I woke up to this fabulous Tweet from Einaudi Editore, the Italian publisher of Paris Red, or Rosso Parigi. Manet first traveled to Italy when he was 21, and I think the country was never far from his mind. In this New York Times article, writer Roderick Conway Morris says that Manet was “consistently” inspired by […]
I’ve written before about how Manet liked to paint yellow gloves, but today I’d like to take my interest in Manet’s sunny colors a step further. Manet often used yellow or orange to create a spark in a painting. Those might not be the colors we first associate with the artist, but they occur over […]
When I was in NYC, I spent time hanging out with Victorine. I just sat in the room at the Metropolitan Museum of Art where Young Lady in 1866 is hanging, looking at the painting and watching other people look at the painting. I particularly liked seeing this young woman looking at Victorine because she […]
Manet died a week ago today, on April 30, 1883. He was just 51 years old. I used the portrait Carolus-Duran painted of Manet at the top of this post because I like how Manet looks in it. Friend Antonin Proust described Manet as “ouverte et franche,” and I think this portrait shows that side […]
This week Facebook pulled my ad for Paris Red because it said I was “promoting nudity.” My ad didn’t have any nudity in it, but it linked to an interview I did that featured a detail from Manet’s Olympia. That’s all it took for me to get this response from Facebook: Here’s the ad as […]
In one scene in Paris Red, Victorine thinks of all the flowers she can to pass the time as she poses for Manet. As she makes a list of posies in her mind, she also thinks about how the next day will be Sunday, the day when the bird sellers also come to the flower […]
This is another of my shabby photos from 1983, taken at the corner of rue de Seine and rue Jacques Callot. It shows the restaurant La Palette and a bit of the outside of Galerie Lara Vincy when the artist Ben (Ben Vautier) covered the outside of the gallery with colored writing for his Boîtes et […]
Where does a gaze in a painting come from? In this post, I’d like to share what Julyan Davis told me about working with the model for By Her Lily White Hand (On the Banks of the Ohio), 2012. When I emailed Mr. Davis, I asked, “When you asked the model to pose for the work, did […]
This is a Julyan Davis painting called By Her Lily White Hand (On the Banks of the Ohio), 2012. It’s one of Davis’s murder ballad paintings, a series of “narrative paintings, setting traditional Appalachian music against the contemporary South.” In the song “On the Banks of the Ohio,” a man asks his love to take a […]
As soon as there was photography, there were erotic photographs. I’ve written before about art historian Beatrice Farwell’s theory that Félix-Jacques-Antoine Moulin photographed Victorine Meurent in 1852. The date doesn’t fit with other information we have about Meurent, but the photos Farwell used to support her argument (found in the Bibliothèque nationale de France) still fascinate […]
Paris Red: A Novel by Maureen Gibbon 