Netsuke

No doubt all of you have heard about such decoration piece as the netsuke. Perhaps you also know the story of it which is dating back to the 17th century Japan and became extremely popular in Europe towards the end of the 19th Century and were sold in many places as novelty items very cheaply.



Usually netsuke is made of Ivory or wood but a variety of other materials also have been used throughout the history, such as ceramic, horn, bone, amber etc. The quality of Netsuke was variable, very often it expressed sexual depictions and symbols referring to different work of Eastern art and literature.



Start as a pocket usage into a sexual giddiness (it’s well known tradition of buying a it to newly married couples) it used as a sexual guide for the older children of wealthy families in Japan and China. So very soon Netsuke became a most popular collectible item all over the world.



For all those who probably be curious, “tentacle porn” art has roots in Japan, appearing first in netsuke pieces, and then in shunga, or erotic art prints, by ukiyo-e Hokusai. For instance this really very thrilling print is titled “The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife” and is dated by 1820.

Love me that is all. Aristide Maillol

If I were asked about the ideal woman and an artist who could create such ideal in art I would call Aristide Maillol as one of those artists who did create the divine one. Woman of Aristide Maillol is a queen, idol, dream or whatever you want, this is the woman you will never confuse with a man, the woman which charms you with all her femininity that make you to lose not only your mind and your feeling of reality but yourself at all. One of the most famouse and my most loved sculpure by Aristide Maillol, I comsider as a hymn of love, is "The River"



Love me like a river does
Cross the sea
Love me like a river does
Endlessly
Love me like a river does
Baby don’t rush you’re no waterfall
Love me that is all
Love me like a roaring sea
Swirls about
Love me like a roaring sea
Wash me out
Love me like a roaring sea
Baby don’t rush you’re no waterfall
Love me that is all
Love me like the earth itself
Spins around
Love me like the earth itself
Sky above below the ground
Love me like the earth itself
Baby don’t rush you’re no waterfall
Love me that is all




Of all the greats in modern sculpture, e.g., Rodin, Giacometti, Picasso, Brancusi, Moore, Manship, there is one figure whose subtle and heroic work left a profound mark on perhaps all sculptors of the early 20th Century. Aristide Maillol is not a household name by any means, yet his work can be viewed in practically every great art museum in the world. In the US, one can view the Frenchman’s art on the sculpture terraces of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, in the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, and at almost every important art destination in between.



Deep within the corners of my mind
I keep a memory of your faces
And I only pull it out when I long for your embrace

Deep within the corners of my mind
I'm haunted by your smile
As it promises me joys like a journey to a tropic isle
It's not hard to see what you do to me
It's like a page right out of fist time wave
Though I try to fight it all the word you write
Leave me standing in the starry robe in some tradjec lovers place

But deep within the corners of my mind
I'm praying secretly that eventually in time
There'll be a place for you and me

That eventually in time
There'll be a place for you and me

There'll be a place for you and me

Deep within the corners of my mind


Beginning his art career at the end of the 19th Century, Maillol determined to join the ranks of the avant garde, first as a decorative artist studying under Alexandre Cabanel (whose voluptuous Birth of Venus hangs famously in the Met in New York), then as a sculptor in the circle of artists who were to contribute to a new chapter in Art History. He was a member of the Nabis (the Hebrew word for “prophet”) artists, who were followers of Gauguin and whose names included Bonnard, Denis, and Vuillard. Maillol participated in the Nabis aesthetic, which strove for pure form and moved away from symbolism and verism. Maillol’s greatest contribution during this period was his single-handed revival of the lost art of tapestry. As an exclusively decorative art, tapestry showed him the way to form for form’s sake, which would become the anthem of early 20th Century art.


Maillol’s first public commission was the Monument to Cézanne (1912-25). This supreme, flying couch of a woman left its mark on 20th Century giants like Picasso (in his classical period which featured giant-limbed, small-headed goddesses no less) and Moore (whose signature style features a bench-like, classically reposed, abstract woman). Monument would be a mother to Maillol’s late period masterpieces like The Mountain (1937), Air (1938), and The River (1938-43). Although undocumented, the clear influence of the great American Deco sculptor Paul Manship is evident in these late works, which each bear characteristics of Manship’s most public of masterpieces: Prometheus in Rockefeller Plaza. Of these, The River is an enigma that will forever leave the book open on Maillol. A reclined, yet animated goddess of a woman is frozen in a kind of mysterious half-exstacy half-torment. At once a Medusa and a languid beauty, this work was based on the idea of a fallen stabbing victim to symbolize the abolition of war. In the end, these polar initiatives become a sublime commingling in art the likes of which the world had not seen since the ancient Laocoon Group of Greece.


all lyrics by Melody Gardot

Tamara De Lempicka

Tamara deLempicka is one of the most famous painters of the art deco period. She was born as Maria Górska in Poland, her father was Boris Gurwik-Górski, a lawyer, and her mother, the former Malvina Decler.




After Poland Maria moved to Russia where stayed until the Bolsheviks arrested her husband Tadeusz Łempicki during the Russian Revolution. After she secured his release they left Russia for Paris. There she enrolled at the Academie de la Grand Chaumiere and studying privately. She was quite a prolific artist (in part facilitated by her spare simple style) and was much sought after as a portrait artist.



At the threat of a second World War, she left Paris for America. She went to Hollywood, to become the "Favorite Artist of the Hollywood Stars". She and her second husband, Baron Raoul Kuffner, one of her earliest and wealthiest patrons, moved into American film director King Vidor's former house in Beverly Hills.



In 1978 she moved to Mexico permanently, buying a beautiful house in Cuernavaca called Tres Bambus, built by a Japanese architect in a chic neighborhood. She despaired of growing old and in her last years sought the company of young people. She mourned at the loss of her beauty and was cantankerous to the end.



Tamara De Lempicka died in her sleep on March 18, 1980 with her daughter Kizette at her side. Her wish to be cremated and have her ashes spread on the top of the volcano Popocatepetl was carried out.

Eric Fischl

Eric Fischl, contemporary painter and sculptor was born in New York City, New York, 1948, educated in California Institute of the Arts and Valencia, California, B.F.A., 1972. Artist lives in New York City and Sag Harbor, New York.










KEN JOHNSON notes, in his short review about Eric Fischl published in NY Times:
"Like the ones in his last show at this gallery, Eric Fischl's curiously repellent paintings are based on his own photographs of hired models behaving like jaded wealthy sophisticates during a daytime love-making session or at home after a late-night party. The middle-aged people in the paintings, who appear in various states of undress, may be talking or arguing about something, but there is a frustrating vagueness about what is going on, and despite the portentously noirish mood, the psychological intrigue is limited."

"...the people he pictures look like the sort you could imagine actually owning Mr. Fischl's paintings. All of this would be more interesting if the imagery were more pointedly defined as social satire or psychosexual drama, and if it didn't look as if Mr. Fischl were congratulating himself with each stroke of his brush. "

Lucien Freud

Lucien Freud is probably one of the most wide known living today painter and figurative artist. He was born in December, 1922, one of three brothers who were brought up in Berlin. He is the grandson of Sigmund Freud. As a youth, Lucian belonged to a gang, roamed the streets, and stole chocolate when dared. Friends of his joined the Hitler Youth because they reported, you got good sausage there. His father was an architect who was prevented from working in Germany in 1933 and who moved his family to England before things in Germany got worse.



I must confess that this artist is not my favorite one, I wouldn't call his art as erotic of course but he has incredible number of followers and fans, that's fact. Then here is some fragments from the book "Lucian Freud" from Lawrence Gowing.


"At the outset there is always a mystery. We cannot know what a painter brought to painting or what drew him to it. Yet everything he paints throughout his life adds to our understanding of one or both these things. When his last picture is painted in that predestined way in which, one cannot help believing, an artist's work, and therefore art, unfolds when the last predestined picture is finished and the trajectory of his meaning completes its curve then we know all there is to be known about these first riddles and understand what can't be known, what remains unknowable about the sources and the resources of a painter.
"This book offers a chance to look at work by Lucian Freud. Generally the sight is not easy to come by, because most of the pictures belong to people, not museums. It is nearly ten years since as many of them as this were shown together. Unlike most noted contemporaries, Freud does not paint museum pictures, though if you come on one in a museum you may never forget it. Large groups of them hang in a few collections; his pictures are sought after and kept at home, as if there was something personal in their significance. This book, in which Freud has taken a large part, is exceptional in another respect. Not only the work but the view of it here (though not the commentary) is his own. Seen through his eyes, the pictures show aspects that are unexpected. In his comparisons, cutting sometimes a little across the order in which they may have been painted, they connect in ways that one had not foreseen. Seen in his context they show more of ... something or other, which one had not noticed, more of a character that is peculiarly his. They not only complement each other; they reveal more of the unpredicted discords that are an elusive element in them. Led by the painter, one is aware at page after page of a residual shock from which familiarity does not shield one. One would not wish that it should. One rather, and shamelessly, prizes the frisson, without particular sentiment for whomever, in what unsparing involvement, inspired it. Familiarity does not shield but sharpens, engaging one more deeply in a relationship that is addictive.

"With modern art in particular one is always considering, or should be if one is not, the shades of indispensability that attach to the surprise. The way that Lucian Freud's world presents itself to him and to us has been inseparable from a chill of incongruity that preserves its particularity, its otherness, as if a coldness in the figurative substance made the visual contact electric and compelling.

"There is always something more or less unexpected in the unfolding of an original artist's work; because few of such people exist at one time we remain unaccustomed to the fact. One is never prepared for the edgy, restless mobility that continually implies something more and different until the artist's last picture has been painted. As I write Freud has just passed his fifty ninth birthday; this concluding and conclusive evidence is a long way off. The latest picture on his easel is as full as any of the peculiar personal momentum that one has known from the beginning, but in every other respect so different that I find myself understanding afresh and differently a condition of private liveliness that was already apparent when I became aware of him more than forty years ago. Apparent and slightly irksome; I was inclined to resent it, and was lately concerned to find that Freud regarded this evidently unconcealed inclination of mine as a positive qualification for writing about him. I first knew this quality of liveliness, for which I should prefer a word that did not suggest animation or wholesomeness, when I think as much of a coiled vigilance and a sharpness in which one could imagine venom (my critical equipment was primitive and my sympathies limited) knew it as a quality of drawing, one that was intrinsic to line and indeed to edges. Freud's view of a subject was marked from the first by a serpentine litheness in the ready, rapid way in which an object was confronted, the object of intellectual curiosity or sociable advantage or desire it was apt then to be all of them at once. A personal flavour that was unlike any one had known was communicating itself to art; it still does. Going to look at the heads in the new picture, I become aware that this uncommon condition is now a condition of the paint, of the material itself and the incomparable alertness with which it is moulded to the experience of people. In the paint itself, through its receptive granulation and equally through its miraculous lack of anything like the approximating mellowness that one had thought endemic to malerisch figuration, one feels the quality of sharpened perception and pointed response that makes one think of the lowered muzzle of some hunting creature, and think with involuntary admiration, unless it is apprehension.

"One may recognize the latest work and the earliest, as well as the successive styles between, as one man's uses for art. That is not to account for them. Painting offers itself unaccounted for, uninterpreted, unexcused. Freud's rather few remarks about art in general set store by the defiantly inexplicable spell that the image arts achieve at their peak. The viable, surefooted, impenetrability of his persona is intended. Again, one is now unaccustomed to a daemon like this in the polite community of the visual arts, but in the past art was full of such people. This is how the young men of the Renaissance must have been, with their eyes on anatomy and the main chance, on the street corners at evening when the botteghe came out and the virgins were hurried indoors. I have been able to confirm rather few even of the relevant details of Lucian Freud's childhood and how he came to painting. There is no evidence for most of the circumstances, least of all the highly coloured ones, that have been described. These myths were not Lucian's myths."

Egon Leo Adolf Schiele

Egon Leo Adolf Schiele, Austrian expressionist, ( 1890-1918). His art is full of erotism even more than Gustav Klimt's works are. Schiele made eroticism one of his major themes and was briefly imprisoned for obscenity in 1912.



His treatment of the nude figure suggests a lonely, tormented spirit haunted rather than fulfilled by sexuality. At first strongly influenced by Klimt, whom he met in 1907, Schiele soon achieved an independent anticlassical style wherein his jagged lines arose more from psychological and spiritual feeling than from aesthetic considerations.

Gustav Klimt

Gustav Klimt (1862 - 1918) was born as the son of a gold and silver engraver in a suburb of Vienna. He had a formal art training at the Vienna School of Decorative Arts. In 1882, Klimt opened a studio of his own with his brother Ernst and Franz Matsch, a fellow student. He specialized on executing mural paintings. He was quite successful from the beginning and received commissions from theaters, museums and other public and semi-public institutions.



In 1897 Gustav Klimt founded with other artists the Vienna Secession and became its first president. By that time Klimt had developed his own and characteristic style, which should became the trademark of the movement. Like impressionism, art nouveau was an International revolt against the traditional academic art style.



Gustav Klimt's style is highly ornamental. The Art Nouveau movement favored organic lines and contours. Klimt used a lot of gold and silver colors in his art work - certainly an heritage from his father's profession as a gold and silver engraver.