In my usual Wikipedia rabbit hole journey, I came across some lovely paintings the other day. I ended up going through the page of Johannes Vermeer, admiring a bunch of his works. Consider my surprise when I scrolled by a familiar painting, The Girl with the Pearl Earring. Although the artist’s name didn’t ring a bell at first, that painting is famous enough that it stopped me in my tracks. Go figure, he’s got all these detailed slice-of-life paintings that give a strong sense of what life was like for an average, middle class, Dutch person in the mid-1600s, and yet the only work of his I’d seen before was that one.
I guess it’s kinda like how some musicians can put out multiple albums, yet be forever known as a “one hit wonder” because only one of their songs “made it big.”
I know it’s kinda off topic, but what I find even weirder are bands that are “one hit wonders” in one country, but have like 10 hits and a long career in another country.
They’ll have a whole wikipedia article of awards they’ve won you’ve never heard of, and tours they went on, and you’re like “they wrote more than one song!?”
And this is why I love Todd in the Shadows’s One Hit Wonderland.
a-ha and their eleven studio albums have entered the chat
One of my favorite painters! A start at looking at his other work:
https://www.dailyartmagazine.com/edvard-munch-in-10-paintings/
These are sick, thanks for sharing!
Reason why people love Scream: mood
I recommend visiting the Munch museum in Oslo. Lots of interesting things to see.
My dumb ass with “why is the munich museum in oslo” I need more sleep…
“We should take Munich, and push it somewhere else!”
The most delicious museum.
IIRC they have an entire floor dedicated to variants of the scream.
Yeah there’s way more to his oeuvre than just the Scream… of which are like 10 versions or so. It’s a great museum. Great cafe on the top floor too
I felt this way about seeing the mona lisa. It’s like 50cm wide, and behind glass, and not that interesting… but there were probably 200 people crowded in front of it all looking at it through their phones.
It’s almost like performance art or something.
I don’t understand why people take pictures of the mona Lisa. Professional photos of it exist online.
The point is to show to others that you stood in front of something famous, the painting itself is of no value to these people
Not always. Most photos I take are really just intended for future me. A few of them have famous things I care about.
Exactly - I’ve got a really shitty memory. I’d take a photo so that in 5 years time I’ll get a reminder from my photos app - hey, on this day 5 years ago you were in The Louvre.
What a coincidence. My memory is also really shitty.
Mines not, I can see a picture online.
first time ive ever seen a line spanning multiple floors was at the mona lisa.
Did you see the painting in the other side of the room the Mona Lisa was in? We I went there it was a gigantic and beautiful buffet with dozens and dozens on people. The whole time in the room I was looking the opposite way to her lol
That would be The Wedding Feast at Cana. Another pretty impressive one is The Intervention of the Sabine Women, most well known for having a dude posing with his cheeks out
I’m so confused. what’s going on? We’ve got naked folks, fighting, children on the ground, is that lady in white trying to hold the two men back? What in the world.
Right? Old paintings kick so much ass.
Oh I’ve seen that ass!
And, yes! It’s the wedding feast painting, thank you!
I can’t imagine any of those photos are coming out well either, so I don’t understand the point. I can see a selfie or a picture of your family in front of it, but I’m never going to look at a phone pic of a framed painting behind glass at a distance.
I can’t imagine doing it for something like the Mona Lisa, but I take plenty of other paintings to get the painting and plaque in one shot, so after I can look up the names of painters I liked and hadn’t heard of.
Munch’s The Scream actually does kind of merit taking a picture, though. At least for the Munch Museum in Oslo, he made a ton of different versions on cardboard or paper bases that can’t hold up to extended exposure to light, so the ones on display get rotated every half hour or so. There’s also another version of it a short distance away in the National Museum, so it could be fun to compare all the different versions you can catch.
You can look at it right after you watch the video of those New Year’s fireworks from 2019.
You just reminded me - somewhere I’ve got a video of my oldest kid seeing his first fireworks. Don’t think he was even toddling yet, and his grandmother was holding him.
I don’t think he even has any memories of her when she was still lucid, I need to dig that out!
Nice. Glad I could help. Hopefully it was a video of him and not the fireworks!
I still can’t believe “The Scream” is mostly just crayon on cardboard.
Maybe they’re not worth looking at? Nobody ever tells You to listen to another song by Spin Doctors.
Now I want to know which of Two Princes or Little Miss Can’t Be Wrong you haven’t heard yet. The two-hit-wonder disrespect here is staggering, I say. Staggering!
This is fucking brutal disrespect of Jimmy Olsen’s Blues and I won’t have it!
Little miss what?
Caaan’t be wroOOong
I can see why The Scream jumped out as unique with its surreal image, but in his 205 works he’s got a few that are decent paintings. Just not as eye catching. And I’m no expert, so maybe someone with knowledge of use of color or flow or whatever could say what level he was.
Wasn’t because of the connection to Guernica and it’s bombing? Or am I confusing some paintings here?
I believe Picasso has Guernica related paintings, might be that you’re thinking about?
I thought The Scream was related to the Krakatoa eruption 10 years earlier.
Inspiration of it, from the artist: “I was walking along the road with two friends – the sun went down – I felt a gust of melancholy – suddenly the sky turned a bloody red. I stopped, leaned against the railing, tired to death – as the flaming skies hung like blood and sword over the blue-black fjord and the city – my friends went on – I stood there trembling with anxiety – and I felt a vast infinite scream through nature.”
It’s not the person who’s screaming, but nature itself - or at least that’s what they’re perceiving.
Right. The landscape is screaming. The person is covering their ears.
I love The Sun and its different versions. You should check it out!
Klimpt has a similar problem.
vs. everything else…
Same as described above and in comments.
Tons of people taking selfies, pictures, anything.
Thing is, you really can’t capture anything great about The Kiss if you’re not in person. It’s all about the way the light reflects in the gilding.
(Source: was in Vienna and saw it in person last year. In case you’re wondering, I don’t think I took a single photo but looked at it for like 20 minutes from every angle I could.)
I saw an exhibition here and even without the guilding, masters have a… luminance that is impossible to capture on film or print.
100%
I used The Kiss as an example due recent experience sparked by your reference to it above.
To anyone reading this who hasn’t already: Do yourself a favor and keep an eye out for a Van Gogh exhibit coming to somewhere near you.
Not an experience or whatever else.
Make sure they have real paintings. The texture of the paint must be seen in person. The way the light moves on the oils is magnificent.
Don’t take pictures, just look at the fucking light on the oil on the canvas.
Marketing manipulation. We have been conditioned to precieve value in some things over others. It eleminates the idea that you as an individual have to engage and investigate to find your own value of a piece of art. I’m not saying that the popular pieces of an artist aren’t incredibly good. Just understand that an artist probably has dozens of other work you might want to engage with and appreciate.
I’ve seen this soon many times at art museums. Sure Starry night and Mona Lisa are great but the artists’ other masterpieces are literally 10 steps away and people seem to casually ignore. The power of the totebag fridge magnets.
Yup most people seem to have no taste of their own, they only value what others have already liked, they have no personality of their own
It’s called the “Shot Gun Approach” … I learned it a long time ago with basic photography. I was so worried about being able to take great photos that I asked a professional photographer about it and he just said take lots of photos, as many as you can … the ‘Shotgun Approach’.
You just snap a ton of stuff, stuff you think is good, stuff you think is important, stuff you want, stuff you think you should do, this stuff, that stuff, any stuff … just get the biggest memory card you can get or film or whatever and just take as many photos as you can of everything.
When you get back, about 98% of all your photos will be shit … but you will have about a dozen great shots where people will comment on how great a photographer you are.
You basically blast the entire activity with everything you got … like a shot gun blast … a true shot gun blast throws out a lot lead pellets in a general direction. Not all of them will hit their mark but several will.
It’s better than the Sniper Approach … where you base all your energy, will and hopes into one single shot … you take all your energy and time into that one shot and if you miss, which is highly likely, you will lose everything and you will be forgotten.
So whatever you are doing in life … just give it your all … most of it will be forgettable but a small part of it will be celebrated because people will think you were a genius for doing it. The more you do, the more likely you will be successful in something.
Counterpoint: sometimes the best still shot requires a particular moment captured with a particular, consciously arranged setup.
This interview of a veteran NBA photographer breaks it down of how he only has a single shot per shot because of how he necessarily relies on strobes set up to not distract the players or interfere with the broadcast. As a result, he scouts/studies each player and team so that he knows when the right moment is to actually capture the shot, because he can’t exactly ask players to do it again.
If you read interviews of Pulitzer photography winners, they’ll often say a lot of the same things: being prepared and being lucky and having that convergence of having incredibly high skill/expertise/understanding of the setting, while being able to capture in every opportunity presented.
You should capture a lot of photos and examine them to understand how to make them better, and increase your skill level and understand your subject so that you can still optimize for the very best shot possible.
Why was he so productive in 1788?
I get the same when people post holiday pictures. I’m not going to scroll through 100 images. But if you post 1 to 3 I’ll look, so just pick the very best ones.
I recommend visiting the Louvre and going to the room with the Mona Lisa. It’s a tiny image, alone on a huge wall constantly surrounded by dozens of people and you can’t see shit. But turn around in the very same room and there’s an absurdly big image covering basically the entire opposing wall, it’s hugely impressive but I don’t think more than like 10 people a day even notice it
What is the bottom right one in the second panel?
~Also, is it me or are those specific ones telling a story?~
Found it! It’s “Melancholy”, which is apparently a series of similar paintings he did. You have to scroll down the page to find the one that matches.
Thank you!
