STARRY NIGHT NEWS #8: World domination, autism, MoMA etiquitte, symphonies and learn to paint like Van Gogh

STARRY NIGHT MOST POPULAR WORK OF THE DECADE

WICHITA, Kansas—How do you measure an artwork's success? By its price on the auction block? Its placement in the museum? By how much it moves people, or makes them think? By how many college kids hang it on their dorm-room walls?

According to Overstockart.com, a company headquartered in Wichita, Kansas, that sells hand-painted reproductions of masterpieces for 3-figure prices, rather than the 6- or even 10-figure prices they might command at auction, the most popular work of the decade is Van Gogh's Starry Night, and Impressionist and modern works by European painters are the most coveted.

The top 10 are:

1. Starry Night – Vincent van Gogh


2. Café Terrace at Night – Vincent van Gogh


3. The Kiss – Gustav Klimt


4. Poppy Field at Argenteuil – Claude Monet


5. The Mona Lisa – Da Vinci


6. Le Rêve – Pablo Picasso


7. Luncheon of the Boating Party – Pierre August Renoir


8. The Scream – Edvard Munch


9. Red Cannas – Georgia O’Keeffe


10. Persistence of Memory – Salvador Dali

According to a statement, Overstockart.com has sold over a million oil paintings in the past decade, but has not necessarily noticed a change in what sort of things people buy. “Our numbers indicate that as the years turn and our world evolves some things remain consistent,” said CEO David Sasson. “People are still captivated by the elegance and beauty that the classic artists bring to their home. It will be interesting to see when, if ever, this trend begins to fade.”

http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/33609/starry-night-most-popular-work-of-the-decade/




MOTHER AND SON FIND SOLACE IN PAINTING
by Molly Snyder Edler

If 8-year-old Malachi Schmidt has a tough day, his mom, Nina, sits him in front of his watercolors and his frustrations seem to wash away.

Malachi struggles with articulation and social skills, and at age 5 was diagnosed with autism. Nina, who is a painter, noticed that her son was always interested in her work, so she introduced him to the world of painting at a young age.

"Art is an outlet for Malachi to express himself without having to use words," says Nina, 32, of Fond du Lac.

Malachi instantly loved painting, and his mother found that it calmed him and, over time, gave him confidence. Malachi paints a lot of original pieces, but he also likes to copy famous paintings.

"Van Gogh is his favorite artist and he enjoys replicating his work," says Nina. "After painting 'Starry Night' he said proudly, 'I want to show this to Van Gogh.' It broke my heart to tell him Van Gogh was no longer living. He cried."

When Nina was asked to donate a painting to an auction for a children's charity, she decided to create a painting with Malachi. Nina started the painting, and then suggested to Malachi that he add owls and leaves.

"I did not give him any other direction. I respect his vision with his art and try not to influence him," says Nina. "We had such a wonderful time doing it and there will be many more to come."

Now, the mother and son create paintings together all the time, and this collaborative experience has been extremely valuable for both of them. It allows them to have a creative and intellectual connection, and to share something special between just the two of them. Plus, when Nina and Malachi are painting, autism no longer exists.

Nina and her husband, Jesse, have two other children, Ivan, age 5, and Violet, 19 months.
The couple struggled with their oldest child's behaviors from infancy. From practically day one, Malachi was extraordinarily fussy, needed constant body-to-body connection and he rarely slept. Then, his speech didn't progress and his inability to communicate created frustration that led to intense tantrums. Friends told Nina that his behavior was normal, especially for a boy, but deep down she knew something wasn't quite right.

When Malachi was three, Nina enrolled him in speech therapy to help with his verbal skills and occupational therapy to assist with his behavioral issues, but by the age of 5, she took him to a neurologist who diagnosed him with autism and "mental retardation." The first diagnoses was not a surprise, but the second was a complete shock.

For weeks, the couple did not contact friends or family. They grieved and struggled with the new labels assigned to their son. Finally, Nina accepted the autism, but did not believe her son was cognitively challenged.

Nina and Jesse took Malachi to a second neurologist, who agreed Malachi had autism, but said he definitely was not cognitively disabled. Suddenly, the label of autism didn't seem as scary to Nina, and she knew it was something they would learn to live with, fully and successfully.
"Malachi has autism and it's part of him, but it doesn't define who he is," says Nina. "I don't want his childhood to be overshadowed by his autism, as something we are trying to constantly defeat. We all have our struggles and limitations, but it shouldn't take away from the joys that are there."

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Preventions, about 1 in 110 children have autism. It is uncertain what causes autism, and there is not a test that determines whether or not a child is autistic. The diagnosis is based on behavior, verbal abilities and social skills.
For Malachi, art is a therapeutic tool and a hobby, but someday, it might be much more.
"It's clear that Malachi wants to do something big with his artwork. Really big. I don't know what that is yet, but I believe in him," says Nina.

http://onmilwaukee.com/family/articles/malachipaints.html?21364

WHY IS IT OKAY TO TAKE PHOTOS OF SOME ART AT MoMA AND NOT OTHERS?

Last month, we braved the holiday crowds at New York's Museum of Modern Art for our first visit to the museum, post-renovation. (Yeah, we're about five years behind.)

Getting there at 3pm on a Sunday meant we had to wait in a long line (which moved fairly fast) and that we were shut out from the current Tim Burton exhibit which had sold-out earlier. Boo. (Tip: MOMA members can get in whenever.)

Despite the crowds, we found ourselves going through every floor of the museum all the while keeping a watchful eye out for the nearest EXIT. In maneuvering through such a crowded space, we couldn't help but engage in some serious people-watching. Sure, we observed the art but sometimes, people are just more fascinating. Especially when they are trying to take photos.

In the current exhibit about Bauhaus, the German design school of the early 1900s, we saw a woman get scolded by security for taking a photograph with her iPhone. NEIN! The woman even put up a fight and said something to the effect of "I'm not leaving. Have your supervisor come to talk to me." Interesting.

But then when we wandered into the permanent collections, everyone was taking pictures left and right—some even with flash!—as security guards stood by, doing nothing. One guard was even falling asleep standing up. Meanwhile, an excited couple held up their year-old baby for about 10 minutes in front of Van Gogh's "Starry Night," having a family friend take and retake "the perfect picture."

So what gives?

It turns out that you can take pictures in the museum's Permanent Collections (minus flash) but not in the visiting exhibitions. You can even do some videotaping in the lobby. But leave your tripods at home.

In regards to sketching, know that it is allowed...sans easels. But no sketching while sitting on the floor! If the museum is ultra-crowded (like during the Free Fridays from 4 to 8pm), you can be asked to stop sketching. See the full list of guidelines here.

We're guessing the museum must have thought that anyone with a computer can Google Image a Van Gogh or Picasso, but that Bauhaus and more contemporary work still needs to be protected. Maybe in another 100 years a couple with a baby can hold up their spawn in front of Bauhaus wallpaper to take the perfect picture but for now, no cameras in the visiting exhibitions.

http://www.jaunted.com/story/2010/1/11/162046/075/travel/Why+Is+It+Ok+To+Take+Photos+of+Some+Art+at+MoMA+and+Not+Others%3F

SYMPHONY TO FEATURE SIX TRING VIOLIN

Friendship is at the heart of most musical collaborations. Add strong doses of trust, respect and admiration and you've got conductor Andrew Sewell and electric violinist Tracy Silverman.

They'll be center stage with the Wichita Symphony Orchestra next weekend, performing groundbreaking music from the present and the past.

First up on the symphony's classics program will be new works composed by Silverman — one of them is "Between the Kiss and the Chaos," written especially for these concerts and heard here for the first time...

...Silverman's latest concerto, "Between the Kiss and the Chaos," was composed for Sewell and the Wichita Symphony. The piece is in five movements; the first three will debut next weekend. Each movement is inspired by a famous artwork — Michelangelo's "David," Matisse's "Dance," Van Gogh's "Starry Night" — and each showcases the unique qualities of the electric violin.

http://www.kansas.com/entertainment/music/story/1130427.html#ixzz0cQjQAwT5

STATEN ISLAND CHILDREN'S MUSEUM OPENS FREE TO THE PUBLIC

January 16 - 2 p.m.
Blue Painting Paint Like Van Gogh - The Starry Night Workshops aspiring artists learn to paint like the famous Dutch Painter - paint dark blue swirls and then fill in the rest. January 16 & 17 - Saturday & Sunday at 1, 2 & 3 p.m.

http://www.broadwayworld.com/article/Staten_Island_Childrens_Museum_Opens_Free_To_The_Public_For_A_Cool_School_Holiday_20100111

THIS (post-Impressionist) LIFE

Submitted to The Australian, 9.1.2010

The Australian was correct - the books were damn heavy.

When I opened the Review early on Saturday, 21st of November, I saw a dream manifest before my eyes. The article - Into that good night by Sabastian Smee - told of the ambitious project by the Van Gogh Museum and Van Gogh scholars to publish all of Vincent’s 900 letters, complete with thorough annotations and every piece of art referred to by the great post-Impressionist, represented beside his text. The result was Vincent Van Gogh: The Letters: The Complete Illustrated and Annotated Edition (2009).

I’ve been waiting my whole life for these books. Van Gogh has always been my absolute favourite painter from as early as I can remember. His life and art have has had an extraordinary affect me since when I was a young child. When I finally got to stand in front of his light blue self portrait some fifteen years ago, I wept. A bewildered security guard at the Queensland Art Gallery had to help me to a seat. And like many other wannabe artists, I have always felt a kindred spirit; struggles with art, self-confidence and emotions to a certain extent being similar.

Of course I’ve read versions of some of his letters before: mainly heavily edited letters to Theo and Gauguin. They give some insight into the paintyer and his life, but always left me wondering if I had a true vision the man or one coloured by the need to package and sell a marketable product. Then along came the complete, illustrated and annotated edition and, by God, the thing really did weigh a ton.

I thought I knew Vincent pretty well, but in beginning to read his letters, now complete with explanations for what I once only knew as vague references, I realise that I’m starting a new relationship with this extraordinary person. I’ve never met this 19-year-old, positively cheery young man who is full of praise for his job and in complete wonderment of his surroundings. I’ve never seen the fashionable paintings he sold during his time at Goupil’s, or the obscure paintings he would passionately discuss with his brother. I’ve never had the chance to read the poetry he liked, or his letters to distant but much beloved relatives.

Over the 117 years since the very first publication, editors of his letters have focussed on the dramatic elements of Van Gogh’s life because it sells books. His tortured genius; his religious conviction; his fight with Gauguin; his self-mutilation have all been offered up as fodder for the interested reader. Yes, this new 2,240 page edition has editors - teams and teams, in fact - but the irony is that they’ve let Vincent speak for himself for the first time since his death in 1889.

I plan to make my way through all 2,240 pages (six mammoth volumes) of his letters. It’s a little like watching the movie Titanic, I guess: you know it’s not going to end well but that doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy the story along the way. Most of all, I appreciate being given the opportunity to get to know the real Van Gogh; to understand his motivations behind his actions and his work within the context of the world he knew.

STARRY NIGHT NEWS #7: Do you know Van Gogh?

YOU THINK YOU KNOW VAN GOGH?

Prepare to think again when you visit the Royal Academy’s terrific new show of letters and pictures.

By Mark Hudson

When Vincent van Gogh had his last major showing in this country (UK) – at the Hayward Gallery in 1968 – he was merely one of the greatest artists the world had ever known. His influence on 20th-century art was widely understood, his tragic story universally known. The film Lust for Life, with its eye-rolling, paint-chomping performance from Kirk Douglas, had been consigned to history, while having had a decisive effect on the way we view the artist. Yet van Gogh was just one huge artistic figure among many.

Since then, he has become something no other artist has ever quite been, “the world’s favourite artist”. Van Gogh, even more than the Impressionists, is seen as the artist who blew open the studio door, blasting away centuries of fusty academic painting, to let in the light of real experience.

Vincent’s eye-popping colour combinations – so bizarre to his contemporaries – have come to be seen as more expressive of reality than reality itself. Vincent ran through blazing Provençal cornfields shouting about the power of the sun (or so we tend to think) and we feel he was doing it on our behalf. He’s become the artist par excellence of the Mediterranean – never mind that he was Dutch and that many of his paintings are of flat, dark, rain-drenched Netherlandish fields. Such is the power of the package – life-enhancing pictures plus tragic history – that his paintings are no longer simply works of art but relics of one of the great transcendent human stories.

Yet our sense of van Gogh as a kind of martyr, who died not only for his art but to open the eyes of the rest of the world, can, paradoxically, blind us to the real qualities of his work. While most of us can see past the cliché of the colour-crazed madman, there is the sense that he applied his singular vision in an almost indiscriminate way. Old boots, corners of uninteresting gardens, copies of Old Masters, van Gogh seems to turn everything into yet more van Gogh imagery in paintings it’s difficult to comment on, except to say that they are obviously by van Gogh. Beyond the fact that van Gogh’s early works, painted in Holland, tend to be on the dark side, how many of us could put a pile of van Gogh paintings into any sort of chronological order?

Bringing together 60 works from all over the world, the Royal Academy’s The Real van Gogh: the Artist and his Letters will throw the artist into a new light. By looking at the paintings alongside the letters that reveal the thought processes behind them, we will see his images not just as illustrations to a legend or spontaneous expressions of genius but as points in a line of creative development that continually confounds our expectations. While we think of van Gogh as the master of swirling forms, there are drawings here, done directly on to the letters, that are composed entirely of straight lines. There are paintings you would never think were by him. Indeed, while he had probably the most powerful personal style of any artist ever – he was doing drawings with angular, “Japanese” lines long before he saw Japanese art – he reacts to other artists in a way that can feel almost chameleon-like.

Here he is writing to his brother Theo in a letter of July 31 1882, discussing a watercolour of which he has done a superbly vivid pen and ink sketch on the opposite page, describing “the gloomy landscape – that dead tree near a stagnant pool covered with reeds. Dingy, black buildings”. And of a lone figure walking away in the middle distance: “I wanted to make it the way the signalman must see and feel it when he thinks 'It’s gloomy weather today’.”

While Vincent was painfully isolated for much of his life, and was to a large degree self-absorbed, what emerges from the letters is his desire to empathise with and reach out to others, not only through his art but on a simple human level. Describing his dark masterpiece The Potato Eaters, he writes of wanting to convey “that these people, eating their potatoes in the lamplight, have dug the earth with those very hands they put in the dish, of how they have honestly earned their food.”

Vincent wants us to feel the life of these people whose peat hovels he has shared, but from the perspective of “us civilised people”, as he makes clear in the next paragraph. He wants to be a peasant painter, making art for “labourers, peasants, fishermen and prostitutes”, while enjoying the finest subtleties of the great masters. He wants to take on the techniques and ideas of all the artists he writes about so compellingly – from geniuses to utter hacks. He wants to get everything he’s gleaned from his impassioned, omnivorous reading into the frame. The pathos of van Gogh is that he wants to do everything at once. His triumph is that to a large extent he succeeded.

Van Gogh’s career as an artist lasted only 10 years. And while we tend of think of his dark, Dutch phase with its lowering skies and severe perspectives as a mere blip before he discovered colour, it took up the greater part of that vital decade, and is represented at the RA in a magnificent array of early drawings. Even when he arrived in Paris in the autumn of 1886, his palette was still dominated by thick, dark browns. When he finally saw the works of the Impressionists, he was bitterly disappointed. “Their work is careless, ugly, badly painted, badly drawn, bad in colour – everything that’s miserable.”

But having seen the light – literally – he hoovered up the influences of the major Parisian painters in quick succession: Monet, Pissarro, Seurat and Toulouse-Lautrec, whom he met while studying in the studio of Fernand Cormon. While I’ve always assumed that Lautrec must have been influenced by van Gogh, it was the other way round. Vincent’s portrait of Agostina Segatori is in all essentials a Lautrec painting. When van Gogh writes to Emile Bernard, an artist he met through Gauguin, his drawing in the letter takes on the tremulous quality of Bernard’s own lines. While van Gogh, a Protestant pastor’s son, had become disillusioned with conventional religion by the time he became an artist, this desire to accommodate the other artist almost to the point of becoming them is rooted in a deeply ingrained idea of Christian humility.

In Gaugin he felt he’d found his artistic soulmate, into whose personality he wanted to sublimate his own – with the disastrous consequences that are so well known.
There was a history of insanity in van Gogh’s family. By this point he was drinking heavily, sleeping little, and bouts of derangement experienced earlier in his life were beginning to recur. Yet far from appearing confused, his drawings and paintings are startlingly lucid. A drawing in a letter to Theo, indicating the composition of the famous Bedroom in Arles, is at once fantastically economical and imbued with an almost Art Nouveau decorativeness, while the accompanying notes – “fresh butter yellow, very bright lemon green: coloured in flat plain tints like a Japanese print” – make it a kind of cribsheet on how to do a van Gogh.

As his attacks of insanity became more frequent, Vincent, now in the sanatorium at Saint-Remy, near Arles, created visionary works such as Starry Night and Landscape with Cypress Trees, that have come to be seen as the ultimate of the van Gogh ideal. Yet he also created a much less well-known group of paintings, which are in their way at least as powerful: wintery views of the grounds of the institution with leaves falling on its grey pathways and shattered tree-trunks, all painted in a similar and unusual colour palette.

“You will realise,” van Gogh wrote to Emile Bernard, “that this combination of red-ochre, of green gloomed over by grey, the black streaks surrounding the contours, produce something of the sensation of anguish called 'rouge-noir’, from which certain of my companions in misfortunes suffer.” With their quiet mixture of desperation and exaltation, these paintings that seem simultaneously inside and outside the condition of derangement looks forward to so much of what art has since been about, from Expressionism to Pollock’s gestural abstraction.

Indeed, for all that van Gogh has gone from being dangerous and edgy to the most widely accepted of all artists, has the rest of the world quite caught up with everything he achieved in that terrible final year? He kept on painting – “even when my illness was at its height”, as he wrote in April 1890 – convinced he had failed utterly, yet providing us with a moment-by-moment account of what he saw and felt as he moved from Saint-Remy to Auvers-sur-Oise in northern France, putting himself under the care of a Dr Gachet, before shooting himself at the age of 37. Yet far from dragging us to the brink of derangement, what he gives us are the moments of clarity and hope. What we have here is not the abjectness he felt at so many moments, but the determination to continue as a creative being, right up to the last moment.

It might seem ridiculous to talk of feeling “grateful” to an artist, who is after all doing nothing more than expressing himself. But for what it tells us about the possibilities of the human spirit that is how this exhibition leaves you feeling.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/art-features/6947746/You-think-you-know-van-Gogh.html

NEW ARRIVAL: VAN GOGH - THE LETTERS

I’m a lucky, lucky duck. Waiting for me on my birthday was this nirvana. Sure, I’ve read Van Gogh’s edited letters to Theo (which, quite frankly, I found a little depressing), but I’ve never sighted any letters to other correspondents, let alone read them. But now I have the absolute ultimate collection - an ostentatious six hardback volumes, each measuring 30 x 25cm. All 2,164 pages await my perusal along with a staggering 4,300 illustrations.

I’ve read the Foreword, Introduction, The Notes and the first few letters already. The former two were heavy going - as expected - but the letters from a 19-year-old Vincent, resident in The Hague, to his brother were an absolute dream. The copious annotations make all the difference. Simple and concise explanations of what were, for the reader, vague references to family, friends and art are now fully explained.

I was initially worried that the book would destroy my perception of Vincent. Having read his letters in forms that allow the reader’s imagination to form it’s own opinion, my concern was that this edition would be too constrictive with its continual explanations. I have found just the opposite. The more detail given, the better one’s imagination can work and the clearer the perception.

I plan to read all six volumes - a little each day. In many ways, it feels like the start of a relationship. Everything is new and innocent; a 19-year-old Vincent is upbeat about his life and work. Knowing what is to come doesn’t defer interest. Instead, a world of detail and new understanding awaits.

http://vangoghletters.org/vg/