Art Notes - Hieroticus Bosch

Recently I've been collecting some notes about symbols, allegories and recurrent themes in art, and I wanted to share them here.

OK, let's start from one of my favourite artist:  Jeroen Anthoniszoon van Aken, probably best known by the name of Hieronymus Bosch (this was actually the name of his town, Den Bosch).

Unfortunately we don't have much information about his life, which seems to have been very plain and ordinary (born, married, died)… But his works speak for themselves. They are so rich and dense in meaning that I could spend hours looking at them.

I deliberately leave all the strictly religious motifs aside. Until the Reinassance, when man put himself -finally- at the centre of the universe, art could not exist without religion, although artists managed to sneak away sometimes, as Bosch did.

Although it may not be immediately apparent, as for other painters, I find Bosch very sexual. His depicition of bliss in The Garden of Earthly Delights is very explicit, and many other works bear the traces of a direct relationship with lust and sex.

Some critics believe that he belonged to the sect of HominesIntelligentiae, preaching free love and nudity (at the beginning of 1400! Quite ahead of Woodstock!).

Here are some details from the The Garden of Earthly Delights.

The symbols are all there, fruit (cherries and strawberries were considered symbols of passion), birds (robin was another icon of lust, I really can't explain why). Another recurring motif is the color red. See also the The Seven Deadly Sins and the Four Last Things, where a woman's sex is hidden by a frog (in the punishment section, of course). Bosch's works, this one in particular, are very physical, the body is a powerful instrument to express feelings and narrate stories, without that all-catholic sense of prudery that emerges now and then in art history (see the Braghettone...). What contemporary Italian Christian would describe the Garden of Delights like that? We would probably put much different things there... 

Two thousand Priests and five exploding Swans...

Recently I've watched a beautiful documentary on SkyArte, called Discovering Dalí. Really beautiful.

I want to share an extract, with a truly surrealistic conversation between Dalí and the British director Jack Bond, narrated by himself, on his documentary "Dalí in New York".

[The director tells Dalí that he will accompany him with a flying camera, to film his dreams and obsessions, but Dalí has his own conditions...]

Dalí: You can shoot with your flying camera if I can have five swans, exploding in slow motion, spilling their entrails all over the screen...

Jack Bond: Sounds good, I like that.

Dalí: The swans will be followed by two thousand priests. On bicycles.

Jack Bond: Look, I have no affection for priests in any shape or form, and I certainly don't want to be doing two thousand priests on bicycles...

Dalí: All right, if you supply me with a 7-foot plaster cast of Michelangelo's statue of Day.

Jack Bond: Done.

A very long Progress

Another particular. This piece is nerve-racking. It is true, the more you exercise, the better it gets.
On such a big surface, a lot of burned deposits build on the tips and cause various problems.
Moreover, it is important to remember that the burned areas tend to fade over time, so the contrast has to be very sharp, in order to preserve the tonal values.
Let's see how it turns out.

Quiet after the Storm - An Update

What am I doing now? As always, after one of my moments of furious art destruction, I need discipline. Something to break my head on.

So I bought 93 x 126 cm wood panel and went back to drawing. And wood-burning A ship. A carrack. What I have in mind is a 16th century map. Sea monsters. Compass. The feeling of getting lost in a terra incognita.

It's all very confused now, let's see what will come out.

This is the drawing, although it is not finished I already started burning (here is a small particular). If it goes on, it will take months and months. It's huge. The exact contrary of my I-want-it-all-and-I-want-it-now philosophy.

Spring here in Italy is late, almond trees are already blooming but it's still very cold. I have to turn both heaters on…

Art Exhibit in Ravenna - Borderline - Part III

Alongside the works of “official” or “insider” artists, the exhibit included the works of “outsiders”, mostly people from lunatic asylums or people who experienced some kind of psychological suffering.

Among these works, I was particularly struck by G.R’s. They create a world of their own and, for some inexplicable reason, they speak to me. The calm atmosphere, the weird perspective, the smooth parallel lines, the monochromy… they suspended me in a fairy tale world, filled by unrealistic trees, tilted architectural structures, enigmatic flags, moved by a soft breeze.

I spent a lot watching them closely, paying attention to every tiny detail, the way he drew women, the absence of clouds, the waves. I would have liked to see thousands of his drawings, from a close distance and with a magnifying glass.

The man who made these drawings died from the wounds caused by the bombing of the hospital during World War II. Only the initials of the artist are reported on the tag, G.R.
I thought that, beside his freedom and eventually his life, this man has also been deprived of his identity. 

I would happily trade any Basquiat or Bacon for one of these jewels.

Maybe this is the hint I’m taking home after the exhibit: normality doesn't exist, individuals do.

Oh. A post scriptum. After some swearing against a slow Internet connection I managed to find out the artist’s name. It is Giuseppe Righi (more here). Here are some other works I found on the net.

As for previous posts, I found all images on the net, if there is a copyright on them, notify me, I will remove them right away.

Art Exhibit in Ravenna - Borderline - Part II

I leave Goya aside, this would really take too much, and stop at Alfred Kubin.
I won't say much. Except "****".
The Nazis called his art "entartete Kunst" (or degenerate art), as for many other artists in that period. I find his works mind-blowing,  they speak to me at a level at which very few artists arrive, his voice is really disturbing, no wonder that a "normalizing" regime as Hitler's sought to mute this kind of free expression.

This artist has been an extraordinary discovery to me (that's why I go to art exhibits!). I had already come across some other "blaue Reiter", maybe I didn't have the "right vision" then, but they left me quite unmoved.

I must also admit that I'm very partial to monochromatic stile.

I love his works, as much as I love Poe, Lovecraft, Hoffmann, Fuseli, Beckford...

More to come...
P.S. A stunning collection of Alfred Kubin's works can be found here.

Art Exhibit in Ravenna - Borderline - Part I

Borderline

17 febbraio - 16 giugno 2013

Museo d'arte della città di Ravenna

Official site


Today I had one of those wonderful moments of idleness, while waiting for another translation project to arrive. So I seized the day.

The MAR, the Ravenna Art Museum, is a really beautiful space; I haven't missed a single one of their exhibits in the last years, they are really rich in content and wonderfully organized. And this one did not let me down either.
The theme is, of course, the thin line separating madness and normality. It featured great names (Basquiat, Dalì, Bosch, Goya, Brueghel, Ligabue), alongside with unknown (at least to me) artists who, as a trait-d'union, have been locked away in lunatic asylums.

In the first room I got literally run over by Bosch's War Elephant. The violence of his reds is overwhelming, assholes become mouths, legs become arms, the war becomes a freakshow. The whole picture is pierced by swords, ladders, spears, all pointing towards it, the man-eating colossus, carrying a tower full of soldiers on its swinging back. You can almost hear the clang of the battle.
Bosch is about details, everyone knows that. Every square inch of any of his works contains a whole world.
Bosch is also about irony, a supreme irony popping up here and there, making the horror even more horrible.