Maurice Prendergast

Museum of American Art

Maurice Brazil Prendergast (1858-1924) was a United States post-Impressionist artist who worked to oil painting, watercolor, and monotype. He was a member of The Eight, nevertheless the delicacy of his compositions as well as the mosaic-like attractiveness of his designs were unique; and his work was more imagination oriented; and idealistic compared to other more pragmatic painters inside the group. Prendergast’s work was more genteel than his more abrasive colleagues. His friendship with Vuillard and Bonnard placed him firmly inside the postimpressionist camp. He developed and continued to elaborate an extremely personal style, with boldly contrasting, jewel-like colors, and flattened, pattern like forms rhythmically arranged over a canvas. Forms were radically simplified and presented in flat regions of bright, unmediated painting colors. His paintings happen to be aptly called tapestry-like or resembling mosaics.

Prendergast typically painted people involved in leisurely activities. At the Armory Show in 1913, he displayed seven works that showed his stylistic maturity. Although he predominantly worked in watercolors, he started using oils as part of his later career. He also produced a large number of monotypes between 1891 and 1902.

Everett Shinn

Everett Shinn (1876-1953), a part from the Ashcan school, he was the youngest member of the band of modernist painters who explored the depiction of true to life. He's most famous for his numerous paintings realistic of recent York and also the theater and also various areas of luxury and modern life inspired by his home in New York City. He painted theater scenes from London, Paris and Ny. He found fascination with the urban spectacle of life, drawing parallels between your theater and crowded seats and life. Unlike an artist like Degas, Shinn depicted interaction involving the audience and performer.

George Benjamin Luks

George B. Luks (1866-1933), was an Ashcan school artist whom lived around the Lower East Side of Manhattan. In Luks’ painting techniques, Hester Street (1905), he shows children being entertained by way of a man with a toy while a lady and shopkeeper have a conversation in the shadows. The viewer is probably the crowd instead of above it. Luks puts an optimistic spin on the Lower East Side by showing two girls dancing within the Spielers, which is a form of dance that working glass immigrants would take part in; in spite of the poverty, children dance about the street. He actively seeks the joy and sweetness in the life of the poor instead of the tragedy.

William Glackens

William Glackens (1870-1938), painted your neighborhood surrounding his studio in Washington Square Park. Instead of using strangers Glackens got his friends to pose within their finest clothes as café goers and shoppers. His work relates to Manet in that they both convey the glitter, fashion, spectacle and isolation of urban nightlife. In The Shoppers, Glackens depicts consumerism that has been a rising activity for ladies inside their lives as urban dwellers.

Robert Henri

Robert Henri, (1865-1921) was an important American Realist and a person in The Ashcan School. Henri was interested in the spectacle of common life. He focused on individuals, strangers, quickly passing inside the streets in towns and cities. He'd a sympathetic portrayal rather that the comic portrayal of people, often using a dark background to increase the warmth of the baby portrayed. His works use a heavy impasto which stressed the materiality of the paint and also the painter. He influenced Glackens, Luks, Shinn and Sloan. In 1906, he was elected to the National Academy of Design; however, if painters in his circle were rejected for that Academy’s 1907 exhibition, he accused fellow jurors of bias and walked off of the jury, resolving to prepare a show of his own. He would later reference the Academy as a cemetery of art painting techniques.

Arthur B. Davies


Arthur B. Davies (1863-1928) was an avant-garde American artist. He came to be in Utica, New York and studied at the Chicago Academy of Design from 1879 to 1882. He briefly attended the Art Institute of Chicago and then gone to live in Nyc where he studied on the Art Students League. Arthur B. Davies was president of the Association of yank Painters and Sculptors and with Walt Kuhn the secretary and Walter Pach, he was the principal organizer from the 1913 Armory Show. Davies is best recognized for his ethereal figure paintings realistic. He worked as a billboard painter, engineering draftsman, and magazine illustrator.

Stolen Caravaggio Painting Resurfaces within an online auction marketplace

There's another copy of the same painting techniques in Dublin’s National Gallery of Ireland. It too is thought to be in Caravaggio’s hand, but it’s hard to say.

Barely reported here in the U.S., a version of Caravaggio’s 17th century masterpiece, the Taking of Christ (Judas’ Kiss) was stolen in the Museum of Western and Eastern Art in Odessa, Ukraine on August 1, 2008 and has been recently uncovered at a Moscow online auction at the time of March 16, 2010.

The dramatic painting dating back to 1602 from the Italian Baroque master, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, depicts Judas embracing Our Lord and betraying Him having a kiss inside the Garden of Gethsemane, a very apropos theme as we commemorate these events during this most Holy Week. The National Gallery of Art has a great analysis of the art painting techniques, if you're interested in learning much more about it.

Staff in the Museum of Western and Eastern Art inside the Black Sea port of Odessa discovered the painting, known as the Taking of Christ, or even the Kiss of Judas, missing, cut looking at the frame, August 1, 2008
In 2008, Reuters reported the thieves “entered by way of a window, bypassing an outdated alarm system by removing a pane of glass as opposed to breaking it. Then they escaped across the museum’s roof.” At the period Vitaly Abramov, the deputy head of a second museum within the city, the Odessa Art Museum called the theft “a cultural catastrophe, a national tragedy”.

A few weeks ago the painting was discovered as a result of an anonymous letter that Vladimir Ostrovsky, the Director from the museum received suggesting that the stolen artwork was to be present in an online auction for $2 million.

Vladimir Ostrovsky told the Ukrainian Independent Information Agency (UNIAN) he “got frightened” when he saw an image of “The Taking of Christ”, as well as an announcement stating that it had been available for sale for a mere $2 million.

According to Ostrovsky, the price is ridiculous. Art experts estimate the Caravaggio piece to get along with $100 million.

Ostrovsky asserted, although he was unsure be it the stolen item under consideration or simply a duplicate, he immediately informed the Ukrainian law-enforcement authorities regarding it.

Another version of the same work of art is housed at the National Gallery of Ireland. It also had a history of disappearing. Its whereabouts remained unknown for Two centuries until it had been discovered in 1990 on the Society of Jesus residence in Dublin, Ireland.
Source: stmichaelsociety.com

Cynical realism

Fang Lijun

 Cynical realism is really a contemporary movement in Chinese art, especially in the form of painting techniques that began within the 1990s. Starting in Beijing, it is the most used Chinese contemporary art movement in mainland China. It arose from the search for individual expression by Chinese artists that broke away from the collective mindset that existed since the Cultural Revolution. The major themes tend to focus on socio-political issues and events since Revolutionary China (1911) to the current. These include creating a, usually humorous and post-ironic, take on a realist perspective and interpretation of transition that Chinese society may be through, from your creation of Communism to today’s industrialization and modernization.
Artists related to Cynical Realism include Fang Lijun, Liu Wei, and Yue Minjun.

Edward Hopper

Edward Hopper, Summer Interior 1909, Whitney Museum of American Art
Edward Hopper (1882-1967) would be a prominent American paintings realistic and printmaker. Hopper is the most modern from the American realists, as well as the most advanced. While most popularly noted for his oil paintings, he was equally proficient as a water colorist and printmaker in etching. In both his urban and rural scenes, his spare and finely calculated renderings reflected his personal vision of contemporary American life.
Hopper’s teacher, artist Robert Henri, encouraged his students to use their art to “make a stir in the world”. He also advised his students, it isn’t the niche that counts but that which you feel about it and lose focus on about art and paint pictures of what you are interested in your life. In this way, Henri influenced Hopper, along with famous students George Bellows and Rockwell Kent, and motivated these to render realistic depictions of urban life. Some artists in Henri’s circle, including another teacher of Hopper’s, John Sloan, became members of “The Eight”, also referred to as the Ashcan School of American Art. His first existing oil painting to hint at his famous interiors was Solitary Determine a Theater (c.1904). During his student years, Hopper also painted a large number of nudes, still lives, landscapes, and portraits, including his self-portraits.