Take your pic

Welcome to the land of art auctions where a photograph of Ralph Hotere can be estimated (and probably sell at) at a higher value than a drawing by Ralph Hotere.
Image: Webb’s Important paintings and contemporary art catalogue with Marti Friedlander’s photo est. $4,500 - $7,500 and Ralph Hotere’s drawing Woman with flowers est. $5,000 - $7,000

Cast aside

Hang on, here’s something strange. Over the last three or four months we’ve heard a few people talk about taking life-drawing classes. Is drawing making a come back? If it is someone needs to hot foot it over to the Collection of Plaster Casts of Ancient Sculpture in Berlin.  Imagine thousands of plaster casts of famous sculptures, bits and pieces of male and female bodies, the odd horse and a good range of heads with and without noses. The plaster cast was like a 3D Tumblr. It gave museum visitors around the world the opportunity to see sculptures in the round rather than via books in old time 2D. And art students could hone their craft using models that didn’t scratch themselves or nod off and slump out of pose.

Primary instructions

Why drawing died.
And again, thanks to I love charts

Finders keepers

Today on its very entertaining blog Bunker Notes the Christchurch Art Gallery put up a quiz. Showing details of works that feature smoking (cigarette variety), you're asked to identify the complete art work. Most art savvy people could easily identify three, even four, of the works but the two drawings are pretty mysterious. Now there's a solution. Thanks to Google image recognition all you need to do to win competitions like this is to pop the image into the Google Image search box. All the details came back with pics of the full image, although one of them needed the words Christchurch as a kicker. This is going to revolutionise (maybe it already has) art history research.
LATER (08-03-03): Since posting this the Christchurch Art Gallery has taken their quiz post down for copyright reasons. Kind of ironic given that all the images are out there on the internet anyway, but there you go.

Images: the Christchurch details, even when significantly further reduced still picked up their originals via Google image

Abstracts

You may well think these are sketches for abstract paintings, perhaps by a frontrunner like Maleavich, or even one of our own, McCahon maybe. But they are in fact margin drawings from the The Codex Arundel a collection of papers assembled by Leonardo and now in the British Museum. If you want to spend your day (ok, evening) going through the entire codex (seriously, they have put every page up on line) this is the place to go.

Putting the life back into life drawing

Here’s a chance to get on your bike, learn some anatomy and do some extreme life drawing. Toss a coin, loser wears the suit and rides out front. Muscle skins available here.

Moving

For everyone who has ever made a small memory sketch of an artwork in a gallery, or tried to show someone what they are talking about with only a pen or pencil to help, this c.1942 letter from Alexander Calder to the art historian Agnes Clafin. In it Calder depicts eight of his sculptures (one notated “rather hard to balance”) that he was keen for her to see in his New York apartment. At the time Clafin was probably preparing her narration for Alexander Calder: Sculpture and Constructions, one of the first ever art museum multi-media shows. It was shown as part of Calder’s 1943 survey exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art.

Source: via the wonderful Archivesof American Art