All About Beauty

[tanyaluca]

Soul Self Portrait...

Tanya Luca

[tanyaluca]

Summer Sky…

Tanya Luca

[tanyaluca]

Eternal Beauty…🤍

Tanya Luca

[art-mirrors-art]

Antonie Wierix II, after design by Maerten de Vos - Susanna and the Elders (c. 1580) and detail with a mirror:

[art-mirrors-art]

Kyung Min Nam - Looking at the Van Gogh's Window in the Hockney's Room (2005) RIP David Hockney

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MWW Artwork of the Day (5/18/26) Leonardo da Vinci (Florentine, 1452-1519) Virgin of the Rocks (c. 1503-06) Oil on panel, 189.5 x 120 cm. National Gallery, London

The picture substitutes a motif popular in Florence for the image normally required by Franciscan patrons promoting the doctrine of Mary's Immaculate Conception: a Virgin without the Child, shown standing among prophets holding texts taken to refer to her exemption from Original Sin. In the Virgin of the Rocks the infant Baptist, sheltering under Mary's cloak, venerates the Christ Child in a cool, watery wilderness. The artist's Milanese clients must have worried about confusing the two infants, for a later hand has given John an identifying scroll and a cross clumsily rooted in one of Leonardo's exquisite studies of plants.

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MWW Artwork of the Day (5/19/26) Egon Schiele (Austrian, 1890–1918) Mutter mit zwei Kindern (Die Mutter)(1917) Oil on canvas, 150 x 160 cm. Österreichische Galerie Belvedere, Vienna

The "expressionist" painter Egon Schiele was regarded by many of his contemporaries as the predestined successor to Gustav Klimt, but, like many of his generation, he died before he could fulfil his promise. That he had great talent is unquestionable; that he made the best use of it in his short life is open to debate, as his work often transgressed the limits of good taste and sanity. To understand his character, which was in small part fascinating but largely less than admirable, we have to go back to is early life.

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MWW Artwork of the Day (5/20/26) Aristide Maillol (French, 1861–1944) Desire (1906-08) Tinted plaster relief sculpture, 119.1 x 114.3 x 12.1 cm. The Museum of Modern Art, New York (Gift of the artist)

Maillol first intended to become a painter and went to Paris in 1881, where he lived in extreme poverty. In 1900 Maillol began work on his first major sculpture, a "Seated Woman" for which his wife posed, which was later named "La Méditerranée." The first version (New York, MOMA), finished in 1902, was very close to his model. He noted, however, that it was not sufficient ‘to have a model and to copy it. No doubt nature is the foundation of an artist’s labours…. But art does not lie in the copying of nature’

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MWW Artwork of the Day (5/25/26) Peter Fendi (Austrian, 1796-1842) The Sad Message (1838) Oil on wood, 37 x 30 cm. Historisches Museum der Stadt Wien, Vienna

Nowadays, when Memorial Day for most Americans means a trip to the beach or mall, it's useful to remind ourselves that it originated as a day of mourning for those soldiers, North and South, who had fallen in a bloody civil war. Peter Fendi was an Austrian, not an American, artist -- and a minor one at that -- and had been dead a couple of decades before the Battle of Gettysburg took place. But some aspects of war know not the restrictions of time or place, and Fendi manages to capture here perhaps the most poignant moment of any conflict -- the one in which someone has to tell someone else that a loved one has perished.

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MWW Artwork of the Day (5/26/26) Pablo Picasso (Spanish, 1881-1973) The Visit Two Sisters Oil on panel, 152 x 100 cm. The Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg

Picasso painted this large work in the summer of 1902 in Barcelona. It is one of the most important items of his Blue Period, when the tragic mood of monochrome blue and bluish-green came to determine the whole structure of his paintings. In its static, symbolic nature, the composition recalls monumental religious art, summoning up direct associations with representations of the meeting of the Virgin Mary and the ageing Elizabeth, mother of John the Baptist, and with the ascetic figures of medieval mourners. The women seem to form a human arch, an architectural entrance to a mysterious, cosmically endless world.

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MWW Artwork of the Day (5/29/26) Henri Rousseau (French, 1844-1910) The Sleeping Gypsy (1897) Oil on canvas, 129.5 x 200.7 cm. The Museum of Modern Art, New York (Gift of Mrs. Simon Guggenheim)

As a musician, the gypsy in this painting is an artist; as a traveler, she has no clear social place. Lost in the self-absorption that is deep, dreaming sleep, she is dangerously vulnerable -— yet the lion is calmed and entranced. "The Sleeping Gypsy" is formally exacting —- its contours precise, its color crystalline, its lines, surfaces, and accents carefully rhymed. Rousseau plays delicately with light on the lion's body.

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MWW Artwork of the Day (6/1/26) Caspar David Friedrich (German, 1774-1840) The Wanderer (Traveller looking over a Sea of Fog)(1818) Oil on canvas, 94.8 x 74.8 cm. Kunsthalle, Hamburg

In this quintessially Romantic painting a lonely figure on a mountaintop confronts nature in astonished reverence. Friedrich's figures habitually turn their backs to gaze into the horizon or stare from windows with rapt attention. His Wanderer, frock-coated and stick in hand, has climbed to a rocky peak above swirling mountain mists; the viewer looks with his eyes, the angle of vision being exactly aligned to their level in the picture space. The foreground, the conventional plateau to give the viewer a fix on the subject, has been entirely dispensed with.

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MWW Artwork of the Day (6/2/26) Gustave Caillebotte (French, 1848-1894) Paris Street; Rainy Day (1877) Oil on canvas, 212.2 x 276.2 cm. The Art Institute of Chicago (Charles & Mary Worcester Collection)

Relying on draftsmanship more than on texture or color, in "Paris Street; Rainy Day" Caillebotte created a composition that combines apparent spontaneity with precise choreography. Each well-dressed couple or individual strolls in a different direction, avoiding eye contact; no narrative incidents result from their random proximity. Yet the figures do relate to one another formally, for their glances, postures, and relative sizes all complement and reinforce the converging diagonals that dictate the painting’s perspective.

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MWW Artwork of the Day (6/4/26) Johannes Vermeer (Dutch, 1632-1675) The Astronomer (c. 1668) Oil on canvas, 50 x 45 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris

In order to imbue a sense of order and permanence to his images of momentary events, Vermeer carefully bound together the pictorial elements of his canvases. In the "Astronomer," two distinct realities of the work are brought into relation, its perspective construction (which creates illusion of depth) and the painting's rectangular flatness, the so-called picture plane. In the diagram to the right, we can see that the geometrical center of the painting (indicated by the point where the two yellow diagonals cross) and the vanishing point (indicated by the point where all the light gray perspective orthogonals meet), in fact, fall precisely on the same point.

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MWW Artwork of the Day (6/9/26) Édouard Manet (French, 1832-1883) The Balcony (c. 1868-69) Oil on canvas, 169 x 128 cm. Musée d'Orsay, Paris

When Manet painted this piece, scenes of bourgeois life were in vogue. Yet "The Balcony" went against the conventions of the day. All the subjects were close acquaintances of the artist, especially Berthe Morisot who here, pictured sitting in the foreground, makes her first appearance in Manet's work, and who went on to become one of his favorite models. The painting tells no story or anecdote; the protagonists are frozen, as if isolated in an interior dream, evidence that Manet was freeing himself from academic constraints, despite the obvious reference to Goya's "Majas at the Balcony."

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MWW Artwork of the Day (6/12/26) Paul Cézanne (French, 1839-1906) Young Italian Woman at a Table (c. 1895-1900) Oil on canvas, 92.1 x 73.5 cm. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles CA

Leaning on a fabric-covered table and resting her head in her hand, this young woman looks out with an enigmatic expression. Since the Renaissance, artists have used this pose to portray melancholy. The pose, combined with her hauntingly unreadable face, gives a human poignancy and psychological tension to the figure. Juxtaposing bold, individual strokes of color, Paul Cézanne built up the woman's powerful physical presence and the space she occupies.

[i-love-this-art]

Leo Gestel / "The Flirtation" / ab. 1910 / Private collection