Curio Cabinet

Title: Self Portrait in a Straw Hat
Artist: Élisabeth Louise Vigée-Le Brun (1755-1842)
Created: ca. 1782
Medium: oil on canvas
Dimensions: 38.5 x 27.8 in (97.8 x 70.5 cm)
Current location: The National Gallery, London, England
 

If anyone deserved to paint themselves in a bright manner, it was Élisabeth Louise Vigée-Le Brun. The Self Portrait in a Straw Hat artist perfectly captures her own charm as a European socialite and revolutionary portrait painter with her rococo finery, palette, and brushes. With her dear friend Marie Antoinette as a patron, Vigée-Le Brun was able to attend the prestigious Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, where she was only one of four women enrolled. During the French Revolution, Vigée-Le Brun escaped to Italy, where she became a member of the prestigous Accademia di San Luca. She painted a total of 660 portraits in her lifetime, many of European aristocrats who no doubt found her lively conversation a positive change from long, tedious portrait-sitting sessions of the norm. For female clients, Vigée-Le Brun was an especially inventive artist, freeing them from stiff, stately poses and superficialities that were popular at the time. Indeed, Vigée-Le Brun painted women in tender caresses with children and with teeth-showing smiles—the latter being a tremendous art taboo at the time. Was the practice unpopular? Sure, but Vigée-Le Brun was savvy enough to know that her style and ease(l) would make the work too good to ignore.

 

Below: more of Élisabeth Louise Vigée-Le Brun's paintings of women, including; The Marquise de Pezay, and the Marquise de Rougé with Her Sons Alexis and Adrien; Portrait of Marie Antoinette; and Princess Karoline of Liechtenstein.
 

It's Flashback Friday! Orange you glad you get to enjoy this favorite from the Curio Cabinet archives?
 

Who is Cindy Sherman? It can be hard to tell because the celebrated photographer and MacArthur fellow, who turned 63 this week, has taken up many identities in her self-portraits. This striking orange chromogenic print, commissioned but never published by ArtForum magazine, features 27-year-old Sherman parodying a pornographic centerfold pose. Sherman's character, however, is youthfully innocent and hopeful as she clutches a singles newspaper ad. The photo made headlines when it sold for a hefty $3.89 million in 2011—the most expensive photograph ever sold at the time. This tangerine daydreamer is just one of hundreds of personas Sherman has adopted over the years, from the vulnerable and relatable to the theatrically-posed and parabolic. Among her best-known series is Untitled Film Stills, shot between 1977 and 1980 and showcasing female tropes of the '50s and '60s. A century later, Sherman parodied masculine idealizations of classic European paintings. In her latest series, the artist poses herself as aging Hollywood starlets set before elaborate backdrops. "I am trying to make other people recognize something of themselves rather than me," the artist has stated, which may also explain why she leaves her images untitled. In other words, Sherman provides all the props; it's up to us to tell the story.
 
Below: still from Sherman's Untitled Film Stills (1977-1980), where she portrays the female tropes of a sexy librarian, a country girl in the big city, and a cold sophisticate.
 

 
Below: more contemporary work from Sherman including the European painting-inspired Untitled #196 (1989), an everyday woman in Untitled #355 (2000), and an aging Hollywood starlet in Untitled #574 (2016)
 

 
Image credit & copyright: Cindy Sherman
 

It's Flashback Friday! Orange you glad you get to enjoy this favorite from the Curio Cabinet archives?
 

Title: Untitled
Artist: Villafane Studios
Created: 2018
Medium: pumpkin
Current location: Villafane Studios, Phoenix, Arizona
 

These pumpkin carvings by Ray Villafane are a real hoot. Villafane is a sculptor working in the toy industry, though when the fall season rolls around, so too do the pumpkins, ready to become works of art. The gifted carver initially began sculpting pumpkins with students as an art teacher in Bellaire, Michigan. When students' parents began requesting custom work, Villafane developed a taste for the orange flesh; when he creates his pumpkin carvings, he purchases large, thick-skinned ones and improvises the final look of a piece over a single night. Villafane's pumpkins began to garner international attention when he became the Grand Prize winner of the Food Network's challenge show, Outrageous Pumpkins. Since then, his custom jack-o-lanterns have graced the pages of countless magazines and newspapers, not to mention the pumpkin he carved in a hotel bathroom for display in the White House. Villafane's carving style often includes broad strokes, which makes us think he might have taken a shaving tool to the above owl, slashing and letting the pumpkin pieces fly where they may.

 

Below: more of Villafane's weird, spooky, and downright scary carvings, and a video on his working process in 2011.
 

Image credit & copyright: Villafane Studios
 

Some bees just want to escape the buzz of hive life. Shown above is a mud-flower bee nest created by a member of Osmia avosetta, a solitary species of mason bee that prefers burrows to honeycombs. The autonomy comes with a price, though; females lack the babysitters that beehives accommodate, and must craft these vibrant temperature-controlled chambers to protect their larvae. To create one, an expectant mother first harvests flower petals and hoards them at her nest site, where she burrows about a half-inch into the ground. She then applies overlapping layers of petals and mud to create a shingled nest, and pools it with syrupy pollen and nectar upon which she lays her eggs. Finally, she plugs the chamber with mud. While the exterior hardens, the interior remains humid for the larvae to mature, sip nectar, and wait out harsh winters. It's quite literally a "bed of roses!"
 

Below: a close-up of Osmia avosetta collecting pollen and more looks at the species' colorful nests.
 

Image credit & copyright: Dr. Jerome G Rozen / American Museum of Natural History
 

Title: Panel with striding lion
Artist: Neo-Babylonians
Created: ca. 604 – 562 B.C.E.
Medium: ceramic, glaze
Dimensions: 38.25 x 89.5 in (97.16 x 227.33 cm)
Current location: Metropolitan Museum of Art Fifth Avenue, New York City, New York
 

The Babylonians really knew how to ring in the new year with a great parade. This relief of a lion resided on the original Ishtar Gate, a structure to the north of the city of Babylon that saw special processions during the Akitu festival in Spring. The Akitu festival marked the lunar calendar new year, during which the Babylonians celebrated with parades and retellings of the victory of Marduk, the king of the gods, over sea goddess Tiamat in dragon form. The reign of Nebuchadnezzar II in 600 B.C.E. saw a rise in Babylonian artwork, including the construction of the Ishtar Gate—named after the lion goddess of justice and fertility. Other creatures adorned the blue-and-gold gate in animal form, including Marduk's dragons and the storm god Adad's bulls. During the Akitu procession, a golden statue of Marduk would be carried through the streets of Babylon, which were lined with carvings of Ishtar's lions. To witness the ritual truly would have invoked the words of Nebuchadnezzar's gate plaque: "I placed wild bulls and ferocious dragons in the gateways and thus adorned them with luxurious splendor so that people might gaze on them in wonder."

 

Below: a recreation of the Ishtar Gate at the Pergamon Museum in Berlin, Germany, which was inaugurated in 1930. Excavation efforts originally began in 1899, though World War I delayed digging and restoration.
 

Image credit & copyright: Youngrobv
 

National Puppy Day is this week, and we're lamenting that the late Jim Buck can't join us in the festivities. According to The New York Times, Buck became the first professional dog walker in 1964, receiving a profile in the famed newspaper entitled "145-Pounder Walks 500 Pounds of Dogs." Unsatisfied with his job as an electronics salesman, Buck quit and began advertising his skills with dog walking and training to his fellow wealthy Upper-East Side New Yorkers. As he became more successful with his pooch venture, Buck could be found walking 30-40 dogs across 25 miles of Manhattan "wearing out the soles of a pair of construction shoes every two weeks." Replacement shoes were no biggie, though: Buck could make up to $500 a week walking the dogs (a hefty $4000 in today's dollars). Buck's business soon employed dozens of walkers tasked with herding hundreds of dogs across New York, with the profits allowing him to form his own training academy, the Jim Buck’s School for Dogs. If dogs could talk, we bet a lot of Buck's pawing pupils would have thanked him for making their lives a little less ruff.

 

Below: more images of Jim Buck walking dogs around New York.
 

Image credit & copyright: New York Times