Academic and Illustration Museums

I was trying to compile a list of museums, and I wonder if you can help me. I'm looking for museums with an especially good selection of 19th century academic realism, fantasy or science fiction artwork, or golden age American illustration, where the collection is usually on display, not locked in the basement.


Here's what I've got so far:

Brandywine River Museum, Chadds Ford, PA
Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington, Delaware
Haggin Museum, Stockton, California
Metropolitan Museum, New York, New York
Musee d’Orsay, Paris, France
National Museum of American Illustration, Newport, Rhode Island
New Britain Museum, New Britain, Connecticut
Norman Rockwell Museum, Stockbridge, Massachusetts
Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts
Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, Maryland

Please let me know if I've missed your favorite museum, specifically for this type of artwork.

Art By Committee: Banana Tree

The 15th of the month is the day for a group sketch game called "Art by Committee." I share an excerpt from a science fiction story and you visualize it.

This month's quote was: “I lashed out with my left arm, clutched at something thin and hard, tore at it; the next second a banana tree fell across my chest. But the pain was…”

This assignment was quite specific, but at the same time completely strange. As always, each of you gave it a clever, memorable twist. Thanks for participating!



Dave Harshberger
Image/Blog


"Mei-Yi Chun"
Image


Andy Wales
Image/Blog

Roberta Baird
Image
Website


Andy SketchEAS
Image/Blog


Michael Geissler.
Image
Blog


Marisa Bryan
Image


...and the one from the original Art By Committee sketchbook (click to enlarge).



The next quote for April is:
“Behind the bar, polishing four glasses at the same time with his blue tentacles, was the Tookah. Two of his three eyes didn’t bother to look up, but it was the third one, the upper eye, the sleepy one that appears bored by everything but never misses anything. That one sleepily looked over at me and then blinked and opened wide.”

Have fun! Please scale your JPG to 300 pixels across and compress it as much as possible. Title it with your name, send it to: jgurneyart(at)yahoo.com, subject line ABC. Please let me know in your email the full URL of the link to a larger image or your blog or website so people can see your image in all its glory and learn more about your non-Tookah work. Please have your entries in by the 12th of April. I'll post the results April 15.

The Falls Remain the Same

Fernando Emmanuel Laverde Bohórquez of Columbia has traveled to some of the same places that Frederic Church painted, including Tequendama Falls, 1854. In spite of the human damage (and natural erosion), he has discovered that the landscape is almost the same as it was. Thanks, Fernando.

Antibubbles

A regular soap bubble is a thin film of liquid surrounding a sphere of air and floating in an air medium.

Now think of the exact inverse: a thin film of air surrounding a sphere of liquid and floating in a liquid medium. That is called an antibubble. You can make them in a beaker of soap bubble solution.

An antibubble, with its modest bouyancy, floats slowly upward to the surface just as a soap bubble floats delicately downward.

This YouTube video has other permutations: zero gravity bubbles, bubbles-within-droplets, and a "bubble war" filmed in slow motion and explained by a NASA scientist.



Wikipedia on Antibubbles, link.

Netter’s Medical Illustration

One of the places art meets science is medical illustration, and one of the masters of the field was Frank Netter, M.D. (1906-1991), whose contribution to the field is on the order of Vesalius or Leonardo.

Trained as a doctor, he began doing illustrations to clarify his understanding of anatomy. “I found that I could learn my subjects best by drawing," he said. His life work of more than 4,000 illustrations grew, he said, “in response to the desires and requests of the medical profession.”

The paintings of bones, muscles, cross sections, and internal organs often use color coding to clarify separate subsystems. Dr. Netter used watercolor and gouache, with colored pencils and pastels for shading and fine detail. He once said:

"It is important to achieve a happy medium between complexity and simplification. If the pictures are too complex, they may be difficult and confusing to read; if oversimplified, they may not be adequately definitive or may even be misleading. I have therefore striven for a middle course of realism without the clutter of confusing minutiae."

His work is collected in the Atlas of Human Anatomy (1989), which is still held up as a gold standard among students of medical illustration. For those interested in studying medical illustration, there are specialized programs at Johns Hopkins in Maryland, the Medical College of Georgia, Rochester Institute of Technology, and Cleveland Institute of Art, and the University of Toronto.
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Wikipedia: link.
Graphic Witness: link.
Netter Images: link.

Paris Salon Statistics

Today’s blockbuster museum exhibitions are a sideshow compared with the Paris Salon.

Most modern large exhibitions at the Met or the Louvre display between 100 and 150 paintings. The Salon hung as many as 5,318 works (1887), making it about 50 times larger.

If you took all the paintings and lined them up side by side along a highway, frame touching frame, they would stretch for six or eight miles.

The proper term was “The Exhibition of Living Artists.” After 1855 it opened in the Palais des Champs-Elysees, a vast warehouse-like space.

The Salon opened during the first week in May. Admission was one franc, well within the means of working people. As a result, the appreciation for Salon artwork cut across all social classes, as movies do today.

The paintings were grouped by the letter of the artists’ last name, so Manet, Monet, and Meissonier shared a room. Popular paintings were accompanied by guards to keep people from trampling each other.

Paris had a population of around 1.4 million in the later part of the 19th century. Of that number, about a million people visited the exhibition at least once during its six-week run. About 23,000 visitors passed through the doors on average each day.

By comparison, amongst of the best attended shows at the Met were the Leonardo da Vinci and the El Greco exhibitions. Each of those averaged less than 7,000 people per day, a mere third of the Salon’s attendance.
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Adapted from The Judgment of Paris: The Decade that Gave Us Impressionism, By Ross King, link. and The Studios of Paris, by John Milner, link.
Image courtesy Bearded Roman, link.

Lazy Edges

Nicolas Poussin was a great artist, but he suffered from lazy edges.

‘Lazy edges’ is a compositional fault where all the elements in a composition stop short of the edge of the picture. Everything fits into a neat little box in the middle of the design.

Nothing crosses into the outer margins of the picture. The action seems to take place on a theatrical stage or in a shop window. It’s fine if you want a painting to look artificial, but a problem if you want it to look natural.

Artists since the invention of photography have tended to load the edges. Take any photo of real life, follow along its edges, and there’s plenty happening. The photograph above is by Henri Cartier-Bresson.

A good composition should have some important elements near the margin. One of the masterpieces of loaded edges is Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s A Reading from Homer.

1. The reader’s left hand is at the extreme edge. Above the hand is a crucial inscription.

2. The prone figure lies along the bottom edge.

3. The standing figure is tucked into the upper left corner. Part of his face is cropped.

4. You can’t see it in this reproduction, but the very top edge of the painting shows the horizon only about an inch below the edge of the frame in the original painting. Unfortunately all the online versions of this image are compromised by slight cropping.

In a good composition, the slightest cropping destroys the meaning of the picture.

Other artists who use loaded edges effectively: Rembrandt, Edgar Degas, Carl Larsson, Norman Rockwell (1940s and 50s), Edwin Austin Abbey, Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret, and Howard Pyle.