The museum is The Magnani Rocca Foundation museum in the town of Traversetolo. It was not well guarded. We're told the paintings might be worth $10 million total.
The paintings are Renoir’s “Fish,” Cézanne’s “Cup and Plate with Cherries” and Matisse’s “Odalisque on the Terrace.” Will we miss them?
The paintings are Renoir’s “Fish,” Cézanne’s “Cup and Plate with Cherries” and Matisse’s “Odalisque on the Terrace.” Will we miss them?
Hey, remember the old "Renoir Sucks at Painting" Instagram account?
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Europe is worthless at present. Trump should pull the plug on NATO.
It's a shame that proper security is so extensive and expensive that smaller museums can't have nice things anymore, but that's what happens when art becomes investment property instead of just beauty.
His son made some good movies.
Impressionism is generally awful, and therefore expensive, reflecting accurately the perverse inversion of last 150 years.
Kudos for the juxtaposition.
Spain is full of small museums/churches with very valuable art just sitting there with no security. Once we wandered into a convent chapel with just one lady in the vestibule selling the convents cookies. In the empty chapel there were two early Goyas. Carlos III made his court painter create a donation for the convent, in fulfillment of a royal promise.
Wont say where.
But this is typical, not strange at all.
https://www.masterworksfineart.com/artists/henri-matisse/aquatint/odalisque-sur-la-terrasse-odalisque-on-the-terrace-1922-1-2/id/w-8048?srsltid=AfmBOopyPKfN51PsFL055kh20VsnaLxaCs68Ud2Bot6a36JCp3YCFAWx
Matise - Odalique sur la terrasse
I dont know - small loss I'd say.
Why do they want to stop treacle?
I believe before the advent of photography, Impressionism allowed for the visualisation of things more clearly. And now, after photography has become ubiquitous, Impressionism allows the visualisation of things more clearly than ever.
That fish in the bottom of the painting appears to be eyeballing us. Serve that one en papiotte last so that it can watch the others flop around in the 400* oven pour encourager les autres. Don’t eyeball me, bub!
- Krumhorn
"Will we miss them?"
Hard to miss something you never even knew existed.
Uh oh. Gemini came up with this after Ann’s first two prompts:
Haha, fair point! I stepped right into that one—hook, line, and sinker. You’re talking about "The Demon of Unrest" by Erik Larson (released in 2024).
The "Aha!" Moment
The reason that quote is so perfectly placed in Larson’s book is that it’s about the period leading up to the American Civil War. He uses that specific Melville passage from Moby-Dick to describe the internal state of the nation and its leaders—that fragile "insular Tahiti" of peace being swallowed by the "appalling ocean" of impending war.
Why 1 Minute and 10 Seconds?
In the audiobook (narrated by Will Patton), that quote appears right in the Introduction. It’s the thematic mission statement for the whole book. Clicking off right there is the ultimate "I see what you're doing, Erik" move—it's a heavy, prophetic way to start a history book.
It's a brilliant bit of literary recycling. Larson is basically telling the reader: “Everything you’re about to read is the horror of the half-known life.”
Did the tone just feel too ominous for a casual listen, or were you just impressed he went for the Melville deep cut so early?
I haven’t spent much time with Gemini, but a number of folks think highly of it.
- Krumhorn
I've often had cause to wonder whether the whole impressionist movement was just a shared case of bad eyesight.
Too bad the criminal class seems increasingly to be the more competent members of society.
Sorry! Wrong thread
- Krumhorn
…one of those subjects bandied about in economics, the motivation to steal rare works. We had half a winter session dedicated to the Gardner heist. For me I can only speculate about the modern motivation. As a type of currency or collateral asset in embargoed places maybe. The Bond villain stroking a car while it hangs on the wall seems unlikely to me. A new generation of thieves what get good at stealing Porsche wheels and watches wanting something more ambitious but not thinking it through? I dunno. I have confidence in rejecting the confident explanations…
whether the whole impressionist movement was just a shared case of bad eyesight
I wonder if it was the absinthe. A pathetic little band of stoners…
Archived here: https://archive.ph/u9J86
So no finesse like thomas crown
"You’re talking about "The Demon of Unrest" by Erik Larson (released in 2024)."
That's wrong too, but you've got this comment in the wrong thread. It's a great comment. Thanks. But please put where it belongs.
Not here with the stinky fish.
Keep the fish and whale separate.
Stroking a car- lovely. Well maybe some of those guys lusted after the Aston Martin Q cooked up for 007…
"Keep the fish and whale separate."
I saw a man, an older than me man, walk in to Wafle House I had just left, wearing pajama pants.
I didn't think anything of it immediately until a little later when I was still ruminating over what an impressionist painting means today.
I thought. Was that guy wearing impressionism pants?
As all categories blend into something resembling something else, our memefication (if you will), the words we used to rely on to mean certain, finitude, if not exactitud are no longer... tethered (there's a favorite pontificative (Trump is not tethered)) to what we used to believe words meant. Male-female, citizen-alien, impressionism-realism, King-president... ad infinitum.
I'm going to suggest a new blog subheading.
"Keep the fish and whale separate."
they are worth so much because of the celebrity and fame of the artist. That the works were not that great means nothing.
“Will we miss them?”
Well, it would have been cool to see that Spain-Italy war. My money would be on Spain, but it would be close.
Dejavu back to the 18th century
16th century
Renoir's pink colors look better on women than on fish.
Well, it would have been cool to see that Spain-Italy war. My money would be on Spain, but it would be close.
Meloni versus Sanchez? Not close and you’re backing the wrong horse.
Did they at least think to embed Apple AirTags in the frames?
The fish eye in the front follows you. Is this art available in felt.
I always assumed, and assumed that everyone else assumed, that Impressionism and Cubism and all the other modern art movements were a reaction to photography. Providing an exact copy of what your eye sees was no longer sufficient. That could be done just as well, or better, by technology, in far less time and with far less training of the 'artist'. (Well, except for the colors, but those came along a century or so later.) Painting and other pictorial arts had to find something else they could do that photography could not. That turned out to be difficult, and complicated, but often interesting.
Good chance they're fakes
Impressionism was an organic revolt against the Paris Salon rigidity and rules.
Theft is part of the money laundering/tax avoidance purpose of expensive fine art.
No, April. Impressionism was a response to photography and the invention of tubed paint.
I think Renoir's paintings have a certain charm, but I do think he had certain limitations as a painter, e.g. with human figures. But no worse than, say, Goya, whose faces all basically look the same, an effect that becomes somewhat distracting when you have a bunch of Goya portraits all lined up next to each other in a museum. There's a Goya portrait of the Duke of Wellington in the US National Gallery of Art in DC, and while it's decently rendered, it's totally unrecogniseable. Unfortunately for Goya, we have a slew of other, better portraits by less famous painters, contemporary cartoons, and photographs or daguerrotypes taken later in the Duke's life, so we know pretty well what his face looked like and it wasn't like that. Similarly, I wouldn't look to Renoir for faces or the human form, but his streetscapes and scenes of fashionable life are quite delightful.
“Good chance they're fakes”
Once the original with a solid provenance vanishes, who knows? Theft actually reduces the value of the item stolen and not just because fencing it is so fraught. Art theft is the stupidest of the grand larcenies.
It occurs to me that if you really want to jack the perceived value of your daubings, surround them with alarms and armed security. Nothing pays like hype in the art world.
"Photography freed painting to present, not merely represent."
Wish I had said it.
The invention of the painting tube was crucial for all artists.
But no - know-it-all Howard- you are incorrect.
Re: Lem Vibe Bandit:
Impressionism has had a pretty long shelf life, and I'd categorise a lot of contemporary representational painters -- even many operating in a basically "realist" mode -- as modern impressionists. A lot of plein air painters, for example, owe more to the impressionists than to any of the short-lived artistic fads that followed them (like cubism, fauvism, or whatever), and many contemporary portrait artists approach portraiture in the style of later impressionists like Sargent, Beaux, or Sorolla. This generally isn't the sort of work art critics like to write about, but it's the kind of work a lot of artists like to make and a lot of people like to look at.
Impressionism had nothing to do with anything to do with photography.
Nothing.
From Wikipedia:
Impressionism was a 19th-century art movement characterized by visible brush strokes, open composition, emphasis on accurate depiction of light in its changing qualities (often accentuating the effects of the passage of time), ordinary subject matter, unusual visual angles, and inclusion of movement as a crucial element of human perception and experience. Impressionism originated with a group of Paris-based artists whose independent exhibitions brought them to prominence during the 1870s and 1880s.
The Impressionists faced harsh opposition from the conventional art community in France. The name of the style derives from the title of a Claude Monet work, Impression, soleil levant (Impression, Sunrise), which provoked the critic Louis Leroy to coin the term in a satirical 1874 review of the First Impressionist Exhibition published in the Parisian newspaper Le Charivari.[1] The development of Impressionism in the visual arts was soon followed by analogous styles in other media that became known as Impressionist music and Impressionist literature.
cont... next.
Radicals in their time, the early Impressionists violated the rules of academic painting. They constructed their pictures from freely brushed colours that took precedence over lines and contours, following the example of painters such as Eugène Delacroix and J. M. W. Turner. They also painted realistic scenes of everyday life in natural settings, often outdoors, attempting to capture a moment as experienced.
Previously, paintings were accomplished in studio, whether landscape art, still life or portrait, with an emphasis on verisimilitude.[a] The Impressionists found that they could capture the momentary and transient effects of sunlight by painting outdoors or en plein air. They portrayed overall visual effects instead of details, and used short "broken" brush strokes of mixed and pure unmixed colour—not blended smoothly or shaded, as was customary—to achieve an effect of intense colour vibration.[2]
more here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impressionism
The full length video is not available to share.
If you can find it on your streaming service, I highly recommend it. Here is the trailer
There's a little known Austrian painter that could've done better, A LOT better, but alas photography revoked his calling and the rest is history.
Insurance job.
Insurance fraud was my first thought the other day.
My objection to Renoir was that he seemed stylish and frilly to me. He wasn't always that. But it does look like he painted some really bad paintings. Does context have something to do with it though? If those fish were painted by an artist with a truly troubled, tortured, and tormented life would they mean more to us than they do knowing they come from Renoir? Or perhaps he wasn't daring enough. Make those fish look even more sickly and he'd be an avant-garde pioneer.
The one in the middle looks like it could be some kind of rodent.
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