Is the Hottest New Art Coming from Chilly Nordic Countries?

“Scandinavian Pain” burns crimson in the night in one photo by Ragnar Kjartansson featured in the new exhibition North by New York: New Nordic Art in celebration of the centenary of the creation of The American-Scandinavian Foundation. That phrase could serve as the motto for much of the work that appears in this choice selection of contemporary Nordic art curated by Robert Storr and Francesca Pietropaolo. This cross-section of modern angst from the territory of Munch, Ibsen, and Sibelius updates that Nordic sensibility for a new age and shows how these artists use new media to convey that old message. As Mieskuoro Huutajat, also known as the Screaming Men’s Choir (image above), prove, this new wave of hot art from a cold climate is something to shout about. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Is the Hottest New Art Coming from Chilly Nordic Countries?"

[Image: Petri Sirviö featuring Mieskuoro Huutajat (Screaming Men’s Choir), Sorry Speech, 2010. Video stills—4 images total; 3-channel video installation, 3 min. synchronized loops, sound. Courtesy of the artist.]

[Many thanks to The American-Scandinavian Foundation for providing the image above from and a review copy of the catalog to North by New York: New Nordic Art, which runs through August 19, 2011.]

Women and Children First: Thomas Lawrence’s Portraits

“Nobody has ever painted eyes, women’s eyes particularly, so well as Lawrence,” Romantic painter Eugene Delacroix wrote after visiting British painter Thomas Lawrence in 1825 and finding himself bowled over by his portraits. “And those parted lips which are completely charming. He is inimitable.” In the exhibition Thomas Lawrence: Regency Power and Brilliance, which runs at the Yale Center for British Art through June 5, 2011, Lawrence once again bowls over viewers with the ravishing beauty of his painted ladies, the subtly erotic attraction of his youthful subjects, and the powerful, peacock-like men hailing from the halls of power. Men ruled the day when Lawrence painted, yet today it seems as if it is the women and children who come first—not in the classic chivalric call of high seas lifesaving, but rather in a resurfacing and reevaluation of Lawrence’s art that may mark the salvation of the heyday of British portraiture. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Women and Children First."

[Image: Thomas Lawrence. Frances Hawkins and her Son, John James Hamilton, 1805–6. Oil on canvas. Abercorn Heirlooms Settlement Trustees.]

[Many thanks to the Yale Center for British Art and Yale University Press for the image above from and a review copy of the catalog to the exhibition Thomas Lawrence: Regency Power and Brilliance, which runs through June 5, 2011.]

Thinking Globally: Cultural Contact and the Making of European Art

Everyone loves labels. Italian Renaissance, French Baroque, Classical Greek—such little conveniences help us understand and comprehend the often tangled and messy reality of artists and art movements, which, like any living thing, are always more complex and fascinating than any label can express. Cultural Contact and the Making of European Art Since the Age of Exploration, a collection of essays edited by Mary D. Sheriff, chair of the art department of The University of North Carolina, takes on the enduring, monolithic, and inadequate label of “European Art” by questioning what goes into that concept. Rather than completely reject the label, however, Sheriff explains, she and her fellow essayists “aim… to loosen and redraw the boundaries of what has constituted ‘European art’” by focusing on “different contact zones, and in distinguishing different sorts of exchange” between cultures. Sheriff et al. ask us when thinking of European art not to think “locally” but rather to think globally—to recognize just how much the rest of the world contributed to the grand tradition of “European art” that continues to dominate what we consider “fine art.” Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Thinking Globally: Cultural Contact and the Making of European Art."

[Many thanks to The University of North Carolina Press for providing me with a review copy of Cultural Contact and the Making of European Art Since the Age of Exploration, edited by Mary D. Sheriff.]