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The images brought back many wonderful memories of Istanbul and Cappadocia. Images, panoramas and links on a journey to Turkey.
Ahmet Ertug”s photos are worth a stop at the Penn Museum.
Ahmet”s website.
Search Results for: Penn Museum
Panorama: Penn Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology
Click or tap to view this handheld panoramic scene from the Penn Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology. Apologies for a few scene errors.
The Oriental Institute
Reverse-Engineering a Genius (Has a Vermeer Mystery Been Solved?)
David Hockney and others have speculated—controversially—that a camera obscura could have helped the Dutch painter Vermeer achieve his photo-realistic effects in the 1600s. But no one understood exactly how such a device might actually have been used to paint masterpieces. An inventor in Texas—the subject of a new documentary by the magicians Penn & Teller—may have solved the riddle.
In the history of art, Johannes Vermeer is almost as mysterious and unfathomable as Shakespeare in literature, like a character in a novel. Accepted into his local Dutch painters’ guild in 1653, at age 21, with no recorded training as an apprentice, he promptly begins painting masterful, singular, uncannily realistic pictures of light-filled rooms and ethereal young women. After his death, at 43, he and his minuscule oeuvre slip into obscurity for two centuries. Then, just as photography is making highly realistic painting seem pointless, the photorealistic “Sphinx of Delft” is rediscovered and his pictures are suddenly deemed valuable. By the time of the first big American show of Vermeer paintings—at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in 1909—their value has increased another hundred times, by the 1920s ten times that.
Despite occasional speculation over the years that an optical device somehow enabled Vermeer to paint his pictures, the art-history establishment has remained adamant in its romantic conviction: maybe he was inspired somehow by lens-projected images, but his only exceptional tool for making art was his astounding eye, his otherworldly genius.
Battle of the Barnes
The new museum attempts to mimic the best of the original with modern twists and technological improvements.
Even their friends were against it at first but Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, husband-and-wife architects, persevered. Selected in 2007 to design the controversial new Barnes Foundation museum in downtown Philadelphia, the couple battled scorn, litigation and the maze of creative restrictions imposed by an irascible art collector who died 60 years ago.
Five years and $150m later, the new Barnes is set to open this weekend. Only a few miles from its former pastoral home in leafy Merion, Pennsylvania, it is situated in the city’s cultural centre, where the once-reclusive jewel box will become an international destination for lovers of art.
A 2002 Barnes panorama.
You’ll fit right in being poor in Berlin
If you show up in Berlin strapped for cash, you’re in good company. The German capital’s sizable student population, high unemployment rate and swelling starving artist contingent makes penny-pinching a citywide obsession.
This is, after all, the city that has not only been dubbed one of the hippest in Europe because of its raging nightlife, plethora of museums, independent art galleries and concert spaces, but it’s also known for being wracked with debt. So much so that in 2003, Mayor Klaus Wowereit lent it the accidental slogan: “We’re poor, but sexy.”
Asian Artists Paint the Color Of Money
Throughout Asia’s developing nations, once penniless painters are getting used to this most unexpected emotion. The region’s contemporary-art market has never been so hot. Last year, a collection of dreamlike portraits and landscapes by China’s Zhang Xiaogang raked in just over $24 million — more than British enfant terrible Damien Hirst made in 2006. In March, a sale of modern Indian art in New York City raised a record $15 million, including just under $800,000 for Captives, a stark evocation of desiccated torsos by New Delhi–born Rameshwar Broota. Two months later, an auction in London elicited $1.42 million for a Tantric-inspired oil painting by India’s Syed Haider Raza. Even in Vietnam, idyllic rural scenes coated in the country’s distinctive lacquer that sold for a few hundred dollars a few years ago are now selling for 10 times that. A gouache-and-ink painting by Vietnamese post-impressionist Le Pho, whose work is part of the permanent exhibition at the Modern Art Museum in Paris, captured nearly $250,000 at a Singapore sale. Overall, leading auction houses Sotheby’s and Christie’s auctioned $190 million in contemporary Asian art last year, compared to $22 million just two years before. “This is just the beginning,” says Swiss art dealer Pierre Huber, who in September oversaw a debut contemporary Asian art fair in Shanghai. “For so long, people did not know about Asian art. But now the world is turning to Asia, and what they see is amazing.”