Francesco Queirolo’s 1754 sculpture Release From Deception depicts an angel releasing a fisherman from a net.
Unbelievably, the entire piece was carved from a single block of marble.
Historian Giangiuseppe Origlia called it “the last and most trying test to which sculpture in marble can aspire.”
See The Veiled Virgin and Folds of Stone.
After several delusional episodes, seamstress Agnes Richter was institutionalized at the University of Heidelberg Psychiatric Clinic in 1893, at age 49. While performing the needlework expected of female patients, she sewed a diary of sorts into a remarkable jacket pieced together of wool and linen. “Writing” in a now-obsolete German script, she recorded brief, enigmatic expressions reflecting life in a psychiatric hospital: I wish to read, I am not big, I plunge headlong into disaster. Her laundry number, 583, appears several times, apparently to ensure that the jacket was not lost during cleaning.
Another patient, Mary Lieb, institutionalized periodically at Heidelberg for mania, would sometimes decorate the floors of various rooms with patterns of cloth strips. The warders found some of these remarkable enough to photograph (below). Physician Hans Prinzhorn included some of the photographs in his collection of the art of the insane, and the images have survived to the present day as strangely vivid marks of an inscrutable self-expression.
“The patterns are extraordinary, comprising rows of starbursts (or perhaps flowers), letters, crosses, geometric patterns, and sometimes intricate curved figures,” writes Lyle Rexer in How to Look at Outsider Art. “Their purpose and organization are unclear, but like much outsider art, the work appears to be a combination of decoration and communication, an attempt to reorder the space ‘from the ground up,’ visually transform it, and invest it with new significance.” What it means only Lieb knew.
In November 1985, a couple walked into an art museum in Tucson, Arizona. While the woman chatted with a security guard, the man disappeared briefly upstairs, and then the pair departed. Then the guard discovered that Willem de Kooning’s painting Woman-Ochre was missing — it had been cut out of its canvas.
More than 30 years later, in 2017, retired New York speech pathologist Rita Alter passed away in the little town of Cliff, N.M., five years after her husband, Jerry, a former schoolteacher. In their bedroom was the missing de Kooning, in a position that was visible only when the door was closed. The painting appeared to have been reframed only once in the 31 years it had been missing, suggesting that it had had only one owner in that time.
Had the Alters stolen the painting? They were admirers of de Kooning and had been in Tucson the day before the theft. But such a crime seems vastly out of character for the retiring couple. “[They wouldn’t] risk something as wild and crazy as grand larceny — risk the possibility of winding up in prison, for God’s sake — they wouldn’t do that,” Rita’s sister told the New York Times.
Had the pair then bought the painting from a third party? That seems impossible too — it was worth an estimated $160 million. Perhaps the painting’s authenticity had been forgotten by the time of the transaction, so that both buyer and seller thought it was a copy? How could that have come about?
Jerry Alter once published a story in which a woman and her granddaughter steal an emerald from a museum and keep it on private display, “where two pairs of eyes, exclusively, are there to see.” Is that a coincidence? A veiled admission?
We may never know. The FBI’s case remains open.
(Thanks, Daniel.)
This is charming: Looking for a place to practice her drawing one day, an anonymous child in the 1700s chose the blank spaces in a music book. In doing so, she made herself immortal, as the music is now held in university collections.
The figure at left is scrawled in John Wilbye’s Second Set of Madrigales, now at the Royal Academy of Music; the one on the right is in Thomas Weelkes’ Balletts and Madrigals at Harvard. Drawings and handwriting exercises apparently by the same child appear in music books at UCLA, Huntington Library, and the University of Illinois. (The drawings all appear in tenor books, which suggests that these copies had been bound in one volume when the girl drew the pictures.)
The child’s identity is unknown, although the name Eliza Richardson accompanies one practice alphabet. She seems to be drawing the same woman consistently, recognizable by her prominent nose, strong chin, and thick neck. It’s not clear when the drawings were made, but the woman appears to be wearing a sack-back gown, a style that was most popular between 1720 and 1770. According to Durham University music professor David Greer, “The dense patterns, small cap, and closely dressed hairstyle suggest the early part of this period.” But I believe that’s all we know.
(David Greer, Manuscript Inscriptions in Early English Printed Music, 2015.)
For a 2005 retrospective on Salvador Dalí, the Philadelphia Museum of Art painted its front steps.
“I have never taken any drugs,” Dalí once said. “Dalí is the drug.”
When [a man] puts a thing on a pedestal and calls it beautiful, he demands the same delight from others. He judges not merely for himself, but for all men, and then speaks of beauty as if it were a property of things. Thus he says that the thing is beautiful; and it is not as if he counts on others agreeing with him in his judgment of liking owing to his having found them in such agreement on a number of occasions, but he demands this agreement of them. He blames them if they judge differently, and denies them taste, which he still requires of them as something they ought to have; and to this extent it is not open to men to say: Every one has his own taste.
— Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, 1790
In 2021 Denmark’s Kunsten Museum of Modern Art engaged artist Jens Haaning to recreate two of his earlier works, An Average Austrian Year Income and An Average Danish Annual Income. Those pieces had presented framed piles of kroner and euro bills to represent the sums indicated in their titles, so the museum gave Haaning 532,549 kroner for the purpose.
Instead, he delivered two framed blank canvases. The title of this new work, he said, was Take the Money and Run.
“This is only a piece of art if I don’t return the money,” he told the New York Times. “I believe that I have created a good and relevant piece of artwork, which could be hung on the wall.”
It didn’t work out that way — on Sept. 18, a Copenhagen court ruled that he must return the money.
Haaning acknowledged that he hadn’t fulfilled the commission, but “I completed something else,” he argued. “You’re asked to show a 10- and a 12-year-old work, and suddenly you have a better concept.”
(Thanks, Sharon.)
Is this art? It’s a drawing made by Austrian scholar and mystic Rudolf Steiner, who traveled Europe between 1919 and 1924 giving more than 5,000 lectures on “spiritual science,” art, medicine, agriculture, and economics. During the lectures Steiner would draw on the blackboard, and in 1919 his colleague Emma Stolle, apparently realizing the drawings’ value, began placing sheets of black paper over the blackboards in order to capture them.
Steiner himself doesn’t seem to have intended the drawings as beautiful, only as vehicles to express his ideas. Here’s the point he was illustrating with the image above, from a lecture on Aug. 12, 1924:
You look at a plant and say to yourself: I am a being of which I see only a mirror image, an inessential reflection, while on Earth. The more I turn my gaze to the stars, the more I see the true being up there. Nature is revealed in its entirety only when I look up from the Earth to the stars, when I consider the Earth and the cosmos as one. Then I can look back to myself as a human being and say: that which in the plant reaches up to the heavens has been compressed (bunched together) into myself on Earth. As a human being, I carry the physical world, the soul world, and the spiritual world.
Piet Mondrian, Wassily Kandinsky, and Alexej von Jawlensky all attended Steiner’s lectures, though none of them left any written comment about the images he drew. But one museum director remarked that if Steiner’s drawings don’t fit within any current definition of art, then a definition must be devised to include them.
(Lawrence Rinder, ed., Knowledge of Higher Worlds: Rudolf Steiner’s Blackboard Drawings, 1997.)
Part of New York is standing still. In 1978, artist Alan Sonfist reclaimed a rubble-strewn lot on the corner of West Houston Street and La Guardia Place in Greenwich Village and re-established the vegetation, soil and rock formations that had existed there before the Western settlers arrived.
“As in war monuments that record the life and death of soldiers, the life and death of natural phenomena such as rivers, springs and natural outcroppings need to be remembered,” he wrote in a 1968 manifesto proposing the project. Interestingly, he’d hoped to do even more than this: “On Canal Street I propose to create a marshland and a stream; on Spring Street I propose to restore the natural spring; in front of City Hall I propose to restore the historical lake. There are a series of fifty proposals I have made for the City of New York.”
Only this one, called Time Landscape, has been realized. But it’s still growing after 44 years, a tiny piece of history that Sonfist says helps the city remember its heritage.
Prague artist Robert Barta’s installation Crossing Half a Million Stars consists of 500,000 ball bearings covering the floor of a room.
The visitors themselves create a spontaneous performance as they try to make their way across it.
