Painting in the news this week as it is on display until the 9th, and set to go to auction 6/27. I found this of note because of the digs I did way back when on the creepy Obama portrait. The artist of the severed heads compared his work to this painter and this subject. Both artists used people of the streets, or off the streets. "Boys" for the Obama artist, prostitutes and peasants for Caravaggio. A documentary of Caravaggio set to air the 13th. Painting may sell for $170m? Just interesting imo.
Long-lost Caravaggio painting to be auctioned in June in France
(Reuters) - A painting by Italian master Caravaggio discovered five years ago in an attic will be sold at auction on June 27 in the French city of Toulouse and could fetch up to 150 million euros ($170 million), art experts said.
The painting, currently on display at the Colnaghi Gallery in London, dates from 1607 and depicts biblical heroine Judith beheading the Assyrian general Holofernes.
"Judith and Holofernes"
was found by the owners of a house in Toulouse in 2014 …
The painting is the second by Caravaggio to depict the decapitation of the drunken Holofernes by Judith. The first, dating from around 1600, is on display…
https://in.reuters.com/article/art-caravaggio-idINKCN1QO172
Two kinds of realism: The painter Caravaggio and Apollo astronauts
By Brooks Robards-March 6, 2019
Two documentaries are on deck next week at the M.V. Film Center. “Apollo 11” opens Friday, March 8, and “Caravaggio: The Soul and the Blood” plays Wednesday, March 13, in a special event as part of the Film Center’s “Great Art on Screen” series.
The Italian painter Michelangelo Merisi is better known to much of the world as Caravaggio, after the town where his parents were born. In a life marked by violence and turmoil, he brought an intense new form of realism to Baroque painting in the early 17th century. He used prostitutes and peasants as models. …
https://www.mvtimes.com/2019/03/06/two-kinds-realism-painter-caravaggio-apollo-astronauts/
Exerpts from a 2012 article on Kehinde Wiley, painter of the Obama portrait:
http://nymag.com/arts/art/rules/kehinde-wiley-2012-4/index2.html
"In one hand, she holds a knife. In the other, a cleanly severed brunette female head. “It’s sort of a play on the ‘kill whitey’ thing,” Wiley says….
Which brings us back to the lady with the severed head. … Her pose is a riff on classical depictions by Caravaggio and Gentileschi, of the biblical story of
Judith beheading Holofernes.
And the severed head? “She’s one of my assistants.” …
“I don’t want you to know every aspect of where my hand starts and ends, or how many layers go underneath the skin, or how I got that glow to happen,” he says. “It’s the secret sauce! Get out of my kitchen!” …
The spectacle is always carefully staged, particularly with “the boys,” which can sell for more than $100,000. “There are certain ground rules,” says Wiley. …
Wiley likes to keep his intentions ambiguous, comparing himself to the two-faced Nigerian trickster god Eshu. …
Painting a powerful political figure is different from pulling a kid off the streets, of course. “It’s redundant, almost,” he says. But as Wiley sees it, it’s not his job to judge. “The games I’m playing have much more to do with using the language of power and the vocabulary of power to construct new sentences,” Wiley says. “It’s about pointing to empire and control and domination and misogyny and all those social ills in the work, but it’s not necessarily taking a position. Oftentimes it’s actually embodying it.”