Post your favorite works of art
 

Bouguereau- Birth of Venus



Francois Pascal Simon: Psyche and Cupid


Jacques Louis David The Death of Marat

I like sort of campy comedic 20th century stuff too

Norman Rockwell, self portrait



Alberto Vargas- Can Anyone Beat My Pair?




Gil Elvgren Cowgirl

Michelangelo- David


Auguste Rodin The Kiss

Jean Louis Cesar Lair The Torture of Prometheus



Dante Gabriel Rosetti- Proserpine

William Blake Cerberus


Jacques Louis David Hector



Bouguereau- Madonna and Child with St. John the Baptist


(they had this on display at the Frick Art museum in Pittsburgh, it is an amazing painting, this and the David are the only ones I've seen in person as I recall) I like how John is depicted based on his description as an adult.

I really like the ones in your second post.

Brett Whitely is one of my favourite artists. My girlfriend bought me one of his books for Christmas, it's a beautiful book.

Brett Whitely:

More of the amazing Brett Whitely:









Some of my favourite artworks by him I can't find big enough pics of on the net.

Some John Olsen:

More John Olsen:





I saw one of Olsen's pieces, which was pretty huge, in my local gallery last year. It was amazing. I stood in awe for quite awhile. I can't find a pic of it though.

That third one of Brett Whitely's is gorgeous. I went to see an exhibition of Hans-Peter Feldmann on Saturday. Comes across as rubbish on the interbox screen, but certainly one of the better things I've come across this last year or so. The larger 'modern' gallery round here tends to be quite patchy, but this was pretty ace. I'll post some of my fave arts presently.

The Whitely stuff is cool, but the Olsen stuff doesn't do much for me.

Is the 2nd Whitely one a painting of the operahouse in Sydney, or is that just coincidence?

I did a history of aesthetics course a few years ago. Unfortunately, there was a belligerent NZ feminist who made me hate Antipodean art for a while. She would constantly hark on about how NZ had better (female) artists than Western Europe, and it was a 'conspiracy' against either women or the Antipodes that they weren't better known over here. She bought in a slide show of her favourite NZ artists, and without exception it was whollly derivative of various 20th-Century movements, 30+ years too late. I assume Olsen and Whitely are from Australia, so I'm going to change my mind on Antipodean art.

This one is pretty cool. I also like the ones by Brett Whitely that Norma J posted.

I read a great art history article about how this painting is the first great modern propaganda painting . very interesting.

I am and always have been a big Picasso nut. I was born 9 months after he died in 1972.

3 Musicians. (I got to see this in person when MOMA sent a huge chunk of it's collection to HOuston. It was huge and awesome)\


and this one too.
I love how Picasso can make a painting of his lover masturbating with her titty popped out and her finger third knuckle deep in her hot pussy and it comes out so delicate and beautiful and nearly inoffensive.

When I went to Europe this summer we had delays, preventing us from spending enough time in Barcelona to go to the museum and see some Picasso stuff :(

fucking DELAYS!!!!!

the barcelone Picasso museum is one of my "go see before I die" places.

well, not necessarily my fav pieces (too many to post, and plenty for each artist), but some of my fav "classic" artists' works:

less "classic" maybe:

the Menil Collection in Houston has a huge collection of some of Magritte's best shit.
The DeMenil's were friends and early collectors of his.

Gregor Schneider: Dead House must be the thing I liked the most in the last few years.

"Dead House ur features an obsessively altered version of Schneider’s childhood house in Rheydt, Germany. Schneider has been dismantling and reassembling the house’s interior since he was 16. Layering walls on walls, adding dead-end corridors and secret passageways, living within the work and constantly revising it, he has created a haunting depiction of domestic memory. His duplicated rooms both resemble and conceal the original spaces, and so many changes have been made that Schneider can no longer reconstruct the original layout."

simply INSANE to experience

http://www.gregorschneider.de/biography.php
a few vids are up on his site, I doubt they can convey the feelings of this thing..

ps search for totes haus and venice biennale to see the same thing I saw.

i wasn't all that impressed by it. it ranks low on my list of fave museums.

Pretty much anything by Hopper is hideously depressing, but surely that's what makes him so great.

As for Picasso, I'm not much of a fan but the Guernica is something else.

I like Hopper's paintings. they have that cool film noir air around them. He pays great attention to angles.

I like anything by Michëal Borremans

The first one is cool. The 2nd seems a little too messagey to me. Is that a skirt or a lamp shade in the 3rd one?

looks like an upside down toque to me

These are three artists who I would call my favourites.





Anselm Kiefer Palmsonntag 2006
Mixed media Dimensions variable © the artist
Photo: Stephen White Courtesy Jay Jopling/ White Cube (London)







Grande Anthropophagie bleue
Hommage à Tennessee Williams, 1960
(Large blue anthropophagy, Homage to Tennessee Williams)
Grande bataille [Great battle]
Pure pigment and synthetic resin
on paper marouflaged to canvas -276 x 418 cm
Centre Pompidou, Musée national d'art moderne Collection
© Adagp, Paris 2007




The Rothko Room, Tate Modern


Tate © Kate Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko/DACS 2006

"When I say that my paintings are Western, what I mean is that they seek the concretization of no state that is without the limits of western reason, no esoteric, extra-sensory or divine attributes to be achieved by prayer & terror.Those who can claim that these [limits] are exceeded are exhibiting self-imposed limitations as to the tensile limits of the imagination within those limits. In other words, that there is no yearning in these paintings for Paradise, or divination.On the contrary they are deeply involved in the possibility of ordinary humanity." -Mark Rothko

I've always liked this "classic" one

the birth of venus reminds me -- i still want a tattoo of a cherub.

my favourite painting is called why cant i stop smoking but i can't find it anywhere

Yes, it's the Sydney Opera house.

I just had a great overwhelming feeling and urge, just then, to go to Sydney again real soon, Newtown inparticular.


Yeah they're both Australian artists. There's a Whitely piece in my local gallery called 'Summer at Carcoar'. It's marvellous. I couldn't find a big enough pic on the net that shows the beauty of it in detail though.

I'm glad you guys like them.

I really like that one of the Olgas; he almost turns them into phallae, or whatever the plural of phallus is.


edit: I should've just written "phallic symbols".
edit edit: or a bunch of dicks.

How did I immediately know that was a Russian painting? I immediately thought to myself "that looks like it is right out of a Dostoevsky novel." The attention to detail is great here, I love the carpet and the way it is bunched up.

Rene Magritte-Le Therapeute

I saw this at the museum in St. Louis, so I can picture it in my head, and I should have taken your word for it when you said you couldn't find a photo of it anywhere...because I had to look through 60 pages of Flickr just to find the top half of the painting (which I personally have an issue with, because it's words and all of that).





I'm still looking, but I doubt I'll find the bottom.

gordon matta-clark on the far right

You can see it at a distance (on the right) in this picture.
And it is totally being mauled by Richter.