Spent about 30 minutes really studying the Rebmrandt drawings and etchings in the following show (see below):

Rembrandt and His Circle: Drawings and Prints
July 11, 2006–October 15, 2006
Robert Wood Johnson Jr. Gallery for Drawings and Prints, 2nd floor

 

 From the Exhibition notes:

This exhibition celebrates the 400th anniversary of the birth of Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn (1606–1669). Selected from the Museum’s world-class collection, these 58 graphic works by the great 17th-century Dutch master and his pupils illustrate the range of Rembrandt’s creative genius—his spontaneity, originality, and innovative approach to traditional media.

What I noticed was how much Rembrandt’s drawings are poetical - as a natural extension of himself.   I see many of the drawings as “pre-paintings” and while I don’t go into the strong light/dark thing that was popular at the time - I do appreciate the poetry of his drawings.
Sometimes, there’s touches of pigment to promote depth - something I would not have thought that Rembrandt needed to do - since his drawings are so strong, as they are. 

But then I realized, there really is not limitation on what an artist can or should do, save the limitations they put on themselves.  

If Rembrandt need some pigment to pull out a face or a Tiger’s mane, who I am say it’s not the right thing to do?

Spent a couple of hours at the Metropolitan Museum of Art this evening and discovered that I overlooked the Girodet Exhibition on my recent visits because I did not know about it.

Girodet: Romantic Rebel
May 24, 2006–August 27, 2006
Special Exhibition Galleries, 2nd floor
 

From the Exhibition Notes:

This is the first American retrospective devoted to A. L. Girodet-Trioson (1767–1824), a favored but rebellious pupil of Jacques-Louis David. Girodet’s idiosyncratic style fuses David’s Neoclassical ideal with his own prescient Romantic vision. A selection of approximately 100 paintings and works on paper reflects his originality and the diversity of his works, from mythological subjects to portraits and representations of Napoleon’s military triumphs.  

Here’s the paintings I responded to the most .

The Oath of the Horatii, 1786
Jacques-Louis David (French, 1748–1825)
Toledo Museum of Art.

I thought The Oath of the Horatii was a David painting - but this “copy” was also sorta an original and surpassed David, I’m told, in the transparancies in the background.  While David ran a tight ship, and made his students compete with each other - Girodet began to develop a dislike of David and decided to move away from his former master as soon as began to mature as an artist. 

I think David’s studio was probably a good place to be during the late 1780’s - 1790’s but if you wanted to develop your own individuality - you needed to break away from David, and that’s what Girodet did.

The Sleep of Endymion, 1791
Anne-Louis Girodet-Trioson (French, 1767–1824)
Musée du Louvre, Paris.

It was hard to believe the same artist that painted in under David would also paint something so different than anything that David would have done, or approved of.  Of course, by the time Girodet painted The Sleep of Endymion, he was living in Rome, having won the Prix De Rome in 1789 (it was a good time to get away from Paris anyway - right?).

Burial of Atala (répétition of 1808 original), 1813
Anne-Louis Girodet-Trioson (French, 1767–1824)
Musée Girodet, Montargis.

The masterpiece in the show - the one painting that would cement Girodet’s place in Art History.  One thing I noticed - there are artists that are important in their time, and go on to be famous for “all time” - like Velasquez, Titian, Michaelangelo, Raphael, Rubens, Constable, Rembrandt, etc.   Then there are no less deserving artists who are important for their time, but don’t transend into universality - Girodet is one of these types of artists - though at moments he almost touches pure greatness.

François-René de Chateaubriand, 1808
Anne-Louis Girodet-Trioson (French, 1767–1824)
Musée d’Histoire et d’Ethnographie, Saint-Malo

What can I say; I never read Chateaubriand but the image is very familar to me - and therefore I can say this painting is one of the more important one’s in the show, to me, for that reason.

Burial of Atala was probably my favorite painting in the show; everyone in NYC who is into art should go and see the Girodet: Romantic Rebel show - there’s only three weeks left.  I’ll probably go once more before the show closes.

The New York Times talks about H.D.R. Photography.

“Although H.D.R. photos are often compared to paintings, they are an attempt by software makers to allow photography to more accurately mimic human vision.

Dynamic range measures how great a difference between light and dark can be captured by a digital camera or film. Relative to the human eye, all photography has a limited dynamic range, and digital photography suffers even more than film.

It is this limitation that leads to landscape photos where a dramatic sky appears as a washed-out smudge. A classic example of the problem is trying to photograph a room’s interior while still capturing the view outside its windows. In that case, photographers are usually forced to choose either the room or its view as their subject.

“The concept of H.D.R. photography is fairly simple. It starts with a photographer harvesting every bit of difference in brightness by taking several different photos of the same scene, with large exposure differences between them. Software then sorts through the resulting images, which range from underexposed views that are nearly black to washed-out overexposures, to calculate the full dynamic range of the view. Using that vast amount of data, it then constructs a single, high dynamic range photo.

At least that’s the theory. While the actual practice can be highly automated, it is slightly more complicated.

These H.D.R enhanced photos, such as those shown in the New York Times, look like illustrations or highly polished paintings - but they’re still photographs.  I think the story here is not so much about High Dynamic Range Photos but the power that highend Adobe Software brings to the average photographer who has many more options of where to go with their photos than ever before.