Paintings (Well, Posters) in My Apartment

One of the exciting things that happened in the past six months was that my framed posters arrived from Boston, where they’d been hurriedly stashed four years ago upon departing Connecticut to return to sunny California. When in CT I had money to burn, and did so by professionally framing a number of works of art which I enjoyed. They are all fine art pieces – works I knew I would want hanging on my walls for years to come. (To share a secret I may even daydream of a house that feels like an art museum, complete with the individual lighting, like V’s shadow gallery or the library from Myst.)

Goals.

The pictures of framed art from here on out are all mine. I spent a lot of money on framing these works, so I wanted the frames to be represented along with my descriptions. Some angles are askew, and this is due to attempting to avoid glare. Without further ado, then, here’s a guide to the art on my walls, and why these pieces speak to me:

We’ll start in the bedroom.

The Treachery of Images, Rene Magritte, 1929.

Purchased and framed in CT.

This is my smallest piece, above my door. It’s a standard size, so we found nice, rich chocolate frame with a black highlight to bring out the contrast of the image and its light background – nearly the same shade as the walls it would be hanging on. I like Magritte, he’s one of my favorite surrealists. As a kid I had a poster of the other great surrealist Salvador Dali’s Persistence of Memory (you know, the soft watches). It was my first fine art poster, along with, of all things, Peaceable Kingdom by Edward Hicks. Both are now lost or destroyed.

The Hicks painting is interesting as it represents a visual list, namely of animals. He made many versions, and one is housed in the collection in de Young art museum in San Francisco. The de Young is relatively third-rate, but I liked that one painting as a child, obviously due to its animals, and my mom bought it for me. In general, I enjoy works that require time to soak in – and a visual list is a good example of my early interest, in a basic way, with this form of contemplation. In Umberto Eco’s work, The Infinity of Lists, a companion piece to a curatorial work he did for the Louvre, he dedicates a chapter to paintings that are visual lists of animals, usually focusing on Noah’s Ark as the encyclopedia-ing means (for example Memberger’s The Animals Entering the Ark). Later in his work, a chapter discusses the role of lists of excess, with animal themes again prevalent (for example Bruegel the Elder’s Allegory of Air).

So my first two paintings were an allegorical bestiary and a highwater-mark of surrealism. Magritte’s small piece is the inheritor of the latter trend in my taste. In high school, while reading Scott McCloud’s now-ubiquitous, then-still-fresh work Understanding Comics, I ran across the following:

When time came for a Magritte to add to my collection, despite having dressed up as The Son of Man for Halloween in high school, Treachery of Images became my choice.

Drawing Hands, M.C. Escher, 1948.

Purchased in youth, framed in CT.

The third print I bought as a youth, which happily still survives, is Escher’s Drawing Hands. The work has long been a favorite. In my high school Ceramics class I made a pencil holder that was a to-scale three-dimensional rendition of the lithograph. Escher is fun, although my favorite work of his is the cosmic Another World II, about which I wrote and submitted a poem my Freshman year. (Our English teacher, Dave Lavender, read it in front of the class, anonymously, and then said ‘Well done, Ross,’ at the end, upsetting the preservation of anonymity. Oh well.)

Two of the art books I first bought, in middle school, were compendiums of Dali and Escher. I still own the Escher work, but the Dali coffee table book I gave away. Surrealism was a favored theme of my childhood, and Escher, these days, is the other manifestation of that.

The framing is one of three works where we decided to use a very simple black metallic frame, to not distract from the composition.

Three Musicians, Pablo Picasso, 1921.

Purchased and framed in CT.

This painting, what with a border already present, is the second of the simply-framed pieces. The framer and I even decided, for the proportions, to keep the poster’s label visible at the bottom. I enjoy Picasso, but struggled to find a work of his that matched my aesthetic and taste. Guernica is too large, as is Les Demoiselles. I enjoy Picasso, but not to that extent. The Old Guitarist was a work I admired as a child, but as I got older felt less inclined to it. Instead, this work, with its harlequin flair, may be the most humorous of his works, which drew me to it. I like an aspect of humor in my works, whether through absurdity or other means.

The final touch, and a theme we will see repeated, is the detail, perhaps initially missed, of the dog under the table. A dog under the table of the three musicians, who are themselves seemingly allegorical, is what sold me on adding this work to my little poster collection.

The Tempest, Giorgione, c. 1508.

Purchased and framed in CT.

We now step way out of the 20^th century, back to the Renaissance. This is one of my all-time favorite paintings, because, in keeping with the theme, it is so very peculiar. It is the oldest work on my walls.

For framing I wanted to highlight the three dominant colors, the verdant green, the gold in the cloud, and the light brown earthiness. With the double matte I think we achieved the result. It is easily my favorite framing job I’ve ever planned.

In college I lived at the San Francisco Zen Center for a month or so, and during that time, as the weeks went on, the Center decided to sort of use me as a go-between for them and the outside world. One particularly pleasant errand they sent me on was to get some works of art that hung in their hallways framed – they wanted a double matte, but beyond that trusted my artistic judgement to decide the rest (my tastes and talents having recently been displayed in an exercise of flower arranging). That was when I became interested in framing as an art. But admittedly, the roots go deeper, to trips to Marin with my father who was busily framing the dozen or so works of original comic book art he had purchased and was hanging around our house.

I have no recollection how I first came upon the work – I suspect it was in a book, but don’t recall. Years later, though, in college, during my Junior half-year abroad, I dragged my mother and sister through the Accademia in Venice – which is not a great collection – just to see it, the highlight of the gallery.

There is symbolism here, and intriguing, near-surreal aspects as well. First the woman’s gaze directly engages the viewer. The way she is holding the child is odd, instead of on her lap, at her side. The nudity is also inexplicable. The role of the solider, at left, is also strange – why is he there? He may be focused on her, but maybe not. There’s a storm coming, as the title suggests, but their stance and poses are calm, unhurried, and unconcerned. The ruins in the background of the mythic town are hauntingly empty, and there’s further a broken column prominently displayed – a well-known symbol from the era of death, a life cut short.

This was also the first nude I added to my collection. I was hesitant at first to have nude paintings – what would people think? – but I have subsequently purchased two more. I have no intent of adding to these three, though.

Cupid and Psyche, Gerard, 1798.

Purchased and framed in CA.

I bought this, the most recent nude of the three, in response to a framing sale. I simply needed a poster to frame and I’d been planning on buying this poster for a while, and so it was picked! It is again a double matte, which coincidentally is the case with all three of my nudes, a fact I did not realize until surveying them now. The blue of the sky needed a bit of punching up, I thought, and the creaminess of the flesh-tones could also feature. The more old-fashioned dark wood frame balances it out, so that the work doesn’t become too light and airy, veering into sentimental, or even kitsch, territory.

Gerard is not a great artist. I can’t claim to like any of his other works – portraits of Napoleon and women in the style of, but inferior to, Jacques-Louis David.

According to the myth, Psyche cannot see Cupid, who has himself fallen in love with the beautiful young woman. This kiss, then, is strange to her, as she cannot see the love-grounded, winged figure bestowing it upon her. The wings of Cupid, incidentally, are a favorite – clearly the artist studied some bird of prey, matching nicely with his quiver.

This poster is easily the most explicitly erotic, yet it’s very sweet, the mythology telling a story of innocence and gentleness tempered by new feelings of arousal, seen in Psyche’s dilated pupils engaging with us, the viewer, striving, perhaps, to glimpse her lover.

 

The School of Athens, Raphael, 1511.

Purchased and framed in CT.

While discussing the Greeks, let’s look at the great Renaissance masterpiece depicting the cream of ancient thought.

This is one of my largest posters, and one of the costliest to frame. No matting here – bust we needed a huge wood frame to hold it, and the monster of silver, with simple classical lines, did the trick. As a shinier frame it matches with the actual contours and molding of the wall which the image depicts – the painting is, after all, a fresco, and Raphael used a little trompe-l’oeil to make his work fit in with the wall he was working on.

The work is obviously a list, a game to find the various famous figures and identify them, from Raphael himself in the bottom right, looking out at us, and his contemporary Michelangelo, slouched in purple mirroring Diogenes on the stair, to the great philosophers of antiquity – Plato and Aristotle, center, Socrates, at left, in green, etc.

My earliest engagement with philosophy came in middle school, in religion classes, but ripened during my Sophomore through Senior years in high school when I started reading original texts, and then came to fruition in college, where I averaged one philosophy class per semester until grad school. This poster is a reminder to me of that development of my mind.

Again, in college while abroad, my mother, sister, and I went to the Papal chambers in the Vatican to see the original work. Secular in nature, it has long been a favorite depiction from the height of the Renaissance era. I identify far more with School of Athens than, say, the Sistine Chapel ceiling which we saw later that day.

Autumn, Spring, Summer and Winter, Alphonse Mucha, 1896.

Purchased and framed in CT.

This set of four, depicted in the poster not quite in the order they were painted, was bought in desire to have an Art Nouveau poster, preferably a Mucha. Since Steinlen’s Le Chat Noir has become a poster-lover’s cliché, I wanted something of the time period, but maybe more refined. As a boy I like Toulouse Lautrec, and even wrote a report on him. I admired his style, and so the initial interest in having a work from the French Belle Epoque could be said to stem from grade school.

San Francisco, being a city that was born during the era of Art Nouveau, has remnants of this sensuous past, built upon the wealth of immigrants seeking gold, whose conspicuous consumption was displayed in mimicking the European visual tastes of the era. Not much survived the 1906 earthquake, but again, the style fascinated me from my earliest rambles around the city as a child.

For this framing we hit upon an ideal wooden frame immediately. Since the poster already has a large gap surrounding the four figures we dispensed with the matte and enclosed the work in a slightly ornate, faintly curlicued, dark gold border. It picks up and mirrors the four individual frames and is just shiny enough to add a little glint to a relatively flat subject matter.

As for the allegorical depiction of the seasons, since this is one of Mucha’s earlier works, I think it doesn’t suffer from the rigidity of his later portraits of women. With time they became increasingly academic, whereas this work, due to its subject, presents the models in sparse, but evocative backgrounds – landscape elements which his lithographs in later years tended to avoid, or not accomplish as well.

We now move on to the living room.

San Giorgio Maggiore at Dusk, Claude Monet, 1908.

Purchased and framed in CA.

Sticking with the Belle Epoque, we come to another centerpiece.

This is my other very large work, along with the Raphael, and it required a lot of deliberation. I bought it in response to moving into my new apartment in Berkeley, which had vast white walls to fill. At the framers we decided on a blue to both compliment the overall orange and red, and to bring a bit more notice to the strip of sky at top. I was concerned, at first, about using a simple white matte, but the framer was right in the need to create some visual distance from the business of the work, providing room for those intense colors to pop before contacting the frame.

Not my favorite Monet. That title goes to Impression, Sunrise from 1872. But that landmark work, however wonderful, does not match my aesthetic and style of dwelling. I do, however, enjoy this Venetian sunset as a close second, and more harmonious choice, for my space.

Again, at the de Young, I recall seeing an exhibit of Monet’s water lilies as a child. I liked his works immediately – as so many do – but the lilies weren’t a motif I cared for as much. I left wanting to learn more about him and his style, if not lilies.

Oddly, this is the only landscape in my collection.

Picture Gallery with Views of Modern Rome, Giovanni Paolo Pannini, 1757.

Bought in MA, framed in CT.

This picture caused some confusion for me. The version I have is on display in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, where I purchased it from. Yet I have seen it elsewhere, as there are different versions of work, with slight variances, in different locales. This was the first work I got professionally framed in CT, and we immediately hit upon the ruddy gold, with the black contrast as the frame that perfectly matched the subject.

What I like most about this visual list of a painting, though, is an aspect seen only, to my knowledge, in the MFA’s copy: the children peeking in to view the painting from behind this bizarre theatrical curtain.

It cannot be classified with a proto-work of post-modernism, like Foucault famously does with Las Meninas in The Order of Things. Indeed, such peeking and framing is not unusual: going back at least as far as Filippo Lippi in the 1400s. But by combining it with the infinity on display it makes for a special piece.

Umberto Eco, in his work on lists, has the following to say about the version of the work found in the Louvre:

“The fact is that an image in sculpture is defined in space…whereas in paintings the image is limited by the frame. As we have said, even the Mona Lisa is portrayed against the background of a landscape that could obviously continue beyond the frame, but no one wonders how far the forest behind her may extend, and no one thinks Leonardo wished to suggest that it extend to infinity. Nonetheless, there are other figurative works that make us think that what we see within the frame is not all, but only an example of a totality whose number is hard to calculate…Think of Pannini’s picture galleries: they are not intended to represent merely what is shown but also the rest of the (indefinitely large) collection of which they are only an example.”

Choose Your Weapon, Banksy, 2010.

Purchased and framed in CT.

By far the most recent piece in my collection. The next oldest is Escher’s Hands, from 70 years earlier. It is the third, and final, work for which we used a simple black metallic frame.

My San Francisco 90s childhood was rife with Keith Haring. His large sculpture, Three Dancing Figures was initially located downtown before moving adjacent to the de Young in Golden Gate Park. His altarpiece, The Life of Christ was located at my school, Grace Cathedral, in the Interfaith AIDS Memorial Chapel.

Not until I was older did I learn of his graffiti roots, roughly around the same time when I was discovering Banksy as a prankster ‘guerrilla artist’ who was sneaking his works into museums. It was all very exciting and Thomas Crown Affair – it appealed to my subversive adolescent tendencies going into college.

When Banksy decided to make a statement that art is a weapon, and in doing so pay homage to Haring, I knew it was a work I wanted in my collection. My sister, Jess, bought the print for me, done on canvas, and I was glad to add it. Its inclusion means that Escher’s monochromatic hands aren’t quite so lonely.

Thalia, Muse of Comedy, Jean-Marc Nattier, 1739.

Purchased and framed in CA.

We end with my favorite painting.

I bought this upon returning to California, to mark moving home to the Bay Area. The piece was purchased already framed from the Legion of Honor, my favorite art museum in San Francisco. They used a standard ‘academic’ framing, whose gold helped accentuate the light gold touches in the work. It has a double white matte frame, which is peculiar, in my opinion, and a standard black frame, but, as a standard frame, it works well.

Thalia is a Grecian muse, as the title states, of comedy. I can recall from middle school art classes my teacher telling me that, to direct the eye of the viewer, you want to think carefully about what you put in the center, and to sparingly use the color red.

I therefore find this painting to be hilarious. Nattier’s bullseye of a nipple is fitting for a comedic muse. Besides being an attractive subject, from the twinkle in her eye to the smirk, this is the third, and final, of my nudes. For all the talk of the de Young, the Legion, as a space and a collection, is strongly preferred, and as a child, when I bashfully looked at this portrait, I thought she was one of the most beautiful women I’d ever seen. Unlike Psyche or the enigmatic figure of The Tempest, this is the only female figure adorning my wall which is placed there for attraction.

We again, like Pannini, have a theatrical curtain, blue to contrast to the red from before, with a stage scene in the background. All of my framed posters bring me an aspect of joy and contemplation, but perhaps none so much as Thalia, embodying comedy, mirth, and laughter itself. She makes me smile.

So there you have it, all of my posters, and why they are important to me.