Art. Books. List.

Just a quick post since I saw this article online from ARTnews about Art History books that are going to change my mind.  I'm not sure of what but honestly, you had me at those three words in the subject line.  Three of my favorite things!

While I'm never a fan of "The [place number here] MOST [adjective] Artist/Exhibition/Anything" types of books, they only list one and I'm pretty excited about the one on Edmund de Waal, a great author and ceramicist, as well as Lucy Lippard's Undermining: A Wild Ride Through Land Use, Politics, and Art in the Changing West.  That's covering a lot of ground (pun intended) but it's an interesting topic and I'd like to see how Lippard pulls it together.

It's hard not to be intrigued by a book titled The Duchamp Dictionary and the one about the Florentine Codex promises illustrations of headdress fabrication, myths, and midwifery in 16th-century Mesoameria!

Summer's a great time for reading, so get to it!

The TGV is for Futurists

I know, I know, enough with France already, but we really did see a lot in a few short days and there is much to discuss.  On our way back from Normandy we got to ride the TGV, the high-speed train that set the record for the fastest wheeled train.  We weren't on that line but we were still rocketing by and it traveled so smoothly you could barely feel it until you hit a turn.  As I stared out the window at the blur that was the scenery, I began thinking about how the train must have changed the entire viewpoint of society at the time.  Trains could go pretty fast even in the late 19th and early 20th century and the vantage point of zipping along at such a high speed must have added this new way of seeing to the world.  It reminded me of a part in Clara and Mr. Tiffany where the main character describes how having a bicycle had changed her view of the world since you move so much quicker than walking.

This then got me thinking of the Futurists from the early 20th century in Italy.  They're entire movement in art was based on a speeding up of the world and seeing the city fly by from a car or train and how that ease of movement can bring excitement and how there is beauty in that.  From Filippo Tommaso Marinetti's "Manifesto of Futurism":  "4. We affirm that the world's magnificence has been enriches by a new beauty: the beauty of speed.  A racing car whose hood is adorned with great pipes, like serpents of explosive breath -- a roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace."*  In just this quote you can see that Marinetti is calling for something entirely new and modernized and completely leaving art history behind.  He later called for museums to be burned down, along with libraries and academies. The Futurists also celebrated war as a way of cleaning out the old and ushering in the new, the only way to fully modernize.

Umberto Boccioni, Dynamism of a Cyclist, from Wikimedia.Commons

I love some of the Futurist's work, such as the Umberto Boccioni's Dynamism of a Cyclist or Giacomo Balla's Dyanism of a Dog on a Leash.  They really show movement in a new way and were trying to capture this world speeding by them.

Maybe it's just because I know World War I broke out just a few years after these works were created, effectively ending the movement but there is also something very unnerving about the writings and works of the Futurists to me; a feeling of not being able to stop, get off, or control the virility that is pulsating through a city and a world.

*Filippo Tommaso Marinetti "The Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism" in Harrison, Charles and Paul Wood, Art in Theory 1900-2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, 146-149.  

Gardner's: Futurism (1020-1022).

Winnie Cooper would approve*

While we were in France I forced another museum upon my husband and friends and was lucky to come upon free museum day at the Cluny Museum, filled with Medieval art from wood carved statues, to painted church furniture, to a room filled with stained glass.  It was crowded but filled with little "finds" that people weren't looking at closely including this tapestry that hung on the wall of the very first room.  People were so intent on getting in to the next rooms they were walking past it.  I stopped at first because I thought I had spotted a female money lender, which I thought would be notable.  But then I noticed that she was
she was labeled.  I could quite make it out but when I looked at the label to the side, she is identified as "Arithmetic"  This is a depiction of the personification of the liberal art of "Arithmetic".  This artist wasn't the earliest feminist, women being used in other places to personify the Liberal Arts, see Sandro Botticelli's depiction of all of them here, as well as Graces or other concepts.  But just remember MATH IS A WOMAN!

* This refers to the actress Danica McKellar, who played Winnie Cooper in The Wonder Years, and how she went on to major in math in college then wrote a number of books about how great math is and has become an advocate for promoting women in math and science and education in general.