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Another shot from last summer's trip to Chicago. This was in an area of construction where we parked for lunch. The signature of the artist reads: M. Glascott - 2011.

www.linkedin.com/in/mglascott

I haven't taken any pictures in at least a month - ran across this from our trip to Chicago last summer. At least it's attention getting.....

The morning after we arrived, last July, this sculpture was unveiled at Frontier Plaza on Michigan Avenue outside the Chicago Tribune Building at the southern end of the "Magnificent Mile" of skyscrapers and luxury hotels and shopping.

Here are some excerpts from one article:

"Citizens of Chicago have been variously panicked, enraged and excited by the appearance of a 26ft-statue of Hollywood actor Marilyn Monroe. Unveiled earlier in July, the statue pays homage to Monroe's notorious leg-flashing scene from The Seven Year Itch. Critics have lined up to label it "sexist" and "creepy". Tourists, meanwhile, have lined up to take pictures.

Designed by artist Seward Johnson, Forever Marilyn stands accused of pandering to the worst instincts of passers-by. "Even worse than the statue itself is the photo-op behaviour it inspires," claimed Richard Roeper, a columnist on the Chicago Sun-Times. "Men (and women) licking Marilyn's leg, gawking up her skirt, pointing at her giant panties as they leer and laugh," Roeper added, for good measure, that the statue was "hideous".

Elsewhere, Abraham Ritchie of the Chicago Arts Blog dismissed it as "creepy schlock from a fifth-rate sculptor". The statue, he said, "caters to cheap titillation that is in itself pathetic".

The Seven Year Itch was directed by Billy Wilder and based on the 1952 play by George Axelrod. It cast Monroe in the role of "the Girl", who spends the summer in a sweltering city apartment and cools herself by standing in the draft from a subway grate.

The arrival of the Monroe statue has led some critics to wonder how it came to be erected in Chicago when The Seven Year Itch was set in New York. They can take comfort from the fact that, despite its name, Forever Marilyn is merely visiting. The statue is due to be removed next year."

www.guardian.co.uk/film/2011/jul/20/marilyn-monroe-sculpture

What do you think?

I ran across this from last May's trip to England. Don't know why, but it amuses me somehow.

From: www.artic.edu/artexplorer/search.php?tab=2&resource=468

By the end of his life Paul Cézanne was recognized as one of the great masters of his era. His treatment of color and form as inseparable descriptors of the physical world was nothing short of revolutionary.

Cézanne was born in Aix, where his schoolmate was Emile Zola. The friendship ended in 1886 with the publication of Zola's L'Oeuvre, a novel containing an unflattering portrayal of the painter. Cézanne prepared to be a lawyer, worked as a banker, and then studied painting in Paris. His canvases from 1861 to 1871, mostly portraits, are characterized by dark tones, thick paint, and strong lighting.

Camille Pissarro convinced Cézanne to adopt the broken brushwork and light palette of the impressionists. He exhibited at the first and third impressionist group shows, but soon lost faith in the goals of the movement. He claimed that his ambition was to "make of impressionism something solid and durable like the art of museums." By 1883 the artist was conveying mass and volume through a series of hatched strokes.

A meticulous and deliberate painter, Cézanne often worked on his canvases for several months. A substantial inheritance from his father in 1886 allowed him to live comfortably in Provence. He was a shy man who adopted a deliberately crude, rustic manner to keep people away. His art had a profound impact on early twentieth-century artists such as Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, who recognized Cézanne's post-impressionism as an essential precursor of cubism.

From www.artic.edu/artexplorer/search.php?tab=2&resource=209:

A look at Monet's still life painting and his ability to both animate the scene and anchor it with a sense of stability.

Claude Monet took up still-life painting for a time around 1880. This traditional genre may seem an unlikely arena in which to stage a career shift, but Monet hoped to expand his market during a period of economic recession. He renewed his attempts to gain access to the Salon and tried to form associations with dealers other than Paul Durand-Ruel. In addition to being easier to sell than landscapes, still lifes allowed the artist to continue his experimentation with the textures and colors of nature during periods when bad weather prohibited him from painting outdoors.

Here, Monet depicted an assortment of two different kinds of apples, together with green and red grapes, and introduced an element of animation, even suspense. This still life is anything but still: the smaller apples at the lower right seem ready to roll off the steeply angled table, and the folds of the cloth appear to ripple like waves. Yet the artist's control over the objects is evident, giving the composition a sense of stability and vitality. Not only did Monet adopt a magisterial view from above, but he also anchored the fruits and basket with palpable, grayish-green shadows. Exploring the possibilities of materials at hand—one of the central challenges of still-life painting—Monet found several ways to use the same dabs of white pigment: on the grapes, they represent translucent fragility; on the large apples, matte solidity; and on the little apples, glossy sheen.

Still life never became central to Monet's repertory, but it is tempting to look from this brief experiment to those of his colleagues—most notably Paul Cézanne, who would bring the genre to new heights of complexity and beauty.