8 in;

Image | February 2, 2009May 29, 2018 | Paul Greer

“This is the most important painting to come out of Paul Klee‘s trip to Egypt, from mid-December, 1929, to early January, 1930. He visited Luxor, Karnak, Thebes, Aswan, and Cairo. The journey was nearly as great an experience as the earlier one to Tunisia. He must surely have had a fairly clear idea of what he was looking for. It is noteworthy that certain works done long before the journey exhibit similarities to the works inspired by Egypt.”

“The work was painted about six months after his journey. The pictorial ideas were left to mature until the meaning of the incomparable land could be communicated in a way hitherto unknown, until Ka, the land’s very source and substance, had entered into the picture. In this pattern of fields all is order, timeless structure, with a poetic element added – for what could be more poetic than an Egypt born again out of invented means, in twentieth-century creative language?”

Walton Ford

Image | January 12, 2009May 24, 2018 | Paul Greer

‘An enthusiast of the watercolors of Audubon, Ford celebrates the myth surrounding the renowned naturalist-painter while simultaneously repositioning him as an infamous anti-hero who, in reality, killed more animals than he ever painted. Each of Ford’s animal portraits doubles as a complex, symbolic system, which the artist layers with clues, jokes, and erudite lessons in colonial literature and folktales.’

— via Ingoing

“Madame X” by John Singer Sargent

Image | January 11, 2009May 25, 2018 | Paul Greer

“The model was an American expatriate, ((a young socialite named Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau)) who married a French banker, and became notorious in Parisian high society for her beauty and rumored infidelities. She wore lavender powder and prided herself on her appearance. The English-language term “professional beauty” was used to refer to her and to a woman in general who uses personal skills to advance herself socially.[4] Her unconventional beauty made her an object of fascination for artists; the American painter Edward Simmons claimed that he “could not stop stalking her as one does a deer.” Sargent was also impressed, and anticipated that a portrait of Gautreau would garner much attention at the upcoming Paris Salon, and increase interest in portrait commissions.”

“While the work was in progress, Gautreau was enthusiastic; she believed that Sargent was painting a masterpiece. When the painting first appeared at the Paris Salon under the title Portrait de Mme *** in 1884, people were shocked and scandalized; the attempt to preserve the subject’s anonymity was unsuccessful, and the sitter’s mother requested that Sargent withdraw the painting from the exhibition. Sargent refused, saying he had painted her “exactly as she was dressed, that nothing could be said of the canvas worse than had been said in print of her appearance”. Later, Sargent overpainted the shoulder strap to raise it up and make it look more securely fastened. He also changed the title, from the original Portrait de Mme ***, to Madame X – a name more assertive, dramatic and mysterious, and, by accenting the impersonal, giving the illusion of the woman archetype.The poor public and critical reception was a disappointment to both artist and model. Gautreau was humiliated by the affair, and Sargent would soon leave Paris and move to London permanently.”