Teylers Museum does not own 9 drawings by Raphael, but 12. These drawings are Portrait of a Young Man (1515-17), Flying Putto (1518) and Joshua speaks to the Israelite tribal chiefs in Shechem (1516-1518). Earlier, these drawings had been attributed to his pupils. Raphael had a workshop with many students with whom he worked closely for his major contracts, including the world famous “Stanze” in the Vatican.
More than 10,000 images were submitted for the annual Wild Wonders of Europe photography competition last year. Now the judges have made their selections. The winners offer a spectacular glimpse at Europe’s wild beauty.
In the tradition of one of the largest nature photo contests ever undertaken, more than 10,000 images were submitted for the “Wild Wonders of Europe” competition, but only two won the grand prize.
Hobbyists, semi-pro and professional photographers from 27 countries captured pictures of European animals in the wild between August 2010 and November 2011, and the jury chose their favorites this month.
The first-place image in the adult category came from Spaniard José Luis Rodríguez, who managed to photograph nine European Bee-eaters nestled onto a single branch together on a rainy May day. First place in the “Young Crew” youth category, went to 17-year-old Frenchman Quentin Martinez, who went underwater for a unique perspective of a marsh frog paddling along the surface.
“Both images are so colorful and have such an exotic look to them — they could have been taken in Africa or Asia. But no, they are shining examples of the beauty of our natural heritage here in Europe,” said the project’s Media Director Bridget Wijnberg in a statement.
The Wild Wonders of Europe project claims to be the world’s biggest nature photography-based conservation initiative. It began with sending 69 of Europe’s best wildlife photographers to all of Europe’s 48 countries between May 2008 and 2009 to capture images of its diverse natural beauty. It has been followed by annual online photography competitions focused on nature, plants and wildlife since then.
More bee-eater photos (not by José Luis Rodríguez, not entered for the Wild Wonders of Europe competition, not from Spain, but from Portugal) are here; along with other bird photos.
Nikon Corp. canceled its planned photo exhibition of wartime sex slaves for “various reasons,” the major camera maker has announced.
Although Nikon declined to state the specific reasons for the cancellation, a company spokesman admitted it received a number of complaints about the event, which was to be held from June 26 to July 9 at Shinjuku Nikon Salon in Tokyo’s Shinjuku Ward. The photos were taken by South Korean photographer Ahn Sehong.
“We received complaints by mail and telephone, but we cannot comment on how many complaints we got or the nature of the complaints,” said the spokesman, who asked not to be named.
The atrocity has been a major source of diplomatic friction in Asia, especially between South Korea and Japan.
In 1993, Yohei Kono, then chief Cabinet secretary, issued a statement acknowledging the state played a role in the wartime brothel program and offered an apology. But the government has refused to pay individual redress.
The Japan Visual Journalist Association is preparing a statement slamming Nikon for violating freedom of expression, said Takeharu Watai, one of the three representatives of the group.
“This is basically Nikon’s self-censorship. Is it all right for a large corporation like Nikon to permit such a wimpy reaction?” Takei asked.
Nikon called on the public for photos to display at the Shinjuku salon late last year and decided to hold the exhibition of Ahn’s comfort women photos earlier this year, the spokesman said.
On May 21, Internet bulletin boards 2channel and Yahoo Chiebukuro Q&A forum had postings on the event, which had the obvious intention of soliciting protests. The 2channel posts have a phone number and detailed information on Ahn, an Aichi Prefecture resident, and called on others to lodge protests targeting the photographer.
Nikon decided to cancel the photo exhibition the following day, the spokesman said.
Military Sexual Slavery by Japan During the Second World War, a group seeking to raise awareness of the sex slaves, released a statement May 24 that said: “Ahn Sehong does not accept the cancellation of the photo exhibition, which (Nikon) cannot explain the reasons for. The world-renowned Nikon’s reaction damages one photographer’s honor and will be known by the global media.”
In contrast to Nikon’s decision, the city of Yokkaichi, Mie Prefecture, will stick to its plan to hold an exhibition of Ahn’s comfort women photos at a community hall from 2 to 4:30 p.m. on June 10.
“We have received some complaints. But (Ahn) asked to use the hall and we confirmed there is no violation of city ordinances. Thus there is no reason to reject his request,” Yokkaichi official Takuya Sugawa said.
Mummies reveal Egyptians were original cat breeders
Monday 28th May, 2012
The mystery about how cats went from running in the wild to becoming our domesticated furry friend may have been solved after analysing the genetic makeup of Egyptian cat mummies.
The results of a study of DNA from the remains of ritually slaughtered animals found in tombs have suggested that Ancient Egyptians were the first to breed the domestic cats, according to The Sunday Times.
In a paper published in the Journal of Archaeological Science, scientists at the University of California Davis claimed that in order to keep up with the demand of cats as sacrifices to the gods, the Egyptians had large catteries where felines were bred for slaughter, the Daily Mail reported.
The research project, headed by Jennifer Kurushima, a scientist at the University of California Davis, said: “Modern cats can trace their genealogy to the time of the pharaohs. The Egyptians may well have been the first cat breeders, an important step in the domestication process of cats.”
The Egyptians revered cats and it is heavily featured in Ancient Egyptian art as early as 4,000 BC.
They worshiped feline goddesses like Mafdet, the goddess for protection of dangerous animals, who was most commonly depicted as a woman with a lion or cat-head, and more famously Bastet, the cat goddess of beauty, women and fertility.
It was to these two goddesses that the Egyptians sacrificed the ancestors of the modern domesticated cat more than 2,200 years ago.
The aim of the study was to find genetic similarities between the mummified cats and modern cats and wild cats, to work out how long ago humans turned them into pets.
Kurushima and team extracted mitochondrial DNA from three mummified cats found in tombs and compared it with samples from modern wild cats and domestic cats.
“Millions of cat mummies were offered and buried in areas throughout Egypt. To supply the demand for votive offerings, catteries were established to raise large numbers of felines for slaughte,” Kurushima said.
Cats have long been popular household pets not only for their cuddly fur and great companionship.
Their vermin hunting skills led to cats becoming popular as pets in North Africa nearly 4,000 years ago, apart from a period of time in the Middle Ages when they were hunted alongside ‘witches’ and accused of being associated with the devil.
This painting is by seventeenth century Flemish artist Frans Snijders (1579–1657). Called, “The birds’ concert”, it depicts 27 bird species, mainly European, but also some Asian and South American.
The painting is said to be inspired by ancient Greek literature, a story by Aesop. The fable tells about a wise owl addressing a meeting of birds, warning them about dangers, like humans catching birds with glue.
However, the painting is rather about the central owl acting as a conductor for the sound of the various birds around him.
Frans Snijders’ painting inspired other, similar, seventeenth century paintings.
Many people had come for the lecture in the Hermitage museum hall.
De Haan pointed out that Rubens was good at painting many subjects, but not birds. He often left painting birds on his works to others, including Jan Brueghel the Elder; and Frans Snijders.
The eagle on Snijders’ painting is a white-tailed eagle. A bluethroat is depicted as well (after over three centuries, the colour blue on the painting has faded; like with the kingfisher and the jay as well).
A partridge is depicted on a tree. Nico de Haan said 2013 will be the Year of the Partridge in the Netherlands. He said that in nature, partridges will not sit on a tree, like in the painting. Also, the bird species in the painting would not come together in reality.
According to De Haan, it was not so clear which owl species Snijders’ depicted as “conductor”. A long-eared owl?
The birds in the concert do not seem to really like the “conductor”. De Haan joked that, if you transplant the painting to Dutch politics of today, the owl looks like Henk Bleeker, minister in the recently broken-up Rightist Dutch government. Owl “Bleeker” reads out his awful anti-wildlife plans, and the other birds boo him for that.
On the right in the painting, two bitterns. A Bewick’s swan. A female marsh harrier.
Two domestic pigeons.
In the upper left corner, a woodcock. Next to it, a golden oriole. Its colour has faded after centuries. And a jackdaw.
Two hoopoes. Two goldfinches. A blue tit. A bullfinch. A song thrush.
A grey heron and the painting’s only mammal, a bat.
Much of the Hermitage art was once property of the Russian imperial family.
At present, there is an exhibition in the Hermitage in Amsterdam called Rubens, Van Dyck & Jordaens. Flemish painters from the Hermitage.
This video is called Exhibition Rubens, Van Dyck & Jordaens in Hermitage Amsterdam extended to 15 June 2012.
There are 75 paintings and twenty drawings. I saw them on 18 May.
Also Flemish paintings from Saint Petersburg, by painters other than the three famous artists from the exhibition name, are on show there in Amsterdam. Basically, those Flemish paintings have in common that they are from the first half of the seventeenth century. Rubens lived 1577-1640; Anthonie van Dyck 1599-1641; Jacob Jordaens 1593-1678.
That was an interesting revolutionary period in Belgian, Dutch, and European history. It was the second half of the eighty years’ war between the Spanish and Austrian Habsburg monarchs on one side, and the rebels who wanted to break free from the Habsburgs after the revolt against the Spanish king’s economic and religious policies in the 1560s in the Netherlands. So, this exhibition now in Amsterdam brings up questions: of art history, but also of general history.
In this article, I will mainly use “the Netherlands” as authors then used it: not just the present state of that name, but, roughly, present day Belgium (and Luxembourg) as well.
One way to look at that long conflict is to consider it as a conflict between feudalism and the rising bourgeoisie.
Already in the late middle ages, towns and their bourgeois inhabitants were comparatively strong in the western Netherlands: Flanders, Antwerp city in the west of Brabant duchy, Zeeland, Holland.
While the eastern Netherlands (French-speaking Walloon regions, German-speaking eastern Luxembourg, the east of Brabant duchy, Gelderland duchy, Overijssel province) were more conservative, more like much of continental Europe: hierarchical, with the nobility and the high level Roman Catholic clergy more powerful than the towns.
The 1560s revolt against King Philip II of Spain, with its iconoclasm against the rich Roman Catholic church, was especially in the western Netherlands. The bulwark of the townspeople; and of the Protestant religion growing among them.
After defeats in the 1570s, in the 1580s the armies of the Spanish king, now under more able military leadership, starting from the feudal south-east, managed to re-conquer the urban south-west. And the north-east; which, however, they were unable to hold, as the big rivers through the central Netherlands were a military obstacle.
So, the military frontier between the Spanish monarchy and the new Dutch republic became not an east-west divide, but a north-south divide, more or less along the present border between Belgium and the Netherlands.
That was bad news for rebels in the south, many of whom fled to the north. In some Dutch cities in Holland county, the majority of inhabitants now consisted of refugees from the Spanish occupied Netherlands. This contributed to Amsterdam city becoming the commercial capital of Western Europe soon.
Previously in the sixteenth century, that had been Antwerp. When the Spanish forces conquered Antwerp, that was a disaster for that prosperous city. About half the people fled to the northern Netherlands (or to Protestant towns in Germany, like the family of painter Rubens). And for those who stayed in Antwerp, income went down. As the war continued, and the estuary of the Scheldt river, on which Antwerp trade depended, was in rebel northern hands.
The artists Rubens, Van Dyck and Jordaens had in common that they all worked in Antwerp during that time. In 1609, a twelve years’ truce between the independent and the Spanish Netherlands started. Which meant some economic recovery, and some more possibilities for artists, in Antwerp. Those artists, however, had to recognize the victory of the Spanish monarchy, of the feudal old order, in the southern Netherlands, including Antwerp. The Roman Catholic church needed many new altar paintings after the 1560s iconoclasm, for its counter-reformation propaganda.
As for the position of an artist like Rubens in the southern Netherlands, compared to an artist like Rembrandt in the north, I will now paraphrase from an earlier blog post.
At an exhibition in The Hague, one exhibit made a visual statistic comparison between the paintings of Rubens and Rembrandt.
They spoke the same language, Dutch, and lived in what was still seen as the seventeen united provinces of the Low Countries.
With both the bourgeois republicans who in Rembrandt’s and Rubens‘ days ruled the north, and the Habsburg monarchs who ruled the south, at least initially still hoping to unite all seventeen provinces under their own rule.
Nevertheless, the statistics of the various categories of subjects in Rubens’ and Rembrandt’s artistic productions show significant differences between the two artists.
Differences in artistic views between two individuals, doubtlessly.
But also differences showing how different socially and politically Rubens’ South and Rembrandt’s North had become since the Dutch revolt against the Roman Catholic Spanish absolute monarchy had started in the 1560s.
These are the figures; percent of total works by Rubens and Rembrandt:
Altar paintings: Rubens 15%, Rembrandt 0%
Biblical paintings, not commissioned by a church: Rubens 20%, Rembrandt 20%
Scenes from daily life and landscapes: Rubens 10%, Rembrandt 5%
While Rubens was originally from a Protestant, rebel, and refugee Antwerp family, and made his peace with the Roman Catholic Church and the monarchy later, Rembrandt’s views are closer to the republican Dutch revolt.
The figures show that Rembrandt, contrary to Rubens, made zero altar paintings.
In the northern low countries, the newly established Protestant church did not commission them.
Neither did the Roman Catholic church, now on the margins of legality.
If we put both Christian religious categories together, 20% of Rembrandt’s paintings fitted in the “Christian” category, vs. 35% of Rubens’.
Rembrandt himself was not an official member of any church, and was free to do that in “tolerant” Amsterdam.
The Bible was interesting to him as a source of subjects, but over all, religion did not play as big a role in his work as in Rubens’.
Rembrandt painted far less historical and mythological paintings than Rubens.
In countries other than the Dutch Republic, these types of paintings often made complimentary allusions to contemporary princes and nobles, and/or were often commissioned by them.
In The Netherlands, there was no monarchical court comparable to this.
Which would have liked very much to be a princely court like elsewhere in Europe; but constitutionally wasn’t.
Rembrandt got one commission from the princely court (princely, as the Stadhouders were also absolute monarchs in the tiny statelet of Orange in southern France).
The Hermitage Amsterdam exhibition notes that Stadhouder Frederik Hendrik prefered painters from the feudal southern Netherlands, though that region was the military enemy, to “bourgeois” northern painters like Rembrandt. He also prefered Gerard van Honthorst to Rembrandt as a painter of portraits of his wife. Honthorst was not from the Spanish occupied, southern Netherlands. However, his home province Utrecht in the central Netherlands was less bourgeois rebellious than Rembrandt’s Holland. And Honthorst had spent much time in feudal Italy.
Nevertheless, if compared to Rubens, Rembrandt painted many more portraits.
Not commissioned by princes or nobles, but by the newly emerged bourgeoisie. Dutch art historian Bert Biemans who studied the economic side of seventeenth century Dutch art, estimates that a million paintings were painted then in the Netherlands. Many, compared to other countries then. As the Dutch bourgeoisie who might buy art bought comparatively more than mainly upper class people in other countries.
That Rembrandt painted so many more portraits than Rubens may be a sign of a stronger bourgeoisie; and of stronger individualism in the northern low countries.
Rubens, Van Dyck and Jordaens, like Rembrandt, were from “bourgeois” families. However, Antwerp bourgeois, including artists, if they wanted to survive, unlike Rembrandt, had either to become refugees or to accept a social order in which nobles and Roman Catholic clergy were of higher rank than them. Here, one can also see differences between the three individuals. Rubens, being both a successful painter and a diplomat, managed to climb on the social ladder. So did Van Dyck, whom the king of England knighted not so long before the English revolution upset the old order in ways similar to the sixteenth century Dutch revolt. Jordaens, from an affluent merchant family, sold his works to fellow bourgeois, not to the church or the nobility. Except for the court of Stadhouder Frederik Hendrik: a princely-feudal enclave in the northern bourgeois republic.
Under the Guatemalan jungle, 1,200-year-old paintings like no others.
Erik Vance in Xultún, Guatemala
for National Geographic News
Published May 10, 2012
In the last known largely unexcavated Maya megacity, archaeologists have uncovered the only known mural adorning an ancient Maya house, a new study says—and it’s not just any mural.
In addition to a still vibrant scene of a king and his retinue, the walls are rife with calculations that helped ancient scribes track vast amounts of time. Contrary to the idea the Maya predicted the end of the world in 2012, the markings suggests dates thousands of years beyond that.
“The paintings we have here—we’ve never found them anyplace else,” excavation leader William Saturno told National Geographic News.
And in today’s Xultún—to the untrained eye, just 12 square miles (31 square kilometers) of jungle floor—it’s a wonder Saturno’s team found the artwork at all.
For the first time in five years, the Van Gogh Museum has purchased a work by Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890). The watercolour Pollard willow is a major addition to the museum’s collection. Director Axel Rüger comments: ‘This specific work was on the museum’s wish list as a major potential purchase, because it is one of the most representative watercolours from Van Gogh’s period in The Hague, and until now, there was a gap in our collection here.
Van Gogh made this work in the Hague when he was a pupil of Anton Mauve.
These two exhibitions are curated from the archive of Albert Adams, who was born in South Africa in 1929 and died in 2007.
Adams‘s father was Hindu and his mother was designated by the state as “Cape coloured.” He lived with his mother, a domestic worker, after parental separation.
As a young black man, he was barred from art school and worked as a sign writer.
But he attended art classes and eventually was encouraged to look abroad for art training.
In 1953 he won a scholarship to the Slade School of Fine Art in London and never returned to his native land.
“I think the most difficult question to be answered by anyone is ‘Who am I?” he later said. “I have never regarded myself as an exile, although South African born and raised.
Adams went onto study with Oscar Kokoschka in Salzburg but his work was ultimately influenced by, among others, Goya, Picasso and Frances Bacon.
He worked at City University in London and his work was exhibited across the world, from Yugoslavia to Brazil.
A gifted expressionist painter and printmaker Adams never forgot his background, memorably demonstrated in the painting South Africa 1959 which became known as the “South African Guernica.”
In the collection The Burden Adams explores his own identity. There are pictures of him as a young man, as well as the artifacts such as African and Asian artworks that influenced his paintings and reflected his own Indian background.
Adams was a political artist and Incarceration documents his response to war, torture and human rights abuses. They range from Robben Island, where his family were imprisoned, to Abu Ghraib.
Adams donated over 150 of his paintings and prints to Salford University and these two shows are drawn from them. The exhibition will tour nationally next year and it’s highly recommended.
Incarceration runs at the Working Class Movement Library until June 29. Free. Opening times: (0161) 736-0161. The Burden runs at The Clifford Whitworth Library, University of Salford, until June 3. Opening times: (0161) 295-2444.
Since the late 19th-century invention of cheap reprographic printing processes, artists have grappled with the dilemma of making their works relevant to a public already inundated with sophisticated, mostly photographic, mass-media imagery.
In the aftermath of WWI, most artists still disdained or competed with photography. But the communist artist John Heartfield embraced it, so pioneering photomontage in Germany. Committing his talent to the political struggle he understood that photographic imagery and cinema were popular with the masses because they expressed the complexities of modernity in a visually accessible way.
Using satire, humour and visual wit he appropriated and then subverted the mass media’s processes and forms in order to expose the reactionary obfuscations and lies of its messages.
Heartfield amazed his public by juxtaposing separate realities, manipulating scales and using trick photographic techniques such as double exposure and X-ray and added text to convey precise meanings as succinctly as poetry.
By bringing together separate realities he created new ones which revealed the truth.
The ironically captioned This Is The Salvation That They Bring from 1938, protesting at nazi aerial bombings in Spain, transmutes the skeletal fingers of an X-rayed hand into tail smoke from war planes, beneath which lie ruined buildings and murdered children.
Some such as The Spirit Of Geneva (1932), in which the dove of peace is sliced dead by a bayonet, have become iconic. First produced in protest at the shooting of demonstrating workers in Geneva, home of the League of Nations, he reused the motif in East Germany under the slogan Never Again in 1960 and with a poem for peace in 1967.
Rejecting the bourgeois notion of art as a unique commodity, Hearfield’s images were widely dispersed in posters, book jackets, pamphlets and magazines, using mass printing technology.
Probably his most famous works are those for the communist magazine AIZ – the Workers Illustrated Paper – for which he produced montages, sometimes weekly, between 1930 and 1938. A number of them were also flyposted as posters.
Art world legend relates that as a political refugee in Britain during WWII, Heartfield offered his work to the Tate Gallery but they rejected it saying it was not art. Although long acknowledged as a giant of 20h-century art by graphic designers, he is still not accorded this status by the dominant art history narrative.
It is a delight that an entire room of his work is currently on loan to Tate Modern from a private collection. Because this is a free “display” rather than a paying exhibition it has not been hyped by the media and it’s really not to be missed.
In the 1960s the discovery of photomontage by Heartfield and the Soviet Constructivists enabled Peter Kennard to find his voice as a politically committed socialist artist. Photomontages such as his poster showing a cruise missile breaking against the CND logo are well known on the left.
Since 2003 he has collaborated with Cat Phillipps and they now work as a collective under the name kennardphillipps. Like Heartfield, they engage directly with capitalist mass media to subvert its pernicious deceptions.
The series The War You Don’t See uses the same hand-crafted photomontage technique as Heartfield. In some the very “crudity” of this approach – one now unfamiliar to younger artists used to slick digital image manipulation – adds visual punch to the message and implies a critical attitude to expensive electronic media.
Yet their video and digitally printed protest banner shows that they do embrace electronic processes. They use them but refute their tyranny. Their large wall pieces marry digital printing processes with the handcrafted to create tactile, fragile surfaces made from glued layers of newspapers, overprinted and painted.
From afar, George Bush A Portrait (2007) shows a photograph of the president. But seen close-to we discover that this image is digitally printed onto a surface made up of faded sheets of the Houston Chronicle with its inane capitalist content.
Parts of this are ripped to reveal the Arabic newspaper beneath, its coloured images exposing the savagery, torture and destruction which the US inflicted on Iraq and its people.
The Iraqi artist Hanaa´ Malallah’s works are born of direct experience of the war.
Her aesthetically seductive wall hangings and sculptures reveal their message subtly. Small pieces of thin, frayed canvas are scorched, burned and torn, so evoking the destruction, insecurity and fear which war brings.
But they are then patiently stitched, stuffed, interwoven with string and pasted together so asserting the resilience, tenacity and will of her people to survive and rebuild.
Iraq: How, Where, For Whom? runs until June 8, free. Opening times: (020) 7370-9990. John Heartfield runs at Tate Modern until the end of December 2012, free. Opening times: (020) 7887-8000.
The ironically captioned This Is The Salvation That They Bring from 1938, protesting at 
