Genialna, jak dla mnie, perspektywa. Rzeczywiście widoczna fascynacja fotografią.

Więcej prac Caillebotte'a w linku u góry.

18 April 2008 - 10 August 2008

Admission free

This major exhibition captures the excitement of the steam train in art from the earliest days, through the boom years of Victorian railways to the end of the line in the 1960s.

Art in the Age of Steam is the most wide-ranging exhibition yet held to look at how artists responded to the extraordinary impact that steam trains had on landscape and society. It is one of the major highlights of Liverpool’s European Capital of Culture year.

Around 100 paintings, photographs, prints and drawings from some of the world’s greatest art collections come together in a dazzling display including:

“Aboard these great machines, passengers travelled at faster speeds than ever before and notions of time and space were forever changed. Nothing has been done on this scale before – visitors are transported on an exhilarating journey in the company of some of the world’s great artists.” Julian Treuherz, Co-Curator and former Keeper of Galleries at the Walker

Exhibition organised by the Walker Art Gallery, National Museums Liverpool and The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri, USA. The exhibition will be staged at The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art from 13 September 2008 to 18 January 2009.

Daily Telegraph review, 22 April, 2008

The coming of the railways transformed the way people lived - and provided glorious inspiration for artists, photographers and filmmakers. By Richard Dorment

The modern world came into being with a shriek and a rattle and a puff of dirty smoke on the day in 1830 when the first passenger train pulled out of Liverpool on its way to Manchester. The steam engine... changed man's perception of the world and his place in it.

(complete article - many more pics!)

Na pewno spotkaliście się z terminem "artysta jednego przeboju". Występuje on głównie w świecie muzyki, ale pasuje też do innych dziedzin sztuki. Takim artystą jednego malarskiego hitu jest chociażby Gustave Caillebotte.

"Paryska ulica w deszczu" rzuca mnie na kolana. Nie ma wątpliwości, że to deszczowy dzień. Caillebotte przewspaniale ukazał mokrość bruku, parasoli i przede wszystkim chodnika. Gdy tworzył ten obraz był malarzem dopiero od paru lat. Przez resztę życia nie stworzył już jednak nic lepszego, choć warto wspomnieć, że jedno z późniejszych płócien - Mężczyzna na balkonie - poszło w 2000 roku za całkiem niezłą kwotę ponad 14,3 mln dol.

Zapewne patrząc na "Paryska ulicę..." nie dacie wiary, że Caillebotte był jednym z pierwszych impresjonistów. To dlatego, że z reguły malował bardziej realistycznie niż koledzy, a w samej "Paryskiej ulicy..." widać jego fascynację fotografią.

1877, olej na płótnie, 212,2 na 276,2 cm, Art Institute of Chicago (powiększenie)

I’m no music expert, so I’ll just stick to the thing that I love best about the album: Bruce himself, circa the mid 1980s. 

He's it for me. A man who vacillates between homely and comely (depending on the camera angle), and embodies that that streak of guileless, poverty-tinged dignity that is always so easily and successfully romanticized by artists and advertising executives alike. When I listen to that album, it is that quality that entrances me: “Bruce,” that sweetly rough-handed character pouring bravado out of the speakers, takes me to a part of America that is pained and perfect, and sets me into a delicately constructed scene that roils with dust, sex, twilight, and the yearnings of a desperate young man. And, at that moment, I don't give a shit about reality. Some might call that “transportive”—I find it intoxicating.

Obviously, Bruce was easy on the eyes back then (maybe now, too, but that’s a story for another time). He possesses a slight under-bite, and juts a strong jaw forward—imparting a haughty, Peter Pan defiance to his handsome, grown-up face. It’s the face of a man who thinks he’s the messiah: righteous, contrary, but unerringly compassionate, too. The character of his body speaks to a studied, hardened, sexual rusticity. Who cares if it’s character dress? It’s a blue-collar sinewy strength, as dynamic and noble as anything portrayed in Caillebotte’s Raboteurs de Parquet, or Lhermitte’s La paye des moissonneurs.

Sure, it's stagey, and maybe a little contrived, but the imagery is powerful. Somehow, Bruce and the painted working class folk above are more real and productive than the rest of us (and not in a Marxist way). The theme has persisted, I think, because of the freedom it promises to observer; it tells us that, though this life is laden with hard work, kernels of hope and beauty spring from appreciating honest toil. And who better to convey that message than lusty peasantry (including Bruce) themeselves?

The drunken quality of Bruce's voice, though, is what really does it for me. Plain naked passion, made all the more sensually irresistible by a lightly-slurred, swingy twang. Oh, sure, it varies from song to song, but it’s always there. It lays bare the careless sincerity of a heated, aroused heartbreaker too naïve to conceive of his own charms. Bruce is in the moment in those songs, a dramatic poet obsessed with his own dreams and pains, which (let’s face it) only very attractive people can make compelling. Song after song, he churns it out; he’s a consistently magnetic lothario, who men want to be, and who women want to fuck.

I’m not saying it’s high art—but it is beautiful, and hopelessly erotic, and, of course, it is absolutely inspiring.