ArtDelineo

24/03/2026

"Sándorfi István 1948-ban született Budapesten. Családjával az 1956-os szovjet megszállás idején kényszerült elhagyni Magyarországot. Az emigráció első állomása Németország volt, majd Franciaországban telepedtek le véglegesen. Tízéves kora óta Párizsban élt, tizenkét évesen kezdett festeni. Kivételesen korai művészi érettségéről tanúskodik, hogy első önálló kiállítását mindössze tizenhét évesen rendezte meg a párizsi Galerie Jeune-ben. A tárlaton elsősorban szürreális olajfestményeket mutatott be; csendéleteit meghökkentő módon belső szervekből, belekből komponálta, már ekkor jelezve művészetének radikális, a konvenciókat kérlelhetetlenül megkérdőjelező irányát. Ezzel párhuzamosan művészeti tanulmányait a párizsi École des Beaux-Arts, majd az École des Arts Décoratifs intézményeiben folytatta, ahol klasszikus alapokon nyugvó képzésben részesült. Az 1970-es évektől kezdve Sándorfi festészete egyre erőteljesebb visszhangra talált, munkái iránt fokozódó kommerciális érdeklődés mutatkozott, galériák keresték meg és állították ki festményeit. 1973-ban a Musée d’art Moderne de Paris nagyszabású kiállításra hívta meg." - részlet Makláry Kálmán: Brutális intenzitás és meghökkentő realitás: Sándorfi festészete című tanulmányból

10/10/2025

"He was only an eye -- but what an eye!" -- Paul Cézanne on Claude-Oscar Monet (1840-1926)

The first of three MWW exhibits of Monet's works. The paintings cover the period from 1858 through 1879, the year of his wife's death, and appear roughly in the order in which they were created.

Born Oscar-Claude Monet in Paris on 10 November 1840, Monet moved with his family to Le Havre at the age of five. His early work as a a caricaturist (ca. 1856) drew the attention of the painter Eugene Boudin, who, along with J.B. Jongkind, first convinced Monet of his vocation as an open-air landscape painter. Monet met Jongkind in 1862 while studying in the atelier of academic painter Charles Gleyre (1806-1874). Monet produced his first significant works in 1864, which were exhibited in the Salon the following year.

Throughout the second half of the 1860s Monet worked closely with a group of young painters whom he had also met in Gleyre's atelier: Frédéric Bazille (1841-1870), Auguste Renoir, and Alfred Sisley. Drawing on a wide range of precedents in recent, naturalistic French painting -- particularly the work of Courbet, Corot, and the Barbizon school of landscape -- the young artists painted landscapes, still lifes, and figurative works, employing a frank, direct manner of paint application. Like the previous generation of open-air landscape painters, they occasionally worked in the Forest Fontainebleau, where Monet began the immensely ambitious "Déjeuner sur l'herbe," a response to Manet's famous work of the same title of 1863. Monet would never complete this painting, which was to be a monumental (4 x 6 m.) merging of open-air techniques with a portrayal of modern types, gestures, and dress (two large fragments are in Paris, Musée d'Orsay, and a large, final sketch is in Moscow, Pushkin Museum). Monet's next major work, the "Women in the Garden," was rejected from the Salon of 1867, the year of Monet's first paintings of Paris. The Paris works were quickly followed by another group of successful landscapes with figures, executed in the fashionable resorts of the Normandy coast.

In the 1870s Monet became a leading member of the Impressionist group. In 1883 he settled in Giverny, about fifty miles west of Paris, where he lived for the rest of his life. During the 1890s, after his second marriage and the purchase of the property at Giverny, he began to develop extensive flower and water gardens, which he first painted in the late 1890s with a series devoted to a Japanese bridge, and which became his chief subject for the rest of his life.

See also, the other two MWW Monet exhibits:
* Monet II: Impressionism on Steroids (1880-99)
* Monet III: Tending to One's Own Garden (1900-26)

23/09/2025

As Arctic sea ice disappears, seals are losing the platforms they need to rest, raise pups, and survive.

Norway has stepped in — not with campaigns, but with craftsmanship. Engineers have created floating ice pods designed to replace the vanishing habitat.

They're made from biodegradable, non-toxic materials. Insulated to stay cold under the Arctic sun. Grooved to keep seals from slipping. Some even carry sensors to monitor populations.

For seal pups, these pods mean life instead of death. For adults, they reduce the strain of finding safe ground in a warming ocean.

This isn’t just design — it’s intervention. When nature loses ground, survival becomes an act of construction.

22/09/2025

N.B. In response to Facebook's new censorship policies and the potential threat of deletion of our account about a dozen photographs which originally were included in this gallery have been removed. They do not consider photography an art.

Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946) is universally acknowledged as "the father of modern photography" -- the man who more than anyone else made it an art form. Less appreciated is the role he played in spearheading the modern art movement in America through his path-breaking Studio 291. Over the course of four decades he shepherded and promoted dozens of prominent photographers (Steichen, Strand, etc.) and painters (Marin, Dove, Hartley, etc.). He even married his most talented protegée, Georgia O'Keeffe, who also happened to be his favorite photographic model. This first of the galleries in the "MWW Great Photographers" series in devoted to him.

Stieglitz was a founder of the Photo-Secessionist and Pictorialist photography movements in the United States and promoted them in "Camera Notes" and "Camera Work," the influential journals that he founded and edited. His early photographs were Pictorialist in style. His late work focused in depth on a few subjects, including New York City, the cloud studies that he called "Equivalents," and a portrait series of his wife, the painter Georgia O'Keeffe. This gallery includes a representative sample of his photographs from each of these periods.

Except for the last section, the photographs in this gallery are presented in the chronological order of their creation. The commentaries that accompany the photographs of Stieglitz himself constitute a running biography for those interested in learning more about the man. All the portraits of others also include biographical about the person portrayed. Many of the other photos also include background comments. (To read these, click "See More" in the box that appears to the right of the full-screen image.)

The final section of this gallery presents a selection of over seventy of the Georgia O'Keeffe photos. Stieglitz's famous photographic cycle of O'Keeffe began in 1917 when she was thirty years old and he was fifty-three, and ended in 1937 when ill-health caused Stieglitz to put down his heavy camera. In over 300 black-and-white photographs —- some of them candid shots, many more of them showing her n**e and provocatively posed —- Stieglitz revealed to the world O'Keeffe's strengths and vulnerabilities, and almost single-handedly defined her public persona for generations to come. It's not only a remarkable "portrait of an artist" but also an intimate study of the maturation of a woman and, given their relationship, a true "labor of love." Check it out.

Other entries in the "MWW Great Photographers" series include:
* #2 - Edward Steichen
* #3 - Dorothea Lange
* #4 - Brassai
* #5 - Paul Strand
* #6 - Ansel Adams
* #7 - Imogen Cunningham
* #8 - Man Ray
* #9 - Edward Weston & Tina Modotti
* #10- Henri Cartier-Bresson
* #11- Yousuf Karsh
* #12- Robert Capa
* #13- Walker Evans & the FSA Photographers
* #14- Richard Avedon
* #15- Sebastião Salgado
* #16- Eugène Atget & Berenice Abbott

25/07/2025

Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-1669), generally considered to be the greatest artist of his century, owes his fame mainly to his many masterful paintings, prints and drawings depicting events from the Bible. In his own day, however, what paid the rent were the portraits he painted.

During the 17th c., as a consequence of Holland's rise to the leading position in the rapidly expanding Capitalist World System, gold flowed into the small nation in unprecedented amounts, enriching not only the big merchants but the petty bourgeoisie as well. Unlike the analogous situation when the U.S. became the center of World Capitalism after WWII, there weren't a lot of investment opportunities for this new-found wealth -- no stock market, appliances, automobiles, real estate to absorb the money. So the middle classes invested in paintings: good for their status, don't take up much space, and possibly they'll go up in value. As the demand rose, so did the supply of painters to meet it. For every painter of talent there were, as might be expected, a hundred hacks. The new buying public wasn't too discriminating in its taste either: if the portrait resembled what they thought they looked like, they were satisfied.

Ironically, the portraits for which Rembrandt is today remembered are mostly portraits of civic groups like "The Night Watch" and "The Syndics of the Drapers' Guild." These types of portraits paid handsomely, but Rembrandt didn't get many commissions for them, making his living mainly from painting individual portraits. Painters were also craftsmen, and craftsmen were used to working cheap. So, if Rembrandt wanted 50 florins, and the hack down the street would take 49, they went to the hack. Rembrandt's style wasn't considered "classical" enough for the toney fellows who made the big commissions, like the Town Hall, so he relied mainly of portraits of the middle class for income. He even ran a "painting factory" of sorts, letting a dozen or so employees handle the routine stuff under his supervision. Either he was a horrible businessman, or the economic cards were stacked against him, for he seems to have been perpetually in debt.

This gallery includes all the portraits, individual or group, that can be attributed to Rembrandt or his studio. As is the custom with all MWW galleries, the works are presented in chronological order and the majority are accompanied by commentaries. (Click "See More" to the right of the full-screen image to access these.)

For more Dutch art see also these MWW exhibits:
* Dutch Masters I: The Rise to Prominence (1600-1648)
* Dutch Masters II: Age of Great Genre Painters (1640-1685)
* Dutch Masters III: An Embarrassment of Riches (1650-1720)
* Vermeer - All the Paintings
* Rembrandt van Rijn: Light and Shadow
* Frans Hals -- All the Paintings
* the five Van Gogh galleries
* M.C. Escher: The Early Works
* The Topsy-Turvy World of M.C. Escher

24/05/2025

RIP

01/03/2025

01/03/2025