, it must be a bugger to transport, though? "Not really. The tank and the shark travel separately. Then you clean it and set it up, add the formaldehyde. Basically," he says, without irony, "it's just a big aquarium with a dead fish in it."

Hymn, 1996

Obscenity in 16th- and 17th-century France

Just read a fantastic article by Valerie Worth-Stylianou, "The Definition of Obscene Material 1570-1615: Three Medical Treatises Held to Account," EMF: Studies in Early Modern France 14 (2010): 148-167.

Pick your Poison, Honey

Ganked from the Guardian History of Science blog.

Originally from a copy of Ibn Butlan's The Maintenance of Health printed around 1531 by Johann Schott in Strassburg.

Also used in the Slades!

Colors of Nature

Great post about the conservation of this dress, including the reattachment of thousands of iridescent green beetle wings.

Unexpected finds in this month's Print Quarterly, part 2

Now, I'm well aware of the Japanese erotic print tradition, but... the cat. THE CAT.

Unexpected finds in this month's Print Quarterly, part 1

Admittedly, it reminds me of the "snakes in the toilet" fear common to young children. And myself.

Favorite WTF Art History posts

http://wtfarthistory.com/post/13502106700/allegory-of-love-syphillis-and-honey

http://wtfarthistory.com/post/12284218167/men-attracted-to-venus

And a compendium on farts:

http://wtfarthistory.com/tagged/fart

Tulips

A prized tulip, the Semper Augustus. It was a rare and expensive find in the 1600s, and even moreso now since its variegation is due to a specific virus. See this link.