The grapes of February 2021 – all the latest news and views on classical & contemporary art and artists from MappaArt’s global art grapevine.

8 Female Surrealists Who Are Not Frida Kahlo—from Meret Oppenheim to Dorothea Tanning

Source:artsy.net 

“Mexican artist and cultural icon Frida Kahlo is arguably the world’s most famous female Surrealist, but women across the globe have long employed art to plumb the depths of dreams and the unconscious. As art historian Whitney Chadwick notes in LACMA’s catalogue In Wonderland: The Surrealist Adventures of Women Artists in Mexico and the United States, the companion to the museum’s 2012 exhibition, “Surrealism’s legacy included a model for creative practices that encouraged many women to adapt its principles in their search to link artistic self-identity to the realities of gender and female sexuality.”

“Biological Fantasy”, 1946, by Helen Lundeberg, © The Feitelson / Lundeberg Art Foundation, courtesy of Louis Stern Fine Arts.

Mosaics

Source: europeana

“Throughout history, mosaic art has been an expression of aesthetics, spirituality and luxury. Here are inspirational Greek, Roman and Christian mosaics that have brought art and color to the walls and floors of palaces, theatres, churches, public buildings, villas and baths.”

Mosaic depicting Raphaël, [Public domain] via europeana

Ed Benguiat: Stranger Things, Esquire and the 600 Creations of a Unique Typographer

Source: Domestika

“A retrospective on the prolific typographer and logo designer, featuring some of his most emblematic creations

“Ed Benguiat (1924-2020) was an American typographer, designer, and lettering artist whose influence on the creative world is difficult to overstate. In addition to having served as associate director of Esquire magazine—whose logo he designed, he was a prestigious jazz percussionist under the name Eddie Benart, a pilot, a teacher with more than 50 years of experience, and, every now and then, he found the time to retouch some “scandalous” images in magazines.”

Fat Stuff design, Ed Benguiat, School of Visual Arts Archive via Domestika

Study Finds Artists Become Famous through Their Friends, Not the Originality of Their Work

Source: artsy.net

“Ingram and his colleague Mitali Banerjee, of HEC Paris, used MoMA’s findings to examine the role that creativity and social networks played for these artists, in relationship to the level of fame they achieved. In a 2018 paper, they relayed their findings—including that for successful artists, making friends may be more important than producing novel art.”

Peer network of the artists in “Inventing Abstraction, Courtesy of Paul Ingram and Mitali Banerjee via artsy.net

I heard it through the grapevine. Welcome to the latest news about classical & contemporary art and artists from MappaArt’s global art grapevine.

Art exhibit honouring missing and murdered Indigenous people opens in Bozeman

Source: Nora Mabie | Great Falls Tribune

“We Are Still Here and This is Our Story,” a group exhibit that honours and advocates for missing and murdered Indigenous people, opened on Friday at the Emerson Center for the Arts and Culture in Bozeman, Montana, USA.

The exhibit, which features contemporary art, beadwork and fashion design from 11 Native women artists, will be open through Feb. 28. Ten of the featured artists are women from Montana.

“Indigenous Hillshade,” 24 x 36 in., Acrylic on canvas, 2020, by Salisha Old Bull via Facebook

The Scottish Sisters Who Pioneered Art Nouveau

Source: JStore Daily

Margaret and Frances Macdonald and their Glasgow School of Art classmates, Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Harold MacNair, were Art Nouveau’s Glasgow Four.

Spring, by Frances MacDonald (c. 1900-1905) via Wikimedia Commons

The Rijksmuseum Has Made 709,000 Artworks Available for Free Online

Source: MyModernMet

The Rijksmuseum’s online collections known as Rijks Studio are easily searchable by artist, object type, period, and place. Users will encounter magnificent 17th-century portraits by Frans Hals, realistic still life paintings, and ornate furniture, including one opulent dollhouse in a cabinet. If you start searching the collections, you are sure to find art and artists you never knew existed.

View of Houses in Delft, Known as ‘The Little Street’, Johannes Vermeer, c. 1658. (Photo: Rijksmuseum [Public domain])

An Origami Samurai Made from a Single Sheet of Rice Paper

Source: Twistedsifter

Origami artist Juho Könkkölä spent 50 hours folding an origami samurai from a single square sheet of paper, with no cutting or ripping used in the process.

Origami Samurai, by Juho Könkkölä via twistedsifter

Rarely-Seen Illustrations of Dante’s Divine Comedy Are Now Free Online, Courtesy of the Uffizi Gallery

Source: Mymodernet 

Illustrated editions of Dante’s poem began appearing in 1472, and the first fully illustrated edition in 1491. By the late 16th century, the poem had become a literary classic (the word Divine joined Comedy in the title in 1555). By this time, the tradition of depicting a literal, rather than a literary, hell was firmly established.

Frederico Zucarri’s Illustration of Canto I from Dante’s ‘Inferno’ (Photo: Helvio ricina, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)