Pablo Picasso

Still Life with Death's Head,

Paris, autumn 1907
Oil on canvas
115 x 88 cm
Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg

One scholar has suggested that this painting was inspired by the death of Alfred Jarry on November 1, 1907.Alfred Jarry was the author of the play Ubu Roi (1896) considered an important work of literature as the forerunner of Surrealist writing.

In honor of dbra's new chicks ...

Melchoir d' Hondecoeter is one of the best painters of chicks and chickens in all of art history.

Condé Nast Publications announced yesterday that they would cease monthly publication of Gourmet Magazine.  Gourmet began in 1941, though Conde Nast only owned it since the 80s. A friend of mine called it the fall of the Western world a few years ago when he heard that University School planned to stop offering French -- for me, the death of Gourmet Magazine is a similarly bleak omen for America.

How an artist sees the world ...

There is plenty of opera in Cleveland, though not all of it is live. Now technology allows us see and hear MET performances, almost as if we were there. Severance Town Center is no Lincoln Center, but the tickets are a lot cheaper.

I would like to give someone in NEO Two Free Tickets to a Metropolitan Opera performance of La Sonnabula (The sleepwalker) music by Vicenzo Bellini, Italian libretto by Felice Romani.
Pre-recorded and screening Wednesday April 1, 7 pm at

I thought I'd post this since we have had some very interesting dialog in the past on graffiti and art. This tag appear recently on the steps of the Mildred Putnam Sculpture Garden on East 118th Street near Euclid Avenue.

SHALL WE KISS directed by Emmanuel Mouret

Once a year, during the brief run of the Cleveland International Film Festival, Cleveland feels like one of the great cities of the world. For a little more than a week the grand space of Tower City is filled with life; diverse crowds of art lovers flow in and out, steadily buzzing with excitement for what they are experiencing. Because it only happens once a year, it is easy to overlook The Cleveland International Film Festival as one of Cleveland's greatest assets.
 

I prefer to write about the arts, but my experience the other night has me inspired to blog about online tax programs.

This year I decided to try Turbo Tax for my Federal and State tax returns -- it was such a waste of time. I ended up starting over and filing with Free Tax USA.

You may have noticed a group of golden brown rectangular stones swelling out of the ground in the Euclid Avenue median across from Severance Hall. I don't have a good photo yet, but I will post one soon. The work is by Murase Associates http://www.murase.com/flash/index.html founded by Robert Murase (1938-2005) a Japanese American landscape architect.

Maybe you were there at Gray's Auctioneers Inaugural Auction on Sunday June 17th? Doors opened at 10:30 am for one last opportunity to preview the over 200 lots of fine art, furniture and decorative items, and by noon, auction time, the room was packed with excited bidders.  Some of the people in the audience were old pros and others were new to the auction world.  This first auction had something to suit  everyone's taste and price range. Those who attended were glad they did!

Community gardens play an important role in our city and its neighborhoods.  They are a source of fresh produce for those who don't have the space at their own residence.  Gardening is a great form of exercise.  Being in contact with nature and the soil relieves stress.  A strong sense on community grows quickly in a shared gardening space.  Crime levels drop around community gardens. These are just a few of the reasons to support community gardening.

These photos were shot flying above the town of Barrow Alaska by my friend Katrina as she reach the end of an extraordinary cyber-educational adventure. Over the last 11 days she literally went that extra mile to make distance learning for NEO grade school students exciting and meaningful.

How many times in the last 10 -15 years I have gotten off the highway at the East 72nd Street exit of the Shoreway and winced at how depressing this mostly post industrial, impoverished landscape looks.

Toronto in spring is a romantic place. I discovered this when I spent the afternoon of Sunday April 22 on Queen Street West. I know there are many interesting districts in Toronto, for museums, dining, theater, and shopping, but I had been to Queen Street West before and I already knew that if pressed for time this street had more than enough to offer in the way of dining, arts and culture, and shopping. This was the first time I had experienced spring in Toronto. The last time I was on Queen Street it was mid November and beginning to snow. The sky was grey, it was a damp cold depressing day and outside at least, it wasn't much better than being in Cleveland. Mid-April is a totally different story though; the day was warm and sunny, almost like summer. Thousands of people were out, biking, walking, walking their dogs and children, and patios were open for dining. I started out with several objectives – get some good coffee and chocolate, find some birthday gifts for friends (children and adults), and take in some world class art and fashion.

Friday night I attended a reception and lecture at SPACES Gallery for select Cleveland organizations with interest in urban planning and sustainability. The current exhibition at Spaces, Shrinking Cities, explores strategies for post-industrial urban areas and should be of great interest to anyone interested in urban planning and sustainability. Terry Schwarz, Senior Planner at the Urban Design Center of Northeast Ohio, was to give a tour of the exhibition. My affiliation? I am an energy ambassador at Case. I am also an art historian, and although there are some witty, beautiful and innovative works represented in the exhibition the theme and the messages of the show truly over power the aesthetics. One could easily forget they are in an art exhibition.

Wednesday night's lecture at the Cleveland Clinic with Peter B. Lewis and Frank Gehry was everything I had expected and more. I doubt an audience member left without a new appreciation for the  positive,  transformative power of architecture, friendship and collaboration. It was inspiring just to be in the same room with two people who had made such great contributions to architecture. It was also inspiring to see two people, two friends, who worked so well together as client and architect. A testament to Gehry's fame, the lecture had very few visuals – only a few slides of his most famous buildings such as the Disney Concert Hall in LA, The Experience Museum Project in Seattle, the Guggenheim Bilboa and the unbuilt Peter B. Lewis residence were shown.  Peter Lewis and Frank Gehry each spent 15 minutes discussing some of the highlights of their lives and careers and then they took questions from the audience.

The Asian art collection at the Cleveland Museum of Art may be in storage, but this past Saturday, April 7th, Clevelanders had an exciting opportunity to learn about ancient and contemporary Chinese Art and a leading scholar's recent work in that area through the eighteenth annual Harvey Buchanan Lecture in Art History and the Humanities.

Claude Monet. Poplars, Pink Effect, 1891
36 7/8 x 29 1/8, Private Collection

Wednesday night I attended a lecture at the Cleveland Museum of Art, part of the Monet Lecture Series that accompanies the exhibition Monet in Normandy. So far I have attend all but the first in this eight lecture series. I found the previous lectures all to be very entertaining and enlightening. I feel I know a lot about Monet now -- I read the exhibition catalog and gallery labels and I have listened to the audio tour, but I am finding that Claude Monet is a truly fascinating figure and it seems there is always something more to learn about him. Paul Tucker is a  professor at the University of Massachusetts and a renowned scholar on Monet and Impressionist painting. His lecture was titled "Monet, Modernism, Normandy, and La France" -- a title I believe was meant to cover all the bases. What I found most interesting about Professor Tucker's hour long lecture was his insights on some of Monet's late works that become narrow and vertically oriented (such as Poplars, Pink Effect 1891) and the role of religion in Monet's life and work. 

There are not many opportunities to see African art in Cleveland -- especially while the Cleveland Museum of Art is under renovation. Fortunately, there are some generous collectors with outstanding African collections in Cleveland. Art: Trilogy, Anonymity, and Eclecticism, 100 pieces of African Art and African American Art is an exhibition going on now through May 15th 2007 at the Cleveland Public Library, Main Library Building, 2nd Floor Exhibit Corridor, which taps into the collectors' and creators' spirits.

The Church at Varengeville, Morning Effect is the most powerful work Monet created while on a painting campaign in Varengeville in 1882. The church of Saint-Valery is a Romanesque medieval church, built in the 12th-century, perched dramatically near the edge of  a towering cliff. It has long been a mariners' church and many generations of local fisherman are buried in the cemetery.