Monday at the Met

Manet/Degas.

The above are my images of detail from the following works of art:

✤ Edgar Degas. Édouard Manet Standing. circa 1868
✤ Edgar Degas. Edmondo and Thérése Morbilli. circa 1865
✤ Édouard Manet. The Dead Toreador. probably 1864
✤ Édouard Manet. Émile Zola. 1868
✤ Édouard Manet. The Races at Longchamp. 1866
✤ Edgar Degas. The Orchestra of the Opera. circa 1870

At the museum

Images captured at MoMA

The above are my images of detail from the following works of art:

✤ Willem de Kooning. Painting.1948
✤Joan Miró. Barcelona, XXIII. 1944
✤ Peter Blume. The Eternal City. 1934-37
✤ René Magritte. The Menaced Assassin. 1927
✤ Joseph Cornell. Untitled (Bébé Marie). 1940s
✤ Leonora Carrington. And Then We Saw the Daughter of the Minotaur. 1953
✤ Marcel Duchamp. The Passage from Virgin to Bride. 1912
✤ Marc Chagall. I and the Village. 1911
✤ Egon Schiele. Standing Male Nude with Arm Raised, Back View. 1910
✤ Jackson Pollock. One: Number 31, 1950. 1950
✤ Jackson Pollock. Number 1A, 1948. 1948
✤ Lee Krasner. Untitled. 1949
✤ Pablo Picasso. Harlequin, Paris. Late 1915

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The images above are my photos of detail from the following paintings in Art, Life, Legacy: Northern European Paintings in the Collection of Isabel and Alfred Bader:

Ruth and Naomi by Jan Victors, Dutch (1653)
Old Woman with a Book by Jacob van Campen, Dutch (1625-30)
Elisha and Gehazi by Lambert Jacobsz, Dutch (circa by 1629)
Self-Portrait with a Skull by Michael Sweerts, Flemish (circa 1661)

Seen; seeing

Yesterday, at the Art Institute.

The images above are my photos of detail from the following paintings:

■ “David Garrick as King Lear” by Richard Westall; about 1815
■ “The Penitent Saint Peter” by Jusepe de Ribera; about 1630
■ “Study Head of a Bearded Man” by Frans Floris; about 1565
■ “The Captive Slave (Ira Aldridge)” by John Philip Simpson; 1827 

We attended member hours to to see Among Friends and Rivals: Caravaggio in Rome, but what really captured our imaginations was Remedios Varo: Science Fictions.

At the Milwaukee Art Museum

The above are my images of detail from the following works:

Janitor by Duane Hanson, 1973
Wet Saturday by Martin Lewis, 1929
Le Penseur de Notre Dame by John Taylor Arms, 1923
The Fiddler by James Abbott McNeill Whistler, 1859
Untitled Anxious Audience by Rashid Johnson, 2017
Portrait of Frederick Layton by George Henry Yewell, circa 1888
Portrait of Dr. Karl Schwartz by Lovis Corinth 1916
The Card Players by Eduard vin Grützner, 1883
Triple Profile Portrait (The Mignons of Henry III) by School of Fontainebleau, 1570s

Notes

It seemed only right that I include a photo of our younger cat.

Over the weekend, I attended the Ann Arbor Art Fairthe featured artist of which was Katie Musolff. Her work is stunning, and I was delighted to see this magnificent painting in person. The work of Lauchlan Davis also attracted my attention, so much so that I purchased a numbered print of her 2022 “Duck, Duck, Goose.” 

During my music lesson this week, my teacher corrected an embouchure issue with which I have been struggling in piccolo practice. What a difference! Both my concert flute and alto flute are now en route to the technician for annual cleaning and adjusting, so for the next week or so I’m working with my trusty Yamaha.

Only three meetings remain in the Plato’s Republic reading group. Between the discussion and David Roochnik’s fabulous lectures, I am learning far more than I did forty years ago when I first read this work as a college freshman.

Slowly, surely, I am making my way through my Latin I tutorial. I have reached the point at which I can say that it brings me as much satisfaction as my music studies. (And it is just as difficult.)

Also slowly, surely, I’m accumulating mileage. The air quality and increasing temperatures make exercise difficult, but we take our primary walk early enough to mitigate some of the concerns.

I am a few pages away from finishing a smart and entertaining novel:  Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution by R.F. Kuang. (Review here.) In fact, the last few books I’ve read are worth mentioning:

The Fold (Peter Clines; 2015. Fiction.)
The Thursday Murder Club (Richard Osman; 2020. Fiction.)
The Man Who Died Twice (Richard Osman; 2021. Fiction.)
The Bullet That Missed (Richard Osman; 2022. Fiction.)
Long Live Latin: The Pleasures of a Useless Language (Nicola Gardini; 2019. Non-fiction.)
The Guest (Emma Cline; 2023. Fiction.)

The novels represent my favorite sort of summer reading (engaging, light without being utterly frivolous, sometimes even thought-provoking), and Gardini’s meditation on Latin was perfect. (Review here.)

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Detail from paintings in Van Gogh and the Avant-Garde: The Modern Landscape:

— “Roadway with Underpass, Asnières“ by Vincent Van Gogh (1887)
— “The Fortification of Paris with Houses” Vincent Van Gogh (1887)
— “The Restaurant Rispal at Asnières” by Vincent Van Gogh (1887)
— “Railway Junction near Bois-Colombes” by Paul Signac (1885-86)
— “Strolling Man next to Tree on a Bank (Study for ‘La Grande Jatte’)” by Georges Seurat (about 1894)