Maeve Binchy Has Left Her Circle of Friends, Family, Fans And All Are Broken At The Departure - Tuesday 28 May 1940 To Monday 30 July 2012

It was in California where I read Maeve Binchy’s novel The Glass Lake - a daughter-mother relationship tale set in rural Ireland and urban England during the 1950s. I have been remiss in continuing to read her works, though Maeve Binchy was one of thirty women writers I featured in this blog during March 2010.

Wherever Maeve Binchy has traveled, there are bound to be others willing to form a new circle of friendship with the Irish writer. May they be a treasure to her as Maeve will be to them.


Images:
Left: Maeve Binchy from the website bellenews.com
Center: Front cover of The Glass Lake from the website bookcrossing.com
Right: Maeve Binchy from the website livelib.ru

Monday Morning Museum: Jules Bastien-Lepage

Jules Bastien-Lepage

Jules Bastien-Lepage – 1 November 1848 Darnvillers, Meuse, France to 10 December 1884 Paris, France

French Realist Painter

Joan of Arc, 1879

“With the loss of the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine to Germany in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War (1870–71), the national heroine from Lorraine, Joan of Arc, acquired new symbolic importance among the French. A succession of sculpted and painted images of the medieval teenaged martyr appeared in the Salons of the 1870s and 1880s. At the 1880 Salon, Bastien-Lepage, himself a native of Lorraine, exhibited this painting, which represents the moment of Joan of Arc's divine revelation in her parents' garden. His depiction of the saints whose voices she heard elicited a mixed reaction from Salon critics, many of whom found the presence of the saints at odds with the naturalism of the artist's style.” – Metropolitan Museum of Art

Last Monday’s Artist – Alfred Stieglitz
Next Monday’s Artist – Adolphe-William Bouguereau

“Monday Morning Museum” logo created by Adrean Darce Brent

Monday Morning Museum: Alfred Stieglitz

Alfred Stieglitz, 1933 by Dorothy Norman

Alfred Stieglitz – Friday 1 January 1864 Hoboken, New Jersey to Saturday 13 July 1946 New York, New York

American Tonalist Photographer

Georgia O’Keeffe, 1918

"Stieglitz photographed me first at his gallery "291" in the spring of 1917. … My hands had always been admired since I was a little girl—but I never thought much about it. He wanted head and hands and arms on a pillow—in many different positions. I was asked to move my hands in many different ways—also my head—and I had to turn this way and that. … Stieglitz had a very sharp eye for what he wanted to say with the camera. When I look over the photographs Stieglitz took of me—some of them more than sixty years ago—I wonder who that person is. It is as if in my one life I have lived many lives. … His idea of a portrait was not just one picture. His dream was to start with a child at birth and photograph that child in all of its activities as it grew to be a person and on throughout its adult life. As a portrait it would be a photographic diary."

Georgia O'Keeffe, 1978 – Metropolitan Museum of Art

Last Monday’s Artist – Ellsworth Kelly
Next Monday’s Artist – Jules Bastien-Lepage

“Monday Morning Museum” logo created by Adrean Darce Brent

Monday Morning Museum: Ellsworth Kelly

Ellsworth Kelly

Ellsworth Kelly – Thursday 31 May 1923 Newburgh, New York to still living as of this post

American Minimalist Painter and Sculptor

Blue Green Red, 1963

"In "Blue Green Red," he has juxtaposed three bold colors in a highly skillful and effective manner to create a complex picture in which color and shape are one. The edges of one shape—the rectangle—are identified with the edges of the canvas, while the blue ellipse expands beyond the canvas, forcing us to finish it in our minds. Despite the clean, precise rendering of the ellipse, its form is irregular and seems to float and swell, activating the entire composition.

Kelly's arrangement of the complementary colors, which work to intensify one another at their intersections, is also an essential component of the work. The opposite colors of red and green both add to the boldness of the work and divide the overall rectangle into distinct units. The artist has also exploited the tendency of warm colors to appear to come forward on the picture plane, and cool ones to recede. While the bright, unmodulated colors are unequivocally two-dimensional, we can nevertheless read the red strip at the bottom as foreground and the cool green and blue as receding background. When viewed as foreground and background in this way, the sources in nature for Kelly's forms are suggested. Blue and green are the colors of water and earth—perhaps lake and field, as indicated not only by hue but by the swelling, fluid shape of the ellipse and the flatness of the green surrounding it. While the painting itself is continuous with the European biomorphic tradition, its scale is that of the huge close-ups of billboards and movie screens—a very American form." – Metropolitan Museum of Art

Plant Drawings exhibition

Last Monday’s Artist – Paul Victor Jules Signac
Next Monday’s Artist – Alfred Stieglitz

“Monday Morning Museum” logo created by Adrean Darce Brent

Monday Morning Museum: Paul Victor Jules Signac

Paul Victor Jules Signac

Paul Victor Jules Signac – Wednesday 11 November 1863 Paris, France to Thursday 15 August 1935 Paris, France

French Pointillist Painter

Notre-Dame-de-la-Garde (La Bonne-Mère), Marseilles, 1905-1906

"Signac went even farther than Seurat in his methodical studies of the division of light into its components of pure color, and he arranged rectangular brushstrokes like tesserae in a mosaic.
In 1901 Signac had painted a smaller and less vibrant version of this view of the Marseilles, crowned by the church of Notre Dame de la Garde. The luminosity and brilliant color of the present picture are dependent on his continued use of unmixed pigments, but also on his contact with the young Fauve painters Henri-Edmond Cross and Matisse and Saint-Tropez in summer 1904." – Metropolitan Museum of Art

Last Monday’s Artist – Camille Pissarro
Next Monday’s Artist – Ellsworth Kelly

“Monday Morning Museum” logo created by Adrean Darce Brent

Monday Morning Museum: Camille Pissarro

Self Portrait, 1873 by Camille Pissarro

Camille Pissarro – Saturday 10 July 1830 Charlotte Amalie, Danish West Indies to Friday 13 November 1903 Paris, France

Caribbean-born French Pointillist/Impressionist Painter

Haystacks, Morning, Eragny, 1899

Medium: Oil on canvas
Dimensions: 25 x 31 1/2 in. (63.5 x 80 cm)
Classification: Paintings
- Metropolitan Museum of Art

Last Monday’s Artist – Jean Hey
Next Monday’s Artist – Paul Victor Jules Signac

“Monday Morning Museum” logo created by Adrean Darce Brent