M.C. Escher

Born in 1892, the Dutch artist M.C. Escher is often associated with dorm-room posters or coffee book tables of his graphic art. Although he has become very "mainstream", I am still often struck by the oddness of hisi work. I remember as a child sitting for hours looking at my Escher book, amazed, and a little disturbed by the twists and turns and optic tricks he was able to create (without the aid of a computer). I realize that I've fast-forwarded a few centuries from my typical posts, but I recently was reminded of his work by a friend and thought I'd take a look at it again:

Gericault's Man Woman

A reader recommended that I check out this Theodore Gericault painting, entitled The Mad Woman with a Mania of Envy. Completed in 1823, the work is one of ten portraits (only five remain today) in which Gericault portrays a subject with a mental disorder. These haunting images make me really wonder what it must have been like to suffer from a mental illness in a time when they just "sent you off to a nut house". So sad, but such beautiful paintings.

James Ensor at the MoMA

Skeletons Fighting Over a Pickled Herring, 1891 - image via the Museum of Modern Art, New York

Among all of the really great current shows at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the James Ensor exhibition is one of my favorites. The show features 120 works "examining Ensor's contribution to modernity, his innovative and allegorical use of light, his prominent use of satire, his deep interest in carnival and performance, and his own self-fashioning and use of masking, travesty, and role-playing".

I have always loved Ensor's work, and this is the first time I got to see such a large collection of the haunting, yet comedic images. As Jerry Saltz says in his review of the show, Ensor "let his freak flag fly."

El Greco

El Greco, one of history's most talented artists (and one of my personal favorites) was born in 1541. His expressionistic, slightly disturbing style and elongated forms - just look at those fingers - brought confusion to his contemporaries, but have become heralded today.

Christ Carrying the Cross, ca. 1580s (?), oil on canvas

Portrait of a Cardinal, 1600, oil on canvas

Paul, the Apostle, 1606, oil on canvas

The Ugly Dutchess

This image of The Ugly Dutchess has become a sort of icon of gross humor and symbol of absurdity, but the truth may not be so funny...

From the Guardian:

"She is one of the most popular paintings in the National Gallery, whose rather unfortunate looks inspired illustrations for Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. But one question has always puzzled: did the poor lady really look like this?

Today the Guardian can reveal that she did and was suffering from an exceptionally rare form of Paget's disease - an abnormality of the metabolism that enlarges and deforms the bones.

The portrait, An Old Woman, painted by the Flemish artist Quinten Massys in 1513, is popularly known as The Ugly Duchess and will be part of the National Gallery's eagerly awaited exhibition Renaissance Faces: Van Eyck to Titian, which opens next Wednesday.

Curators are particularly excited about this painting because two important discoveries have been made in recent research: firstly, the portrait is truthful and she almost certainly looked like that, and secondly, a long held historical theory that the painter was copying Leonardo da Vinci is wrong.

The medical research shows that she was suffering from an advanced form of Paget's disease - osteitis deformans - which enlarged her jaw bones, extended her upper lip and pushed up her nose. It also affected her...."

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