Every Thursday, as part of my personal “enriched environment” initiative, I post a piece of art, usually from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which recently released online some 400,000 high-resolution images of its collection. All artwork will show a sun (or sunlight) somewhere.
I won’t name the piece or the artist, but instead invite you to study the art and post a comment addressing one or more of these questions:
- What is going on in this picture?
- What do you see that makes you say that?
- What more can you find?
If you have another idea, run with it.
Special Update! The New York Times website does this same exercise every Monday with a news photo that is uncaptioned and contains no text (click!). The Times asks viewers the same three questions:
- What is going on in this picture?
- What do you see that makes you say that?
- What more can you find?
However, at the end of the week, the Times posts the background information on the picture. So, I’ve decided to do the same. I’ll still post an unlabeled piece of art on Thursday. But return on Sunday (for the Sunny Sundays post!) and you’ll find an update on the artwork here.
Note: To embiggen the image, click on it!
Update Sunday November 13
About This Picture
From the Metropolitan Museum of Art Website:
Title: View of Cagnes
Artist: Chaim Soutine (French (born Lithuania), Smilovitchi 1893–1943 Paris)
Date: ca. 1924–25
Medium: Oil on canvas
Best known for his somber portraits, Soutine also painted landscapes throughout his career. From 1923 to 1925, Soutine spent time in the mountain village of Cagnes along the French Rivera. The blue, green, and ocher palette suggests the serene atmosphere of the region, while the swirling expressionistic brushwork gives the village a fanciful, almost fairytale quality. Soutine’s stacked and condensed forms cause the hilltop town to appear nestled into its coastal surroundings.
The world is falling apart. There’s a great upheaval. A prone probably dead gray body is lying in the street. Night is coming on.
This makes me feel queasy.
Looks like my house in Chappaqua after Donald Trump bombed it.
I fail to see sunlight this time, and it’s strange. The sky is dark blue, the buildings are lit up on their own accord. The buildings are also bent and warped like we’re seeing them in a funhouse mirror. Definitely a sense of upheaval. I like the comment above about the gray shadowy figure lying in the road. Yes, I can see this. And not only are the buildings heaving and moaning but they seem perched on a precipice. What makes the whole scene “queasy” is that there are no straight lines, either vertical or horizontal, which you’d expect in a painting about houses and other buildings. It’s like the houses are made of jelly and are quivering in an earthquake.
The section of the painting where there are buildings and roads, which is to say civilization, is mostly light. The surrounding wild spaces are dark. Who would paint such a painting where the buildings are melting like so many bars or chunks of white chocolate?