Post: #1

From times to times I see paintings that illustrate strong and positive values, (usually famous) paintings describing military valor, friendship, patriotism, traditional family values, motherly love even; inspirational works of art, one might call them.

So, if you want to post on this thread about such interesting and uplifting paintings, please do - adding, if possible, a few words to explain their relevance and historical background.

I'll start below with a powerful and complex painting that made a massive impression when it was shown to the general public, in 1784. It's The Oath of the Horatii (Le Serment des Horaces)



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oath_of_the_Horatii

This painting became almost instantly iconic in French society, and had a positive, politic impact just before the Revolution, being in favor of personal sacrifice to the common good.

Also, this painting has the added virtue of describing the women as beautiful, dignified and submitted to the imperious will of their fathers and husbands, sole protectors of the State.
(Note by the way that the little son in the painting, has more audacity than the women around him, as he refuses to have his eyes covered)

Post: #2

   

This painting by the Norwegian painter Christian Krogh depicts the real historic event of the Viking landing (discovery) of North-America around year 1000. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leif_Erikson
It`s one of the most famous paintings of the National-Romanticism era in Norway.

Post: #3

"The Anchorage"

   
"At Home"

   
"New Year's Eve"

Romantic Realism contains a streak of optimism and progress one is hard-pressed to find in the modern-day art world.

Post: #4

Copied synopsis:

Ivan Aivazovsky’s great painting, The Ninth Wave, is a striking portrayal of Hope itself. It depicts survivors of a shipwreck struggling to hold on to a piece of wreckage in a violent storm. The name relates to a nautical tradition in which successive waves grow in strength up to the ninth, after which the cycle repeats. Even though the subject of the painting is a brutal struggle against nature, the treatment of the scene is dramatically beautiful, and in a sense, heartwarming. In the horizon we see the bright light of the sun radiating through clouds like a giant flame. The blaze of the sky is reflected on the surface of the water, touching it with a flickering glimmer of light.

The men fighting for their lives may perish at any moment, but the sense of imminent death is dispelled by an even stronger sense of hope, a sense that one’s struggle will not be in vain if only one keeps his resolve to carry on. In this way, the bright, warm, burning sun is a personification of Hope, the rays of which keep the survivors’ will afloat just as the remaining part of the ship carries their bodies. The physical piece of wreckage is essential for their survival, but what is more essential is the ever present hope that keeps their efforts going, for once the spirit surrenders nothing else will matter.

Post: #5

In spite of everything, we felt a strange attachment to Vietnam and, even stranger,
a longing to return....Though we were civilians again, the civilian world
seemed alien. We did not belong to it as much as we did to that other
world, where we had fought and our friends had died・

Post: #6

"Wanderer above the sea of fog".

The fog represents the uncertainty of life. You can climb to the top and look ahead, but you never quite know what lies ahead. Then as we look into the backgrounds at the rocks in the fog, they seem to give off an appearance of not rocks, but ruins. The misty memory of a great past that was lost. Melancholy, a yearning for a "return of kings".

Post: #7

I always took Jacob wrestling with the angel about overcoming yourself whether it be external obstacles or your own spiritual mountains.

Post: #8

Albert Bierstadt, american landscape.

Almost a religious painting.

Post: #9

Those are really nice...maybe just add a happy little tree...and then, he'll need a friend...i think even a tree needs to have a little friend...and some little clouds that live over there...

Post: #10

Napoleon Crossing the Alps (1801)



The Creation of Adam (c.1512)



Salvator Mundi (c.1500)

Imagine won't upload for this one for some reason.

Post: #11

D-Day


Iwo Jima

Post: #12

Ilya Repin - Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks to Sultan Mehmed IV of the Ottoman Empire

Based on supposed historical event. Cossacks allegedly wrote insulting reply to sultan after he gave them ultimatum to submit under his rule.

Positive values? Size of cossack balls! True shitlords.

Quote:Zaporozhian Cossacks to the Turkish Sultan!

O sultan, Turkish devil and damned devil's kith and kin, secretary to Lucifer himself. What the devil kind of knight are thou, that canst not slay a hedgehog with your naked arse? The devil shits, and your army eats. Thou shalt not, thou son of a whore, make subjects of Christian sons; we have no fear of your army, by land and by sea we will battle with thee, fuck thy mother.

Thou Babylonian scullion, Macedonian wheelwright, brewer of Jerusalem, goat-fucker of Alexandria, swineherd of Greater and Lesser Egypt, pig of Armenia, Podolian thief, catamite of Tartary, hangman of Kamyanets, and fool of all the world and underworld, an idiot before God, grandson of the Serpent, and the crick in our dick. Pig's snout, mare's arse, slaughterhouse cur, unchristened brow, screw thine own mother!

So the Zaporozhians declare, you lowlife. You won't even be herding pigs for the Christians. Now we'll conclude, for we don't know the date and don't own a calendar; the moon's in the sky, the year with the Lord, the day's the same over here as it is over there; for this kiss our arse!

Post: #13

This is a great idea for a thread.

The quiet domestic moments captured hanging in time by Vermeer stopped me in my tracks the first time I saw them in person.

I was travelling around the world, didn't know jack about art, and was arrested time and again by his hyper-real depictions of young women quietly going about homely activity.

It was the first time I really understood the power of art. In these museums, there were so many pictures that my eyes were over-saturated and the paintings began to run together.

And yet time and again, New York, Amsterdam, Paris, wherever, the spirit of a man dead for centuries would reach out and speak to me, personally it seemed, across time, and long before I even knew who Vermeer was, each of his paintings had the same effect, to remind me of the value and beauty of a woman in the home, engaging in the simplest of domestic activities, the simple beauty of it.


That last picture, The Lacemaker, moved me so much that, having no artistic experience, I used the grid method of copying paintings and took over a month trying to recreate it using colored pencils.

You learn so much about a painting when you do this. The thing I noticed the most about this painting was the way light flows like a golden waterfall down her right side starting at her hair curl and moving on down beside the table.

A tiny painting, but got to me more than anything else in the Louvre.

Post: #14

Post: #15

This thread is an antidote to this:

Jeff Koons and the Establishment Art World’s Condescending Cult


https://remodernreview.wordpress.com/201...ding-cult/

Quote:Elitist malfeasance has marginalized the visual arts in popular culture. Practically no one is paying attention to contemporary art other than a small bubble of artists, academics, institution apparatchiks, trophy-hunting high rollers, and those who wish to vicariously participate in their presumed sophistication.

[…]

Quote:The secret is the art world cosmopolitans are still dripping with contempt towards most of humanity. What has been added is the soul sucking Postmodern gambit of irony. By celebrating the tacky, elitists are actually mocking their straw man version of what “ordinary” people are capable of. Our New Aristocracy of the Well Connected disrespect the intelligence and capacities of all those whose lives don’t revolve around relentless elitist status signalling contests.

They assume that all we can appreciate is tawdry junk, and so they are having a patronizing laugh at us by spending millions on art that carefully reproduces…tawdry junk. Now it’s avant garde to clone kitsch, which makes it totally different because of reasons. Isn’t it ironic?

If you think that sounds dumb, you would be right. Welcome to the inverse values of the nasty Postmodern world, where our betters try to force us to accept that bad is good and stupid is clever.

[…]

Quote:The real perk for most establishment art types is a sense of superiority. Supporting a hoax substitute for art gets converted into the gold of social prestige through the alchemy of Postmodern dogma. It’s yet another proof that our current crop of cultural elitists are really not advanced at all.

Elitists hype outsourced and infantile art because of their own limitations. They lack depth and real achievement themselves, so they can’t tell the difference. They embrace this failure of character as a badge of honor, and mandatory for admission to their tribe.

What Postmodern charlatans have been pushing for decades isn’t even art at all. It’s artifice, an empty mimicry of the outer appearances and gestures of art, without partaking of any of its true substance and significance.

Post: #16

I enjoy the many paintings which depict Saint Joseph the carpenter passing on his knowledge and skills to his son Jesus.

Post: #17

(07-17-2018 10:03 AM)Horus Wrote:  I enjoy the many paintings which depict Saint Joseph the carpenter passing on his knowledge and skills to his son Jesus.

I like other George De La Tour paintings. Dude liked to illuminate things with single candles.

This picture of the penitent Mary Magdalene shows an uncommon positive value, a woman feeling bad about something she had done.

Post: #18

The virgin female fighter for God and France, Joan of Arc, captured by cruel British soldiers:

Dignified both in glory and defeat... Remaining us of the frailty of glory and the ugliness of small people:





Making of the painting above, explained in video - quite fascinating:

Post: #19

There is a French artist named Daumier who is mostly remembered as a caricature artist who has some fine paintings depicting the quiet intense concentration of men engaged in artistic appreciation and pursuit. The simplicity of these paintings, along with some bold stylistic flourishes, put me in a contemplative mood whenever I see them.

An amateur collector of artistic prints taking a closer look at a painting in a street stall half hidden in shadow.



An older artist giving advice to a younger.



Two sculptors considering a work. (I really like the messy confident strokes used for the face of the sculptor on the left.)

Post: #20

Warriors across the ages and nations. But the god is only one.
I am not religilous, but I find it very powerfull.



It´s link from my facebook, I hope you can see it too.

Post: #21

"The Old King" by Georges Rouault

Post: #22

(07-14-2018 08:35 PM)nomadbrah Wrote:  

"Wanderer above the sea of fog".

The fog represents the uncertainty of life. You can climb to the top and look ahead, but you never quite know what lies ahead. Then as we look into the backgrounds at the rocks in the fog, they seem to give off an appearance of not rocks, but ruins. The misty memory of a great past that was lost. Melancholy, a yearning for a "return of kings".

Interesting how Friedrich also painted the spiritual correlative of this, a monk by the sea. The spiritual man appears, by necessity, to be a smaller figure in the landscape.

Post: #23

Bellini's St. Francis in Ecstasy from 1480 is literally a picture of a man stepping into the light, and has themes of solitude, nature, illumination, and spirituality.

Post: #24

^ It's a theme in romanticist paintings, people in the foreground to natural background.

Naturally everyone will their own interpretation, I get a different vibe from that monk one.

Where as the wandered painting, I feel that "confidence yet melancholy" of a man who has conquered life, where as the monk painting has a feeling of very intense and intimidating doubt with man standing alone against the great existential unknown, the feeling here is "courage". There is no peak to climb here to master like in the wanderer, just a big vast expanse of nothing to bravely confront.

Post: #25

(07-17-2018 01:13 PM)nomadbrah Wrote:  ^ It's a theme in romanticist paintings, people in the foreground to natural background.

Naturally everyone will their own interpretation, I get a different vibe from that monk one.

Where as the wandered painting, I feel that "confidence yet melancholy" of a man who has conquered life, where as the monk painting has a feeling of very intense and intimidating doubt with man standing alone against the great existential unknown, the feeling here is "courage". There is no peak to climb here to master like in the wanderer, just a big vast expanse of nothing to bravely confront.

Kind of like Goya's dog.