Girassóis (Sunflowers) - Vincent van Gogh

 

Girassóis (Sunflowers) - Vincent van Gogh
Neue Pinakothek, Munique, Berlim
OST - 92x73 - 1888

Girassóis (Sunflowers) - Vincent van Gogh

 

Girassóis (Sunflowers) - Vincent van Gogh
National Gallery, Londres, Inglaterra
OST - 92x73 - 1888


This is one of five versions of Sunflowers on display in museums and galleries across the world. Van Gogh made the paintings to decorate his house in Arles in readiness for a visit from his friend and fellow artist, Paul Gauguin.
‘The sunflower is mine’, Van Gogh once declared, and it is clear that the flower had various meanings for him. The different stages in the sunflower’s life cycle shown here, from young bud through to maturity and eventual decay, follow in the vanitas tradition of Dutch seventeenth-century flower paintings, which emphasise the transient nature of human actions. The sunflowers were perhaps also intended to be a symbol of friendship and a celebration of the beauty and vitality of nature.
The sunflower pictures were among the first paintings Van Gogh produced in Arles that show his signature expressive style. No other artist has been so closely associated with a specific flower, and these pictures are among Van Gogh’s most iconic and best-loved works.

O Jardim do Artista em Vétheuil, França (The Artist's Garden at Vétheuil) - Claude Monet

 

O Jardim do Artista em Vétheuil, França (The Artist's Garden at Vétheuil) - Claude Monet
Vétheuil - França
Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena, Estados Unidos
OST - 100x81 - 1881


The years that Monet spent at a rented pink house in Vétheuil were among the most difficult of his life. The market for his work had collapsed; his wife fell ill and died; his servants all quit. And yet the pictures he painted there, in his lush, sunny garden conceived as an outdoor studio, are among the most exuberant of his career. This view of a path shaded by sunflowers and punctuated with gladioli was one of four studies of the scene that Monet made in the early 1880s. The Norton Simon’s version has long been thought to serve as a preparatory sketch for the largest canvas, today in the collection of the National Gallery of Art. However the artist’s comparatively tight, confident brushwork in this painting—particularly in the handling of the sky and clouds—suggests that it is a more fully realized reduction of the National Gallery’s composition, perhaps made with a bourgeois buyer in mind.

Alcachofra de Jerusalém (Jerusalem Artichoke Flowers) - Claude Monet

Alcachofra de Jerusalém (Jerusalem Artichoke Flowers) - Claude Monet
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Estados Unidos
OST - 99x73 - 1880

Girassóis (Sunflowers) - Vincent van Gogh

 

Girassóis (Sunflowers) - Vincent van Gogh
Museu Van Gogh, Amsterdã, Holanda
OST - 95x73 - 1889


Van Gogh’s paintings of Sunflowers are among his most famous. He did them in Arles, in the south of France, in 1888 and 1889. Vincent painted a total of five large canvases with sunflowers in a vase, with three shades of yellow ‘and nothing else’. In this way, he demonstrated that it was possible to create an image with numerous variations of a single colour, without any loss of eloquence.
The sunflower paintings had a special significance for Van Gogh: they communicated ‘gratitude’, he wrote. He hung the first two in the room of his friend, the painter Paul Gauguin, who came to live with him for a while in the Yellow House. Gauguin was impressed by the sunflowers, which he thought were ‘completely Vincent’. Van Gogh had already painted a new version during his friend’s stay and Gauguin later asked for one as a gift, which Vincent was reluctant to give him. He later produced two loose copies, however, one of which is now in the Van Gogh Museum.

Buquê de Girassóis (Bouquet of Sunflowers) - Claude Monet

 

Buquê de Girassóis (Bouquet of Sunflowers) - Claude Monet
Metropolitan Museum of Arts, Nova York, Estados Unidos
OST - 101x81 - 1881


While living with his family at Vétheuil, a small suburb on the Seine northwest of Paris, Claude Monet took up floral painting both outdoors in the garden and indoors with cut flowers. From 1878 until 1883, he completed twenty floral still lifes, including this painting of sunflowers in a vase signed and dated by the artist in 1881. Bouquet of Sunflowers was shown at the seventh Impressionist exhibition of 1882, where critic Paul de Charry noted Monet’s "great talent" at painting still lifes (quoted in Isaacson 1986). The same year, he painted The Met’s Chrysanthemums, which has a nearly identical provenance. Monet exhibited both pictures in 1883 at the dealer Paul Durand-Ruel’s gallery, in 1886 with Les XX in Brussels, and in 1886 in New York at the National Academy of Design, making them among the first Impressionist paintings on view in the United States.
A rainy day was often the pretext for a floral still life for a painter as devoted to his garden as Monet became, first at Vétheuil and later at Giverny. These particular flowers are probably the same as the sunflowers that grew to either side of the steps leading to his garden at Vétheuil (Moffett 1985); in the same year, Monet painted four views of the steps flanked by sunflowers, among them Garden at Vétheuil. Able to sit and capture with exacting detail the state of the particular sunflowers he had chosen, Monet presented not only the "blazing" sunflowers described by his critic-friend Gustave Geffroy (1883) but also their simultaneously wilting leaves. Purposely placed a bit off-center, as has been noted (Richard Mühlberger, What Makes A Monet A Monet, New York, 1993, p. 29), the vase of flowers overspilled its assigned canvas space, so the artist truncated the blooms at right. The resultant cropped image seems to continue beyond the space of the canvas. Cropping in this fashion may well be a result of Monet’s relatively early exposure to Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints, in which such cropping is typical.
The still life is a pretext, too, for a study in complementary colors. Green leaves contrast with the red tablecloth, as blues peek through from the background to heighten the oranges in the flower petals, and pinks placed over these background blues create a violet effect in contrast to the yellow sunflowers. The artist would return to these same pinks and blues of the background in his Waterlilies series from the 1890s on.
While in Vétheuil, Monet painted three other paintings of flowers in this same vase: Dahlias (private collection), Asters (private collection, U.S.A.), and Jerusalem Artichoke Flowers. Each image of the vase is from a slightly different angle, some highlighting the delicate blue painting on the porcelain more than others. The question of whether this vase is Chinese or Japanese is, according to The Met’s Brooke Russell Astor Curator of Chinese Art Denise Patry Leidy (via email with the author, June 10, 2016), not possible to determine, as both cultures have employed this shape of vase and the same blue pigment. 

However, the inclusion of an Asian vase in The Met’s picture is another indication of Monet’s continued interest in all things Asian. The painter subtly transmutes the sheen of glaze on the porcelain into an irregular patchwork of brushstrokes that come together at a distance to convey the reflective surface of the vase.
The particular sunflowers depicted are a smaller variety known as "soleils" in France and by their botanical name, Helianthus chrysanthemum, in England. This is a different variety from the larger sunflowers more typically found in the United States and also from those preferred by Vincent van Gogh, known in France as "tournesols".
While the image of a vase of sunflowers was more famously and less naturalistically explored by Van Gogh a bit later in the 1880s, Monet’s depiction of the subject had an impact on both the Dutch painter and his friend Paul Gauguin. Gauguin had an opportunity to see this picture in Paris sometime before its departure for Brussels in February 1886, most likely at the Impressionist exhibition of 1882. In a letter to his brother Theo on November 19, 1888, Van Gogh reported, "Gauguin was telling me the other day—that he’d seen a painting by Claude Monet of sunflowers in a large Japanese vase, very fine. But—he likes mine better. I’m not of that opinion . . . ."
Gauguin, himself, painted a Basket of Flowers (ca. 1884, Mr. and Mrs. William Coxe Wright collection, Philadelphia) that has been compared to The Met’s picture in its similarly textured background and sinuous rhythms (Roskill 1970). Van Gogh’s sunflowers have been seen as more individualized than the collective whole presented by Monet (Rosenblum 1975). His earthenware pots, too, are more self-consciously "of the people" than Monet’s Chinese or Japanese vase, then more of a Parisian luxury item than Van Gogh’s provincial pot (Cox 2011).
Still, the impetus to locate expressivity in the sunflower began with Monet’s canvas and continued in Van Gogh’s several versions of the flower. For, as noted by Gordon and Forge (1983), "It is particularly in Monet’s still lifes that we recognize what it was that Van Gogh learned from him: not simply the powerful and expressive palette but also a quality of impassioned drawing that is much more apparent in the flower paintings—forms painted at the range of stereoscopic vision, therefore more tactile—than in most of his landscapes. In these sumptuous flower paintings done only when the weather prevented outdoor work, the drawing and color are carried along together with tremendous impetus. His love for flowers is unmistakable. The character, the quality of growth, the specific rhythm of each bouquet is given its due." When both Chrysanthemums and Bouquet of Sunflowers arrived at The Met with the Havemeyer bequest in 1929, the reviewer Frank Jewett Mather Jr. (1930) gushed, "The representation is so complete, joyous and instructive that it becomes really a matter of indifference to the Metropolitan Museum whether it acquires further Monets or not."

30 Girassóis (30 Sunflowers) - David Hockney

 

30 Girassóis (30 Sunflowers) - David Hockney
Coleção privada
OST - 182x182 - 1996


Created in 1996, 30 Sunflowers is a singularly extraordinary masterpiece within Hockney’s inimitable oeuvre. Marking Hockney’s return to painting after a decade primarily immersed in photography, the exuberantly radiant painting represents the artist’s momentous undertaking of traditional subject matter – the venerated still life – at the height of his artistic powers. At the brink of his sixtieth year, at a cogent peak of his career, he must have finally deemed himself ready and worthy to encounter his heroes and predecessors, including Vincent van Gogh, Paul Cézanne, Claude Monet and Johannes Vermeer.
Prior to painting 30 Sunflowers, Hockney attended two exhibitions that proved to be tectonic: Claude Monet, 1840-1926 at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Johannes Vermeer retrospective at the Mauritshuis in the Hague. Emerging thrilled and revitalized, he picked up his brush again with renewed vigor and urgency, applying unprecedented attention to painterly texture and modulated tonalities. Hockney recalls: “When I came out [of the Monet exhibition] I started looking at the bushes on Michigan Avenue with a little more care. He made you see more. Van Gogh does that for you too. He makes you see the world around just a little more intensely” (the artist cited in Martin Gayford, A Bigger Message: Conversations with David Hockney, 2011, p. 85).
Returning to California, Hockney readjusted the location of his easel in his studio to allow the north light to illuminate his still life studies. The flower paintings from 1996 stand out from the rest of Hockney’s oeuvre: they commence an astonishing dialogue with Monet, Van Gogh, Gaugin as well as earlier painters like Vermeer and the Dutch Golden Age masters. With a heightened naturalism coupled with saturated, emotive colors, Hockney devoted his energies into scrupulously meticulous application of color and rendering of light. In particular, he closely studied Vermeer’s method of layering yellow and blue beneath outer layers of color to achieve mesmerizing radiance – here rendered to consummate effect in 30 Sunflowers.
30 Sunflowers is not only one of the two largest paintings of the Flower series; it is without doubt the most superlatively exceptional in terms of its richly resplendent color palette, complex, charged compositional structure, and intimately significant subject matter that characterize the artist’s most iconic masterpieces. The definitive picture was featured on the cover of the catalogue for Hockney’s “Flowers, Faces and Spaces” exhibition in 1997, which was his largest exhibition in London since his 1988 Tate retrospective.
30 Sunflowers dazzles with the sublime bravura that only comes with artistic maturity, as well as the quiet yet palpable elation of a master once again intoxicated by the very craft of painting. In the artist’s words:
“Painting still lifes can be as exciting as anything can be in painting. I remember once saying to Francis Bacon in Paris, that I knew a painting in California of tulips in a vase that was as profound as any painting he’d made. I think at first he almost thought I was referring to my own, but I was referring to the Cézanne in the Norton Simon Museum. It’s the most beautiful painting, and it is as profound as anything he did. Just some tulips in a vase. The profundity is not in the subject, it is the way it’s dealt with.”
In keeping with the tradition of the greatest still lifes in history, 30 Sunflowers prompts contemplations on mortality and transience. At the time 30 Sunflowers was created, Hockney was emerging from a period of prolonged mourning over several significant losses, including the passing of his closest confidant and champion, the critic and curator Henry Geldzahler. Elegiac in tone yet imbued with hope, optimism, and the pure exuberance of life, 30 Sunflowers encapsulates a cherished worldview that is weathered yet untainted by sorrow and loss.
Encapsulating both splendor and brutality, celebrating ravishing beauty as well as delicate ephemerality, 30 Sunflowers is a glowing exaltation of light, space, and color refracted through the lens of art history while suffused with personal meaning and transformation – manifesting the supreme quintessence of Hockney’s artistic output that powerfully establishes him as one of the greatest painters of the twentieth century.

Resale Right - Artigo

 

Resale Right - Artigo
Artigo


Texto 1:
The resale right is a fundamental right for authors of graphic and plastic arts. It consists of a small percentage of the resale price that art market professionals pay to them at each resale of their works be it in auction or in a gallery.
The specificity of visual artists is that their primary source of income is the material selling of their original works. While auction houses and galleries make their business by taking commissions, it would be paradoxical that artists do not benefit from the profit generated by their works on the art market.
This is why the resale right, which is not applicable to first sales and therefore not on those galleries that do the work of promoting artists, was created. It also helps to restore the balance with the authors of other creative sectors (composers, screen-writers and film directors, writers…) whose rights of reproduction and communication to the public cannot be compared with those of visual artists.
Born in France in 1920, harmonized in Europe by the Directive of 27 September 2001 and provided internationally by Article 14ter of the Berne Convention at the International Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), but non-binding, the right is now recognized by 65 states (members of the European Union of course, but also Australia, Brazil, Russia, Mexico, Tunisia, Senegal…).
Currently, the two top countries in terms of the art market are considering introducing this right. Indeed, the United States draft bills were tabled in both houses of Congress so that the resale right, which already exists in the State of California shall become a federal law. China has included this right in the revision of the law on intellectual property. A bill was also filed in Canada. And at WIPO, more and more voices are calling that the right should become mandatory within the Berne Convention.
In a global world, the protection of artists should be the same in different places of the art market, be it London, Paris, New York or Hong Kong. Thus, the authors of fine arts from the five continents – and not just those of Western countries – must be able to benefit from the wealth generated by the sales of their creations. And the first ones being concerned are the artists from emerging countries whose works are purchased at low prices and then resold with significant gains on the art markets of Western countries.
To achieve this equality between the authors around the world the resale right must become, under the auspices of WIPO, a global right.
Texto 2:
Directive 2001/84/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 27 September 2001 on the resale right for the benefit of the author of an original work of art is a European Union directive in the field of copyright law, made under the internal market provisions of the Treaty of Rome. It creates a right under European Union law for artists to receive royalties on their works when they are resold. This right, often known by its French name droit de suite, appears in the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works (as Art.14) and already existed in many, but not all, Member States. As a result, there was a tendency for sellers of works of art to sell them in countries without droit de suite provisions (e.g. United Kingdom) to avoid paying the royalty. This was deemed to be a distortion of the internal market (paras. 8–11 of the preamble), leading to the Directive.
For the droit de suite to apply, the work, the sale and the artist must all qualify. The work must be an original work of art or a copy made in limited numbers by the artist himself or under his authority, including "works of graphic or plastic art such as pictures, collages, paintings, drawings, engravings, prints, lithographs, sculptures, tapestries, ceramics, glassware and photographs" (Art. 2), and under copyright protection [Art. 8]. The sale must involve a professional party or intermediary, such as salesrooms, art galleries and, in general, any dealers in works of art [Art. 1]. The droit de suite does not apply to sales directly between private individuals without the participation of an art market professional, nor to sales by individuals to public museums (para. 18 of the preamble). The artist must be a national of a Member State or of another country which has droit de suite provisions: Member States are free, but not obliged, to treat artists domiciled on their territory as nationals (Art. 7).
Member States may set a minimum sale price below which the droit de suite will not apply: this may not be more than €3000 (Art. 3), or €10,000 where the seller acquired the work of art directly from the artist less than three years before the resale.
Portion of the net sale price royalty rate (Art. 4):
<€50,000 4%; €50,000 – €200,000 3%; €200,000 – €350,000 1%; €350,000 – €500,000 0.5%; >€500,000 0.25%.
Member States may apply a rate of 5% for the lowest portion of the resale price [Art. 4(2)]. The total amount of the royalty may not exceed €12,500: this corresponds to a net sale price of €2,000,000 using the normal royalty rates.
The droit de suite is an inalienable right of the artist, and may not be transferred except to heirs on death, nor waived even in advance [Arts. 1, 6]. Member States may provide for the optional or compulsory collective management by collecting societies [Art. 6(2)]. As a transitional provision, Member States which did not previously have droit de suite provisions may limit the application to works of living artists until 2010-01-01 [Art. 8].

Gladíolo com Duas Laranjas (Gladioli with Two Oranges) - David Hockney

 

Gladíolo com Duas Laranjas (Gladioli with Two Oranges) - David Hockney

Coleção privada

OST - 65x81 - 1996

Texto 1:
Gladioli with Two Oranges depicts a sprightly bunch of burgundy flowers bursting from a rounded glass vase, with a rich colour pop of orange from two casually placed pieces of fruit. Rendered in short horizontal brushstrokes of vibrant cerulean, the enigmatic background denies specificity of time, place and scene. Yet though the background remains completely abstracted, the attention given to the geometric planes, tonal gradation, and accompanying shadows beneath the pot restores our mind’s ability to recognise three-dimensionality in direct association with our own experience of receiving such a joyous arrangement. Throughout the picture plane, Hockney’s application of colour forms a remarkably strategic tool to generate depth in an otherwise flattened composition. By adding a touch of dark paint to the respective burgundy, orange, green, and blue hues, Hockney adds depth while keeping his hues consistent. The result is a simplified and pared-down colour palette that offers a purist depiction of the scene. In reducing the colour palette to a limited number of colours and shades, Hockney directs his artistic curiosity and painterly inventiveness towards other variables such as space and form. Here, Hockney dispenses with traditional perspective and flattens the background to emphasise the objecthood of the flower and fruit as the main subjects of the composition. Hockney felt that it was an elemental part of an artist's practice to be able to render the soft lines and volumes contained in the form of a flower with clarity and authenticity – not necessarily a mimetic type of authenticity, but rather of the kind championed first by the Impressionist painters, where the light and colour of any given moment can differ drastically from the next; where the same object is constantly shifting and changing right in front of us. Hockney realised that in depicting a simple bouquet of flowers, there was an infinite number of ways that he could do so. Gladioli with Two Oranges is therefore more about the process of painting a still-life, than about the record of the object itself.
The present work most importantly signifies Hockney’s momentous undertaking of traditional subject matter – the venerated genre of the still life – at the height of his artistic powers, when he must have finally deemed himself ready and worthy to encounter his heroes and predecessors, including Vincent van Gogh, Paul Cézanne, Claude Monet and Johannes Vermeer. In its exploration of experimental still life painting, Gladioli with Two Oranges invokes not only a centuries-old art historical tradition, but also a motif that is of central importance within Hockney’s own oeuvre. Still life painting first captured Hockney’s interest in the 1960s, and served as a focus for a number of early works; from there, through the precise realism of the artist’s 1970s painting, to the colourful and imaginative abstraction of the present work and other 1980s paintings, the still life genre has allowed Hockney to continually refresh and explore his creative vision through familiar subject matter. Describing the draw of still life painting, the artist reflects: “I think every artist who deals with the visible world must come back to them. You begin to see how many choices you can make in even these simple things right in front of you. How exciting they are” (David Hockney, quoted in: Piet de Jonge, ‘Interview with David Hockney’, in: Exh. Cat., Rotterdam, Museum Boymans-Van Beuningen, David Hockney: Paintings and Photographs of Paintings, 1995, p. 34).
Hockney's intense occupation with his still-life series is a testament to how much he enjoys the genre. The pleasure of painting is an essential element of his work. He said, "I think anyone who makes pictures loves it, it is a marvelous thing to dip a brush into paint and make marks on anything, even on a bicycle, the feel of a thick brush full of paint coating something. Even now, I could spend the whole day painting a door just one flat colour" (David Hockney cited in: Nikos Stangos. Ed., David Hockney by David Hockney, London 1976, p. 28). Throughout art history, flowers have remained a traditional focus for all painters from the Dutch Old Masters to the Post-Impressionist masters and to Pop art innovators. Hockney’s purist depiction of six purple violets clearly pays homage to the master of still-life and landscape, Vincent van Gogh. The work draws visual reference to van Gogh’s dazzling Sunflowers, which was painted a century prior to Hockney’s still life. Expressing his admiration for the influential Dutch Post-Impressionist painter, Hockney commented, ‘I’ve always had quite a passion for Van Gogh, but certainly from the early seventies it grew a lot, and it’s still growing. I became aware of how wonderful [his paintings] really were. Somehow, they became more real to me…it is only recently they’ve really lived for me’ (David Hockney, quoted in Marco Livingstone, David Hockney, New York, 1997, p. 149).The background is perhaps the most painterly element of the painting. The brushstrokes are vivid and clear. They function to close the space between background and foreground, flattening the image and dispensing with the aura of illusion. The vase could be resting on a windowsill or a tabletop. Like Monet, Hockney frees colour from pictorial veracity and allows us to enjoy it purely as an impression or emotion.
Throughout his remarkable career, David Hockney has successfully merged a deep appreciation for and awareness of art historical precedent with an unwavering desire to push the boundaries of contemporary art through his own, utterly unique painterly vision. Used to remarkable effect in Gladioli with Two Oranges, this tension between tradition and innovation has, over the past sixty years, distinguished Hockney as amongst the foremost artists of the contemporary age. As seen in Gladioli with Two Oranges, the still life, one of the most traditional genres of painting, becomes Hockney’s template upon which he subverts traditional perspective and notions of depth while trying to depict his own idiosyncratic reality. Gladioli with Two Oranges is a glowing exaltation of light, space, and colour refracted through the lens of art history while suffused with personal meaning and transformation – manifesting the supreme quintessence of Hockney’s artistic output that powerfully establishes him as one of the greatest painters of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries.
Texto 2:
Gladíolo L. é o nome comum das plantas bulbosas floríferas do gênero Gladiolus (do latim, diminuitivo de gladius, espada) da família iridaceae.
O gênero Gladiolus contém cerca de 260 espécies, das quais 250 são nativas da África subsariana, principalmente da África do Sul. Cerca de 10 espécies são nativas da Eurásia. Existem 160 espécies de gladíolos endémicos do sul da África e 76 da África tropical. As espécies variam desde muito pequenas até às espetaculares espigas de flores gigantes disponíveis no comércio.
São largamente cultivadas no mundo inteiro, por causa dos seus cachos altamente decorativos e que têm grande valor comercial.

Caminhão Carregado de Tomates na Fábrica da Cica, Década de 60, Jundiaí, São Paulo, Brasil

Caminhão Carregado de Tomates na Fábrica da Cica, Década de 60, Jundiaí, São Paulo, Brasil

Jundiaí - SP

Fotografia

Nota do blog: Destaque para os cestos de transporte de tomates, uma ideia que, segundo contam os que trabalharam na empresa, não deu muito certo.