From any genre: books, songs, movies, poems, paintings, sculptures, buildings, dances, etc.
How or why does it move you, or what significence does it have in your life? Pics or links if possible, please.
It’s hard to find a really good version online, but Titian’s Portrait of a Young Englishman is my favorite painting. The eyes! He makes the Mona Lisa look like a pile o’ puke, to quote Moe Szyslak.
Wow. That is a beautiful man with a very confident and compelling gaze. I would like his number; and a time machine. (Isn’t it peculiar that the hairstyle and goatee would be current and stylish today?)
And of course the artist did a remarkable job conveying character. I looked up more of his portraits- a lot of wealthy women with bodice askew- tres risque. Titian Vecellio does flatter his subjects.
Speaking of eyes…
No reproduction can do justice to the eys of the girls in William Bouguereau’s The Broken Pitcher. You have to go to the Palace of the Legion of Honor. I stood for ten or twenty minutes just staring at that painting before having to rejoin my group.
Michelangelo’s David is indescribably wonderful in person, its majestry wholly uncaptured in photographs. (Which are always distressingly shot in a close-up on David’s face, which is dopey because Michelangelo deliberately exaggerrated the width of the face so as to make it more convincing for those looking at it from 12 feet away – y’know, how you actually look at it.) Go to Florence and see it. 
–Cliffy
I was gonna do something from Nabokov (my current project and with the added advantage of being hopelessly snobbishly arty), but instead I’ll go with the portrait flow–here is my favorite guy with eyes and goatee (el Greco’s Fray Hortensio):
http://www.bodenheimer.com/referenceimages/grecoparavicino.jpg
Greco did this on spec as a sample to prove his worth upon arriving in Italy. He was successful.
Guenica - Art that says something more.
Perhaps my favourite modern artist is Anselm Kiefer. I think the first of his works that I saw was Twilight of the West (Abendland) in the National Gallery of Australia. It’s typical of his work: about 4 metres by 4 metres, with the top half made out of lead sheeting (a favourite material of his), combining an reaction to the postwar desolation in Germany (Kiefer was born in 1945) with references to earlier literature and mythology.
There’s really no way t=you can appreciate these works by seeing reproductions: they are so large, and so dependent on texture, that you need to stand in front of them. And because they are so large, galleries tend to only have one or two of them, so you need to go from gallery to gallery to see a variety of Kiefer’s work. But there are a pair of them in the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, including Angel of History, which again you can’t appreciate from a picture: it’s a 5 metres by 4 metres by 2 metres sculpture, in “lead, glass, and poppies”, of a bomber.
I love the work of Andy Goldsworthy for both his sense of balance and use of color. (Go through a few pages if you have time; the artist does a lot of transient work that lasts only long enough to be photographed; but also has permanent stone work all over the world)
I love all the portraits so far- an expressive gaze from any era is compelling. (including the National Geographic Afghan girl)
MrDibble, I have a couple reproduction Picasso nude sketches-. But I couldn’t live with Guernica in my home. Too evocative of the nagging human shame I have been feeling since March 20, 2003. It makes me want to lower my eyes. Does it have that effect on you?
Humble Servant, bring on the Nabokov. I have some literature to share as well.
Because i am profoundly disturbed, one of my favorites is the so-called Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymous Bosch:
http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/bosch/delight/
This 500 year old triptych is utter fascinating, because, I believe, it has been consistently misunderstood and misinterpreted. “500 years before Freud”, says Maximilien Schell’s character in the film version of “The Man in the Glass Booth”, echoing what I’m sure many think of it. a misleading, although not wholly inappropriate statement.
In the first place, we don’t know what Bosch called this work. The earliest reference to it, many many years after it was painted (and after Bosch’s death) calls it “The Strawberry Plant” (There is a giant, if odd-looking Strawberry in the central panel, but it’s not the focus of any attention. Still, Bosch’s work, like Breughel’s, was sometimes named for non-central items. ) One critic has suggested calling it “The Sinful escendants of Adam”, suggesting that the central panel represents the sinners before the Deluge. An odd writer named Wilhelm Fraenger (whose ideas, because they were weird, got way too much “air time”) thought it should be called “The Millenium”, and that it represented the earthly Paradise that would result after the Second Coming. He also believed that Bosch was a member of a free-spirited heretical freethinker sect. His interpretations of a lot of the symbolism is definitely off-the-wall. I think somebody should’ve gotten those two gus together and let them duke it out. For the record, I think they’re both wrong.
We do know the sources of many of Bosch’;s symbolism. Some was lifted from other period artwork. Others he used in other examples of his own work. The outer doors of the Triptych represent The Creation, before animals and Man. The left Wing is the Garden of Eden, pretty obviously. But there are some weird things about it – God the Creator appears as Jesus Christ, not a venerable white-bearded God (as he does even in Bosch’s other ttriptychs). There are weird animals, including a lop-eared antyelope with two legs that looks like a dog (we can trace the image back to its roots , where it’s clearly an antelope, although four-legged). There are some three-headed beasts. Worse, the animals are eating each other – fish eating fish, a cat with a mouse, a three-headed bird being eaten. This conflicts with Genesis, which says Death came into the world when Adam and Eve sinned. I have no idea why he did it this way.
The right panel is clearly Hell. Some items are recognizable from elsewhere – you can see Greed and Pride and Gluttony being punished, as on Bosch’s tabletop of the Seven Deadly sins. But the other sins don’tt seem to be there. There’s the comic image of Animals Hunting Men that appeared elsewhere, and some images suggesting specific abuses, like sales of Church Lands. But much of it is cryptic. Even Fraengers’ suggestions that the knife and giant ears suggesting “those who have Ears, but do not Hear” start seemin to make sense, but only because there’s no good alternative.
As for the central panel, to those who suggest that this shows the sinning that precedes Hell, I say that there’s a conspicuous absence of most sins (especially those seen actually being punished ion the other panel – Greed, Pride, Gluttony, Church abuses). Yopu can claim that kit’s all Lust, but then it’s pretty weird that they should concentrate on that one sin.
the people are all young and naked. There are blacks in with the white people, which is pretty interesting for 1500, whatever it’s supposed to mean. There’s a lot of fruit imagery (suggesting, it’s hard to deny, sex). There’s overt phallic imagery (the guys riding the animals in the cavalcade in the center). But it looks oddly innocent, nonetheless, and good natured. Nobody’sd hurting anyone else. Nobody’s pushing or fighting. Behavior should be this good at the playground.
There are giant birds all over – why? The image of the knight with the fish tail is actually derived from a medieval description of a lobster (!) Some people claim it personifies Anger, but I don’t see it. There are Mermaids, too, and acrobats (usually a symbol of sinning, it’s true, but it’s hard to see that here – nothing supports it).
I don’t know what the central panel means, but it still provokes plenty of thought, after all this time.
I love David’s Cupid and Psyche. The best part is that I can go see the actual painting!!! It’s a very large piece and, of course, this little reproduction doesn’t do it justice.
I love the expression on Cupid’s face, those two beautiful bodies.
I think Robert Frost may be out of fashion right now, but I love “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” and Randall Thompson’s choral setting of it. (And, taped on my office door, I have a newspaper article entitled “I Hate PowerPoint,” in which this poem is rendered as a PP presentation. Cracks me up!) I love the rhyme scheme of the poem and the simplicity of the language. Those woods, “lovely, dark and deep,” call to me.
And going in reverse, from song to poetry (and back to song), I think one of THE most beautiful sounds in the world is the song of the wood thrush. And Frost’s “Come In” is about thrush song. Thompson’s setting of “Come In” has a beautiful homage to thrush song in the piano accompaniment. I love wood thrushes because I remember taking walks in the evening with my dad when I was a little girl, and, in the midst of our very suburban neighborhood, there was a little wooded ravine where we could hear the thrushes. I loved that sound!
Naw, CalMeacham, you’re not disturbed. I’ve always loved that Bosch piece. (Or maybe I’m disturbed, too.) It is utterly amazing. I want to be on whatever he was on when he painted it.
I do NOT want to be on what he was on when he painted the Hell panel.
Railroad Sunset. Edward Hopper, 1929.
You’ve been here. I’ve been here. We’ve all been here. I don’t care if you’ve never been on a train in your life. You can hear this time of the day, feel it, maybe even smell it.
Some things never change. Hopper found them, and painted them.
Giles, Kiefer’s work is stark and startling. Most post industrial/post war photographs make me cringe- but his work is much more evocative and expressive than a mere photo. I agree with his symbolism: even an apocolyptic wasteland is eventually reclaimed by the landscape. I feel like I am missing an important textural element viewing it online; though. Straw, emulsion; burlap- and on such a large scale, too- physicality must be apparent when you Kiefer’s work in person. The man must be a brute.
CalMeacham, I find Bosch’s middle panel lovely and enchanting. I had childhood fantasies of communing with the wild things - and I would still love to be surrounded by tame and exotic flora and fauna. Add to that cavorting about in the unashamed nude while eating ripe fruit: this is a crowded party I would love to attend.
And if the sins of man are depicted in the center panel- then the punishment seems disproportionately excessive. The manmade objects and devices in panel three make me feel ill.
My overall feeling is that Bosch created a parody of common Christian themes; but my education in art history is woefully lacking and I am sure that my view is naive. What is your gut response to the tryptych?
And isn’t there an ornithologist on the board? Would he or she have some ideas about the bird symbolism?
Beware of Doug, I almost beat you there. Too often artists paint a washed out, faded and milky sky in a landscape. But in the Fall when humidity drops the sky becomes an impossible shade of blue that when represented in paint: no one ever remembers or believes. Even children will choose a pale light blue crayon to represent sky. But those intense blues, reds, and oranges- happen. They do. I am always proud of those artists who dare to slap on such saturated color and call it fact. I am on that train with you.
freckafree, I am profoundly touched that you included thrush song in your description of art. Your perspective is liberal and inclusive. kowtows
When I am dust it is too late to weep or be glad.
OK, I guess I can stand to be accused of following the crowd once in a while…
Sincerely, my all time favorite that just always tugs lots of different emotions from me is Van Gogh’s Starry Night.
Secondly, as already mentioned, is Picasso’s Guernica. Not so much for the images themselves, but also the knowing of what went into it by the artist.
The Garden of Earthly Delights makes me think of this comic.
For me, the surprising thing about The Garden of Earthly Delights is that it was a favorite painting of Felipe II, than whom it is hard to imagine anyone more Catholic. The Spanish monarch even had a tapestry made of it for his palace cum monastery at El Escorial.
I’ve always been partial to propaganda art - despite the realities behind them, they instill a strong sense of patriotism and can-do spirit, regardless of nationality! My favorites are the Chinese ones (a nice collection here ). Of these, my favorite is this oil painting by Yu Zhenli.
Take up golf. You’ll understand it completely.