Favorite paintings/drawings/photography/sculptures (visual art thread)

[El Chupacabra]

Ha, I don't know. Its permanent home is MoMA, but I guess it could have traveled. But there is also a great one at the National Gallery and I get them confused all the time.

 

[TexasDeac10]

Turner is my BOY. The Fighting Temeraire is such a powerful painting, imo. I can't imagine the zeitgeist of the industrial revolution, ushering in a new era so starkly different from the old era. I think this painting captures that well. The squatty tugboat is so smug, with the gallant, beautiful Temeraire in tow. The image even moves from beauty to smuttiness from left to right, and IIRC, the actual image shows both a setting sun and a rising moon. That's a little harder to see in this image.

For American art, I'm a big fan of the Hudson River school stuff, mostly because Wake's collection in this area is very good. In this school, it just doesn't get any better than Thomas Cole.

The Oxbow:

 

[TownieDeac]

Hudson River School paintings are a must see in person type deal for their scale.

 

[drew]

Just taught Hudson River School stuff today. Love "The Course of Empires" series by Cole.

 

[TheTwinAndreBen]

Not really all time favs, but these are some paintings I saw this summer and was particularly impressed with:


Lilacs - Van Gogh - Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg (the greens are really a lot more intense IRL)

Really dug the art of Russian Avant-Garde artist Pavel Filonov

 

[HeltonCreek]

I've always loved Nighthawks

 

[El Chupacabra]

Speaking of Turner,

As barges and gondolas slowly cross the Venetian lagoon, the misty city vanishes in the twilight. John Ruskin, the major art critic who was one of Turner’s few champions later in his career, hailed the canvas as “the most perfectly beautiful piece of colour of all that I have seen produced by human hands.” In the Royal Academy catalogue for 1844, this entry was accompanied by a quotation that Turner himself rewrote from Lord Byron’s poem Childe Harold:

“The moon is up, and yet it is not night,
The sun as yet disputes the day with her.”

First time I rolled into Venice, it was dusk just after a storm and the light and clouds were just insane. I almost lost it. I was like, HOLY FUCK I AM SEEING WHAT TURNER SAW I SEE IT I SEE IT.

 

[Skydog Deac]

Big James Ensor fan.

Two Skeletons Fighting Over a Herring, 1891

 

[TownieDeac]

Jean-Michel Basquiat

My roommate's dad is a retired hedge fund manager, and he has three Basquiats in the house, each of which are easily worth a mil. And they're charcoal drawings.

 

[Wakeforest22890]

Love Turner, he's by far my favorite artist. I love the transition he made from painting very clear, vivid seascapes to the almost impressionist take near the end of his career:

My second favorite, Calais Pier, I believe from 1797 or 1798?:

1801:

My favorite, Dido Building Carthage, from 1815:

Then 1844, Rain, Steam, and Speed:

I love seascapes and I think that Turner is the best.

 

[TexasDeac10]

Jean-Michel Basquiat

My roommate's dad is a retired hedge fund manager, and he has three Basquiats in the house, each of which are easily worth a mil. And they're charcoal drawings.

Hot damn. Awesome story about your friends dad.

Just watched The Radiant Child the other night. Dude was taaalenteed.

 

[coredeac]

I've always loved Nighthawks

This is hanging on a wall in my house. Love the painting

 

[TownieDeac]

YOU LIVE AT THE ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO?

 

[coredeac]

YOU LIVE AT THE ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO?

LOL. Perhaps I should have been more specific. A "print" is hanging on a wall in my house.

 

[TownieDeac]

Haha I have a print too. One of my all time favorites as well. Incredible to think it was originally sold for $3000. It has appreciated at least 25 fold since then.

 

[Juice]

TIMEO DANAOS ET DONA FERENTES

dat LAOCOON

 

[TownieDeac]

Laocoon and sons? What is the story there, Juice? Also, where does it fit in your pantheon of sculpture phalluses?

 

[El Chupacabra]

I tried to read a Turner biography once because I thought that he must be the most crazy motherfucker out there and it would be about him crushing shit, but he was actually very, very boring.

 

[TownieDeac]

I tried to read a Turner biography once because I thought that he must be the most crazy motherfucker out there and it would be about him crushing shit, but he was actually very, very boring.

Manet was bonkers. Everybody knows it about Van Gogh, who probably was legitimately paranoid schizophrenic, but most people didn't realize Manet's syphilis took hold early and really messed up his brain. It's fascinating to watch the breakdown from his early work to late. Some similar form of encephalitis afflicted Nietzsche in his later days, and almost certainly accounted for his megalomania.

 

[wakephan09]

LOL, I can never read that Aeneid shit without thinking of Nic Cage and Sean Connery.