Nature, Up Close and Personal

In summer, it can be difficult in the city, could be heaven for the painter Charles Burchfield, the 20th century mystic light of America. Because he spent most of his time in a suburb of Buffalo, which marked the tree aura season midday sun, sky brightness as cool as the song thrush and gardens of a pulse with music from the shackles the moon.

Even nature was tense and anxious. From the beginning, Burchfield concluded, as God he once had, meant that people were not Paradise, and rarely painted throughout. He also learned that hell was a society of one: himself. A natural ecstasy, was also a chronic depression: not a stop passive case, but a grieving and yearner. "Oh God - How to get there!" He wrote in his diary, "not" be childhood innocence, the home.

A dynamic mood seems to swing sharply in the survey called "heat waves in a swamp: The Paintings of Charles Burchfield" at the Whitney Museum of American Art, perhaps in part because the show was organized by Robert Gober, the artist American contemporary whose work mines neurotic at the bottom of the American psyche. However, even with an emphasis on certain aspects of Burchfield's career, Mr. Gober gives us nothing more than himself Burchfield. The peaks and valleys are all right there in the art.

Born in Ohio in 1893, Burchfield, since I could remember, was highly sensitive to the nature, partly as a substitute for a lost religious faith. His father, the son of a Methodist minister, had resigned to orthodoxy in anger. And when later Burchfield mother felt excluded from a local congregation, rejected religion altogether.

He spent four years at art school in Cleveland, absorbed in thought of the artist and philosopher Arthur Wesley Dow (1857-1922), who taught that nature should not be represented realistically, but as graphic patterns. In 1916 Burchfield left New York City on a scholarship to study at the National Academy of Design, but once there, balked and withdrew after a single afternoon. He managed to get a solo show in a bookstore-gallery in Manhattan before heading desperately nostalgia, back to Ohio.

By then he was already doing interesting things.

He had settled in watercolor - technically demanding, almost in its entirety on the light - as their primary medium and in the landscape, both observed and imagined, as its theme. Aesthetic stimuli was pulling from all sides: nature of children's books, Japanese prints, Chinese scrolls, illustrations by Arthur Rackham Wagner, Léon Bakst of games for the Ballets Russes, and the painting of the Romantic artists like William Blake and, surely, Samuel Palmer.

In 1917, which Burchfield called his "golden years", this eclectic hodgepodge generated some of his most famous images.

In one entitled "The Chorus of Insects" the plant world becomes an anthropomorphic force made up, with trees represented as a bumblebee jazz swirls of yellow and black, and the buzzing of cicadas groups symbolized as dashed lines .

It becomes natural energy and funeral crushing "Church bells, rainy winter evening," a picture of a bell tower looms like a big eyed bird squatting over a black population as rain pours. To Burchfield, at that point while agnostic and terror of damnation, the painting expresses the fear that the religion instilled in him.

It’s a Bird, It’s a Plane, It’s the Mayor of New York

New in our paperback list this week is Volume 9 of "Ex Machina", the collection of the penultimate WildStorm / DC Comics series about Mitchell Hundred, the mayor of New York was once a superhero known as the Great Machine .

Honor His adventures are illustrated by Tony Harris and written by Brian K. Vaughan, who also wrote the hit "And the last man."

The social conscience "Ex Machina" has boldly taken on issues few superhero books have dared to play before: School vouchers! Art museum controversies!

Gay marriage! Sanitation strikes! This volume reprints issues # 40 and 44 of the comics. The latest issue of the series, No. 50, will be available in comic shops on 28 July.

In Cleveland, a Frenzy to Prepare Antiquities

The museum is in the midst of one of the most ambitious reconstruction programs of any art institution in the country, a project of $ 350,000,000 expected to be completed in 2013. Along the corridors, workers with trucks and moving blankets transported improbable sets of valuable works of storage and preservation of the rooms as the museum prepares for its reopening next month of antique galleries, as well as those dedicated to the Byzantine and medieval works, all of which have been closed for five years.

On a recent day at the Cleveland Museum of Art here, a heroic-size bronze of Apollo believes that the work of Praxiteles, among the greatest sculptors of ancient Greece, was awaiting technical care in the conservation laboratory , large white stone eyes making it look vaguely impatient.

It is a company whose complexity - and importance to patrons of classical art and ancient - is perhaps only comparable to the reopening of the Getty Villa near Los Angeles in 2006 and the renovation of the Greek and Roman Galleries at the Metropolitan Museum Art a year later.

The museum built its collection to the early 20th century, when wealthy industrialists conservatives gave wide latitude in the art market. As Cleveland's fortunes declined along with those of other rust belt cities, the museum began to play an even greater role as a cultural center of the city.

They will be linked by a glass atrium with a height, flanked by the new wedge-shaped wings, one of which opened two years ago. The original neoclassical building was restored to the studs, ridding it of dropped ceilings and once again open spaces high, full of light. With the reopening of the galleries of antiquities in June, three quarters of the building will again be used to display art.

Can Art Be ‘Priceless’ in Rocky Times?

What explains the quick acknowledgment to aplomb in the art market?

This month, a painting by Picasso, “Nude, Green Leaves and Bust,” became the best big-ticket painting anytime awash at an bargain back it exceeded expectations to back $106.5 actor at Christie’s. In February, a carve by Giacometti, “Walking Man I,” awash for $104.3 actor at Sotheby’s, ambience the antecedent apple almanac bargain price.

What accounts for these bargain prices? Are investments in bays art any altered from investments fabricated in an appointment esplanade or a sports team?

* Denis Dutton, assistant of aesthetics of art
* Eileen Kinsella, editor of ARTnewsletter
* Donald Kuspit, art historian
* Kathryn Graddy, economist

The Joys of Jumpology

When the photographer Philippe Halsman, said, "Jump", no one asked him how high. People just moved, or jumped to the extent that physical capacity and personal decorum allowed. At that moment in the air Mr. Halsman clicked the shutter. Jumpology called his method.

The idea that people jump off the camera may seem a gimmick, but it is saying is that the contributions of a few syllables jumpology psychology. As Halsman, who died in 1979, said: "When you ask a person to jump, his attention is mostly directed toward the act of jumping and the mask falls so that the real person appears."

A wonderful exhibition of about 50 jumps Halsman captured on film from the 1940s through the 50s - sometimes commissioned by Life magazine - you can see in the Laurence Miller Gallery 20 West 57th Street in Manhattan , until Friday. The photographs show star of stage, film and television, national leaders, a prima ballerina, writers and creative types. Except for a few choreographers land, almost everyone cooperates.

Some images involved a little more stage directions than others, but by Halsman collaboration with surrealist Salvador Dalí since late 1940. The most famous of these images, "Atomicus Dali," Dali shows the crazy high, brush and palette in hand. He is flanked by a president and two easels (holding paintings Dalí) - all rose, and seemingly floating on the floor, increasing the sense of suspension. But the principal event is the grand arch curve of water through the image, along with three wheels (or remote) wet cats in disarray, confused. For once, something characteristic of Dalí exaggerated sense of surprise.

The program also includes six failed attempts at this shot, its shortcomings taken into account by Halsman. I was amazed that in these attempts, the main stand has only an empty frame. I took a closer look at the photograph published: the image in the main stand is a pretty accurate representation of flying cats, clammy skin tip and everything. It was drawn (or painted) and properly inserted after the fact, the empty frame shadow is still visible on the ground. Dalí was not lost much when it came time Dali.

It Was a Royal Pain, but It Ended Well

It is "the Great Charter, the Magna Carta. Accidents and interruptions of history have conspired for us to see this document: a 1217 version of a letter of 1215 that agreed to in advance, bearing the royal seal of King John of England. It is one of the four original copies, belonging to the Bodleian, and for almost 800 years that has never left Britain. An original letter of 1215 was on loan temporarily to the United States Capitol for the 1976 Bicentennial celebrations, a gift from Britain at that time included a copy of gold located in a special showcase.

A Morgan, everything about this manuscript is more humble. The Latin text is the parchment, crammed into a tight space, almost no margins, luxuriously designed in what is described by the museum as "a hand in the style of the chancellery. "It's much less large in size than the founding documents of the United States, almost be missed, housed on a pedestal in front of a fireplace in the library whose walls are covered with established JP Morgan inlaid walnut bookcases, a tapestry of 16th century and allegorical paintings in homage to the arts and sciences.

But there is darkness on the Constitution, a shadow on his vision of an ideal eclipsed almost mundane circumstances of his origins. Are all American school children still learn about its ramifications: The way this document - a treaty, really - between a feudal king and his rebellious barons introduced a form of constitutional law at the English tradition? The way in their agreements on former forest land and purveyances created a contract in which the king is subject to the rule of law?

Picasso nabbed in $123M Paris museum heist

PARIS - An alarm system was broken as easy as 1-2-3: A masked intruder cut a lock, broke a window and stole a Picasso, Matisse and three other masterpieces in a museum in Paris Friday - a distance of 123 million U.S. dollars which is one of the world's largest theft of art.

Downloading the artwork can be a difficult task, however, with Interpol and collectors around the world now on alert.

In what seemed like fantasy art thief, the alarm system had been broken since March in parts of the Museum of Modern Art in Paris, said the mayor, Bertrand Delanoe.

The museum, in a tony neighborhood across the river Seine from the Eiffel Tower, reopened in 2006 after spending $ 18 million (euro15 million) and two years to upgrade its security system. Spare parts had been ordered to set the alarm, but had not yet arrived, the mayor said in a statement.

So with no alarm to worry about, a lone masked intruder entered the museum at about 3:50 am, said Christophe Girard, deputy secretary of the culture city of Paris. The thief cut a padlock on a door, then broke a side window and climbed inside - their movements caught in an operating chamber of the museum, according to the Paris prosecutor's office.

The intruder then fell back, carrying the fabric and leaving behind empty frames. Each lasted 15 minutes, a police official said.

Three security guards were on duty during the night, but "did not see anything," said Girard. A night watchman discovered the theft from 7 am

The works stolen were "Picasso, Le Pigeon aux petits pois" (The pigeon peas), a cubist oil painting ocher sung by an estimated $ 28 million (euro23 million), and "Pastoral" (Pastoral ), a pastel oil painting of nudes in a slope of Henri Matisse valued at approximately $ 17,500,000 (euro15 billion), said Girard