MOMA’S QUESTION: Does an artist's personality effects our way of thinking about their art?

The morning after the moment that changed my life...

YOUR ART ESCORT'S RESPONSE:

Absolutely … YES. When I first approached art school, I did not like Van Gogh’s art work. I could not figure out why he was so important and why all these other guys were important too. The old cliché, “My kid could paint better that.”

I felt safe enough with this one teacher to tell her how I really felt. She was clearly a mature woman and I was too, going back to school for art around 40ish. Barbara, my teacher explained it’s what we learn about their lives that make us so convicted or compelled to move emotion within ourselves.

Over the next few years I set out on adventure, to reach this point of personal comprehension of why what appears to be sometimes just outright ugly art becomes a master piece.

Where it led me I never thought I would have gone. What I saw and personally experienced during this 2 years period would be so consuming that reading and learning about artists who had suffered seemed my only way out.

During this extended period of HELL, with suicidal ideation, the life stories of other artists was one of my saving grace, and the care taking of my 20 year old to lead my life for me for a while...

It’s sort of funny now that adding then another two years of trying to climb out of hell with multiple therapies and rehabs, the one I wrote my own prescription for… turned out to be the one that has shaped the reconstruction of my new  life.

I became intimate with so many international artists and settled in on my love for the modern art movement as my favorite. The impressionist pieces prior to my illness could not satisfy my hunger or squelch my thirst.

It was the artists’ details of their lives, what made them tick? Why they needed to be driven to paint something that would never sell but they kept doing it. What kept them from the edge of suidice or let them fall to succumb?

Now when I see works that I like, or that are different, weird or just ugly, I research the artist’s life deeper than others to see if I can see what I can find. To see how I may have aligned myself with whom they were expressing themselves to be. 

now are your all wondering what the hell happened to her that she write such crazy nonsense, knowing the depths of hell?

Sept 2006

Informed I have 1 to 3 months before my heart valve blows, 

Oct 15, 2006

Legal divorce is finalized, my little daughter is 5 years old

Nov 6, 2006

Open heart surgery mitral valve repair

Dec 5, 6, 7, 2006

Suffered 3 mini strokes, one each day

Dec 13, 2006

Suffered Ventricular Tachycardia or VTAC for short

Dec - April 2006 Coumadin resistant needing multiple blood draws every week, arm veins scarred and collapsed 

Dec 26, 2006

Entered a multiple year phase of suicidal ideation

Jan 2007

Body Memory Flashback started raging for 9 months

May 2007

Diagnosis of Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder

Nov 2007

Amnesia broke and night terrors started for 6 months

June 2008

The bombing stopped and it was a wait and see

Aug 2008

The first therapy started for stroke rehab. Progress was slow at best

Jan 2011

Chronic Fatigue Immune Disorder was diagnosed and a whole new treatment plan was started

April 2011

Started an experimental drug for my CFS neurological brain virus attacking my auto immune system

June 2011

Registered for a MOMA online course… to help gather, organize and make sense of the past 4 years of my life through other artist’s stories and suffering

MOMA AND MODERN ART

REPRINTED FROM: MOMA

Alfred H. Barr, Jr., 1930. The Archives of The Museum of Modern Art, Chart of Modern art

A video about women in MoMA's early history with commentary by Michelle Elligott, Museum Archivist.

ALFRED H. BARR, JR., AND THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART

The Museum of Modern Art was founded in 1929, and from the beginning to the present day it has been the foremost museum of modern and contemporary art in the world.

Alfred H. Barr, Jr.
The Museum's founding director, Alfred H. Barr, Jr., was only 27 years old when he took the post. He had previously designed and taught the first modern art course in the United States, at Wellesley College in Massachusetts.

The Museum started out in 1929 in a few rented rooms in a midtown Manhattan office building at 57th Street and Fifth Avenue. In 1939, just 10 years after the stock market crash of 1929, the Museum was transferred to a new building on 53rd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues.

From the very beginning, Barr wanted multiple departments, so he established the first art museum departments of photography, cinema, architecture, and industrial design.

In 1933, Barr drew his "'Torpedo Diagram of Ideal Permanent Collection" to suggest that the collection moved like a torpedo through time, with its nose representing the present and its tail being the past. The goal was to have most of the collection focus on the early part of the 20th century.

For the cover of the Cubism and Abstract Art exhibition catalogue in 1933, Barr designed his famous diagram charting the "isms" that preceded, coincided with, and followed World War I. The art historian Robert Rosenblum wrote in 1986:

Amazingly, even now ... Cubism and Abstract Art maintains its fundamental authority. ... Barr's text survives to this day in a strangely timeless and undated way, a combination of historical chronicle with an unfailing ability to single out that work of art whose description will make the most salient points. ... This level of distilled excellence is so consistent that, for the past half-century, most scholars have been refining, amplifying, or diluting Mr. Barr's initial presentation of the Gospel of modern art in 1936.

With our class, we will examine many of these "isms" and look at their relationships to each other. Each week, one main artist will be used as a lens to focus our understanding of key concepts.

Francesca Owens, American Artist, has chosen Spoleto as her home, she is also a talented art critic!

REPRINTED FROM: SPOLETONLINE

Translated from Italian to English

Written by: Sandro Morcihelli 

As a host of Spoleto, a well-known Italian-American artist resides her in our historical center from New York City and Colorado. She is called Francesca Owens and has already put in evidence for some of her successful exhibitions in Italy, with particular reference to city Etruscan Cortona, where has a clear reputation. Her work has been presented in America in numerous states, where her paintings representing high-level which were enthusiastically received, as known critics have written, that have focused on excellent technique combined with color Brilliant, immediately strike the eye of the visitor.

www.francescaowens.com her website includes wild animals and particularly savage, like the tiger, leopard, jaguar and lion. Not for nothing has worked together with famous biologists, who have sincerely appreciate his art, as can be seen from articles signed by famous personalities.

At present, Francesca Owens told us that following an illness that lasted for four years, she devoted herself to criticism of modern and contemporary art, and was also invited by directors American and foreign journals. He also added his criticism of the site Austrian Journal of Tamara de Lempicka for a show that is still held in Rome in Victorian, can be read here at Tamara’s official website.

Canada and Austria, the United States and in Italy, has popularity, having been placed in evidence for its intense activities is considered very useful against a painting that can be defined as alive and real, not suffering any contamination.

For the immediate future, Owens will participate in some important "Seminars", putting at the disposal of young talent and schools that wish to be able to learn from the voice of an artist everything that is known only in a unsatisfactory and or skims the surface.

It should also be noted that our Francesca has a real archive of art books, DVDs, CDs and even toys table to educate modern art. 

FRANCESCA OWENS AN AMERICAN ARTIST, AS HER HOME HAS CHOSEN SPOLETO. She also is a talented art modern critic. We intend to come back at the next Festival of the 2 Worlds, when our cities will be These Art Critics not only from Italy.

Photograph by Cesare Cestari of the Torre del Greco, near Naples