Behind her, filling most of the wall, hangs a large painting of the Last Judgment — the ultimate reckoning, the weighing of every soul, the final verdict of eternity. She faces neither toward it nor away from it. She simply holds her own scales steady in the soft light coming through the window, and she is entirely at peace. Vermeer placed her there deliberately. The judgment of strangers looms large and dark behind her, and she is unmoved by it. Her attention is inward. The pearls and gold on the table — the beautiful, tempting, earthly things — are present but untouched. She is somewhere between all of it, holding the balance, serene. She is also, if you look closely, pregnant. Carrying new life while weighing the world. That detail changes everything. Vermeer's woman knows something about darkness. The darkness behind her is real. The judgment of strangers is real. The earthly treasures on the table are real. And she holds her own scales level anyway, in the light, in the quiet, tending to what belongs to her and no one else. Serenity is not the absence of darkness. It is the decision to hold your own balance in spite of it.

Johannes Vermeer :
Woman Holding a Balance, c. 1664

National Gallery of Art, Washington.

She stands at a table in the corner of a quiet room, holding a small balance scale in her right hand. The pans are empty. The scales are perfectly level.

Further description in the alt text 👇

April is Jazz Appreciation Month

Amedeo Modigliani :
Roma Woman with a Baby, 1919

oil on canvas
115.9 x 73 cm | 45-5/8 x 28-3/4 in

National Gallery of Art

Buddy Guy, c.1970s at his club The Checkerboard Lounge.

The Checkerboard Lounge was a blues club on Chicago's South Side, founded in 1972 at
423 E 43rd St., by L.C. Thurman and Buddy Guy.

Reefer Madness 1936- Colorized YouTube video by American Reefer

Happy 420! 😎🪴

Morton was jazz's first arranger, proving that a genre rooted in improvisation could retain its essential characteristics when notated. His composition "Jelly Roll Blues" published in 1915, was one of the first published jazz compositions. He also claimed to have invented the genre. https://youtu.be/H4o01H7lnbs

Ferdinand Joseph LaMothe (later Morton, 1890-1941) known professionally as
Jelly Roll Morton
was an American ragtime and jazz pianist, bandleader, and composer.

I did a paper on Jelly Roll Morton in college.
If you're unfamiliar, do yourself a favor and change that. His life was quite a story.

Joan Miro in his studio in Montroig Montroig/Barcelona, 1952

Dancer, 1925

Dutch Interior (I) is an Oil on Canvas Painting created by Joan Miró in 1928. It lives at the MOMA, Museum of Modern Art in New York

The Birth of Day, 1968 The final years of Miro's artistic career were characterized by an abundant use of black and a loose manner of applying paint to the canvas, which resulted in much dripping and splattering. In the seventies, exhibitions of his work became increasingly all over the world. The immediacy of his best paintings today remains inimitable. The primal themes he pursued - the earth, the sky, the human personage transformed - and the means he used to express them - compositional simplicity, sure, confident brushstrokes, mainly primary colors - established one of the most important bodies of work in twentieth-century art.

Remembering Joan Miró i Ferrà on the anniversary of his birth in 1893. 🎂

“I try to apply colors like words that shape poems, like notes that shape music.”

📸 : Henri Manuel -

Little Accordion Player,
Paris, 1900

06-The Beatles - Rubber soul (Full album) - YouTube

Still, my fave of all of theirs.
Enjoy 😊

Afterwards he was a master student at Burg Giebichenstein and took part in the theater class and worked as a painter in the Krefeld textile industry. In 1931-34 he continued training with Johannes Itten at the Higher Technical School for Textile Surface Art in Krefeld, where he then worked as a draftsman until 1938, when he employed by the United Silk Weavers. Bauhaus

Karl Hermann Haupt (German, born otd in 1904) :
The Drinker, 1925

Oil on canvas, 63 x 59.5 cm

After studying painting at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Halle, Haupt attended Bauhaus courses with Albers and Moholy-Nagy, as well as with Klee, Kandinsky and Gropius.

More info in the alt text 👇

Max Ernst in New York, 1942

📸 : Arnold Newman

Body: see 'Description' https://emuseum.nmmusd.org/objects/13912/trillingszither

Trillingszither, c.1790
made in Germany

This unusual zither features an intricately carved head, guitar-shaped body, and three fingerboards.

Ink stamp is that of Joseph Salzer (1846-1923) of Vienna

Housed at the National Music Museum in Vermillion

See description link in the alt text 👇

Harry Clarke is mostly known as one of the greatest stained glass designers of all time, but he also was a talented illustrator. “And Ariel weeping from Belinda flew, Umbriel, a dusky melancholy Spright, As ever sully’d the fair face of Light, Down to the Central Earth, his proper Scene, Repairs to search the gloomy Cave of Spleen”

Harry Clarke (Irish, 1889-1931) :
Down to the Central Earth, his Proper Scene, 1913
(One of 6 illustrations for a version of Alexander Pope’s poem The Rape of the Lock)

Ink over graphite on card
36.9 x 28 cm

National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin

More in the alt text 👇

Jacques Lipchitz, 1947-55 📸 : Sanford H. Roth, 1906–62 Gelatin silver print 26.7 × 34.2 cm | 10-9/16 × 13-1/2 in The Art Institute of Chicago

In Spring Rains, Higgins featured two Native Americans on horseback amidst a sublime landscape. He depicted El Salto Peak ringed with clouds and flooded the valley below with light, creating shimmering atmospheric effects with his vibrant palette. As the artist once observed, “A field or a mountain is always changing. They change size and color with every passing cloud and with the passing of every hour and season.” Higgins studied and taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He first went to Taos, New Mexico, in 1914, sponsored by a group of Chicagoans who wanted to support local artists. Liberated from financial concerns, Higgins experimented boldly with modern form and color.

Victor Higgins :
Spring Rains, 1924, Taos, NM

Oil on canvas
102.2 × 109.9 cm | 40.25 × 43.25 in

Friends of American Art Collection
The Art Institute of Chicago

Further description in the alt text 👇

Verdun. Interpretation of a war painting, black, blue and red projections, ravaged land, gas clouds.

Félix Valloton :
Verdun - Tableau de guerre, 1917

oil on canvas | 114 x 146 cm

Musée de l'Armée, Hôtel des Invalides, Paris

Art is making a thing, and then trying to make a better one, and you keep doing this until you die, and that's a pretty good life. ~ Jacques Lipchitz

Thomas Esmond Lowinsky (2 March 1892 – 24 April 1947) was an English painter of Hungarian and South African descent. Born in India, the son of Thomas Herman Lowinsky of Tittenhurst, Sunninghill, Berkshire and elder brother to author and philanthropist Xenia Field, Lowinsky grew up in England and was educated at Eton and at Trinity College, Oxford before studying at the Slade School of Fine Art from 1912-14. Following service in France during World War I, Lowinsky continued painting, holding his first one-man exhibition at the Leicester Galleries in 1926. He was a member of the New English Art Club from 1926-42. Lowinsky's work was primarily portraiture, but he also painted fantasy scenes. Amongst the books for which he provided illustrations was Edith Sitwell's Elegy on Dead Fashion. Lowinsky died in London on 24 April 1947; a memorial exhibition was held in 1949 at Wildenstein's. Subsequent exhibitions have been held at the Graves Art Gallery in Sheffield (1981) and the Tate Gallery (1990). His works include The Mask of Flora (1931), The Offering of Cain and Offering of Abel (1932), and portraits of Miss Cicely Hamilton (1926), Miss Jean Brady (1933) and Miss Avril Turner (1937).

Thomas Esmond Lowinsky : The Mask of Flora, 1931

Oil on Canvas | 31 x 27.5 cm

Wolverhampton Art Gallery

Bio in the alt text 👇

Widely considered to be the father of Mexican modern art, Alfredo Ramos Martínez is known for depictions of Mexican and Mexican-American people who reveal the influence of both French Post-Impressionism and his country’s Pre-Columbian heritage. In 2007, his painting Flowers of Mexico (1938) sold for a record $4.1 million at Christie’s. As a teenager, Ramos Martínez won a scholarship to the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes in Mexico City. He disliked the school’s rigidity and Eurocentrism however, preferring instead to sketch scenes of everyday life outside the classroom. After studying in Paris, he returned to Mexico in 1910 on the eve of national revolution to found the first of several open-air art schools inspired by the Impressionist practice of plein air painting. David Alfaro Siqueiros and Rufino Tamayo were among his students. Ramos Martínez moved to Los Angeles in 1930 and soon after abandoned oil painting altogether, instead creating portraits of fruit vendors and Indigenous women in tempera on newsprint and painting murals commissioned by patrons and institutions in L.A. and across the U.S.

Alfredo Ramos Martínez :
Vendedora de Alcatraces
(Calla Lily Vendor), 1929

oil on canvas
45.8 x 36 in | 116.2 x 91.4 cm

Private Collection
(On loan to Whitney Museum of American Art)

Further info in the alt text 👇

Charleston, its interior decorated by Grant and Bell and its garden developed and frequently recorded by them in their paintings, became a meeting place for artists and writers in the Bloomsbury circle. The house and garden have recently been restored and opened to the public.

Duncan Grant :
Garden Path in Spring 1944

Oil on canvas | 91.3 x 83.2 cm

Flowers were big in Grant's later work. The garden represented is at Charleston farmhouse, near Firle in Sussex, he shared with painter Vanessa Bell and where he lived and worked from 1916 until his death.

Tate Gallery 👇

A couple standing in front of a painting. One says to the other: "I said, 'I wonder what it means,' not 'tell me what it means.'

Featuring a poetic, dreamlike depiction of Paris landmarks. Often rendered in deep blue tones with surreal elements like floating figures, it highlights his obsession with the city. It was published by André Sauret and is cataloged as Mourlot Subject: The artwork merges the Notre-Dame Cathedral and the Eiffel Tower, surrounded by dreamy, ethereal imagery. Atmosphere: It captures a romantic, nostalgic view of Paris, blending reality with fantasy, a signature of Chagall's modernist style. Color Palette: Dominated by deep blues and shades that enhance the dreamlike, nocturnal mood. Context: Created during a period when Chagall was prolific in printmaking, often collaborating with Atelier Mourlot. This work is part of a series of prints that often explore the dreamlike nature of Parisian scenes, similar to Place de la Concorde from the same year.

Marc Chagall :
Notre Dame et La Tour Eiffel, 1960

Lithograph in colors on Arches paper
32 x 24.5 cm

"Paris! There was no better word for me.”
- mc

Further description in the alt text 👇

Wassily Kandinsky :
Three Stars, 1942

Oil on canvas | 12 × 16 inches

London, Christie's

A conventional looking man, a civil servant perhaps, stands with his back to us. Ahead of him is a billowing cloud ejected by an unseen steam train. To the side of him, also unseen, is another man holding a balloon. Why? What has brought this bizarre combination together? And why here, in this wintry forest far from anywhere? The obvious question to ask when looking at a Mark Edwards work is: what’s going on in this painting? But after a few minutes, you realise the question you should be asking is: what the heck is going on outside it? 'The White Wood' series is the latest phase in the remarkable artistic story of Mark Edwards, which began when he went straight from school in 1967 to Medway College of Art, and continued with his studies at Walthamstow College of Art in London.

Mark Edwards (UK, b. 1951) :
The Start of a Perfect Day, 2022

Acrylic on Canvas
15-7/10 × 15-7/10 in | 40 × 40 cm
Private Collection

Further description in the alt text 👇

LOLLL - same

😊

She was brilliant.

Born in Norwalk, CA in 1926 to Japanese immigrant parents, Asawa was the 4th of 7 children and grew up on a truck farm. In 1942, her family was sent to different Japanese internment camps as a result of U.S. isolation policies during World War II. At the Rohwer War Relocation Center, Asawa learned to draw from animators who previously worked at Walt Disney Studios interned there. In 1943, she was able to leave the camp to attend Milwaukee State Teachers College on scholarship. Hoping to become a teacher, Asawa was ultimately unable to, as her Japanese ancestry prevented her from obtaining a teaching position in Wisconsin. In 1945, Ruth and her older sister traveled outside of the U.S. to study in Mexico. She was taken by the colors and arts there. It was during her second trip to Mexico in 1947 that she learned the knitted-wire loop technique from a Mexican teacher, which she used to make the sculptures for which she is most famous. Eventually in 1946, Asawa joined the avant-garde artistic community at Black Mountain College, where she studied under German-American Bauhaus painter and color theorist Josef Albers, as well as the American architect and designer Buckminster Fuller. At Black Mountain College, Asawa began making looped-wire sculptures inspired by the basket crocheting technique she learned on a 1947 trip to Mexico. In 1955, she held her first exhibition in New York. By the early 1960s, Asawa had achieved commercial and critical success and became an advocate for public art, saying, "art for everyone." Asawa was the driving force behind the creation of the San Francisco School of the Arts, which was renamed the Ruth Asawa San Francisco School of the Arts in 2010. She passed away in 2013 at the age of 87, leaving behind a legacy that transforms pain into beauty.

Ruth Asawa :
American modernist known for her abstract looped-wire sculptures inspired by natural and organic forms. In addition to her 3-dimensional work, she created figurative and abstract drawings and prints influenced by nature, mostly flowers and plants.

More of her story in the alt text 👇

Man Ray :
Portrait of a woman, card, c.1950

Gelatin silver print
10.8 x 8.1 cm

Centre Pompidou