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The Art of Green and Orange
Essay
Pears / Poires
Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919), French
Oil on canvas, 12" x 9" (w x h), circa 1890
Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia, PA
Source: Still Life in Painting from Antiquity to the Present Time by C. Sterling
"Nurtured on the traditions of eighteenth-century French painting, Renoir ... carried on the serene simplicity of Chardin (a great French painter). Pale shadows, light as a breath of air, faintly ripple across the perishable jewel of a ripe fruit. Renoir reconciles extreme discretion with extreme richness, and his full-bodied density is made up, it would seem, of colored air. This is a lyrical idiom hitherto unknown in still life, even in those of Chardin. Between these objects and us there floats a luminous haze through which we distinguish them, tenderly united in a subdued shimmer of light."
Source: Wiki, edited
In 1890, likely the year Renoir painted this, Renoir married Aline Victorine Charigot, a dressmaker twenty years his junior, who, along with a number of the artist's friends, had served as a model for Luncheon of the Boating Party in 1881. In 1885 they had their first of three sons. After marrying Renoir painted many scenes of his wife and daily family life including their children and their nurse, his wife's cousin Gabrielle Renard.
Child with Lamp
Pierre Bonnard (1867-1947), French
Lithograph printed in pink, green, brick red,
blue, and orange on light gray chine,
18" x 13" (w x h), 1897, 1897
Source: AIC Museum notes edited
Bonnard was sometimes called the Japanese Nabi, because he used the asymmetrical composition, elevated viewpoint, and bold colors of Japanese prints in his own work. Like Vuillard, Bonnard used children and his own family as favorite models for his early interiors. Attention centers on the lamp, Bonnard's symbolist interest in ordinary objects.
Orange Green
Ellsworth Kelly (1923-2015), American
One from a series of ten lithographs,
30" x 42" (w x h), 1970
MoMA, Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY
Source: Wiki edited
Kelly's background in the military has been suggested as a source of the seriousness of his works. While serving time in the army, Kelly was exposed to and influenced by the camouflage with which his specific battalion worked. This taught him about the use of form and shadow, as well as the construction and deconstruction of the visible. It was fundamental to his early education as an artist. Ralph Coburn, a friend of Kelly's from Boston, introduced him to the technique of automatic drawing while visiting in Paris. Kelly embraced this technique of making an image without looking at the sheet of paper. These techniques helped Kelly in loosening his drawing style and broadened his acceptance of what he believed to be art. His introduction to Surrealism and Neo-Plasticism (Dutch origin "Nieuwe Beelding" /new image, abstract art that had been purified by applying the most elementary principles through plainly rational means, and practiced by Piet Mondrian) caused him to test the abstraction of geometric forms.
Halsingborg Suede (Swedish) Poster
Gunnar Christenson (1895-1997). Swedish
Painting for poster, 25" x 29" (w x h), circa 1930
The town of Halsingborg was renamed to
Helsingbord in the 1970s.
Source: Come to Sweden Publishing edited
Gunnar Christenson studied at the Technical School in Stockholm 1914-1919 and at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts 1920-1921. During the 1920s Christenson traveled on study trips around Europe, and in the late 1920s he worked as a drawing teacher at the school Helsingborgs Läroverk. From the buildings top floor you have a nice view of Kärnan, a medieval tower that once was part of a larger fortress, its ancient, burnt-orange brick structure looming imposingly over the rest of the seaside village. This was probably where he drew this poster over Kärnan and the landscape up towards Mölle.
Christenson later on combined his teaching with a successful artistic career. He had several exhibitions and is represented in museums.
Oranges on a Branch
Donald Sultan, (1951- ), American
Tar, spackle, and oil on tile over Masonite,
97" x 98" (w x h), 1992
Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, MI
Source: DIA museum notes
The boldly silhouetted oranges bursting with vivid color are in direct contrast to the thick black surface. The sense of drama in Sultan's works comes from his early interest in the theater, which he combines with his inspiration from other art movements, such as Abstract Expressionism, Color Field painting, and minimalism. Sultan abstracts, simplifies, and stylizes this representation of painted oranges against a background made of tar and oil. His unorthodox use of these industrial materials symbolizes American industry, reinforced by his incorporation of vinyl tiles taken from office and factory floors. Looking at art from the past for inspiration, Sultan struck upon the traditional still life for his subject matter, with his choice of oranges as a twist on his trademark lemons, originally inspired by a painting by Édouard Manet that he saw in a retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Life already Prevailed Yesterday /
Elämä voitti jo eilen
Olli Lyytikäinen (1949-1987), Finnish
Crayon, 16" x 10" (w x h), 1973
Finnish National Gallery
Source: Kiasma Magazine and Ateneum in Helsinki
Olli Lyytikäinen (1949-1987) was a Finnish artist. In 1967 at 18 years old Olli and a friend took a boat to London. "We didn't have a penny when we arrived in London." Olli did some drawings which h sold to make ends meet." He went on to illustrate and paint in Finland. Many key Finnish galleries and museums, such as Ateneum art museum in Helsinki featured his work. In 1979 a devastating fire in his studio destroyed 500-4000 works (depending on the method of counting). In 1986 He was one of three Finnish representatives at the XLII Venice Biennale. He died the next year at home at 38-years-old. The record price for this artist at auction is $56,185 USD for Venetsialainen Variaatio, sold at Stockholms Auction House in 2012.
Green/2 Orange X Painting
Robert Mangold (1937- ), American
Acrylic and black pencil on canvas,
100" x 96" (w x h), 1983
Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL
Source: AIC Museum Notes
Robert Mangold is an American Minimalist painter best known for painted canvases that incorporate drawn line, exalting simplified means and structure. Over the course of the last 50 years, he has employed a variety of geometric forms—circles, ellipses, squares, rectangles, trapezoids—as the support for his pared-down compositions. From 1980 to 1986, the artist created a series of paintings based on the letter X and the plus sign. Green/2 Orange X Painting is composed of three conjoined canvases of unequal size and three distinct colors—two oranges and a green. Drawn lines of unequal length mark the axis of the cross, replicating the overall shape within the plane and unifying the composition. Here the physical presence of the canvas edge becomes the central formal motif; the structural skeleton of painting becomes the subject of the work.
Untitled (Head with Orange and Green)
Sideo Fromboluti (1920-2014), American
Pastel and charcoal on paper, 21" x 16", 1990
MoMA, Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY
Source: NY Times Obituary and A Shared Life in art, Provincetown Gallery Catalogue edited:
Sideo Fromboluti was born in Hershey, PA of Italian immigrants in 1920. He was the first of his family to attend college having won the only scholarship offered by his high school to the Tyler College of Art. He earned a BFA and Masters degree.
Sideo and Nora Speyer met as art students at the Tyler School of Art, Temple University, Philadelphia. They were married in 1945. From the beginning of their lifetime married life, Nora and Sideo painted in the same studio and influenced each other's aesthetics. The couple moved to New York City in the late 1940s and they built a summer home and studio on Higgins Pond in Wellfleet, MA. In winter Sideo worked in an urban environment, his paintings and drawings leaning towards the figurative and capturing a subtle psychological dimension in his sitters.
He counted as his friends the artists who were major figures of the Abstract Expressionist movement. He had numerous solo shows, one at the Carnegie Museum of Art in 1998. He was represented by the Darthea Speyer Gallery in Paris, France for many years. He was a founding member of the Landmark Gallery in NYC and the Longpoint Gallery in Provincetown, MA.
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