Ponte Santa Isabel, Assembleia e Ginásio, Recife, Pernambuco, Brasil

Ponte Santa Isabel, Assembleia e Ginásio, Recife, Pernambuco, Brasil
Recife - PE
Fotografia - Cartão Postal

Claude Monet em Giverny, França - H. Roger-Viollet

Claude Monet em Giverny, França - H. Roger-Viollet
Giverny - França
Fotografia

Shopping Center Matarazzo, Atual Shopping Bourbon, São Paulo, Brasil

Shopping Center Matarazzo, Atual Shopping Bourbon, São Paulo, Brasil
São Paulo - SP
Fotografia

O Shopping Center Matarazzo, o primeiro shopping da região da Pompeia, aqueceu o comércio dos bairros de Perdizes, Água Branca e Barra Funda. Localizado na Rua Turiaçu, 2010, ao lado do Parque Antarctica, hoje Arena Palestra Itália, o shopping foi inaugurado na década de 1970. Ele tinha dois grandes atrativos para os moradores da região oeste, um supermercado Jumbo-Eletro, depois o Sonda, e uma loja do McDonald's, grudada ao seu estacionamento. A lanchonete ainda permanece no local.

O comércio e os empreendimentos imobiliários na região cresceram na década de 1990, assim como a concorrência do shopping. A inauguração do West Plaza, em maio de 1991, e o fechamento da unidade do Jumbo Eletro do Matarazzo fizeram cair o número de frequentadores do local. O shopping tentou, sem sucesso, reanimar suas vendas construindo uma área exclusiva para alimentação e uma pista de patinação de 240 m² da Maxi-Roller. Mas, em 1997, foi levado a leilão para saldar as dívidas de IPI, ICMS e outros impostos. Foi arrematado por R$18,5 milhões pelo Grupo Zaffari, que no local ergueu o Shopping Bourbon, inaugurado em março de 2008.

Cena de Praia em Trouville, Trouville-sur-Mer, França (Scène de Plage à Trouville) - Eugène Boudin

Cena de Praia em Trouville, Trouville-sur-Mer, França (Scène de Plage à Trouville) - Eugène Boudin
Trouville-sur-Mer - França
Coleção privada
OST - 31x48 - 1864

Scène de plage à Trouville is a beautiful early example of Boudin's favourite subject, that of fashionably dressed figures on the beach of Trouville. Having settled in Paris after his marriage in 1863, throughout the 1860s and 1870s Boudin travelled every summer to Trouville, where he found the inspiration to paint variations on the themes most dear to him. Jean Selz wrote: 'What fascinated Boudin at Trouville and Deauville was not so much the sea and ships but the groups of people sitting on the sand or strolling along the beach: fine ladies in crinolines twirling their parasols, pompous gentlemen in top hats, children and little dogs playing on the sand. In the harmony of the colours of the elegant clothes he found a contrast to the delicacy of the skies' (J. Selz, Eugène Boudin, New York, 1982, p. 57).

 By the second half of the nineteenth century Trouville had become a fashionable summer retreat for the French aristocracy, and their colourful costumes provided a subject-matter to which Boudin returned throughout his career. Captivated by the picturesque dress of these elegant society figures, Boudin rendered them in quick, impressionistic brushstrokes highlighted by bright blue and red tones. What fascinated the artist was the contrast between these densely grouped men and women and the expanses of the sky against which they are depicted. Boudin's interest in capturing the fleeting effects of sunlight on sumptuous fabrics and the effect of a windy day on the flowing garments, so masterfully explored in the present painting, was to have a profound influence on Impressionist artists.

Boudin's working method consisted of painting outdoors during the summer and finishing the work in the winter in his Paris studio. The essential elements of these compositions are established from the beginning and are then explored with infinite variety. As in the present work, a large expanse of sky occupies about two-thirds of the composition with a thin band of sea, only barely visible on one side, marking the distant horizon. The foreground is occupied by an area of sand and the holidaymakers, placed against the low horizon line. It is in the rhythmical grouping of the figures and their colourful clothing that the artist articulates space and masters his understanding of pictorial harmony. The cabins placed at varying angles brilliantly lead the viewer's eye around and through the groups of figures whilst at the same time providing a source of dramatic contrasts of light and shade.

In Scène de plage à Trouville the artist exhibits his exceptional qualities as an observer and recorder of society and nature. Vivien Hamilton wrote: 'Although Boudin preferred painting groups of people to painting individuals, he succeeded in capturing the characteristic gestures, movements and costumes of the individual figures with astonishing accuracy. The artistic challenge presented by the subject was not only the representation of movement, colour and light but also the successful incorporation of the human figure into the landscape. At their best, the beach scenes vibrate with subtle nuances of light, colour, shade and movement, tiny and hasty specks of pure colour simultaneously dramatizing the surface and bringing the whole into harmony' (V. Hamilton, Boudin at Trouville, London, 1992, p. 63).

The artist's need to paint largely outdoors enabled him to endow his works with intuitive immediacy and freshness. Boudin wrote in his notebook: 'Beaches. Produce them from nature as far as is possible ... things done on the spot or based on a very recent impression can be considered as direct paintings' (quoted in Gustave Cahen, Eugène Boudin, sa vie et son œuvre, Paris, 1900, p. 183). In the present painting, Boudin brilliantly combined his mastery of colour and light with his sense of pictorial harmony to create an exceptional composition.

Natureza Morta Dálias, Uvas e Pêssegos (Nature Morte Dahlias, Raisins et Pêches) - Henri Fantin-Latour

Natureza Morta Dálias, Uvas e Pêssegos (Nature Morte Dahlias, Raisins et Pêches) - Henri Fantin-Latour
Coleção privada
OST - 51x48 - 1868

Best known as a painter of still-lifes, Fantin-Latour never tired of depicting flowers and fruits in endless variations. In the present work he combined a bouquet of colourful dahlias in a green vase with a bunch of grapes and peaches, arranged on a table top. The precision with which he depicted his subject, paying attention to the texture and various colours of individual flowers and fruits, displays Fantin-Latour’s virtuosity in capturing their ephemeral and fleeting beauty. This technique, which allows the artist to render differences in surface quality of various elements within the traditional genre of still-life, owes much to the Old Masters whose paintings he studied at the Louvre, particularly those by the eighteenth-century master Chardin. Unlike his friends from the Impressionist circle, Fantin-Latour rarely painted outdoors, preferring the studied and controlled environment of the studio. Douglas Druick compared his still-lifes with those executed by Edouard Manet:

‘Fantin also has shown more interest than Manet in breaking away from the conventions of still-life composition. Where Manet, following tradition, has aligned the various objects on a buffet, parallel to the picture plane, Fantin has looked for an arrangement that, while controlled, suggests the randomness of nature […] This successful compromise between order and disorder allowed Fantin the best of both worlds’ (D. Druick in Fantin-Latour (exhibition catalogue), National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, 1983, p. 124). This truthfulness to nature is beautifully exemplified in the present work in the richness of flowers in the vase and the seemingly spontaneous arrangement of the fruits spilling out of the plates. The versatility and endless possibilities offered by these subjects provided the artist with an infinite source of inspiration, and the present composition demonstrates the mastery and refinement that he had already reached in the early stages of his career as a painter.

Reflexão (Réflexion) - Pierre Auguste Renoir

Reflexão (Réflexion) - Pierre Auguste Renoir
Coleção privada
OST - 46x38 - 1877

In its elegance and beauty, Réflexion is a classic example of Renoir's style at the height of his Impressionist period. Treating the artist's signature theme, it captures the beauty of the sitter with all the grace and serenity characteristic of Renoir's major works. Portrayed in semi-profile, the woman is shown here alone and self-absorbed seemingly unaware of being watched and painted. The sensuousness of the composition is heightened by her slightly open mouth and the invocation of the sense of touch, as she rests her head on her beautifully positioned right hand whilst her left gracefully strokes her cheek. Renoir used a palette of soft colours to render the delicate features of the woman's face and hands whilst contrasting it with the stronger tones, such as the deep blue of her costume and hat, and the bright red of the flower, the collar and her lips. Against the broadly brushed, subdued background, the flesh is treated with great clarity, especially in the colour nuances which model the face.

The subject of the seated figure had long been a constant in Renoir's art, even since the early days of his career when he exhibited at the Salon. As in the present work, Renoir's sitters were often young women, with a sensuality and finesse that became the hallmark of his art. Discussing Renoir's portraiture, John House has noted that he was able to 'combine breadth with extreme delicacy of effect... At times he painted very thinly and with much medium over a white priming, particularly in his backgrounds, allowing the tone and texture of the canvas to show through, and creating effects almost like watercolour. His figures tend to be more thickly painted, but not with single layers of opaque colour; instead fine streaks of varied hue are built up, which create a varied, almost vibrating surface' (J. House, Renoir (exhibition catalogue), Hayward Gallery, London & Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1985, p. 278).

Renoir's admiration for the Old Masters and the art of eighteenth century France in particular, led him to produce numerous portraits that enabled him to explore a full range of painterly effects. In Réflexion, the introvert posture of the woman and her elegant costume with a hat create a rather noble effect whilst the model's fine features with her demure gaze and her delicate hands express a state of intimacy and harmony. As suggested by the title, Renoir seems to transcend the genre of portraiture and develops a more symbolic sense of expression. Depicting the sitter against a neutral, unidentified background, Renoir brilliantly focuses the viewer's attention on the woman's face whereby the artist's skilled draughtsmanship becomes evident. Additionally, the refined depiction of the model's wonderfully finished eyes and feathers on the sleeves of the dress underline the artist's meticulous attention to detail and style.

Fascinated by Renoir's exquisite rendering of female portraits, Théodore Duret remarked: 'Renoir excels at portraits. Not only does he catch the external features, but through them he pinpoints the model's character and inner self. I doubt whether any painter has ever interpreted woman in a more seductive manner. The deft and lively touches of Renoir's brush are charming, supple and unrestrained, making flesh transparent and tinting the cheeks and lips with a perfect living hue. Renoir's women are enchantresses' (T. Duret, reprinted in Histoire des peintres impressionnistes, Paris, 1922, pp. 27-28). 

Praia de Sainte-Adresse, França (The Beach at Sainte-Adresse) - Claude Monet

Praia de Sainte-Adresse, França (The Beach at Sainte-Adresse) - Claude Monet
Sainte-Adresse - França
The Art Institute of Chicago, Estados Unidos
OST - 75x102 - 1867

In the summer of 1867, Claude Monet stayed with his aunt at Sainte-Adresse, an affluent suburb of the port city of Le Havre, near his father’s home. The paintings he produced that summer, few of which survive, reveal the beginnings of the young artist’s development of the revolutionary style that would come to be known as Impressionism. In his quest to capture the effects of shifts in weather and light, Monet painted The Beach at Sainte-Adresse out-of-doors on an overcast day. He devoted the majority of the composition to the sea, sky, and beach. These he depicted with broad sheets of color, animated by short brushstrokes that articulate gentle azure waves, soft white clouds, and pebbled ivory sand.

While fishermen go about their chores, a tiny couple relaxes at the water’s edge. Monet did not exhibit this work publicly for almost ten years after he completed it. In 1874 he banded together with a diverse group of like-minded, avant-garde artists to mount the first of what would be eight independent exhibitions. He included Sainte-Adresse in the second of these Impressionist shows, in 1876.

Caminhada no Penhasco em Pourville, Pourville-sur-Mer, França (The Cliff Walk at Pourville) - Claude Monet

Caminhada no Penhasco em Pourville, Pourville-sur-Mer, França (The Cliff Walk at Pourville) - Claude Monet
Pourville-sur-Mer - França
The Art Institute of Chicago, Estados Unidos
OST - 66x82 - 1882

The Cliff Walk at Pourville is an 1882 painting by the French Impressionist painter Claude Monet. It currently resides at the Art Institute of Chicago. It is a landscape painting featuring two women atop a cliff above the sea.

The canvas was inspired by an extended stay at Pourville in 1882. Monet settled in the village between February and mid-April, during which time he wrote to his future wife, Alice Hoschedé, "How beautiful the countryside is becoming, and what joy it would be for me to show you all its delightful nooks and crannies!" They returned in June of that year. The two young women standing atop the cliff may be Hoschedé's daughters, Marthe and Blanche; it has also been suggested that the figures represent Alice and Blanche, both of whom painted out of doors at that time.

The various elements of the painting are unified through brushwork; short, crisp strokes were used to paint the grasses of the cliff, the women's drapery and the distant sea. A sense of movement suggested by painterly calligraphy was a property of Monet's work in the 1880s, and is here used to connote the effect of a summer wind upon figures, land, water, and clouds moving across the sky. During the painting process, Monet reduced the size of a rocky promontory at far right, to better balance the composition's proportions; however, it's also been noted that this secondary cliff was a late addition to the canvas, and was not part of the original design. An X-ray of the painting indicates that the artist originally painted a third figure into the grouping, then removed it.

Describing similar works by the artist, art historian John House wrote, “His cliff tops rarely show a single sweep of terrain. Instead there are breaks in space; the eye progresses into depth by a succession of jumps; distance is expressed by planes overlapping each other and by atmospheric rather than linear perspective- by softening the focus and changes of color.” The sense of immediacy is heightened by the juxtapositions of the cliff and sea, the contrast between ground and openness.

In February 1882, Claude Monet went to Normandy to paint, one of many such expeditions that he made in the 1880s. This was also a retreat from personal and professional pressures. His wife, Camille, had died three years earlier, and Monet had entered into a domestic arrangement with Alice Hoschedé (whom he would marry in 1892, after her husband’s death). France was in the midst of a lengthy economic recession that affected Monet’s sales. In addition, the artist was unenthusiastic about the upcoming seventh Impressionist exhibition—divisions within the group had become pronounced by this time—and he delegated the responsibility for his contribution to his dealer, Paul Durand-Ruel.Disappointed in the area around the harbor city of Dieppe, which he found too urban, Monet settled in Pourville and remained in this fishing village until mid-April. He became increasingly enamored of his surroundings, writing to Hoschedé and her children: "How beautiful the countryside is becoming, and what joy it would be for me to show you all its delightful nooks and crannies!" He was able to do so in June, when they joined him in Pourville.The two young women strolling in Cliff Walk at Pourville are probably Marthe and Blanche, the eldest Hoschedé daughters. In this work, Monet addressed the problem of inserting figures into a landscape without disrupting the unity of its painterly surface. He integrated these elements with one another through texture and color. The grass—composed of short, brisk, curved brushstrokes—appears to quiver in the breeze, and subtly modified versions of the same strokes and hues suggest the women’s wind-whipped dresses and shawls and the undulation of the sea. X-radiographs show that Monet reduced the rocky outcropping at the far right to balance the proportions of sea and sky.

Lagoa com Ninféias (Water Lily Pond) - Claude Monet

Lagoa com Ninféias (Water Lily Pond) - Claude Monet 
The Art Institute of Chicago, Estados Unidos
OST - 89x101 - 1900

In 1893, three years after buying property at Giverny, Claude Monet began transforming the marshy ground behind his home into a pond, on the narrow end of which he built a Japanese-style wood bridge. Adding both exotic and domestic plantings, including his famous water lilies, the artist created the garden that would be one of his principal subjects for the rest of his life. Water Lily Pond was among the 18 similar versions of the motif that he made in 1899–1900; their common theme was the mingling of the lilies with reflections of other vegetation on the pool’s surface.

Ninféias (Nymphéas) - Claude Monet

Ninféias (Nymphéas) - Claude Monet
Coleção privada
OST - 88x100 - 1906

Claude Monet’s Nymphéas are amongst the most iconic and celebrated Impressionist paintings. The profound impact the series has made on the evolution of Modern Art marks them out as Monet’s greatest achievement. The famous lily pond in his garden at Giverny provided the subject matter for most of his major late works, recording the changes in his style and his constant pictorial innovations. The present work, which dates from 1906, is a powerful testament to Monet’s enduring vision and creativity in his mature years. Monet’s Nymphéas from 1905-1907 are triumphantly achieved monuments of colour; the water reflects the skies’ shifting hues and the lilies themselves are elegant touches of paint applied with bravura. As Daniel Wildenstein notes, all the works created in 1906 were painted from the same spot, and took an especially close up view of the pond, with a number of water lilies in the foreground of their compositions.

By 1890, Monet had become financially successful enough to buy the house and large garden at Giverny, which he had rented since 1883. With enormous vigour and determination, he swiftly set about transforming the gardens and creating a large pond. There were initially a number of complaints about Monet’s plans to divert the river Epte through his garden in order to feed his new pond, which he had to address in his application to the Préfet of the Eure department: ‘I would like to point out to you that, under the pretext of public salubrity, the aforementioned opponents have in fact no other goal that to hamper my projects out of pure meanness, as is frequently the case in the country where Parisian landowners are involved […] I would also like you to know that the aforementioned cultivation of aquatic plants will not have the importance that this term implies and that it will be only a pastime, for the pleasure of the eye, and for motifs to paint’ (quoted in Michael Hoog, Musée de l’Orangerie. The Nymphéas of Claude Monet, Paris, 2006, p. 119). Once the garden was designed according to the artist’s vision, it offered a boundless source of inspiration, and provided the major themes that dominated the last three decades of Monet’s career. Towards the end of his life, he obfuscated his initial intentions, perhaps with a mind to his own mythology, telling a visitor to his studio: ‘It took me some time to understand my water lilies. I planted them purely for pleasure; I grew them with no thought of painting them. A landscape takes more than a day to get under your skin. And then, all at once I had the revelation – how wonderful my pond was – and reached for my palette. I’ve hardly had any other subject since that moment’ (quoted in Stephan Koja, Claude Monet (exhibition catalogue), Österreichische Galerie Belvedere, Vienna, 1996, p. 146).
Once discovered, the subject of water lilies offered a wealth of inspiration that Monet went on to explore for several decades. His carefully designed garden presented the artist with a micro-cosmos in which he could observe and paint the changes in weather, season and time of day, as well as the ever-changing colours and patterns. John House wrote: ‘The water garden in a sense bypassed Monet’s long searches of earlier years for a suitable subject to paint. Designed and constantly supervised by the artist himself, and tended by several gardeners, it offered him a motif that was at the same time natural and at his own command - nature re-designed by a temperament. Once again Monet stressed that his real subject when he painted was the light and weather’ (J. House, Monet: Nature into Art, Newhaven, 1986, p. 31).
In 1908 Jean-Claude Nicolas Forestier visited Monet at Giverny and gave a thoughtful description of Monet’s working methods for the review Fermes et Châteaux: ‘In this mass of intertwined verdure and foliage […] the lilies spread their round leaves and dot the water with a thousand red, pink, yellow and white flowers […]. The Master often comes here, where the bank of the pond is bordered with thick clumps of irises. His swift, short strokes place brushloads of luminous colour as he moves from one place to another, according to the hour […]. The canvas he visited this morning at dawn is not the same as the canvas we find him working on in the afternoon. In the morning, he records the blossoming of the flowers, and then, once they begin to close, he returns to the charms of the water itself and its shifting reflections, the dark water that trembles beneath the somnolent leaves of the water-lilies’ (quoted in Daniel Wildenstein, Monet or The Triumph of Impressionism, Cologne, 2003, p. 384). The unending variety of forms and tones that the ponds provided allowed Monet to work consistently on a number of canvases at the same time.
The spectacular field of colour presented by Nymphéas is created to elicit an instinctive emotional response rather than to record a particular location, temporal conditions or natural phenomena. Over the course of three crucial years, from 1905 until 1907, Monet experimented with different approaches and painting techniques. The paintings from 1905 were thickly painted with a dense surface and horizontally oriented, whilst those from 1906 have a more painterly interplay between rich impastoed areas with finer luminous washes. In 1907 Monet used his canvases vertically and experimented with longer brushstrokes. Another important feature of the works from this period is how Monet removed the perspectival elements that had existed in his earlier renditions of the lily pond, so the banks and borders which sometimes featured no longer informed the scope or scale of the works. Since the birth of Impressionism, Monet’s primary concern had been the sensation of colour and its properties and these technical innovations underwrote his highly advanced theoretical approach. In Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, the narrator goes to visit a fictional painter called Elstir who was based in part on Monet. Here, in the studio the narrator begins to see Elstir’s new purpose for art. ‘But I was able to discern from these that the charm of each of them lay in a sort of metamorphosis of the things represented in it, analogous to what in poetry we call metaphor, and that, if God the Father had created things by naming them, it was by taking away their names or giving them other names that Elstir created them anew. The names which denote things correspond invariably to an intellectual notion, alien to our true impressions, and compelling us to eliminate from them everything that is not in keeping with itself’ (quoted in Charles Prendergast, The Triangle of Representation, New York, 2000, p. 154). Monet’s Nymphéas fulfils the promise of Elstir’s intentions, managing to transcend paintings traditional, illusory function in order to create a new sense of purpose for art.

Even in his earliest depictions of the Nymphéas Monet embraced a monumental scope, which would be most fully realised in his Les Grandes décorations, a sequence of monumental paintings of the gardens that took his depictions of the water lily pond in a dramatic new direction - the artist envisaged an environment in which the viewer would be completely surrounded by the paintings. In 1909 Monet was quoted by Claude-Roger Marx outlining his vision: ‘The temptation came to me to use this water-lily theme for the decoration of a drawing room: carried along the length of the walls, enveloping the entire interior with its unity, it would produce the illusion of an endless whole, of a watery surface with no horizon and no shore; nerves exhausted by work would relax there, following the restful example of those still waters, […] a refuge of peaceful meditation in the middle of a flowering aquarium’ (quoted in Claude Roger-Marx, ‘Les Nymphéas de Monet’, in Le Cri de Paris, Paris, 23rd May 1909). The present work and the others in this series eventually led to Les Grandes décorations, now in the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris, which are according to Daniel Wildenstein ‘the crowning glory of Monet’s career, in which all his work seemed to culminate’ (D. Wildenstein, op. cit., 1996, p. 840).

The present work was included in the seminal exhibition held at the Galerie Durand-Ruel in 1909, which the artist entitled Les nymphéas, series de paysages d'eau par Claude Monet. This long awaited show had been planned for many years, and delayed by Monet’s prevarication and his lengthy trip to Venice earlier in the year. The artist insisted on payment for almost all the works to be included in the show, resulting in Durand-Ruel, not having the funds to bankroll the whole exhibition, having to jointly acquire the pictures with the Bernheim-Jeune brothers - though the present work was soon owned solely by Paul Durand-Ruel, with whose family it remained for many years. Monet and the dealers chose 48 canvas all of the same subject which were shown in three rooms and drew the attention and admiration of countless collectors, as Daniel Wildenstein notes: ‘These works perfectly matched the aesthetic of the first years of the 20th Century’ (D. Wildenstein, Monet or The Triumph of Impressionism, Cologne, 2003, p. 388), their natural grace and exuberance related to the Art Nouveau. Writing on the exhibition at the time, Jean-Louis Vaudoyer stated: ‘None of the earlier series… can, in our opinion, compare with these fabulous Water Landscapes, which are holding spring captive in the Durand-Ruel Gallery. Water that is pale blue and dark blue, water like liquid gold, treacherous green water reflects the sky and the banks of the pond and among the reflections pale water lilies and bright water lilies open and flourish. Here, more than ever before, painting approached music and poetry. There is in these paintings an inner beauty that is both plastic and ideal’ (J.-L. Vaudoyer in La Chronique des Arts et de la Curiosité, 15th May 1909, p. 159, translated from French).

The lasting legacy of Monet’s late work is most clearly seen in the art of the Abstract Expressionists, such as Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still, Jackson Pollock and Sam Francis, whose bold colour planes and rejection of figuration is foreshadowed by the Nymphéas. In recent years Gerhard Richter's monumental abstract canvases, such as Cage 6 from 2006, have carried on the tradition established by his artistic forebears. As Jean-Dominique Rey writes: ‘Late Monet is a mirror in which the future can be read. The generation that, in about 1950, rediscovered it, also taught us how to see it for ourselves. And it was Monet who allowed us to recognize this generation. Osmosis occurred between them. The old man, mad about colour, drunk with sensation, fighting with time so as to abolish it and place it in the space that sets it free, atomizing it into a sumptuous bouquet and creating a complete film of a ‘beyond painting’, remains of consequential relevance today’ (J.-D. Rey, op. cit., Paris, 2008, p. 116).