Art
Galleries visited, exhibitions loved, and the occasional attempt of my own. Here are some paintings I never get tired of:
A woodblock print from Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, made when Hokusai was around seventy. Its deep blue came from Prussian blue pigment, newly imported into Japan, and the image went on to become one of the most reproduced artworks in history — look closely and Mount Fuji is the small peak under the wave.
Painted in June 1889 from the window of his room at the asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence; the village below is partly imagined. Van Gogh himself wasn't convinced by it — today it anchors the collection at MoMA in New York.
The icon of German Romanticism. Friedrich turns his subject away from us — the Rückenfigur — so we stand inside the painting, contemplating the sublime with him. A painting philosophy students never stop putting on book covers. It hangs in the Hamburger Kunsthalle.
Not a portrait but a tronie — a study of a face in costume. Almost nothing is known about the sitter, which is half the magic. Often called the Mona Lisa of the North; it lives at the Mauritshuis in The Hague.
Munch described walking at sunset when "the sky turned blood red" and he sensed "an infinite scream passing through nature." He made several versions in paint and pastel; this one hangs in the National Museum in Oslo.
Likely Lisa Gherardini, wife of a Florentine merchant, painted with Leonardo's smoke-soft sfumato. It was admired but not world-famous until 1911, when a museum worker stole it from the Louvre — the theft made it the most recognized painting on Earth.
The peak of Klimt's Golden Phase, with real gold leaf worked into the robes. The Austrian state bought it before it was even finished; it has never left Vienna's Belvedere since.
Painted for the Medici family — unusually on canvas rather than wood panel — reviving the classical nude a millennium after antiquity. At the Uffizi in Florence.
A group portrait of an Amsterdam militia company that Rembrandt turned into a scene of motion and drama. It is actually a daytime scene — centuries of darkened varnish earned it the wrong name. At the Rijksmuseum.
The harbor of Le Havre at dawn. A critic mocked the title — "Impression!" — and accidentally named the entire Impressionist movement. At the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris.
Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time – Thomas Merton