Manhã no Rio Sena, França (Matinée sur la Seine) - Claude Monet

Manhã no Rio Sena, França (Matinée sur la Seine) - Claude Monet
França
Coleção privada
OST - 89x92 - 1897

There are few paintings of the inland water landscape in Monet’s oeuvre, and certainly no single sequence prior to the magisterial and crowning Nymphéas in the early twentieth century, that are more mysteriously enchanting and serenely contemplative than the twenty-two canvases of his Matinée sur la Seine series, which record the exquisitely delicate, elusive effects of early-morning light on a tranquil arm of the river near the artist’s home in Giverny, during the summers of 1896 and 1897. In these ethereal and evocative pictures, some of the last that Monet would paint of his beloved Seine, he focused intensively and exclusively on the subtlety of atmospheric effect, ultimately transcending the pure representation of landscape and moving into the realm of poetic decoration. The emphatic contrast in the present view between the foliage in shadow and the brightening light of the new day, achieved by means of a dramatic contre-jour effect, carries this hushed, elegant composition to the very brink of abstraction.
“Beyond time, quiet and calm, these paintings have a poetic way of evoking atmosphere, whereby the concrete figurative element is relegated completely to the background,” Karin Sagner-Düchting has written. “As though by undergoing metamorphosis, the figure is divested of familiar and identifiable features. In a symbolist sense it is merely suggested, not clearly defined” (Monet and Modernism, exh. cat., Kunsthalle der Hypo-Kulturstiftung, Munich, 2001, p. 52).
During the previous two years, Monet had embarked on extended painting campaigns in Norway and along the Channel coast, battling difficult wintry weather conditions to depict these rugged locales. It came as a welcome pleasure for him, then, to return to the sanctuary of Giverny, and during the summer of 1896 to immerse himself again in the lush, verdant landscape near his home and cherished gardens. He completed four canvases of the Matinée sur le Seine sequence during that year (Wildenstein, nos. 1435-1437, including 1436a), and probably began others in the larger balance of the group as well. That was as far as Monet could take the series in 1896, however. Forty-one days of nearly incessant rainfall during September and October—“frightful weather,” he lamented to Durand-Ruel—forced the artist to cease work on these pictures; he resorted instead to painting several scenes of flooded riverside meadows in Giverny (nos. 1438, 1438a, and 1439). He resumed his Matinée sur le Seine series the following summer, completing those canvases already underway as well as new ones, to all of which he applied the date ‘1897’ (nos. 1472-1488; no. 1499 is dated ‘1898’).
Rather than painting a wide-open expanse of the river, as he often had before, Monet chose for this series a quiet, protected backwater where the Epte tributary fed into the Seine. He worked from his studio-boat, which he left anchored mid-river for the duration of the summer, rowing out to it each morning in a skiff. As he looked upstream into the breaking dawn, on his left was the Giverny bank and on his right was the Île aux Orties, one of several wooded islets that then dotted this stretch of the Seine. He emphasized the meditative qualities of the site by selecting a spot where the trees on the Giverny shore were especially full, arching out over the narrow channel of water. These overhanging branches fill the upper left quadrant of the paintings in the series like a curtain being raised on the ethereal, early-morning landscape. “It seems difficult to conceive that this dreamy, otherworldly place Monet conjures up was just a brief journey from his home,” Tanya Paul has written, “yet it took the artist just a few moments to arrive at it” (Monet and the Seine: Impressions of a River, exh. cat., Houston, Museum of Fine Arts, 2014, p. 41).
Having already painted several extended sequences under changing light and in varying weather conditions, employing grain stacks, a row of poplars, and the façade of Rouen Cathedral as his now-celebrated motifs, Monet had by this time perfected his serial procedure. While working on the Matinée sur le Seine canvases, he kept to a rigorous and disciplined regimen from first to last. The journalist Maurice Guillemot, who visited and interviewed Monet during the summer of 1897, described the process that the artist undertook to paint this series:
“The crack of dawn, in August, 3:30 a.m. His torso snug in a white woolen hand-knit, his feet in a pair of sturdy hunting boots with thick, dew-proof soles, his head covered by a picturesque, battered, brown felt hat, with the brim turned up to keep off the sun, a cigarette in his mouth...he pushes open the door, walks down the steps, follows the central path through his garden...and comes to the river.
“There he unties his rowboat moored in the reeds along the bank, and with a few strokes reaches the large punt at anchor which serves as his studio. The local man, a gardener’s helper, who accompanies him, unties the packages—as they called the stretched canvases joined in pairs and numbered—and the artist sets to work.
“Fourteen paintings have been started at the same time...each the translation of a single, identical motif whose effect is modified by the time of day, the sun, and the clouds. This is where the Epte river flows into the Seine, among tiny islands shaded by tall trees, where branches of the river, like peaceful solitary lakes beneath the foliage, form mirrors of water reflecting the greenery...
“He shows me his fourteen studies in progress, retrieved from the boat and placed for the moment upon easels. It is a marvel of contagious emotion, of intense poetry, and unless one already knew...about the prolonged, patient labor, the anxiety about the results, the conscientious study, the feverish obsession with the work of two years, one would be astonished by his wish: ‘I’d like to keep anyone from knowing how it’s done’” (“Claude Monet,” La Revue Illustrée, 15 March 1898; in C.F. Stuckey, ed., Monet: A Retrospective, New York, 1985, pp. 195-201).
Monet had his flat-bottomed bateau-atelier fitted with a notched frame that held the canvases upright in the order in which he was working on them. As the light changed during the course of the morning, he quickly switched from one canvas to the next. Lilla Cabot Perry, an American painter who was Monet’s neighbor in Giverny, recalled the artist having explained to her that the effect he was seeking “lasted only seven minutes, or until the sunlight left a certain leaf, when he took out the next canvas and worked on that. He always insisted on the great importance of a painter noticing when the effect changed, so as to get a true impression of a certain aspect of nature and not a composite picture. He admitted that it was difficult to stop in time because one got carried away” (ibid., p. 184).
In no other series in Monet’s oeuvre did the artist focus on such a limited portion of the day, recording the ephemeral changes in the light as dawn encroached upon this sheltered spot in the landscape. In the canvases painted earliest in the morning, light has not yet penetrated the scene, and mist still hangs heavily over the river, reducing the distant forms of trees to soft shapes in the background. As the sun began to rise, Monet—looking roughly south-east—rendered the sky bathed in a warm orange glow but the banks of the river still completely in shadow; he then described the way that light catches on the tops of the foliage on the Île aux Orties, and a few moments later when the entire opposite bank flashes luminously in the morning sun. Finally, in an ambitious coda to the series, Monet turned his angle of vision roughly ninety degrees clockwise to face the Île aux Orties head-on, depicting it shimmering in the full light of day (Wildenstein, nos. 1489-1492).
In the present painting, Monet has captured a particularly delicate and fleeting effect, when light has just pierced the secluded inlet and illuminated the distant stand of foliage. The foreground trees, however, remain in deep blue-green shadow, silhouetted in striking counterpoint against the gradually brightening sky, now a delicate pale blue with lingering touches of rose near the horizon. Viewed in backlight, these overhanging branches form an elegant, decorative arabesque that calls attention to the flat surface of the picture plane. The reflections of the foreground foliage, by contrast, define the entrance to a pathway that gently coaxes the viewer’s eye into spatial depth, following the meandering course of the reflected light on the river until it converges with the source of that luminosity in the sky.
The twenty-two canvases in the Matinées sur la Seine series range from horizontals of varying proportions, the conventional choice for landscape painting, to almost perfect squares like the present example, a much more experimental and radically modern format that Monet would next explore in his virtually abstract Nymphéas. Here, Monet has employed a high horizon line that effectively bisects the composition, creating a perfect echo between the trees and sky in the upper half of the canvas and their mirrored double beneath. The dark, overhanging branches in the foreground are re-stated in lighter tints in the tree line on the opposite shore, producing a subtle bilateral symmetry along a vertical axis as well. Monet has countered the geometry of this grid-like composition by rendering the branches and their reflections in generous, undulating curves, suggesting the wonderfully irregular qualities of nature in contrast to the highly rational square. The painting thus exists at once as an abstract design with an internal, aesthetic logic and as an evocative description of this particular site, in all its evanescent beauty.
The Matinée sur la Seine paintings represent one of two major serial undertakings that absorbed Monet almost completely in 1896-1897. The other, collectively titled Les Falaises, depicts the towering chalk cliffs at Pourville, where the artist spent two successive winter seasons. Both of these subjects—the Seine and the Normandy coast—had been constant touchstones for Monet since the earliest years of his career. Rather than re-treading familiar ground, however, he now adopted a visionary new approach to painting these deeply personal, resonant subjects. In both series, forms are pared down to simple arabesques, contours are softer and less defined than ever before, and thin veils of color overlap to create a harmonious, tapestry-like surface. “Everything has become more homogenous, giving the scene a sedate, muffled quality,” Paul Tucker has noted. “The later paintings are much more restrained and much grander” (Monet in the 90s: The Series Paintings, exh. cat., Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1989, p. 236).
In other respects, however, these two contemporaneous series form a striking contrast. Whereas the Falaises are expansive, wind-swept, and volatile, the Matinées sur la Seine are delicate, contained, and self-reflective. In the coastal scenes, the compositional elements are arranged asymmetrically, the land rising and falling in unpredictable and precarious ways. The Seine paintings, by contrast, are balanced and stable, with a mirror-like equivalence between water and sky. The Falaises, Tucker has suggested, are indebted to the Dutch landscape tradition, while the Matinées represent a veritable homage to Corot—for Monet and his fellow Impressionists their most admired forerunner, both for his atmospheric plein-air technique and, in a direct line from Claude Lorrain, for his classical demeanor. “The ties to Corot are evident in the vaporous quality of many of the pictures in the series, in the reverie that the soft, ill-defined forms generate, and in the bucolic world that the group as a whole suggests” (ibid., p. 246).
Monet exhibited fifteen Matinées sur la Seine and twenty-four Falaises together at the Galerie Georges Petit in June 1898, where the two series met with almost unanimous acclaim. The present canvas was likely included in this show as No. 31. The Guillemot article cited above was printed in advance of the exhibition, whetting expectations. Shortly after the paintings went on view, the newspaper Le Gaulois published a special issue exclusively devoted to Monet and his work, which featured an appreciation by Gustave Geffroy, an anthology of critical praise from the previous decade, and a new photograph of the dashingly dressed artist. The next week, the conservative Moniteur des Arts came out with a similar supplement, in which the editor admitted that he had never been one of Monet’s supporters but that the Petit installation had won him over whole-heartedly.
Instead of the stonily encrusted surfaces of the Rouen Cathedral paintings shown three years earlier, viewers now marveled at the harmonious subtlety in Monet’s technique, with formal elements emerging as silhouette and arabesque against the light. “[Monet] looked at that spectacle in the morning mist, at sunrise, during the bright hours and the gray ones,” Geffroy wrote. “He became enamored of the nuances of that great passage of brightness, he followed them in the depths of the sky and the water, he expressed them by the bluish darkenings and greenish and golden awakenings of the foliage. It is these landscapes that are here assembled, these dark forms, these distant ghosts, these mysterious evocations, these transparent mirrors” (quoted in R. Gordon and A. Forge, Monet, New York, 1983, p. 179).
Nota do blog: Vendida em 2017 em leilão da Christie's por US$ 23,375,000.

O Império das Luzes (L’Empire des Lumières) - René Magritte

O Império das Luzes (L’Empire des Lumières) - René Magritte
Coleção privada
OST - 48x58 - 1949

Between 1949 and 1964, Magritte painted seventeen versions in oil, with ten more in gouache, of the idea to which he referred as L’empire des lumières. The artist’s friend Paul Nougé, the leader of the Brussels Surrealist group, provided the title, for which the most appropriate English translation is “The Dominion of Light”. “English, Flemish, and German translators take [dominion] in the sense of ‘territory’,” Nougé noted, “whereas the fundamental meaning is obviously ‘power’, ‘dominance’” (quoted in D. Sylvester, op. cit., 1993, vol. III, p. 145).
The present L’empire des lumières is the very first oil painting that Magritte completed which bears this title. The idea in this picture quickly became popular, and during the next fifteen years the artist created variants based on this original conception, sixteen more canvases in all, for interested collectors.
Each successive picture displays the key elements in the present, original L’empire des lumières—a nocturnal street scene in a placid, well-maintained, bourgeois quarter of town, similar to the Magritte’s own rue de Esseghem in Brussels (some versions were given country settings), with eerily shuttered houses, some curtained windows faintly lit from within, and a single lamppost, shining forth like a beacon, the sole illumination along this darkened length of avenue. The hour is late, and most of the occupants are presumably abed. Only the onlooker is witness to the bizarre vision that hovers above the roof- and treetops—a night sky with neither moon nor stars, lacking the least hint of darkness. For as far as one can see, a blue, midday, sunlit sky with lazily drifting white clouds fills the ether expanse. In the characteristic, straightly descriptive manner in which Magritte painted this scene, all is as natural—but in myriad connotations, also as paradoxical—as night and day.
As David Sylvester recorded, this painting was named as one of three the artist sold to his dealer Alexandre Iolas, on a statement of account dated 8 August 1949 (ibid.). Iolas shipped the painting in September to the Hugo Gallery, New York, of which he was director. Nelson A. Rockefeller, then chairman and president of Chase National Bank in Rockefeller Center, while also serving in similar roles at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, purchased this L’empire des lumières from the Hugo Gallery on 30 March 1950. That Christmas, he gave the picture as a gift to Mrs. Louise A. Boyer, his secretary, who later became his executive assistant when he served as Governor of New York State during 1959-1973. Following Mrs. Boyer’s death in 1974, the painting became the property of her son Gordon A. Robins, and subsequently entered two further private collections, including that of the present owner.
Magritte discussed L’empire des lumières in a commentary written for a 1956 television program, later published in the exhibition catalogue Peintres belges de l’imaginaire, Grand Palais, Paris, 1972:
“For me, the conception of a picture is an idea of one thing or of several things which can be realized visually in my painting. Obviously, all ideas are not ideas for paintings. Naturally, an idea must be sufficiently stimulating for me to get down to painting the thing or things that inspired the idea. The conception of a painting, that is, the idea, is not visible in the painting: an idea cannot be seen by the eyes. What is depicted in the painting is what is visible to the eye, the thing or things that had to inspire the idea. So, in the painting L’empire des lumières are things I had an idea about—to be precise, a nocturnal landscape and a sky above in broad daylight. The landscape evokes night and the sky evokes day. This evocation of day and night seems to me to have the power to surprise and enchant us. I call this power ‘poetry’. I believe this evocation has such a ‘poetic’ power because, among other reasons, I have always been keenly interested in night and in day, although I’ve never had a preference for one or the other. This intense personal interest in night and day is a feeling of admiration and astonishment” (quoted in K. Rooney and E. Plattner, eds., René Magritte: Selected Writings, Minneapolis, 2016, p. 167).
The diurnal antipodes of day and night have long served as poetically symbolic realms that represent the contrasts in the human experience of existence, most fundamentally the give-and- take between demands stemming from interaction with the outer world, and those arising from the inner world of the individual self. The tensions between reality and dream—day and night—lie at the very heart of the Surrealist ethos.
The beauty and revelation of L’empire des lumières—perhaps the latent message that contributed to its enduring iconic status—is that Magritte gazes far beyond any such antithetical notions, even if in this painting he appeared to cast such contradictions as the traditionally opposing elements of earth and sky, night and day, darkness and light. The alignment of element with idea, with one alternative or the other—in either a positive or negative sense—is fraught, however, at every turn with shifting ambiguities and reversals. The artist discovered instead the underlying conciliation and harmony of these opposing ideas. “After I had painted L’empire des lumières,” Magritte explained to a friend in 1966, “I got the idea that night and day exist together, that they are one. This is reasonable, or at the very least it’s in keeping with our knowledge: in the world night always exists at the same time as day. (Just as sadness always exists in some people at the same time as happiness in others.) But such ideas are not poetic. What is poetic is the visible image of the picture” (quoted S. Whitfield, Magritte, exh. cat., The South Bank Centre, London, 1992, no. 111).
The circumstances behind the evolution of the Empire des lumières idea into a painting are not clearly apparent. While staying with his collector Edward James in London during February-March 1937, Magritte gave a presentation at Roland Penrose’s London Gallery in which he considered, as stated at the outset, “certain features peculiar to words, images and real objects” (D. Sylvester, op. cit., 1993, vol. II. p. 53). In one example early in the discussion, the artist cited the opening line of André Breton’s poem L’Aigrette (from Terre de clair, 1923): “If only the sun would shine tonight” (ibid.). Although many of Magritte’s outdoor settings appear in daylight, and numerous interior subjects are given a suitably nocturnal mise-en-scène, the conflation of elements signifying day and night had outwardly figured only occasionally in his paintings. For example, in Le promenoir des amants (1929 or 1930; Sylvester, no. 324), two framed images of daytime clouds appear as if hung on the wall of a night sky, above buildings and trees. A night sky with a crescent moon and stars emblazons the façades of buildings at sunset in the gouache Le Poison (1938 or 1939; Sylvester, no. 1142).
Evidence of Magritte’s intent in the L’empire des lumières theme at the end of the 1940s may be found in a series of texts that he authored during 1946-1947, five manifestos under the title Surrealism in the Sunshine. The artist railed against the idea, sanctioned at the end of the Second World War and still more recently during the emergence of the Cold War, in “philosophies (materialist or idealist),” that “The man on the street...thinks he must live and suffer and that the very meaning of life is that it is a dream-nightmare.” Magritte reminds us that “La Terre n’est pas une vallée de larmes... We must not be afraid of the sunlight using the excuse that it has always served to shed light on a wretched world.” He concluded by announcing: “Here comes the sun to dissipate life’s shadows: joy and understanding to help out. Our mental world is filled with sunlight: the joy we have chosen as a sun to guide us. We have chosen pleasure as a reaction to the years of tedious terror, and consequently we stand firm in our longing for joy, a joy that will spread and grow more intense for everyone when the last noxious fumes of ‘knowledge’ have vanished from everyone’s mental universe.” (K. Rooney and E. Plattner, eds., op. cit., 2016, pp. 94, 96 and 101). This is likely the vision of a “Dominion of Light” that Magritte sought to express in L’empire des lumières.
The English word “empyrean” may be relevant here, as an adjective relating to the heavenly or celestial, or as a noun signifying “the highest part of heaven, thought by the ancients to be the realm of pure fire” (Oxford English Dictionary)—but only, however, insofar as this image may conjure, by way of simile, Magritte’s night sky filled with light. The artist would have taken issue with any suggestion derived from a religious tradition, or any “mystical” notion, as he revealed in comments regarding an interpretation that his friend the poet Paul Colinet had offered for the fourth version of L’empire des lumières (formerly in the collection of Georges de Menil; Sylvester no. 781). “His attempt to explain it is distressing: it appears I am a great mystic, providing consolation (because of the luminous sky) for our miseries (the landscape of houses and black trees). The intention is no doubt good, but all this keeps us on the level of pathetic humanity” (quoted in D. Sylvester, op. cit., 1993, vol. III, p. 200).
A Poetic Art
“The art of painting, as I see it, makes possible the creation of visible poetic images. They reveal the riches and details that our eyes can readily recognize: trees, skies, stones, objects, people, etc. They are meaningful when the intelligence is freed from the obsessive will to give things a meaning in order to use or master them.
“The searching intelligence sharpens when it sees the meaning in poetic images. The meaning goes with the moral certainty that we belong to the World. And so, this actual belonging becomes a right to belong. The changing content of these poetic images tallies with the richness of our moral certainty. It does not happen at will, it does not obey any system, whether logical or illogical, rigid or fanciful.
“The unexpected appearance of a poetic image is celebrated by the intelligence, ally of the enigmatic and marvelous Light that comes from the World.”
René Magritte
(From La Carte d’après Nature, 8 January 1955, p. 6; in K. Rooney and E. Plattner, eds., op. cit., Minneapolis, 2016, p. 161).
Selected highlights from among the variant versions of L’empire des lumières
Magritte’s repeated treatment of the Empire des lumières idea amounts to a theme with variations; the alterations from one canvas to the next, in nuance and motif, serve to expand and enhance the poetic effect of the artist’s intentions. Changes in the size of the canvases, alternating as well between horizontal and vertical formats, allow the viewer to experience the impact of Magritte’s conception in different ways.
At this point, it should be mentioned that the present L’empire des lumières, while the first picture of this subject that Magritte completed, is not the first he actually began. This honor belongs to the penultimate, sixteenth version (Sylvester, no. 954), which Magritte began in 1948, but set aside when no more than two-thirds completed, before he turned to the present canvas (see below).
The artist painted the second version (Sylvester, no. 723) of L’empire des lumières less than a year following the present painting, in June 1950, on a larger sized canvas, allowing a broader array of building façades, in which the artist told Iolas he had “revealed the full strength of the idea” (quoted in cat rais., op. cit., 1993, vol. III, p. 157). The more engaging, intimate effect of the present, original painting, however, is undeniable. Iolas sold the first variant to Jean and Dominique de Menil by the end of the year; they immediately gifted the picture to The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Because the De Menils desired a L’empire des lumières for their own collection, Iolas placed an order for the fourth version (Sylvester, no. 781), which Magritte completed in August 1952. It was shipped to New York in January 1953 and there acquired by the De Menils (sold, Christie’s New York, 7 May 2002, lot 36).
Version 6, 1953 (Sylvester, no. 797) was sold to Richard Rodgers, the composer of South Pacific and other Broadway musicals, in 1953 (sold, Christie’s New York, 11 November 1992, lot 18). Version 7, 1953 (Sylvester, no. 803) was acquired by New York collector Arnold Weissberger after 1953 (sold, Christie’s New York, 14 May 1986, lot 53).
Peggy Guggenheim purchased version 8, 1954 (Sylvester, no. 804) in October 1954, having seen it in the Venice Biennale. Because of confusion stemming from the efforts of three parties to reserve the picture prior to the Biennale, Magritte discovered he had in effect promised it to each of them—Willy van Hove, the Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels, and his dealer Iolas. The artist thereafter painted in 1954 three more variants, versions 9-11 (Sylvester nos. 804, 810, and 814) to satisfy his obligations to all three clients.
Magritte painted version 12 (Sylvester, no. 842), probably in 1956, and sold it directly to a private collector. The artist also managed the re-sale of this painting to Chicago collector Barnet Hodes in 1960.
In response to a request from Iolas, the artist painted an Empire des lumières in 1957 (version 13; Sylvester, no. 858). A member of the dealer’s family saw the work while in progress, and upon completion became its owner; the painting thereafter remained in the family’s possession.
Harry Torczyner, one of Magritte’s most dedicated collectors and the author of Magritte: Images and Ideas (New York, 1977), commissioned version 14 (Sylvester, no. 880) directly from the artist in 1958 (sold, Christies New York, 19 November 1998, lot 313).
Version 16, mentioned above (Sylvester no. 954) is the completion of the painting that Magritte began in 1948. Having seen it in the studio, the eventual owners learned from Magritte that he had been unable to resolve the picture in its vertical format. They offered to purchase the canvas if the artist would finish it, which was accomplished in 1962 (sold, Christie’s London, 25 June 1996, lot 40).
Magritte inserted into the final version 17 (Sylvester, no. 1006) the silhouette of the man in the bowler hat, his proxy, seen from behind, which he painted in 1964 or 1965, for a private collection.
A painting showing a daylit sky above a nocturnal scene was left unfinished and untitled at Magritte’s death on 15 August 1967 (Sylvester, no. 1066).

Nota do blog: Foi vendida em 2017 durante leilão da Christie’s por US$ 20,562,500.

Ferrari F50 Berlinetta Prototipo 1995, Itália

Ferrari F50 Berlinetta Prototipo 1995, Itália
Exterior: Vermelho (Rosso Corsa)
Fotografia

4,698cc DOHC, 48-valve V-12 engine, Bosch Motronic fuel injection and engine management, 513 HP at 7,000 RPM, six-speed manual gearbox in rear transaxle, four-wheel independent suspension with coil springs and unequal-length wishbones, four-wheel hydraulic disc brakes; wheelbase: 2,581 mm
Unveiled by Piero Lardi Ferrari and Sergio Pininfarina at an exclusive preview held before the world-famous Geneva Auto Salon the evening of March 6, 1995 at the Geneva Galleria Museum, Ferrari’s stunning new Ferrari F50 supercar was introduced to the public there by Luca di Montezemolo. The product of “Fifty years of racing, fifty years of winning, fifty years of hard work,” as he stated, the Ferrari F50 remains a stunning achievement on every conceivable level.
Using technology derived from Ferrari’s Formula 1 V-12, the new 4.7-litre engine featured a 65-degree angle between the two cylinder banks and four overhead camshafts with three intake and two exhaust valves per cylinder. Its compression ratio was 11.3:1, a Bosch Motronic module controlled the fuel injection and ignition, while a throttle valve driven by the ECU allowed for two exhaust lengths: one tuned to achieve the greatest torque and another for better top-end performance, reducing exhaust backpressure. A self-diagnostic system even adhered to California’s notoriously strict exhaust emission standards. Cutting-edge materials for the V-12 engine included a crankcase made of high-strength nodular cast iron, while Nikasil-coated cylinder liners and connecting rods were made of titanium. Dry sump oiling was used with three scavenge pumps and one supply pump. All told, maximum output reached 520 HP at 8,500 RPM and peak torque was 347 foot-pounds at 6,500 RPM. The 436-pound engine itself was durable, capable of reaching over 10,000 RPM. A six-speed longitudinal gearbox, complete with limited-slip differential, was fitted behind the engine, between which was mounted the oil tank for the dry sump engine lubrication system – all reminiscent of the layout used in Ferrari’s contemporary Formula 1 cars. Top speed was 325 km/h (202 mph) and the 0 to 100 km/h (62 mph) dash required merely 3.7 seconds.
Some commentators described the F50 as a Ferrari F1 machine with a second seat and a sportscar body. The comparison was far from unfounded. The chassis was made entirely of Cytec aerospace carbon fiber and weighed merely 225 pounds. The aircraft-style rubber fuel bladder was contained within this chassis, behind the driver and in front of the engine. For the first time in a Ferrari road car, the engine/gearbox/differential assembly acted as a load-bearing structure. Large brake discs were ventilated and drilled and were fitted with four-piston Brembo brake calipers. The brakes were so good, ABS was deemed unnecessary. Inside, the instrument panel featured a tachometer and speedometer as well as fuel, oil, and water temperatures and oil pressure gauges – all controlled by microcomputer with LCD display. This system also included a statistics bank, which memorized the various dynamic parameters of the car and incorporated a crash record. Fully adjustable, the throttle, brake, and clutch pedals were all drilled for weight reduction. The gated gearshift was traditional Ferrari and, in the interest of weight, even the gear knob and lever were made of lightweight composite materials. Virtually every element benefited from cutting-edge technology.
In typical Ferrari fashion, just 349 cars would be built over two years – one less than the market demanded. The first 10 cars went to Europe, while deliveries to the United States began in July 1995. Each owner received a document signed by Luca di Montezemolo attesting to the authenticity of the car, and all the owners were invited back to Modena after the last F50 was produced, in order to celebrate the evolution of the car.
The F50 offered here, with serial number ending in #99999, is the first prototype car, with use including pre-production development of the final F50 design and assembly-line procedures. It has certainly enjoyed an illustrious career as a featured subject for legions of automotive journalists and the focus of many test sessions. From early 1994, it had performed lap after lap on Ferrari’s Fiorano test track, usually wearing Italian ‘Prova’ (test) plate MO2112 and completing hundreds of kilometres on the roads around Maranello in the capable hands of test drivers Dario Benuzzi, Niki Lauda, Gerhard Berger and Jean Alesi. In 1994, #99999 was the glamorous subject for factory posters and glamour photos such as those by noted photographer Rainer Schlegelmilch. It was also the basis for scale models produced by Burago, Maisto, Tamiya, Revell and others, as well as detailed cutaway drawings by Shin Yoshikawa. Its now-iconic image was used for the stock press pictures in Ferrari sales literature and in dozens of books, nearly a hundred magazines and even postage stamps. F50 #99999 also marks the end of an era it as the last Ferrari built with a five-digit chassis number.
In addition to select appearances including the Geneva Auto Salon (March 9-19, 1995), F50 #99999 starred at “Forza Ferrari at Suzuka” in Japan (April 8-9, 1995), where it was accompanied by Mr. Swaters, Mr. and Mrs. Piero Ferrari, Ferrari’s Maurizio Parlato, Enzo Francesconi and Niki Lauda. Back in Europe, it was shown at “Ferrari Days” at Spa, Belgium (May 5-7, 1995), under the aegis of Swaters’ Garage Francorchamps, who at the time also took delivery of the first production F50 (001 of 349: F50-103097). On October 15, 1995, it was exhibited at “Tutti la Ferrari in Pista,” at Mugello, along with F50-101919 (later presented to Sergio Pininfarina) and F50-102474 (presented to Piero Ferrari). This F50 returned to Japan for the Tokyo Motor Show (October 27-November 8, 1995) and then during the remainder of 1995 and into 1997, F50 #99999 accumulated perhaps another thousand kilometres in 5-lap increments around the Fiorano test circuit at the hands of test drivers including such former international racing champions as Phil Hill and Paul Frere, both noted motoring journalists from the 1960s-90s. From late 1995 to late 1997, F50 #99999 also served as the shining star of the Ferrari Galleria display.
After miles of road and track testing by the factory, in late 1997, F50 #99999 was rebuilt by the factory in preparation for its presentation to its first registered owner. On January 30, 1998, F50 #99999 was presented to Jacques Swaters and transported to Garage Francorchamps in Belgium where it joined the Swaters collection. Interestingly, the car’s unique VIN had been promised to Swaters – a close friend of Enzo Ferrari himself, back in the 1980s. In 2000, the F50 was driven to Spa for another “Ferrari Days” event initiated by Mr. Swaters and Garage Francorchamps and, in 2002, F50 #99999 was featured in the Garage Francorchamps 50th Anniversary celebrations and would remain in the Swaters collection until 2006.
In Spring 2007, at 502 miles, #99999 was sold to Ferrari collector David Walters of Burbank, California, who exhibited #99999 at various high-profile West Coast automotive gatherings including the August 2008 Quail Motorsports Gathering in Monterey, California. Subsequent owners include Andrew Herrala of New York in January 2011 and Tony Shooshani of Los Angeles in August 2013, followed by the current owner from Long Island, New York in 2017. Today, F50 #99999 is offered with Ferrari Classiche certification and the all-important “Red Book.” It is complete with original accessories including the hardtop with “anvil” case, books/manuals, fitted factory luggage, a serial-numbered key fob, serial-numbered shop manuals, parts books with microfiche, as well as a large file containing additional documentation, literature and related ephemera. Recently, in 2018, this F50 received service from a Ferrari dealer, including fluids, battery, tires, fuel bladders and a stainless-steel Tubi muffler, with the factory muffler included in the sale of the vehicle.
Regarded as the most important of all road-going F50s, with unparalleled provenance and history documented by marque expert Marcel Massini, it remains superb in all respects, ready for immediate enjoyment and appreciation.

Produtos Curiosos / Inusitados: "Vela Cheiro da Sua Vagina”, Marca Goop de Gwyneth Paltrow, Estados Unidos

Produtos Curiosos / Inusitados: "Vela Cheiro da Sua Vagina”, Marca Goop de Gwyneth Paltrow, Estados Unidos
Produto

Além de ser atriz, Gwyneth Paltrow gerencia a empresa de sua marca pessoal, a Goop. Entre itens corriqueiros como blusa, calça e shampoo, um produto chamou atenção. E não era para menos. Trata-se de uma vela aromática que promete levar ao ambiente o "cheiro da sua vagina".

O lançamento, que faz parte de um projeto de bem-estar com tratamentos, digamos, alternativos, já esgotou no site. O preço é de 75 dólares, o que corresponde a aproximadamente 300 reais.

De acordo com a descrição do site, o título da criação de Gwyneth com o perfumista Dougles Little começou com uma brincadeira. A composição do aroma mistura gerânio, bergamota cítrica, absolutos de cedro, sementes de rosa e ambreta.

Lada, Pioneira da Abertura das Importações, Passa de "Mico" a "Colecionável" no Brasil, Artigo

Lada, Pioneira da Abertura das Importações, Passa de "Mico" a "Colecionável" no Brasil, Artigo
Artigo

A reabertura das importações em 1990 foi marcada pela trajetória de uma das marcas mais famosas da Rússia no Brasil. A Lada foi a primeira empresa a trazer carros para cá e logo fez sucesso com modelos que seduziram clientes muito mais pela relação custo-benefício do que por atributos como o design.

A meta da Lada era ousada: vender cerca de 50 mil carros por ano, o que representava 6,5% do mercado nacional. Logo no primeiro ano, 15 mil veículos foram faturados e a rede de concessionárias chegou a 126 revendas.

"Eram carros com motor 1.6, espaçosos e que custavam US$ 5 mil, enquanto um Uno era vendido por US$ 6.500. A marca fez muito sucesso, especialmente entre os taxistas, que viram no Laika um carro espaçoso e barato para trabalhar", relembra o jornalista Flavio Gomes, um dos maiores entusiastas da marca russa no Brasil.

Porém, problemas de qualidade nos carros (que vinham da Rússia sem qualquer adaptação para as altas temperaturas do nosso país) fizeram as vendas desabarem com a mesma rapidez. A queda foi de 66% em 1991 e os números só pioraram até a marca sair do Brasil em 1995.

Desde então, pouca gente se aventura a comprar um Lada no mercado de usados. A única exceção é o Niva, o robusto jipe que tem uma legião fiel de fãs. Outros modelos, como o Samara (um dos primeiros modelos a vir para o país, ao lado do Niva), são quase impossíveis de serem encontrados em estado decente de conservação.

Mesmo assim, a marca ganhou espaço no universo do antigomobilismo nos últimos anos. Alguns exemplares em estado impecável de conservação já são vendidos por valores muito acima do usual, especialmente por lojistas conhecidos por inflacionar preços.

Um dos motivos para a inflação acontece porque os carros da Lada já podem receber placa preta neste ano. Uma perua Laika SW azul foi o primeiro Lada a receber o sonhado atestado de originalidade.

Mas não é só no mercado de carros antigos que a Lada está lentamente reconquistando espaço. Os modelos da marca estão sendo procurados por pessoas que desejam um carro mais barato com tração traseira, inclusive fãs de preparação.

"Até pouco tempo atrás o Laika era muito desvalorizado, mas os preços subiram muito, especialmente pelo fato de ser um carro com tração traseira. Conheço alguns carros que foram preparados, sendo um deles com 320 cv na roda e o outro preparado para provas de track day", afirma Paulo Gastaldo, fundador do Lada Clube SP.

O clube nasceu de forma tímida nas redes sociais, mas cresceu rapidamente e hoje realiza até encontros mensais na Praça Charles Miller, em São Paulo (SP).

"Nosso grupo tem por volta de 700 pessoas no Facebook e 300 carros. Já fizemos alguns passeios, como viagens para Pedra Grande e Paranapiacaba, e uma vez por mês fazemos um churrasco comunitário, normalmente às terças ou quartas-feiras", declarou.

O engenheiro de produção conheceu a marca quando era criança, já que seu pai foi dono de um Laika e sua mãe dirigia um Samara.

"Lembrei da Lada quando estava procurando um carro com tração 4x4. Pesquisei um (Jeep) Cherokee, mas me assustei com o custo de manutenção, e aí fui atrás de um Niva porque queria um carro pequeno e com câmbio manual".

Depois de comprar algumas peças para seu Niva pela internet, Paulo resolveu abrir um negócio para vender peças de reposição para carros da marca. Faltava, porém, uma maneira de trazê-las de forma mais rápida, e foi aí que Paulo viveu uma situação hilária que mudou sua vida.

"Resolvi ir até o Consulado da Rússia em São Paulo e fui atendido muito bem até a hora em que descobriram o motivo da visita. Fui expulso ouvindo palavrões de todos os tipos em russo (risos). Entrei em comunidades de brasileiros na Rússia e encontrei um rapaz que morava em Moscou e conhecia um amigo em Togliatti (cidade-sede da Lada). E esse cara conhecia um amigo que trabalha na linha de montagem da Lada", revelou.

As conversas evoluíram e rapidamente a loja online de Paulo cresceu. "Consegui o contato de algumas fornecedoras e hoje sou o representante oficial de um deles aqui no Brasil".

Agora, Paulo está envolvido em um projeto ainda mais ambicioso. Se tudo der certo, ele será o primeiro e único dono de um Niva 0km no Brasil.

"Estou trabalhando para importar um Niva da Rússia e pretendo trazê-lo pronto de lá. O processo (de importação) é relativamente fácil, mas a conversão direta de valores faz com que ele passe dos R$ 45 mil que custa lá para R$ 125 mil. Poderia até trazê-lo de um dos países em que a Lada vende carros na América do Sul (Peru, Chile ou Bolívia), mas aí precisaria pagar dois impostos de importação, uma vez que o chassi do Niva é de origem russa".

Nota do blog: O carro da foto é um Lada Samara.

Lavradores no Campo / Campo com Lavrador (Laboureur Dans un Champ) - Vincent van Gogh

Lavradores no Campo / Campo com Lavrador (Laboureur Dans un Champ) -  Vincent van Gogh
Coleção privada
OST - 50x64 - 1889

On most mornings for an entire year, between 9 May 1889 and 16 May 1890, as Vincent van Gogh rose from his bed and gazed through the single window in his room, the world outside appeared to him much like it does in this painting. A wheat field enclosed within a low stone wall, a few poplars, and an old farm house loomed into view among the long shadows in the early morning half-light. Vincent’s window faced due east; each morning at the appointed moment the spectacle of the ascending, glowing disc of the sun would exhilarate and inspire him. Having begun this painting of a ploughman tilling the soil of this very plot of land during the final days of August 1889, the artist completed it on 2 September. This was a momentous development for Vincent; he had not handled his brushes for a month and a half, not since mid-July. Dr. Théophile Peyron and the attendants at the asylum of Saint-Paul-de-Mausole in Saint-Rémy had taken care to lock Vincent out of his studio, as they awaited his return to good health and a stable, less frenzied state of mind.
Six weeks previously, a devastating epileptic episode, an all-consuming firestorm, had wreaked havoc on Vincent’s mind and body. An “attack”, as the artist called it, of this magnitude and ferocity had last occurred in Arles on 23 December 1888, following a violent argument with Paul Gauguin in the small “Yellow House” they had shared for the previous two months. Vincent was already deeply upset at having received word from his brother Theo that he planned to marry; Vincent worried that this development would end their close relationship, on which he was emotionally and financially dependent. Fearing for his safety, Gauguin fled to spend the night in a hotel. Believing that his friend was departing for good—a second threat of abandonment—Vincent plunged into a delirium of hallucinations and self-recrimination. He pulled out a razor and severed the larger part of his upper left ear, wrapped it, and left it as a gift for Gabrielle, a young woman who worked as maid in the local brothel. Found at home the next day bleeding and unconsciousness, Vincent spent the next two weeks in the Arles hospital.
Local authorities again had Vincent placed under hospital care and supervision when a month later he displayed symptoms of another attack. His neighbors meanwhile successfully petitioned the mayor not to allow him back among them—it became clear that Vincent could not live anywhere on his own. Reverend Frédéric Salles, pastor of the Reformed Protestant Church in Arles, one of Vincent’s few friends in the town, suggested that he voluntarily enter the asylum of Saint-Paul-de-Mausole in Saint-Rémy. Theo agreed with this idea, and approved the additional cost of placing Vincent in a small private institution instead of a larger, cheaper public facility in which the care accorded his brother might not be as attentive or reliable.
Although Saint-Rémy lies only fifteen miles to the northeast of Arles, the winding railway trip through the Alpilles, including passage through the ominously named Hell Gate, took two hours. Reverend Salles accompanied the artist, and was present when Vincent introduced himself to Dr. Peyron at St. Paul’s Hospital. “[Vincent] thanked me profusely,” Salles wrote to Theo on 10 May 1889, “and seemed somewhat moved at the thought of the completely new life he was going to lead at that establishment. Let us hope that his stay will be truly beneficial for him and that soon he will be regarded as capable of resuming his complete freedom of movement” (quoted in J. Hulsker, "Vincent's Stay in the Hospitals at Arles and St.-Rémy," Cahier Vincent 1, 1971, pp. 35-36).
“I wanted to tell you that I think I’ve done well to come here,” Vincent reassured Theo on 9 May 1889. “In seeing the reality of the lives of the diverse mad or cracked people in this menagerie, I’m losing the vague dread, the fear of the thing. And little by little I can come to consider madness as being an illness like any other. Then the change of surroundings is doing me good, I imagine” (Letters, no. 772).
During the first month of his stay at St. Paul’s Hospital, Vincent was kept under close observation. He was restricted to the rooms and inner grounds of the institution, in which Dr. Peyron and his staff were treating only about thirty patients in all. “I assure you that I’m very well here,” Vincent wrote to Theo on or around 23 May. “I haven’t yet gone outside. However, the landscape of Saint-Rémy is very beautiful, and little by little I’m probably going to make trips into it. But staying here as I am, the doctor has naturally been in a better position to see what was wrong, and will, I dare hope, be more reassured that he can let me paint...
“Through the iron-barred window I can make out a square of wheat in an enclosure, perspective in the manner of Van Goyen, above which in the morning I see the sun rise in its glory. With this—as there are more than 30 empty rooms—I have another room in which to work...
“Speaking of my condition, I’m still so grateful for yet another thing. I observe in others that, like me, they too have heard sounds and strange voices during their crises, that things also appeared to change before their eyes. And that softens the horror that I retained at first of the crisis I had, and which when it comes to you unexpectedly, cannot but frighten you beyond measure. Once one knows that it’s part of the illness one takes it like other things. Had I not seen other mad people at close hand I wouldn’t have been able to rid myself of thinking about it all the time” (Letters, no. 776).
The former monastery configuration of the hospital buildings enclosed a large garden, to which Vincent was allowed access. Walking its paths gave him much pleasure and induced some welcome peace of mind. The profusion of flowers—oleanders, irises, and lilacs—amid unkempt and overgrown foliage soon became the simple but ample inspiration for the first paintings and drawings that the artist created in Saint-Rémy. Working, Vincent believed, would be the key to his recovery. At the same time, he remained perpetually in fear of the next attack, the possibility of which—he understood and inwardly sensed—would become more likely, and spaced more closely together, after each event. Under the watchful eye and guidance of Dr. Peyron, however, and sheltered within the cloister-like environment of the asylum, Vincent grew hopeful there would be less danger of a relapse, and he took some comfort in knowing that should an attack recur, he would quickly receive proper professional attention and care.
While the other patients typically spent their days in idleness, Vincent began writing and working the very next day after his arrival. He penned his first letter from Saint-Rémy in two sections, the first to Theo and the second to his sister-in-law Jo, dated 9 May, which he posted around the middle of month. “I have two [paintings] on the go—violet irises [Faille, no. 608; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles] and a lilac bush [no. 579; The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg].” Vincent described to Jo how the other patients “all come to see when I’m working in the garden, and I can assure you they are more discreet and more polite to leave me in peace than, for example, the good citizens of Arles. It’s possible that I’ll stay here for quite a long time—never have I been so tranquil as here...to be able to paint a little at last. Very near here are some little grey or blue mountains, with very, very green wheat fields at their foot, and pines” (Letters, no. 772).
“I’ve been here almost a whole month, not one single time have I had the slightest desire to be elsewhere; just the will to work is becoming a tiny bit firmer,” Vincent wrote Theo on 31 May 1889. “What a beautiful land and what beautiful blue and what a sun! And yet I’ve only seen the garden and what I can make out through the window” (Letters, no. 777). Around the time Vincent wrote this letter, he completed his first painting of the wheat field—The Field Enclosure (Faille, no. 720; Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo).
Each of the successive canvases that Vincent painted of the field enclosure motif share the same basic elements: the length of the wall traversing the upper edge of the landscape (in some pictures meeting at an obtuse angle a wall that rises on the left side), farm buildings beyond the enclosure, some species of tree as vertical accents (poplars, cypresses, or olive trees), and the distant hills. There are in total thirteen paintings of this kind, seven of which incorporate the rising sun, and one a full moon. A related group, but without the wall and showing a lower horizon line, are the variants and repetitions of a nearby wheat field with a cypress.
Unlike his treatment of the olive groves, comprising sixteen paintings, or the mountainous landscapes, Vincent never looked upon the field enclosures as a series, even if they represent variations on a theme. He depicted the field enclosure motif under different conditions, such as the time of day or weather, and, more significantly, their place within the planting and harvest cycle, for the duration of a single year, from one spring to the next. The reason, perhaps, that Vincent did not treat this subject in a serial manner is that this site was always there in front of him, day after day; he could turn to it whenever the idea of a new variant might suddenly occur to him, or when he was restricted to the hospital grounds. The olive grove canvases, by contrast, required that he work outdoors—having been given permission to visit the site (with an attendant present)—and there make good use of the time he planned to devote to the project at hand.
On 18 June 1889, Vincent painted The Starry Night (Faille, no. 612; The Museum of Modern Art, New York). He mentioned this picture in the letter he wrote Theo on that day: “At last I have a landscape with olive trees, and also a new study of a starry sky.” Earlier in this letter he was optimistic about the state of his health and mind: “As for me, it’s going well—you’ll understand that after almost half a year now of absolute sobriety in eating, drinking, smoking, with two two-hour baths a week recently, this must clearly calm one down a great deal. So it’s going very well, and as regards work, it occupies and distracts me—which I need very much—far from wearing me out” (Letters, no. 782). The astonishing, electrifying painting that he had just completed, however, presaged the crisis to come.
Dr. Félix Rey, a young surgeon who looked after Vincent while he was hospitalized in Arles following the ear-cutting incident of December 1888, astutely suspected that his patient was suffering from epilepsy, a diagnosis with which Dr. Peyron subsequently concurred. The condition was then known to be hereditary, and Dr. Peyron learned that relatives on both sides of the artist’s family had experienced seizures and other debilitating symptoms of mental disorders. These “latent epileptic fits resembled fireworks of electrical impulses in the brain,” Steven Naifeh and Gregory W. Smith have explained. “The brain could weather these storms, researchers discovered, but it could not fully recover from them. Each attack lowered the threshold for the next attack and permanently altered the functions that had been shaken...[leading to] a pattern of behavior—a syndrome—associated with what came to be known as ‘temporal lobe epilepsy.’” The two authors view the famous Starry Night—“Vincent’s euphoric image of a swirling, unhinged cosmos”—as the artist’s visualization of the intense reaction he had experienced during a seizure brought on by these “bolts of neuronal lightning,” an event which “signaled that his defenses had been breached” (Van Gogh: The Life, New York, 2011, pp. 762 and 763).
The recurrent attack that Vincent had been fearing indeed took place, probably on 16 July 1889. He had recently returned from an escorted visit to Arles, where he collected some of the paintings he had left behind. Neither the kindly Dr. Rey nor Reverend Salles, however, both of whom Vincent was anxious to see, were there to meet him. Memories of events six months before began to trouble and confuse Vincent. On the 16th he was painting outdoors— away from the asylum grounds, with an attendant present—the cavernous entry to one of the many quarries, worked from Roman times, in the foothills of the Alpilles. He recalled his relapse in a letter to Theo dated 22 August. “This new crisis, my dear brother, came upon me in the fields, and when I was in the middle of painting on a windy day. I’ll send you the canvas, which I nevertheless finished” (Letters, no. 797; Faille, no. 744; Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam).
The swirling foliage in this painting surrounds and appears to strangle the quarry opening, a telling expression of the uncontrollable forces that had again begun to ravage Vincent’s mind. On his return to St. Paul’s Hospital, he is reported to have drunk kerosene and eaten some of his paints, squeezed from the tubes. Vincent remembered trying to swallow dirt; he experienced pain in his throat for weeks afterward. Dr. Peyron had no choice but to keep Vincent away from his work until he seemed sufficiently recovered.
“For many days I’ve been absolutely distraught,” Vincent wrote Theo, “as in Arles, just as much if not worse, and it’s to be presumed that these crises will recur in the future, it is ABOMINABLE. I haven’t been able to eat for 4 days, as my throat is swollen... Dr. Peyron is really kind to me and really patient. You can imagine that I’m very deeply distressed that the attacks have recurred when I was already beginning to hope that it wouldn’t recur. You’ll perhaps do well to write a line to Dr. Peyron to say that working on my paintings is quite necessary to me for my recovery. For these days, without anything to do and without being able to go into the room he had allocated me for doing my painting, are almost intolerable to me” (ibid.).
Dr. Peyron allowed Vincent to return to his studio at the end of August. He quickly resumed painting. The first canvas he likely completed is the present Laboureur dans un champ. The artist referred to this painting in his letter to Theo dated on or around 2 September: “Yesterday I started working again a little—a thing I see from my window—a field of yellow stubble which is being ploughed, the opposition of the purplish ploughed earth with the strips of yellow stubble, background of hills. Work distracts me infinitely better than anything else, and if I could once again really throw myself into it with all my energy that might possibly be the best remedy” (Letters, no. 798).
The image of the horse and ploughman is repeated in only one other Saint-Rémy painting, a related version but with variant motifs, which Vincent painted later in September (Faille, no. 706; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston). The best known of the St. Paul’s Hospital wheat field pictures contains the figure of a reaper (Faille, no. 618; Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam). Following the present ploughman canvas, Vincent painted a smaller version of the reaper in the field during 5-6 September (Faille, no. 619; Museum Folkwang, Essen), which he discussed in a concurrent letter to Theo. “I’m struggling with a canvas begun a few days before my indisposition. A reaper, the study is all yellow, terribly thickly impastoed, but the subject was beautiful and simple. I then saw in this reaper—a vague figure struggling like a devil in the full heat of the day to reach the end of his toil—I then saw the image of death in it, in the sense that humanity would be the wheat being reaped. So if you like, it’s the opposite of that Sower I tried before. But in this death is nothing sad, it takes place in broad daylight with a sun that floods everything with a light of fine gold. Good, here I am again, however I’m not letting go, and I’m trying again on a new canvas. Ah, I could almost believe that I have a new period of clarity ahead of me” (Letters, no. 800).
To the opposition of the Sower and Reaper, Vincent added a third man, the Ploughman. Indeed, he might identify himself with any one of these three peasant laborers at different times. In the letter quoted immediately above, the artist further wrote: “My dear brother—I’m still writing to you between bouts of work—I’m ploughing on like a man possessed, more than ever I have a pent-up fury for work, and I think that this will contribute to curing me” (ibid.). Following the enforced hiatus of the previous six weeks, Vincent found himself, at this critical stage in the evolution of his work, acting the role of the ploughman—the forerunner—who turns over the upper layer of soil, bringing fresh nutrients to the surface, preparing the ground for the sower of seeds.
Immediately after completing Laboureur dans un champ, Vincent embarked on a series of portraits—two depicting himself, and two versions of the head attendant Trabuc (Faille, nos. 626, 627, and 629; the original portrait of Trabuc, given to the sitter, is lost). He painted himself again later in September, having shaved his beard, with the intent of giving the picture to his mother for her seventieth birthday (Faille, no. 525; sold, Christie’s New York, 19 November 1998, lot 325). Vincent hoped to impress upon both Dr. Peyron and Theo that he had recovered from his ordeal. For the while, however, he remained indoors, working in his studio, taking stock of his inner resources.
“I’m struggling with all my energy to master my work, telling myself that if I win this it will be the best lightning conductor for the illness. I take great care of myself by carefully shutting myself away; it’s selfish if you like, not to become accustomed to my companions in misfortune here instead, and to go to see them, but anyway I feel none the worse for it, for my work is progressing and we have need of that, for it’s more than necessary that I do better than before, which wasn’t sufficient... I must do better than before. (ibid.) 

Nota do blog: Foi vendida em 2017 em leilão da Christie's por US$ 81,312,500.

O Connoisseur / O Expert / O Especialista (The Connoisseur ) - Norman Rockwell

O Connoisseur / O Expert / O Especialista (The Connoisseur ) - Norman Rockwell
Coleção privada
OST - 96x80 - 1961

In 1961, Rockwell's studio was temporarily transformed into an abstract expressionist's workplace as he painted The Connoisseur, a painting about the relationship between conventional and modern art. Always fascinated by modern and abstract art, Rockwell designed a cover in which he could acknowledge his appreciation of the genre. By placing his back to us, he leaves the interpretation of the museum visitor's reaction to the viewer. If we can assume that he is a surrogate for Rockwell, we may also assume that the gentleman is smiling approvingly.
Rockwell constructed his painting in a manner similar to the work of artist Jackson Pollock. Journals in his library would have provided him with information about Pollock's process. Rather than paint the connoisseur and then surround him with the abstract image, Rockwell first produced the abstract as a separate and complete image. He was then able to position a cutout of his painting of the man over his abstract in order to test the final effect. Later, he combined the images for his final painting.
Rockwell submitted a section of the sample painting to an exhibition at the Cooperstown Art Association in New York, signing the canvas with an Italian signature. It took first prize for painting. Another section of the abstract canvas, signed "Percival," won Honorable Mention at a Berkshire Museum exhibition.
The Connoisseur, Norman Rockwell, 1961. Oil on canvas, 37¾" x 31½". Cover illustration for The Saturday Evening Post, January 13, 1962. Private collection.

The January 13, 1962 cover of The Saturday Evening Post features an older man eying a painting that looks like Jackson Pollock at his most…drippy. The painter? Norman Rockwell.

Called The Connoisseur, the painting is a mix of art criticism (this is what we’re forced to look at now!) and bravado (but I can do it too!). It mixes Jackson Pollock’s trademark drip painting with Rockwell’s trademark illustrations. Pollock, of course, famously painted with the canvas on the floor.

According to the Norman Rockwell Museum, Rockwell rearranged his entire studio in 1961. He painted the abstract image first, on the floor like Pollock, and then combined the man and Pollock in his final painting.

While we can’t be sure if Rockwell’s Pollock was parody or homage, we do have a hint. He submitted a section of the sample painting to an art exhibition and signed it with a fake Italian signature. He won the contest and earned a similar honorable mention by submitting as Percival at the Berkshire Museum. It sounds more like Banksy than Rockwell, and it shows the satiric side of the master of illustration.

Norman Rockwell Visita a Redação de Um Jornal do Interior, Paris, Missouri, Estados Unidos (Norman Rockwell Visits a Country Editor) - Norman Rockwell

Norman Rockwell Visita a Redação de Um Jornal do Interior, Paris, Missouri, Estados Unidos (Norman Rockwell Visits a Country Editor) - Norman Rockwell
Paris, Missouri, Estados Unidos
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OST - 83x160 - 1946

Norman Rockwell painted Norman Rockwell Visits a Country Editor for the May 25th, 1946 issue of The Saturday Evening Post. By 1946, not only had Rockwell’s myriad covers of The Post captured the imagination of the nation, but the artist was becoming a celebrity in his own right. Perhaps just as importantly, Rockwell’s work adopted a new sense of earnestness in order to more accurately reflect the realities that many faced in post-War America. While Rockwell’s classic sense of idealism remained intact, his imaginative images confronting issues of the present allowed the public to identify with his interpretation of life in America. Christopher Finch writes, “The period from the mid-forties until the late-fifties was perhaps Rockwell’s time of greatest achievement.” (Norman Rockwell’s America, New York, 1975, p. 31) Conceived during this important era of his storied career, Norman Rockwell Visits a Country Editor is a nostalgic tableau of a small country town and its local newspaper, which captures the spirit of America adapting to life after World War II.
American illustration holds a special place within the context of American art. Before television entered the American home, newspapers and magazines were the primary news sources for the nation. They were also the barometer of public opinion, and naturally, the artists who illustrated these periodicals had a great deal of influence on the perception of their nation. Norman Rockwell did more than simply fulfill his commissions; rather, he understood his advantageous position and put his best efforts into his work. He stated, "No man with a conscience can just bat out illustrations. He's got to put all of his talent, all of his feeling into them. If illustration is not considered art, then that is something that we have brought upon ourselves by not considering ourselves artists. I believe that we should say, 'I am not just an illustrator, I am an artist.'"(as quoted in J. Goffman, The Great American Illustrators, New York, 1993, p. 122)
As artists often do, Rockwell drew inspiration for his illustrations from his own life and experiences. While he largely retained an unsentimental view of his childhood, he affectionately recalled his family’s summer trips to the Adirondack Mountains, which provided a welcome escape from life in New York City: “In the city we kids delighted to go up on the roof of our apartment house and spit down on the passers-by in the streets below. But we never did things like that in the country. The clean air, the green fields, the thousand and one things to do…got somehow into us and changed our personalities as much as the sun changed the color of our skins.” (N. Rockwell, Norman Rockwell: My Adventures As an Illustrator, New York, 1988, p. 34) In these rural settings, Rockwell discovered an idealized form of life that suited his disposition and held his fascination for years to come. Everyday scenes and people, first appreciated by the artist at a young age, manifested themselves in his most iconic works and allowed his paintings to become both universal and relatable.
While Rockwell’s characteristic view of American life had its basis in his childhood, in 1939, he sought new surroundings that would inspire further development in his work, having grown restless in New Rochelle, New York. The small town of Arlington, Vermont, with its distinct New England feel appealed to Rockwell, his wife Mary and their three sons, and his arrival precipitated an improvement in his creativity and motivation. Shortly thereafter, he also began actively travelling the country for inspiration. Between 1943 and 1948, he toured as far south as Georgia and as far west as Missouri to capture the lives of everyday Americans in an eight part pictorial series for The Post. Through these eight images the readers of The Post learned what it was like to spend a night on a troop train with paratroopers (A Night on a Troop Train, 1943, unlocated); wait to see the President of the United States (So You Want to See the President, 1943, Office of the White House, Washington, D.C.); appeal to a ration board (Norman Rockwell Visits a Ration Board, 1944, Private Collection); register to vote at a polling station (Norman Rockwell Paints America at the Polls (Election Day), 1944, Cedar Rapids Art Museum, Cedar Rapids, Iowa); observe the daily operation of a small town newspaper (the present work); watch a lesson in a rural classroom (Norman Rockwell Visits a Country School, 1946, Private Collection); visit a family doctor in a Vermont town (Norman Rockwell Visits a Family Doctor, 1947, Norman Rockwell Museum, Stockbridge, Massachusetts) and travel with a county agricultural agent as he performs his duties (Norman Rockwell Visits a County Agent, 1948, Sheldon Museum of Art, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, Nebraska). Through wars, depression, and civil strife, Rockwell portrayed subjects inspired by ordinary, everyday life and this series was a perfect representation of his contribution.
In regards to this painting and the others from the series, Rockwell described, “During the 1940’s I did a series of pictorial reports for the Post, variously entitled ‘Norman Rockwell Visits a Country School,’ ‘Norman Rockwell Visits his Family Doctor,’ and so on. Each report consisted of a full page spread, and two pages of black and white sketches…I usually spent two days at the scene of the report. During the first day I tried to get the feel of the place and rough out in my mind the story I wanted to tell. The second day I made sketches, decided on the subject and setting of the painting, and had photographs taken. Back in my studio I did the painting and made the finished sketches. I enjoyed doing these reports. They were a pleasant and stimulating change from my regular work…and gave me a chance to travel about the county and meet a lot of people.” (as quoted in R. Schick, Norman Rockwell: Behind the Camera, New York, 2009, p. 51)
In Norman Rockwell Visits a Country Editor, Rockwell captures the office and daily operation of the Monroe County Appeal, a local newspaper founded in 1867 and based in the small town of Paris, Missouri. The focal point of the picture, seated at the central typewriter and set before the office window, is longtime editor of the Appeal, Jack Blanton. The Post captioned the painting: “Blanton is shown batting out a last-minute editorial. That picture above his desk is one of his father, who founded the Appeal. The gold-star service flag hangs beneath the picture of a grandson of Blanton’s, who would have succeeded him as editor if he hadn’t lost his life in the Army Air Force. Peering over Blanton’s shoulder is the Appeal’s printer, Paul Nipps, whose experienced eye is gauging the number of printed lines the editorial will take up.” (The Saturday Evening Post, New York, 1946, p. 25). At the left side of the painting, a young boy, aware of the looming press deadline, races through the office under the watchful eye of a young female reporter. At the right side of the image, two local residents are purchasing a subscription to the Appeal, while a seated customer with legs extended intently reads the paper, reporting the untimely passing of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Ron Schick notes, “The lead story ‘End Comes to President’ and photographs of FDR and his successor, Harry S. Truman, are visible on the front page.” (Norman Rockwell: Behind the Camera, p. 51) Meanwhile, Rockwell himself strides through the door with a portfolio wedged under his arm and a trademark pipe jutting from his mouth. Painted with an acute attention to detail, every element of the painting was carefully considered and rendered with a high degree of clarity.
The extraordinary detail in every vignette of Rockwell’s best works from the 1940s, such as Norman Rockwell Visits a Country Editor, is a result of a profound shift in his working methods around the time of the artist’s move to Arlington. In New Rochelle, Rockwell relied upon professional models, enlisting them for hours until he achieved the desired effect in his paintings. Then, around 1937, Rockwell began to incorporate photography into his creative process. This method meant he could stage elaborate tableaus as subjects and capture the various expressions of his sitters in an instant. Rarely satisfied with a single photograph, the finished illustration was often a composite of many. Indeed, nearly one hundred preparatory photographs were taken for the present work. David Kamp writes of this exhaustive creative system, “First came brainstorming and a rough pencil sketch, then the casting of the models and the hiring of costumes and props, then the process of coaxing the right poses out of the models, then the snapping of the photo, then the composition of a fully detailed charcoal sketch, then a painted color sketch that was the exact size of the picture as it would be reproduced, and then, and only then, the final painting.” ("Norman Rockwell's American Dream," Vanity Fair, November 2009, p. 5) This new approach, coupled with towns around the country full of fresh faces willing to pose for the celebrity artist, meant a flurry of artistic inspiration. "While Rockwell found the perfect settings for works such as Homecoming Marine and Shuffleton's Barbershop close to home, he was willing to travel any distance for his location photography. He went to New Mexico to photograph a train station for Breaking Home Times, the White House for So You Want to See the President!, the offices of a Missouri Newspaper for Norman Rockwell Visits a Country Editor, and New York City to shoot a Times Square restaurant intended for Saying Grace. In so doing, Rockwell gained more than photographs of a background that met his demand for genuineness." (Norman Rockwell: Behind the Camera, p. 98)
Covering a sweeping range of topics, including the difficult subject of war, Rockwell helped forge a national sense of identity through his art. Finch writes, “World War II played a very strange role in Rockwell’s career. Rockwell is far from being a warlike person; he is, on the contrary a gentleman in the literal sense of the word. Yet the war brought out the best in him and turned him toward the naturalistic portrait of home-town America which he put to good use in the decades that followed. His immediate contribution to the war effort on the home front was quite considerable. What is most important about his period, in relation to his career as an illustrator, is the fact that he was given an opportunity to prove to himself and to others that he was capable of dealing with serious subjects without abandoning the human touch which had always been his trademark.” (Norman Rockwell’s America, p. 200)
Norman Rockwell's portraits of America are both a faithful historical record of, and a tender tribute to, American popular culture. "His subject was average America. He painted it with such benevolent affection for so many years that a truly remarkable history of our century has been compiled. Millions of people have been moved by his picture stories about pride in country, history, and heritage, about reverence, loyalty, and compassion. The virtues that he admires have been very popular, and because he illustrates them using familiar people in familiar settings with wonderful accuracy, he described the American Dream." (T.S. Buechner, Norman Rockwell: A Sixty Year Retrospective, New York, 1972, p. 13) The scope of Rockwell’s appeal continues to grow as new generations live through the same quintessentially American types of experiences that he so faithfully depicted in his art.