Tulips burst into a patchwork quilt of colors in the Netherlands

It may be cold outside right now, but here’s a promise of good things to come. French photographer Normann Szkop snapped these amazing aerial photos of the tulip fields of Anna Paulowna in northern Netherlands.

BY CAROL KURUVILLA / NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 2, 2013, 3:12 PM

NORMANN SZKOP

Here’s a vibrant reminder of what makes springtime in the Netherlands so beautiful.

French photographer Normann Szkop took to the skies last year to capture these glorious aerial shots of tulip fields in Anna Paulowna, a town in northern Netherlands. For tulip farmers, this beauty is a business. The flowers are sheared off, and about 2 billion bulbs are exported every year. But for a fleeting moment, the angles and lines created by these tulips turn mass production into quite a lovely thing.

NORMANN SZKOP

The Dutch fields start working early, producing crocuses in late January, according to the National Geographic. Then come the daffodils, narcissi and hyacinths. The flower season reaches a climax in April and May, when tulips blanket the fields like a quilt of many colors.

NORMANN SZKOP

The Dutch have learned to capitalize on this spectacle, drawing tourists in with an annual Tulip Festival. This year’s festivities will begin April 17. 

NORMANN SZKOP

The first tulip arrived in the Netherlands from Asia in 1593, sparking a flurry of sales that would later be called “Tulipomania.” During the 17th century, one bulb could cost you what a Ferrari costs today, The New York Times reports.

The bulbs are destined for Dutch auction houses, where sales of tulips produce about $300 million every year.

NORMANN SZKOP

See more photos at “Flying over the Tulips Fields” Flickr page.

NORMANN SZKOP

Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/tulips-fields-full-bloom-article-1.1253883#ixzz2Jv8jXqYs

Van Gogh and Gauguin letter tells of artistic hopes that turned sour

Original Guardian article found here

‘Electrifying’ missive written by artists on pages of French exercise books goes on sale in Paris next month

Kim Willsher in Paris

Part of the letter written by Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin which is being sold at Christie’s Paris.

The handwritten letter, penned jointly by Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin on cheap paper torn out of a school exercise book, speaks of friendship and hope. Written at a critical point in the careers of both men, it refers to dreams of founding a utopian community of brother artists, of a new artistic renaissance, and of paintings now recognised as masterpieces.

The reality was to be less idyllic. Shortly after the missive was sent, the pair quarrelled violently and in one of history’s most notorious acts of self-mutilation, Van Gogh sliced off his right ear. It was an act that marked the Dutchman’s final decline into madness and suicide.

Now, the four-page letter signed by both artists has emerged from a private collection before its auction in Paris next month, where it is expected to fetch up to €500,000 (£405,000).

Thomas Venning, an expert with the auction house Christie’s, said the document offered an insight into the “most famous artistic menage in history”.

“I spend my life dealing with letters and this is one of the greatest, most electrifying I have ever seen,” he said. “It takes you into their house, into their lives at this particular moment.

“You can imagine Van Gogh sitting down to write the letter on cheap paper because they didn’t have much money, then saying to Gauguin: ‘You finish it off’.”

The letter is written on the square-ruled paper of French exercise books and addressed to Emile Bernard, a young avant garde artist who inspired both men. It was composed in November 1888 at Arles in Provence, where Van Gogh had rented two floors of a private house, 2 Place Lamartine, the subject of the painting La Maison Jaune.

The previous week, after months of procrastination, Gauguin had arrived to live and paint with Van Gogh for one or two years. At the time, the French art world was moving from impressionism to modernism and surrealism, but Van Gogh and Gauguin had yet to be widely recognised.

Van Gogh, mentally fragile and prone to violent mood swings, was fired up with childlike excitement. In the letter, he gives his first impressions of the French painter.

“Gauguin interests me much as a man – very much – I have long thought that in our dirty profession as painters we have the greatest need of people with the hands and stomachs of a labourer – and more natural tastes – more amorous and benevolent temperaments – than the decadent and exhausted Parisian boulevardier.

“Now here without the slightest doubt we are in the presence of a virgin creature with the instincts of a wild animal. In Gauguin, blood and sex prevail over ambition.”

He adds: “We have made several excursions to the brothels and it’s likely that we will end up working there often. Gauguin has at the moment a painting under way of same night café that I also painted, but with figures seen in the brothels. It promises to become a beautiful thing.

“I’ve made two studies of falling leaves in an avenue of poplars and a third study of this whole avenue, entirely yellow.” [Les Alyscamps.]”

Van Gogh writes that he and Gauguin are discussing “the terrific subject of an association of certain painters” and of his “presentiment of a new world … and a great artistic renaissance” that will find its home in the tropics.

On the final page, Gauguin adds: “Don’t listen to Vincent, as you know he’s prone to admiration and ditto indulgence. His idea about the future of a new generation in the tropics seems absolutely right to me as a painter, and I still intend to return there when I have the means to do so. Who knows, with a bit of luck …?”

Eight weeks later, on 23 December, the partnership came to a violent end when the pair quarrelled violently over, it is believed, Van Gogh spending the meagre household budget on prostitutes, and his refusal to stop drinking absinthe.

Van Gogh threatened his “friend” with a razor before slicing off his own ear. Shortly afterwards he entered the first of a series of asylums and died in 1890 aged 37 after shooting himself.

Gauguin returned to Paris and later set up a studio in French Polynesia where he died in 1903, aged 54. The pair never met again, though they subsequently corresponded.

Venning says the letter reveals the two men’s different characters, and the calm before the storm in their relationship.

“It’s a moment of friendship, optimism and shared work. It looks like everything is going to be OK and they achieved a lot of work in a short period of time.”

He added: “The dramatic events that followed the writing of this letter make it rather sad. It’s a mind blowing document.”

The letter is part of the Pierre Berès Collection, being sold at Christie’s Paris on 12-13 December.

Many Rembrant etchings were printed after his death, say experts

Original DutchNews article found here

Tuesday 20 November 2012

Many of the Rembrandt etchings in public collections around the world were not printed by the master or in his studio but by others after his death, according to art experts Erik Hinterding and Jaco Rutgers.

Hinterding and Rutgers have been researching Rembrandt’s etchings for years and have studied some 18,000 prints, RTL news reported on Tuesday. They estimate almost half were made after his death.

Later prints can be identified because of wear and tear and repairs to the copper plate which were not contemporary to Rembrandt. Paper analysis can also help date the etchings.

The researchers say they expect their findings to change the market for Rembrandt etchings and make prints from the master’s own hand more valuable.

A new exhibition at Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum focuses on 36 etchings and their origins. The museum has copies of 314 of the 315 known Rembrandt etchings in its collection.

© DutchNews.nl

How Does the Brain Perceive Art?

Original Wired article seen here.

• By Jonah Lehrer

In 1995, the Metropolitan Museum of Art mounted a controversial exhibition entitled “Rembrandt/Not Rembrandt,” in which works considered to be genuine Rembrandts were displayed alongside those done by his students and admirers. (These lesser paintings are often dismissed as “the school of Rembrandt.”) The point of the exhibition was to reveal the fine line between genius and imitation, authenticity and fakery.

A hundred years ago, about 700 works were attributed to Rembrandt. Over the course of the 20th century, that number declined by 50 percent, as critics and historians began searching for those tell-tale marks that distinguish the old master from his young pupils. Such critical distinctions have massive financial consequences: While a painting by celebrated Rembrandt pupil William Drost might sell for a few hundred thousand dollars — his best canvases can go for a couple million — a genuine Rembrandt is worth many times more. In 2009, a lesser Rembrandt portrait sold for $33 million.

What accounts for this staggering difference in value? One possibility, of course, is that there’s something inherently special about a real Rembrandt, that the Dutch painter filled his art with discernible flourishes that can be detected by observers. Although we might not be able to explain these minor differences, we still appreciate them at an unconscious level, which is why we hang Rembrandts in the Met and consign his imitators to the basement. Great art is not an accident.

The second possibility is that our aesthetic judgements are really complicated. While Rembrandt was an astonishingly talented artist, our response to his art is conditioned by all sorts of variables that have nothing to do with oil paint. Many of these variables are capable of distorting our perceptions, so that we imagine differences that don’t actually exist; the verdict of art history warps what we see. The power of a Rembrandt, in other words, is inseparable from the fact that it’s a Rembrandt. The man is a potent brand.

To test these competing hypotheses, a team of researchers at Oxford University, including Mengfei Huang, Holly Bridge, Martin Kemp and Andrew Parker, set up a simple experiment. They recruited 14 volunteers who were familiar with Rembrandt but had no formal training in art history. The subjects were then put into an fMRI machine and given the following instructions:

In this experiment you will see a sequence of 50 Rembrandt paintings. Before each image appears, an audio prompt will announce whether the upcoming painting is ‘authentic’ or a ‘copy’ (Please see background for further information on copies). A blank screen will appear for a few seconds after each image to allow you to relax your gaze.

The paintings themselves were all portraits, equally divided between Rembrandt and “school of Rembrandt.” While the subjects were staring at the paintings — they were given 15 seconds to look — the scanner was recording changes in cortical blood flow. Here’s where things get tricky: The mischievous scientists reversed the attribution of the paintings, so that half of the subjects were told that the real Rembrandts were actually copies. In theory, this experimental design would allow the scientists to distinguish between the neural response to the art itself and the response generated by the attribution. In the figure below, for instance, Painting A is authentic, while Painting B is a copy:

The first thing the researchers discovered is that there was no detectable difference in the response of visual areas to Rembrandt and “school of Rembrandt” works of art. The key word in that sentence is “detectable”: fMRI remains a crude tool, and just because it can’t pinpoint a significant difference between groups (especially given these limited sample sizes) doesn’t mean there is none. That said, it’s not exactly surprising that such similar paintings would elicit virtually identical sensory responses. It takes years of training before critics can reliably discern real Rembrandt from copies. And even then there is often extensive disagreement, as the 1995 Metropolitan show demonstrates.

However, the scientists did locate a pattern of activity that appeared whenever a painting was deemed to be authentic, regardless of whether or not it was actually “real.” In such instances, subjects showed a spike in activity in the orbitofrontal cortex, a chunk of brain just behind the eyes that is often associated with perceptions of reward, pleasure and monetary gain. (According to the scientists, this activation reflects “the increase in the perceived value of the artwork.”) Interestingly, there was no difference in orbitofrontal response when the stamp of authenticity was applied to a fake Rembrandt, as the brain area responded just as robustly. The quality of art seemed to be irrelevant.

The last meaningful result from the fMRI experiment came when the subjects stared at the inauthentic portraits. It turns out that these fake Rembrandts generated the strongest activations, both in the frontopolar cortex and precuneus. The scientists explain this activation in terms of working memory, as the people were actively trying to “detect the flaws in the presented image.” Because the portraits looked like real Rembrandts — and in many instances were — the subjects were forced to search for visual blemishes to justify the negative verdict, analyzing the paintings for flaws and mistakes that Rembrandt would never make. All of this mental analysis requires frontal lobe activity; being a critic is hard work. Here is Parker, summarizing the results:

Our findings support the idea that when people make aesthetic judgements, they are subject to a variety of influences. Not all of these are immediately articulated. Indeed, some may be inaccessible to direct introspection but their presence might be revealed by brain imaging. It suggests that different regions of the brain interact together when a complex judgment is formed, rather than there being a single area of the brain that deals with aesthetic judgements.

These lessons don’t just apply to the evaluation of art. In fact, the same mental process also appears to drive our appreciation of expensive wine. In both instances, the sensory differences on display — say, the visual distinction between a real and fake Rembrandt, or the taste of Trader Joes Pinot versus a Romanee-Conti — are overwhelmed by our cognitive beliefs about what we’re experiencing. Consider this recent experiment led by neuroeconomists at Caltech. Twenty people sampled five Cabernet Sauvignons that were distinguished solely by their retail price, with bottles ranging from $5 to $90. Although the people were told that all five wines were different, the scientists weren’t telling the truth: There were only three different wines. This meant that the same wines would often reappear, but with different price labels. For example, the first wine offered during the tasting — it was a cheap bottle of Californian Cabernet — was labeled both as a $5 wine (its actual retail price) and as a $45 wine, a 900 percent markup. All of the red wines were sipped inside an fMRI machine.

Not surprisingly, the subjects consistently reported that the more expensive wines tasted better. They preferred the $90 bottle to the $10 bottle, and thought the $45 Cabernet was far superior to the $5 plonk. By conducting the wine tasting inside an fMRI machine — the drinks were sipped via a network of plastic tubes — the scientists could see how the brains of the subjects responded to the different wines. While a variety of brain regions were activated during the experiment, only one brain region seemed to respond to the price of the wine, rather than the wine itself: the orbitofrontal cortex. In general, more expensive wines made this part of the brain more excited. The scientists argue that the activity of this region shifted the preferences of the wine tasters, so that the $90 Cabernet seemed to taste better than the $35 Cabernet, even though they were actually the same wine.

We want to believe that pleasure is simple, that our delight in a fine painting or bottle of wine is due entirely to the thing itself. But that’s not the way reality works. Whenever we experience anything, that experience is shaped by factors and beliefs that are not visible on the canvas or present in the glass. Even the most exquisite works in the world — and what is more exceptional than a Rembrandt portrait? — still require a little mental help. We only see the beauty because we are looking for it.