John Baldessari is featured on Vogue this week, discussing the formal and thematic concerns he reads in Philip Guston’s Stationary Figure, part of The Met’s new series featuring contemporary artists discussing their favorite works from the museum collection.  “He’s almost a dumb artist, and I’m using dumb in a good way,” Baldessari says.  “It’s seemingly clumsy but very sophisticated brushwork.  I guess it comes out of Van Gogh’s painting of a pair of old boots: you don’t need to paint a cathedral, you just need to be an interesting painter.” (more…)

The BBC looks at the early career of Vincent Van Gogh, and the artist’s decision to enter divinity school in his mid-20’s.  It was during this time that the artist visited the depressed Borinage region, and where his work among the laypeople inspired him to draw and paint.  “The people were poor and illiterate, and their work was hard and dangerous,” says curator Sjraar Van Heugten. “Yet for Van Gogh, there was some kind of bigger truth in their simple way of life. After he became an artist, he chose to find his subject matter there. Like artists that he admired, such as Jean-François Millet, he wanted to portray the life of working-class people, and he remained interested in doing so certainly for the first half of his career.” (more…)

In the midst of a recent “boom” in art funds, The Art Newspaper looks back at André Level’s La Peau de l’Ours, a fund founded in 1904 that purchased works like Picasso’s Les Bateleurs and successfully sold them at markedly higher prices.  The fund was inspired by the 1903 Salon D’Automne, which greatly inspired Level.  “I had seen there the canvases that seemed to me, without the slightest doubt, the authentic art of our time and the near future,” he wrote.  “I believed in it; I had faith.” (more…)

Francis Bacon, Study for a Pope III, (1961), Photograph: © The Estate of Francis Bacon.

In Homage, on view at Skarstedt London through August 8^th, takes as its focus six paintings that embody the elements of inheritance and inspiration that sits at the heart of all creative practice. Francis Bacon, George Condo, Martin Kippenberger, Sigmar Polke, Richard Prince, and Andy Warhol are the featured artists. Each work was chosen for the strong ties it reveals to a predecessor, reflecting the styles or borrowing as subjects the master painters Velázquez, Picasso, Baselitz, Ernst, Goya, Munch, and de Chirico. Relationship is explored both as a stylistic approach and an inevitability of the creative process. (more…)

Martin Kippenberger, Untitled (from the series Raft of the Medusa) (1996), Art Observed

One of the last series of work from Martin Kippenberger, The Raft of the Medusa is nothing if not impressive.  Taking the dramatic tableau of Theodore Géricault’s 19th century work as his inspiration, the artist threw himself body and soul into this series of paintings, drawings, photographs, and even a single tapestry, turning his own body into the fuel for a powerful engagement with the destruction and pathos of the original work.  It’s this inspiration that sits at the center of Skarstedt Gallery’s current show of the series of works, compiling Kippenberger’s sketches and photographs alongside his series of visceral, energetic canvases, which served as the apex of his work in the series.  

Martin Kippenberger, Untitled (from the series Raft of the Medusa) (1996), via Art Observed (more…)

Joan Miró, Sans titre, (n.d).,courtesy Fondation de l’Hermitage

On view at the Fondation de l’Hermitage are 80 seminal works from Joan Miró, on loan from the Foundation Pilar í Joan Miró in Palma, Majorca. The exhibition focuses on the last phase of Miró’s career, when he was able to work with the most freedom in his own workshop and laboratory in the midst of a natural environment.  What followed was a series of loose, spirited works that highlighted a poetic, highly graphic approach to his work that distilled the whimsical forms of his early pieces into a new aesthetic freedom.

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