Tag: Art

Lisa Gherardini musta had the highway blues.

“‘All doubts about the identity of the Mona Lisa have been eliminated by a discovery by Dr. Armin Schlechter,’ a manuscript expert, the library said in a statement on Monday…’There is no reason for any lingering doubts that this is another woman,’ Leipzig University art historian Frank Zoellner told German radio. ‘One could even say that books written about all this in the past few years were unnecessary, had we known.’“

After studying notes scribbled in a 1503 book, German art historians argue they’ve definitively pinned down the identity of the Mona Lisa. “Lisa Gherardini, the wife of a wealthy Florentine merchant, Francesco del Giocondo, has long been seen as the most likely model for the 16th-century painting…[the notes] confirm once and for all that Lisa del Giocondo was indeed the model for one of the most famous portraits in the world.” [Via Daily Dish.]

Hail to the Kingdom.

If nostalgia has a name, it must be Drew Struzan. It looks like the famous poster-painter survived The Mist after all, as he’s turned in this throwback teaser poster for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, making the rounds of the coming attractions sites today. Not bad at all. I assume there’ll be a later version, of the floating-head variety, with Shia LaBoeuf, Ray Winstone, Cate Blanchett, John Hurt, and Karen Allen…

Rooms in New York.

“Sexual tension is at the heart of Hopper’s Room in New York, a scenario we peer at through an open window. Home from work, the man reads the sports page. Dressed to go out, the woman plays a single note on the piano, knowing it will annoy him. Their faces are almost as featureless as the blank sheet of music on the piano. Separated by the abstract expanse of the tall brown door, they are literally out of touch. But look a little closer at that fleshy pink armchair…Doesn’t that pink chair look unsettlingly like a huge hand, a jutting thumb and curled fingers, ready to clutch the unsuspecting man from behind and give him a shake? Is this the woman’s fantasy?“

Mount Holyoke English professor Christopher Benfey surveys “Edward Hopper’s secret world” for Slate, commenting at length on a painting whose iconography I’ve been shamelessly pilfering for years here, at the personal site, and elsewhere. Interesting…I always felt the picture captured a state of anomie and self-inflicted loneliness more than it did sexual tension — It’s a furtive through-the-window look at two people crammed into a tiny little room in New York basically ignoring each other. Or, more to the point, the man at left, caught up in the newspaper (news, not sports!) is so distracted by the world at large that he’s shut out his neglected lover at the piano: In his attention to distant events, he’s missing out on the beautiful things in his own life. But, hmm, that chair…

Rooms in New York.

“Even before he had established himself as a delineator of New York places, the artist had already pinpointed a New York state of mind. That state is not so much ‘loneliness,’ as the maudlin cliche about him would have it, but a tougher and more unsparing isolation that touches on the traps of modern urban existence, one in which individuals must become inured to life’s insults and injuries.” Art critic Avis Berman previews her new book on Edward Hopper’s New York for the Sunday Times.