Avenida Paulista, São Paulo, Brasil

 

Avenida Paulista, São Paulo, Brasil
São Paulo - SP
Fotografia

Rua Primeiro de Março, Rio de Janeiro, Brasil

 

Rua Primeiro de Março, Rio de Janeiro, Brasil
Rio de Janeiro - RJ
Fotografia


Quem passa hoje pela Primeiro de Março, em meio ao seu pesado trânsito e constantes engarrafamentos, costuma não se dar conta de que essa rua foi a grande protagonista do processo de crescimento do Rio de Janeiro por quase quatro séculos, nem que ela testemunhou alguns dos mais importantes fatos da História do Brasil – do tráfico negreiro às cerimônias de coroação de D. João VI, D. Pedro I e D. Pedro II. Imagina menos ainda que já foi chamada de Praia da Cidade, ou que, em suas elegantes confeitarias oitocentistas, os cariocas puderam experimentar os seus primeiros sorvetes.
São muitas histórias para contar sobre essa rua, cuja trajetória remonta aos tempos de fundação da cidade, quando Mem de Sá, o terceiro governador-geral do Brasil, escolheu o Morro do Castelo para instalar o núcleo de colonização das terras da Guanabara. Ali se fixaram os jesuítas, a Câmara e os funcionários d’El Rey designados para coordenar o povoamento. Não muito tempo depois, os beneditinos se alojaram no Morro de São Bento.
Margeando a praia, foi aberto um caminho conectando os dois morros. Nessa estradinha, foram edificados o fortim de Santa Cruz, erguido onde hoje fica a Igreja de Santa Cruz dos Militares, e a ermida de Nossa Senhora do Ó, entregue à ordem religiosa dos carmelitas pela Câmara em 1590. Ao lado da antiga capela, na década de 1610, os padres construíram um convento e, por causa de sua presença ali, a via passou a se chamar Rua Direita da Praia de Nossa Senhora do Monte do Carmo, ou simplesmente, Rua Direita. Só virou Primeiro de Março em 1875, para marcar a data (1/3/1870) em que o Brasil derrotou o Paraguai, após longo período de guerra, e que, coincidentemente, também era o dia de fundação da cidade (1/3/1565).

Obras na Avenida Central, 1905, Rio de Janeiro, Brasil

 

Obras na Avenida Central, 1905, Rio de Janeiro, Brasil

Rio de Janeiro - RJ

Fotografia

Natureza Morta (Nature Morte) - Paul Cézanne

 

Natureza Morta (Nature Morte) - Paul Cézanne
Barnes Foundation, Filadélfia, Estados Unidos
OST - 73x92 - 1892-94

Still life was a major preoccupation for Cézanne during the 1890s. He would take everyday household items—jugs, napkins, pieces of fruit—and arrange them in different combinations to study their forms and their relationships to each other. Here Cézanne captures the peaks and valleys of an ordinary napkin as if it is a rocky landscape spreading across the table. We seem to view the table from several perspectives at once, which brings a bit of tension, even motion, to these seemingly inanimate objects.

Cortina, Jarro e Fruteira (Rideau, Cruchon et Compotier) - Paul Cézanne

 

Cortina, Jarro e Fruteira (Rideau, Cruchon et Compotier) - Paul Cézanne

Coleção privada

OST - 59x72 - 1893-94

As Maças (Les Pommes) - Paul Cézanne

 

As Maças (Les Pommes) - Paul Cézanne
Coleção privada
OST - 38x46 - 1889-90


Painted in 1889-90, Les Pommes encapsulates Cézanne’s artistic achievement, and displays the brilliance and economy which characterize his best work. This strikingly modern composition foregrounds the artist's unrivaled facility with the medium and his ability to imbue a still-life with all of the subtlety and emotional potency of portraiture.
Cézanne’s still-lifes have long been recognized among his greatest achievements, the works which demonstrate most clearly the innovations that led to the stylistic developments of early twentieth-century art. His vision breathed new life into the tradition of still-life painting, and his accomplishments had a profound impact on the generations of artists that followed. Picasso proclaimed that “Cézanne was like the father of us all,” and this statement has remained true to this day, with his painting, particularly still-lifes, continuing to influence artists in the twenty-first century.
Cézanne executed a powerful series of medium-scaled still-lifes during the 1880s. His depictions of fruit from this period focus on the inherent geometry of objects and explore the spatial problems of representing three-dimensional form on a two-dimensional surface. In the present oil, several apples are arranged in a pyramid-like shape on a plate, mirrored by an adjacent grouping, on a simple, unadorned surface. Two partially visible apples, disappearing beyond the scope of the picture on the right, emphasize the artist’s radical framing. A dynamic composition is achieved through a contrast between the rounded shapes of the apples and the plate on one hand, and the pronounced horizontal of the background and the table-top on the other. Cézanne’s still-life series became increasingly complex, and would culminate in celebrated paintings such as Les grosses pommes of circa 1890 and Rideau, cruchon et compotier painted in 1893-94.
Cézanne initially approached the genre during the first decade of his artistic production, the 1860s. He executed a number of varied still-lifes, romantic in feeling and based on close observation of reality. In the subsequent decades, his pictorial language became more sophisticated and his compositions more complex. Richard Kendall wrote about Cézanne’s mature paintings: “By this stage in his career, the still-life had taken on a special significance for [Cézanne], and he was to become one of the most original and dedicated exponents of the form. Far from being just a pretext for picture-making, the groups of apples, pears, cherries or flowers were for Cézanne as much a part of nature’s extravagant beauty as the trees and hillsides of Provence, and as likely to produce his ‘vibrating sensations’ as the landscape itself. According to Joachim Gasquet, Cézanne once claimed to overhear conversations between the fruit he was painting, and approached each item in a group as he would a human portrait” (Richard Kendall, Cézanne by Himself: Drawings, Paintings, Writings, London, 1988, p. 11).
Les Pommes imparts the full range of expressive potential that Gasquet identified in Cézanne's still-lifes. The apples are constructed through careful geometries and intrusions of bright yellow tones. Cézanne grounds the gentle curves of the fruit with a clear horizon line provided by the table's back edge. He creates a sense of space and volume that gives the fruit a palpable presence - there is an intrinsic logic to the composition wholly unique to Cézanne's artistic vision.
Cézanne’s mature still-lifes are considered the harbingers of twentieth-century Modernism, and provided a key inspiration for the Cubist compositions of Picasso and Braque. As they formulated a new artistic language during the early years of Cubism, these artists were inspired by Cézanne’s radical approach to form. Although Cézanne’s art was well known and widely exhibited during his lifetime, the first major retrospective of his work was held at the Grand Palais in Paris in 1907, a year after his death. This comprehensive view of his oeuvre was an instant inspiration to many artists, including Juan Gris and Henri Matisse.
For all its modernism and avant-garde style, Les pommes, like other still-lifes Cézanne executed throughout his career, finds its origins in the trompe-l’oeil compositions of the French Old Masters that he had studied at the Louvre. Like his forebears, Cézanne set out to capture the essence and allure of each object in his works. His approach, however, was rooted in a truly modern belief that “Painting does not mean slavishly copying the object: it means perceiving harmony amongst numerous relationships and transposing them into a system of one’s own by developing them according to a new, original logic” (quoted in Richard Kendall, op. cit., p. 298).
Both art historians and artists have argued that Cézanne reached the very pinnacle of his genius within the genre of still-life. This genre – unlike portrait or plein air painting – allowed him the greatest time in which to capture his subject, since in the studio environment he could create and control the composition, arranging the elements in ways that provided an infinite variety of formal problems to be solved on the canvas. The young painter Louis le Bail described how Cézanne composed a still-life, reflecting the great care and deliberation with which he approached the process: “Cézanne arranged the fruits, contrasting the tones one against the other, making the complementaries vibrate, balancing the fruits as he wanted them to be, using coins of one or two sous for the purpose. He brought to this task the greatest care and many precautions; one guessed it was a feast for him. When he finished, Cézanne explained to his young colleague, ‘The main thing is the modeling; one should not even say modeling, but modulating’” (quoted in John Rewald, Cézanne: A Biography, New York, 1986, p. 228).
Discussing Cézanne’s still-life paintings, the English artist and critic Roger Fry noted that he “is distinguished among artists of the highest rank by the fact that he devoted so large a part of his time to this class of picture, that he achieved in still-life the expression of the most exalted feelings and the deepest intuitions of his nature. Rembrandt alone, and only in the rarest examples, or in accessories, can be compared to him in this respect. For one cannot deny that Cézanne gave a new character to his still-lifes. Nothing else but still-life allowed him sufficient calm and leisure, and admitted all the delays which were necessary to him for plumbing the depths of his idea. But there, before the still-life, put together not with too ephemeral flowers, but with onions, apples, or other robust and long-enduring fruits, he could pursue till it was exhausted his probing analysis of the chromatic whole. But through the bewildering labyrinth of this analysis he held always like Ariadne’s thread, the notion that the changes of color correspond to movements of planes. He sought always to trace this correspondence throughout all the diverse modifications which changes of local color introduced into the observed resultant… it is hard to exaggerate their importance in the expression of Cézanne’s genius or the necessity of studying them for its comprehension, because it is in them that he appears to have established his principles of design and theories of form” (Roger Fry, Cézanne: A Study of his Development, Chicago, 1927, pp. 37 & 50).
Les Pommes has a remarkable provenance. Having first belonged to Cézanne’s dealer, Ambroise Vollard, it was later acquired by the prominent Dutch collector Cornelis Hoogendijk (1867-1911), who gathered a large number of Old Master and Modernist works. He accumulated one of the most important collections in Holland and beyond at the turn of the twentieth century. In a buying frenzy that lasted between 1897 and 1899, he acquired over thirty paintings and watercolors by Cézanne from Vollard. Some years after Hoogendijk’s death, the Paris dealer Paul Rosenberg purchased a number of Cézanne works from his estate, and sold them almost immediately to museums and French collectors. The present work was sold to the Parisian collector Jacques Laroche, whose collection included one of Cézanne’s famous self-portraits later donated to the Musée du Louvre. Les Pommes later came into the possession of the industrialist and distinguished collector of Modern art Marcel Kapferer, whose collection was sold at the Galerie Charpentier in Paris in 1934. The painting has been in the Lewyt family collection for almost sixty years.
Vendida em leilão da Sotheby's por 41,605,000 USD.

Flor em Vaso (Flower in Vase) - Wayne Thiebaud

 

Flor em Vaso (Flower in Vase) - Wayne Thiebaud
Coleção privada
OST - 45x40 - 1962


An enchanting portrait of a restaurant table, Flower in Vase situates Wayne Thiebaud amongst the great still life painters. Painted in 1962, the present work illustrates a pink rose inside the thin neck of a glass vase flanked by classic metal head salt and pepper shakers. Together, they hold a menu tight behind them with the support of a half-omitted sugar dispenser. Housed inside a peppermint green walled room, the objects on the table are hit by a gush of light coming from beyond the confines of the upper lefthand corner of the canvas. The allure of the present work rests not only in its luscious treatment of the paint but also in the cultural appeal and powerful sense of nostalgia with which Thiebaud is famously capable of infusing in his work—a nostalgia that is irrefutably linked to the cultural feel and tone of the sixties.
Still life painting was the key to Thiebaud's early evolution and references important precedents in art history. During the 1960s, Thiebaud developed an affinity for the works of Giorgio Morandi, whose influence can be strongly felt in the present work. In Flowers in Vase, the tight compositional unit recalls the structure of Morandi's work from the 1950s. Like Morandi, Thiebaud achieves volume of the objects on the table through the use of calculated brushstrokes. Almost like a pastel filter placed over the image, the present work evokes serenity and contemplation as the items are suspended in time and space. Seemingly bathed in California light, Flowers in Vase achieves a high degree of sophistication through its thoughtful use of light, color, and shape.
Further negating his supposed purity as a Realist, Thiebaud demonstrates an exceptional and incessant manipulation of color. Employing a technique now referred to as ‘halation’ within color theory, Thiebaud juxtaposes warm and cool tones to produce a resounding prismatic synergy that outlines and electrifies each form off the surface of the canvas. In the present work, Thiebaud contours the borders of the salt and pepper shakers withered and purple that add sensational chromatic depth to this seemingly minor detail. Moreover, the calculated use of white allows for these contours to pop, while creating balance. The thick impasto accentuates and activates every form upon the surface of the canvas. Furthermore, the simplicity and reductive quality of the horizon line in the present work echoes the sublime nature of other still life painters like Richard Diebenkorn and Eva Gonzalès, who utilized color and space to create a condensed space that recalls a dream-like vision of reality.
Always painting from memory, Thiebaud holds the innate ability to stimulate that collective consciousness of the sixties in America. Though readily remembered as a Pop Artist, Thiebaud differs from master Pop artists like Claes Oldenburg and Andy Warhol in that his aim is not to critique society but rather to celebrate and remember it. By recalling pleasant remembrances, Flowers in Vase serves as a societal mirror based not on the person, but on the collective memory.

Praça da Sé, São Paulo, Brasil

 

Praça da Sé, São Paulo, Brasil
São Paulo - SP
Foto Postal N. 116
Fotografia - Cartão Postal


Destaque para o relógio público De Nichile da Praça da Sé (em primeiro plano, à direita).

Nota do blog: Data não obtida.

Aqueduto de Cláudio, Roma, Itália

 

Aqueduto de Cláudio, Roma, Itália

Roma - Itália

N. 108

Fotografia - Cartão Postal

Vista da Rua Dr. Falcão Filho, 1936, São Paulo, Brasil

Vista da Rua Dr. Falcão Filho, 1936, São Paulo, Brasil

São Paulo - SP

Fotografia

Vista da Rua Dr. Falcão Filho (antiga Ladeira de Santo Antônio) em direção ao então Largo do Riachuelo. Observa-se o início das obras do Palácio Anhangabaú — mais conhecido como Edifício Matarazzo — projetado em 1935 por Marcello Piacentini e construído entre 1936-1939. Vemos à esquerda, o Palacete Médici e mais adiante o Palacete Riachuelo.