The Dark Age of Rome – The Cadaver Synod

Jean-Paul Laurens, Pope Formosus and Stephen VI (The Cadaver Synod), 1870, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Nantes, France.

n a career that spanned over two decades, Jean-Paul Laurens painted some of French art’s most plaintive historical moments: two young princes huddled together, waiting for their inevitable demise; a king slumped on his throne, his queen clutched beside him, contemplating his official damnation; a deposed emperor finding his pride ahead of the firing squad. But none of Laurens’s art shocks as much as Le Pape Formose et Étienne VI – Concile Cadavérique de 897 (Pope Formosus and Stephen VI – The “Cadaver Synod”, 897).

Its simple title belies the severity of its scene—a medieval pope harangues the decomposed yet freshly attired corpse of his forebear, a jury of fellow bishops whispering to one another in the background. Without a title or context, viewers might see the painting as a tasteless parody. However, Laurens’s work depicts a real trial during the Medieval Catholic Church’s nadir.

Arguably the nadir of the papacy, the so-called “Cadaver Synod” of 897 saw Pope Stephen VI place the corpse of his predecessor on trial for spiritual misdeeds. In reality, Stephen VI held the trial as a favor to noble patrons with a political vendetta against the earlier pope. Jean-Paul Laurens’ painting captures the grim mood of a court aware of predestined notoriety.

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An Incomplete Portrait of Oskar Kokoschka

Oskar Kokoschka, “Giant Tortoises (Alligator snapping turtles)” (1927), oil on canvas; The Hague, the Netherlands

BILBAO, Spain — At night, its floodlit, rackety carapace looks almost lumberingly prehistoric — especially so when that shimmery, silvery flank is exposed to the hard stare of the giant, malevolent Louise Bourgeois spider, which sits in its wake on the north side, looking poised to strike …

The difficulty with showing art at the Guggenheim Bilbao is that the art is always in competition with the building itself, and in most cases, the building wins. There is an additional problem: too little time and thought were given, at that planning stage, to the galleries that would need to be carved out of its interior spaces.

How could a fiddly, mescaline-inspired swarm of black marks by, say, Henri Michaux ever hack it? It didn’t. That was back in 2018.

So our sense of awe ends when we leave the atrium (and the giddying curved walkways that hang off it) and enter the four so-called “classical galleries,” which are currently displaying a sizable retrospective — about 120 works in all, most of them paintings — by a Viennese rebel with the pleasingly syncopative name of Oskar Kokoschka.

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10 Architectural Drawing Tips From a Professional Artist

Illustrator Demi Lang knows a thing or two about creating a stunning work of art. Her passion for architecture and her ability to render it using ink and colored pencils has garnered her quite a following. Luckily, she’s also equally passionate about sharing her knowledge, and her online architectural drawing course is one of My Modern Met Academy’s most popular classes.

Her ability to capture the intricate details of architecture makes her work a joy to view. From an ordinary fish and chips shop to an ornate palace on Venice’s Grand Canal, each building is transformed into a work of fine art thanks to Lang’s passion and precision.

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Mystery Abounds in Lee Madgwick’s Uncanny Paintings of Derelict Buildings

“The Flood” Images © Lee Madgwick

A sense of unease surrounds the buildings in Lee Madgwick’s paintings, their sides crumbling or coated in thick vegetation as they stand alone in fields or swamps. The neglected structures appear lifted from cities and towns and dropped directly into rural landscapes, where nature slowly envelops their brick facades or sprouts trees from their eaves. “I’m forever drawn to places of abandonment and isolation,” Madgwick tells Colossal. “I’m compelled to explore these enigmatic wonders. There’s a poignancy and an unwavering silence and fragility that hangs in the air.”

Containing only remnants of human life, the scenes prompt questions about the buildings’ origins and caretakers. Some pieces, like “The Veil,” depict a home long-deserted by inhabitants as thick vines cover the lower windows, while others like “Fen View” suggest that people remain, as a small window is neatly trimmed out of an overgrown hedge.

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What’s Behind the Angel of History?

Traces of the c. 1520s etching beneath Klee’s “Angelus Novus”

Paul Klee’s “Angelus Novus” (1920) is the Mona Lisa of early modernism, a celebrated work whose history grants it a fabulous mystique. It was purchased by Walter Benjamin, who hung it in his German study, and then in his Parisian study when he was in exile, and discussed it in his famous last essay “On the Concept of History” (1940). Surviving the war when Benjamin did not, after being in the possession of Theodor Adorno and (per Benjamin’s will) gifted to Gershom Scholem, the painting entered the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. A fragile work on paper, it’s rarely on public display for long.

The story told by Annie Bourneuf in Beyond the Angel of History: The Angelus Novus and Its Interleaf begins in 2015 when the American artist Rebecca Quaytman made an amazing discovery. Klee had glued his work, an oil-transfer drawing and watercolor on paper, directly on top of an old engraving, identified with a date in the 1520s and the initials LC. No earlier account mentions that hidden underneath the Klee is an engraving of Martin Luther based on Lucas Cranach’s portraits. Given that Luther’s antisemitic ideas were adopted by the Nazis, what did Benjamin have in mind when he discussed this Klee in his essay on historiography? The engraving is not easy to see, either in Bourneuf’s reproduction or, at least in my experience, when viewing the picture itself. So it’s natural to wonder whether Benjamin knew about it.

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Seeing Ourselves Through Martha Alf’s Paintings of Toilet Paper Rolls

Martha Alf, “Black” (1974), oil on canvas, 37 x 46 inches

LOS ANGELES — Although Martha Alf (1930-2019) is recognized for her distinctive pear drawings, her inaugural posthumous exhibition at the Michael Kohn Gallery, Opposites and Contradictions, sheds new light on her breakthrough moment as a painter. While the exhibition presents a small selection of later drawings, hung salon-style, the primary focus is on the body of work that earned Alf a place in the 1975 Whitney Biennial: her paintings of toilet paper rolls, which she preferred to call “cylinders.” Such phrasing is significant because, by this point in her career, she was a formalist who boldly applied what she learned about abstract painting to still life, but with a twist in the form of unconventional subject matter. As she wrote at the time, she was “finding reality through an artificially contrived arrangement customarily associated with the stage or an altar, which raises the most mundane of material objects in our society to the authoritative power of an icon. It is about the absurdity of the idea that a roll of toilet paper is so important to our society that it can become a symbol of it.”

Born into the Silent Generation, Alf was a frustrated faculty wife in the 1950s, and would never identify as a feminist. Nevertheless, the Women’s Liberation movement impacted her enough that she earned her MFA in 1970 at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she explored abstract painting, became involved in Southern California’s blossoming art scene, and broadened her knowledge and understanding of contemporary art.

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Artist Recreates 18th-Century Romantic “Lover’s Eyes” Tradition by Painting Eyes on Vintage Plates

In the late 1700s, a romantic trend swept through wealthy families in England, Europe, and even America. Called “lover’s eyes,” or “eye miniatures,” these small paintings were commissioned to depict the eye or eyes of spouses, loved ones, and children. While during the Georgian period (1700s to early 1800s) they were worn as accessories like bracelets and pendants, contemporary artist Susannah Carson is reimagining this art form. She adds delicate paintings of eyes and faces to vintage plates.

Each of these depictions is rendered in a style that evokes the original tradition. Human gazes appear in the center of these dishes, staring at the viewer calmly and directly. The form of the dish even acts as a frame, bordering Carson’s handiwork with decorative patterns. This combination of materials enhances the nostalgia of these paintings, making them all the more precious to look at and display.

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Learn About J.C. Leyendecker, the Illustrator Who Defined Men’s Style in the Early 20th Century

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, illustrators were celebrities. They were household names. It might sound strange today, but consider an illustrator’s role in society; this was before photographs were routinely used in magazines and newspapers, so illustrators were the ones who helped define the visual culture at that time. Of the illustrators with immense cultural influence, J.C. Leyendecker was at the top.

Leyendecker had a distinctive style with exquisite attention to detail and a knack for capturing the essence of his subjects. His work for advertising and the covers of Collier’s Weekly and The Saturday Evening Post made him a household name. Leyendecker’s compelling characters, who were sophisticated and good-looking, also made him synonymous with style and elegance.

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Artist Hilda Palafox Coaxes Emotional Depth from Bodily Contortions and Skewed Sizes

“Cuestión de tiempo II,” oil on linen, 47.24 x 39.37 inches.

“A woman’s braid, for me, has a very powerful meaning,” says Hilda Palafox. “It symbolizes the fact of connecting, building, recognizing, changing, and strengthening. And I consider the act of braiding as something very intimate, very personal, and universal at the same time.”

Women convening, considering the size and shape of their forms, or engaging in solitary pursuits are common in Palafox’s works: one figure climbs a ladder sprouting new plant life, others precariously balance bowls on their limbs, and another bends over toward her toes, a table bound to her back with bright red rope.

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Sketchbook #22: Cathy Diamond

Tree study, 16 x 12 in, Watercolor, acrylic, graphite, 2022

To draw the forest is to study complex relationships. Below are a few of the direct studies Diamond has made that indirectly underlie and inform her complex and dynamic paintings. This is how she describes it:

I keep drawings like these visible in order to make larger paintings, not to copy, but to conjure. My first hours at a scene I’m scratching at surfaces. Thereafter, drawing and painting take over, it’s not about the scene anymore, it’s in me and I’m in it.

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