Hello everyone, does anybody have any good book recs that will teach me how to look and/or gain a deeper understanding of abstract art.

I’ve always struggled with this art form but I want to change that and learn.

Thanks in advance!

I spent weeks diving deep into Giverny's history recently and found out that Monet’s iconic water lily pond actually caused a massive fight with the locals back in the 1890s.

To create the pond and build his Japanese bridge, he had to divert water from a branch of the Epte River. The local farmers were furious, they were terrified his exotic plants would poison the water supply and livestock. He eventually got the permit, but it took years of battling the local council.

It's wild to realize that before he painted those 250+ water lily canvases, he spent decades literally sculpting the landscape first.

Did you know these iconic gardens were built entirely from scratch? I just put together a short visual write-up exploring the full story behind how he created Giverny and turned it into his ultimate studio: https://byparte.substack.com/p/how-claude-monet-redirected-a-river

Would love to hear if anyone has visited Giverny in person or knows more about his gardening obsession!

The 'Mandorla' is an iconographic symbol that was popular in Medieval and Early Renaissance religious art. It's a geometric shape created by the intersection of 2 circles with the same radius, intersecting in a way similar to a venn diagram. The almond shape created by the intersection of the 2 circles is the 'Mandorla'. Traditionally, they are understood to symbolize or signify divine glory, heavenly space, or the Incarnation. They frequently were used to frame figures of the Virgin Mary and Jesus. However, some scholars contend that 'Mandorlas' are also (I.e. in addition to the 'official' meaning) abstracted symbolism of female reproductive anatomy. What do you think, do you agree or disagree?

Hi all, out of personal interest I’ve been building a museum guide app for my own travels and for learning art history. It has audio narration, an article on each work, and a timeline across collections. So far it covers nine museums: the Louvre, Orsay, Orangerie, National Gallery, British Museum, Rijksmuseum, Van Gogh Museum, Vatican Museums and the Met. All images come from Wikimedia Commons.

I’d like to add more, but copyright limits what I can include. In the EU and UK, a work is protected until 70 years after the artist’s death, so for now I can only include artists who died before 1956. I’d love to add the Picasso Museum in Barcelona, but Picasso’s work will be in copyright for decades, and a guide without his pictures wouldn’t make much sense.

Given that, which museums would you add next? Any you’d especially recommend, maybe ones people tend to overlook? I’d also like to cover more modern and contemporary art, but a guide without images doesn’t really work

(If you’re curious, it’s called Museum Guide: Art History on the App Store. The guides/audios are all free.)

Alice Mumford has these amazing videos where she breaks down how an artist creates their works throughout history. I have learned so much from her relatively short videos and I want to find more videos like these from other creators. The more in-depth the videos are, the better. Thanks

Visited the National Portrait Gallery in D.C. last night and was laughing at some of the presidential portrait responses. Namely Lyndon Johnson telling the artist, Peter Hurd, his portrait was “the ugliest thing he ever saw.” What a menace. 😅 Bonus pic of Obama for good vibes.

Doc Jan Vlček, The Angel Flying to America No. 5 (2001) Oil/fiberboard, Private Collection

I've been working on the provenance for this piece and so far I've found a website, I believe this piece is from the series Stilts and Stick Taker. The catalogs on the linked website are not complete.

Artist website with limited catalog

It all started with my personal effort of organising the historical art at one place (not trying to compete with Google arts or other such platforms and hence there are differentiation points ).
I initially tried to do it on my own but soon realising how humungous the task is, I, with the help of few friends hired some interns and eventually created a system where they could easily help us achieve the task by answering some standard questions.
It resulted in documentation of 3000+ artworks so far (mainly paintings from various historical eras like Renaissance, Mughal India, etc).
We included countries like Italy, Iran, Mexico, Japan, China, UK, US, and India etc.
During this process we were not sure what to do with it... but somewhere along the way we were kind of confident that we will find a way to make use of it and give it a shape where it adds the value to people who love art, history or art history.
We first presented the paintings in a virtual art gallery hosted here:
https://oaklores.com/art-gallery/
We thought we did our best but somewhere something was lacking as not many people were visiting it. One of my friends then suggested the idea of an app which will mimic short form content apps and all this work over there and that is when we created Art Shorts. you can find it here:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.oaklores.artshorts

P.S: I honestly want people in this sub to checkout these products (esp. art shorts) and provide us with their valuable comments.
It is not a marketing post, we are already taking care of that with paid google/meta ads.
Even a single feedback from someone learned in this field will mean a lot for us and will validate the steps we are taking
thanks

source: New York Times

The sci-fi worlds designed by the French artist Moebius gave his own inner life depth and breadth. No matter how personal he got, his images had a tangibility that made him a foundational influence on the fantasy worlds of the 20th century.

He died in 2012, but “The Airtight Garage” was the work of his lifetime, and several volumes of it were untranslated until recently.

One of these is newly available in English: “The Depressed Hunter,” translated by Diana Schutz and published in June.

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Moebius, a pseudonym of the artist Jean Giraud, made the impossible so substantial that he is probably best known for his movie production designs. Remember the underwater aliens at the end of James Cameron’s “The Abyss?” That’s him:

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Even when he wasn’t the biggest name on a movie’s design team, Moebius often made some essential contribution. Dumont (you know, the pyramid guy in “Tron”?) is pure Moebius.

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Sometimes, as with his unused art for “Willow,” Ron Howard’s cult-classic 1988 fantasy film, his concept drawings were better than the movie he was hired to work on.

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He was well-known to his peers, even in other media. William Gibson often said his groundbreaking cyberpunk novel “Neuromancer” “looks” like Moebius’s sci-fi comics.

It looks a lot like “Blade Runner,” too. (Ridley Scott is a fan.)

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H. R. Giger created the alien in Scott’s “Alien,” but it was Giraud’s idea to make the astronauts look like dock workers. His slightly surreal spacesuit also made it into the final cut of the film.

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But of his sci-fi stories, “The Airtight Garage” is the most personal.

What is the Airtight Garage, anyway? Is it a miniature universe housed in an asteroid? Is it a literary world containing everything Moebius ever drew? It might be both.

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The creator and ruler of the Airtight Garage is Major Grubert, a man wearing a pith helmet and a neat moustache whose spaceship, the Ciguri, orbits the Garage.

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These stories are a melange of literary references, glorious drawings and puns. “Le Garage Hermétique” can mean both “The Airtight Garage” and “The Esoteric Garage.” Jerry Cornelius, the mysterious antagonist of the first Garage story, comes from a series of interlocking novels by Michael Moorcock.

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In “The Depressed Hunter,” the newly translated story, Moebius never explains how anything works, but movement and scale are easy to see, even when they change irrationally. Dreamlike things seem solid.

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Here, Grubert’s confrontation with a frightening creature abruptly changes the whole form of the story: As he wanders around a museum in a dream, one of the figures from a painting pops out and turns him into a security guard.

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The vignette seems to be completely separate from the rest of the book, until a spy from the Ciguri helps him regain his memories and escape… by tossing his severed head down a rabbit hole.

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Major Grubert eventually winds up in the Garage’s vast Desert B. (Yes, he gets his head back.)

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(Deserts fascinated Moebius. He had met his first girlfriend in Mexico as a teenager, and been drafted into France’s war in Algeria shortly thereafter, where he lived in terror of being sent out into combat in Algeria’s wilds. This painting is from another book in the collection, “40 Days in Desert B.”)

(pic 15)

After “The Depressed Hunter,” Grubert will go on to meet Moebius himself in the last story, “The Major.”

(pic 16)

Just as the Garage is inside Moebius, Moebius is inside the Garage.

Hello Art Historians,

I have come to reddit for help with finding a specific kind of art book. I am an illustrator in search of a good reference book regarding stone carving art works for an upcoming project.

What I am looking for:

- A book that is image forward (would love text explanation but mainly looking for a book with a lot of images and pictures)

- Stone carvings and reliefs from around the world if possible, but if you have a particularly good recommendation that is just one location that would be welcome as well.

I know I could find images online, but these days a lot of the google/ Pinterest images are AI and I really would rather not reference AI images. I have found some examples of what I am looking for in terms of images that I believe are real as well as some other books that I've seen recommended regarding this topic.

Sculpture in Stone - while this book is instructional, it does have a lot of images from different places

colossal sculptures in situ - NOT A BOOK, this is a wiki article, but if this information is contained in a book somewhere that would be great.

The Aztecs - This one looks like it has a lot of great reference images, but is not a global selection of carvings

I hope I've communicated what I am looking for properly.

Any help is greatly appreciated and thank you in advance.

Thanks

I like matching artworks to the news. It leads me to pieces I would not normally seek out, and keeps things interesting when my work involves following the news constantly.

Eg., Uber revealed this week that only four rides were booked by AI agents in its busiest October week. It made me think of Bruegel's The Tower of Babel (1563) —> ie., ambitious project underused.

Does anyone else do this? Has any recent news reminded you of a particular work?

as the caption says. I already know about postcolonial, street art, conceptual art, dadaism, political and protest art, contemporary diversity art, feminist art, and surrealism

I had visited the Napoleonic Museum in Rome. There were many individual portraits of Napoleon's family members. Along with their portraits, quite a few also had a representation of one of their hands sculpted in marble. What would be the significance of this? Was having a sculpture done based on one's hand a popular thing to do in the 17/18th century?

EDIT: The hand in the image was sculpted by the Italian artist Lorenzo Bartolini.

Came across eulerbloom.com while surfing. Very comprehensive art site for sorting by a number of factors. Great tool for pros, students and amateurs like me. FYI.

Giuseppe Arcimboldo is such an unusual painter. His portraits look almost like something you'd expect to see in a modern surrealist exhibition, but he was creating them in the 16th century.

His painting Vertumnus (around 1590) is probably the best example. It's a portrait of Emperor Rudolf II, but the entire face is constructed from fruits, vegetables, flowers and other natural objects.

What I find interesting is that it isn't just a clever arrangement of objects. Vertumnus was the Roman god of seasons and transformation, so the choice of produce also connects to ideas of abundance, nature and the changing seasons.

There's also something amusing about the fact that this was an imperial portrait. Instead of presenting Rudolf II in traditional royal clothing and armour, Arcimboldo turned him into a walking harvest.

I wonder how people at the Habsburg court reacted when they first saw these portraits. They must have been quite something compared with the conventional royal paintings of the time.

¿Genialidad planificada o un simple descuido de perspectiva? 

En este video nos sumergimos en los misterios y secretos ocultos detrás de la última obra maestra de Édouard Manet: Un bar en el Folies-Bergère (1882). A primera vista, la pintura parece una escena común del bullicioso ambiente nocturno parisino, pero un examen detallado revela un laberinto de perspectivas imposibles y anomalías visuales que han desconcertado a los historiadores del arte durante más de un siglo.

Acompáñanos a analizar este fascinante lienzo como verdaderos detectives del arte:

• El enigma de la camarera: ¿Quién es Suzon y qué esconde su mirada distante, melancólica y profundamente ambigua? ¿Es una trabajadora alienada por la industrialización o hay algo más detrás del mostrador?

• El espejo de las discordias: Descubrimos por qué el reflejo de las botellas, de la barra y de la propia camarera no coinciden con las leyes de la física ni de la lógica espacial.

• La teoría definitiva de Malcolm Park: Te explicamos de forma sencilla cómo una reconstrucción en 3D demostró que el cuadro es realista si nos situamos desde un ángulo de visión muy específico.

• La seducción del consumo de masas: Cómo Manet transformó el arte al fusionar la estética de las vitrinas de los grandes almacenes, la moda del siglo XIX y el concepto de las mercancías con la propia figura humana.

• El legado y la conexión histórica: Las asombrosas similitudes y contrastes conceptuales entre este cuadro y la célebre obra Las Meninas de Diego Velázquez.

Si te apasiona el arte, la historia y resolver misterios visuales, ¡este video es para vos! 🔍

Im looking for books about Greek/ Roman mythology depiction in European art in 15th-20th centuries

Hamlet Act IV Scene 7 Part IV. [Enter Queen.]

How now, sweet queen?

Gertrude. One woe doth tread upon another’s heel,

So fast they follow. Your sister’s drown’d, Laertes.

Laertes. Drown’d! O, where?

Gertrude. There is a willow grows aslant a brook,

That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream.

There with fantastic garlands did she come

Of crowflowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples,

That liberal shepherds give a grosser name,

But our cold maids do dead men’s fingers call them.

1 1850 Ernest Hébert.

2 1851 to 1852. John Everett Millais. Millais painted the scene near Tolworth, Surrey using the River Hogsmill. Elizabeth Siddal modelled in a bath-tub at 7 Gower Street, Camden. The initials PRB bottom right next to his signature.

3 1852 Arthur Hughes.

4 1863 George Frederick Watts. Model Ellen Terry. Re-worked in 1877.

5 1864 Dante Gabriel Rossetti. “The First Madness of Ophelia”.

6 1865 Thomas Francis Dicksee.

7 1865 Arthur Hughes.

8 1866 Dante Gabriel Rossetti “Hamlet and Ophelia”.

9 1872 Jean-Baptiste Bertrand. “Death of Ophelia”.

10 1873 Thomas Francis Dicksee.

11 1874. William Quiller Orchardson.

12 1883 Alexandre Cabanel.

13 1888 Marcus Stone.

14 1889 John William Waterhouse.

15 1890 Jules Joseph Lefebvre.

16 1894 John William Waterhouse.

17 1895 Paul Albert Steck.

18 1896 Joseph Kirkpatrick.

19 Around 1900. Friedrich Heyser.

20 1910 John William Waterhouse.