Photos: Season Finale- Salon de Musiques: Dorothy Chandler Pavilion
Photos taken at the Season Finale of the Salon De Musiques at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion
by Leticia Marie Sanchez
Music has a healing power, and, in the wake of tragedies in the headlines, I felt particularly hopeful after listening to the uplifting program by Fanny Mendelssohn, Clara Schumann, and Robert Schumann at the Salon De Musiques Season Finale on June 12th.
As Thomas Carlyle once remarked, music “leads us to the edge of the infinite, and lets us for a moment gaze into that.”
Through the talented direction of Founder Francois Chouchan, the Salon embodied the restorative capacity and deep humanity of a language that needs no words.
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In the news: Flooding near the Louvre
Photo outside Louvre
Copyright© 2012 Leticia Marie Sanchez
Venice de Milo surrounded by storage boxes.
Twenty feet of water rising from the Seine.
Due to the past week’s flooding in Paris, curators moved many of the Louvre’s antiquities to safety. According to the New York Times, “Some 150,000 artworks in storage rooms, and an additional 7,000 pieces in galleries, were deemed vulnerable to flooding, and many of them were moved to higher floors starting on Thursday evening.”
For the full scoop, see the NY TIMES article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/04/world/europe/eerily-empty-louvre-what-its-like-when-floods-keep-tourists-away.html?_r=0
read moreWise Men and Women: Pablo Picasso
“The meaning of life is to find your gift.
The purpose of life is to give it away.”
-Pablo Picasso-
Photo Credit: André Villers
La Guerre et la Paix Chapel of Vallauris Castle 1953
read moreIn the news: “One of the World’s Greatest Art Collections hides behind this fence”
Treasures from Ancient Rome, Da Vinci, Van Gogh, 1,000 works by Picasso,
and this exquisite painting from Gustav Klimt:
“Water Serpents II,”
For the full scoop, read the NY TIMES article:
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/05/29/arts/design/one-of-the-worlds-greatest-art-collections-hides-behind-this-fence.html?emc=edit_th_20160529&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=16294325&_r=0&referer
read more“Duchamp to Pop”- A Must-See Exhibit
by
Leticia Marie Sanchez
Cultural Cocktail Hour® is a registered Trademark
This week’s Cultural Cocktail Hour involves a Pinch of Parody, a Dose of Double Entendre, and a Highball of Warhol- Bottom’s Up!
“Duchamp to Pop” is a must-see exhibit in Southern California due to the wit of Marcel Duchamp and his influence on the Pop Art Movement.
CCH loves any exhibit where you can unleash your inner art detective; “Duchamp to Pop” lends itself to peeling back layers of culture and indulging in wordplay and irony.
Cheeky puns are the name of the game. For instance, when one usually thinks of the Mona Lisa, one imagines crowds of tourists lining up to see a dignified work encased behind glass, vigilantly guarded by museum security.
Quite to the contrary, Marcel Duchamp’s mischievous Mona Lisa, La Joconde, bears an absurd mustache, and the letters L.H.O.O.Q. When read aloud, they form the French Phrase, “Elle a chaud au cul,” a risqué commentary on this fine lady’s posterior.
Don’t laugh at my mustache.
I dare you.
A second word game in the exhibit involves Duchamp’s signature: Rrose Sélavy, a pun which evokes the French phrase: “Eros, c’est la vie,” or “Eros, that’s life.”
What does it mean when we gaze upon a mustachioed Mona Lisa? Simply, that we need not take Art, nor ourselves for that matter, so seriously. Art should not signify untouchable pieces on museum walls, but rather, the creativity that we can engender in our daily lives.
The humor and parody continue chronologically in the exhibit with Pop Artists like Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol. Andy Warhol’s Brillo Pads, and Pop Art in general, exposed the mass marketing that dominated the post-war era.
An Andy Warhol Soup Can sold originally sold for a measly $100. Now these cans can be found in the purview of princes and oligarchs. (Warhol’s “Silver Car Crash” sold in 2013 for $105 million).
A bit ironic, that a movement that exposed American dependence on brands, had at its helm, an artist, Andy Warhol, who, himself became a brand. The reason that Warhol’s paintings can command stratospheric sums (and other artists cannot), is because of the name recognition. Like a Rolls Royce or a Patek Phillipe, a work by Warhol has clearly recognizable brand, and thereby, status significance.
The works of the Pop Artists embody parody and satire. Through this movement, we can chuckle at wordplay and irony. And Andy Warhol could laugh all the way to the bank.
L.H.O.O.Q. or La Joconde, 1964 (replica of 1919 original)
Colored reproduction, heightened with pencil and white gouache, Edition of 35, No. 6 (Arturo Schwartz edition)
comp: 10-1/4 x 7 in. (26.0 x 17.8 cm); sheet: 11-3/4 x 7-7/8 in. (29.8 x 20.0 cm)
Norton Simon Museum P.1969.094. Image Courtesy of Norton Simon.
Campbell’s Soup I: Black Bean
1928-1987 Silkscreen on paper 35-1/2 x 23-1/8 in. (90.2 x 58.7 cm)
Norton Simon Museum, Museum Purchase, 1969 P.1969.062.08. Image Courtesy of Norton Simon.
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Wise Man: Marcel Proust
The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.
Marcel Proust
Marc Chagall
Happy Birthday, leap year baby Gioachino Rossini
“
Give me a laundry list
and I’ll set it to music”-
Gioachino Rossini
read moreHappy Cultural Valentine!
HAPPY’S VALENTINE’S DAY to my readers!
Wishing you a day filled with love, art, and music!
All Photography© 2016 Leticia Marie Sanchez
Cultural escapade at the Getty Center
Cultural Cocktail Hour® is a registered Trademark
Sculptures taking Selfies?
When even the sculptures take selfies, you know that we are in trouble!
What would Michelangelo say?
by Leticia Marie Sanchez
Kudos to these artists for providing a snapshot into today’s culture. Lines of tourists crowd Florence’s esteemed Uffizi Gallery, not necessarily to take the time to observe the art, but rather to take a quick selfie with Botticelli’s Birth of Venus before rushing onto the next Instagrammable moment. Today many individuals walk by masterpieces because they are too busy staring at their cellphones or getting ready for a closeup.
Based on Bertel Thorvaldsen’s “Eve Holding an Apple,” “The Immortalization of Self” by Jana Cruder and Matthew La Penta captures today’s self-obsessed culture with cheeky precision.
CCH selects this work as the most timely at LA Art Show this week.
Narcissistic statue seen at LA Art Show 2016
“Immortalization of Self” by Jana Cruder and Matthew La Penta, based on Bertal Thorvaldsen’s “Eve Holding an Apple”
Axiom Gallery
Bertel Thorvaldsen, Venus, 1813-16 (Copenhagen, Denmark, Thorvaldsens Museum)
