About Tatsuro Kiuchi:

Tatsuro Kiuchi was born in Tokyo, Japan in 1966. Originally a graduate in Biology at International Christian University in Tokyo, He made the change to an art career after graduating with distinction from the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. He started illustrating mostly children’s books with several publishers in the US and Japan and eventually branched out into editorial work in magazines and the illustration of book jackets and advertising commissions. His first picture book “The Lotus Seed” (text by Sherry Garland / Harcourt Brace & Company) has sold more than 250,000 copies worldwide, and has been commissioned by such clients as Royal Mail to do Christmas Stamp Collection in 2006, and Starbucks for Worldwide Holiday Promotion “Pass the Cheer” in 2007. He now lives in Tokyo Japan. (Profile)

Visit his official English website, his blog and his Tumblr account. Some of his artwork can be bought online. I first came to know this artist via Coudal Partners.

The dog’s name was Nipper:

In 1898, three years after Nipper’s death, Francis painted a picture based on a photograph of Nipper listening intently to a wind-up Edison-Bell cylinder phonograph, substituting a disc gramophone for the phonograph. On February 11, 1899, Francis filed an application for copyright of his picture “Dog Looking At and Listening to a Phonograph.” Thinking the Edison-Bell Company might find it useful, he presented it to James E. Hough who, in a move that would eventually result in Edison exiting the record business altogether, promptly said, “Dogs don’t listen to phonographs.” On May 31, 1899, Francis went to the Maiden Lane offices of The Gramophone Company with the intention of borrowing a brass horn to replace the original black horn on the painting. Manager, William Barry Owen suggested that if the artist replaced the entire machine with a Berliner disc gramophone, the Company would buy the painting. A modified form of the painting became the successful trademark of Victor and HMV records, HMV music stores, and RCA. The trademark itself was registered by Berliner on July 10, 1900. (wikipedia)

More info about Nipper over at DesignBoom.

Previously on Skandalon.

This photorealist painting belongs to the Desire for Anima series:

an exhibition of new oil paintings on paper by Israeli artist Yigal Ozeri. His paintings of young women are unusual for their uncanny realism and psychologically engaging presence. This is achieved by Ozeris using both still photography and video in their initial stages, and painting the final works with thousands of tiny brushstrokes which animate the paintings, surfaces.

This series of paintings explores portraits of young women, either standing together nude in dense grass fields, or posed alone, often wearing a pink diaphanous and lace gown. Many appear like film still, caught, unawares, unselfconsciously laughing, or moving through the lush backgrounds. Others gaze directly at the viewer in a somewhat challenging and unsettling manner. In some, all that is visible are fragments of the girls, body, faces, limbs, richly textured garments. In every painting, Ozeri captures the vulnerability of the girls bodies, at the transitional age between youth and maturity. For the artist, the results of his paintings express his feminine, anima, Carl Jungs concept of the essential woman. This psychological presence is the hidden essence of his work. (more)

Yigal Ozeri was born in Israel in 1958. He now lives and works in New York.

About Albert Pinkham Ryder:

Albert Pinkham Ryder (March 19, 1847 – March 28, 1917) was an American painter best known for his poetic and moody allegorical works and seascapes, as well as his eccentric personality. While his art shared an emphasis on subtle variations of color with tonalist works of the time, it was unique for accentuating form in a way that some art historians regard as modernist. (wikipedia)

The J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles paid Sotheby’s in London GBP 29.7 million ($45 million) on Wednesday for a sweeping, hazy view of 19th-century Rome by British master J.M.W. Turner.

The sale broke the auction record for Turner four years after the artist’s Venetian seascape “Giudecca, La Donna della Salute and San Giorgio” sold for $35 million at Christie’s.

The Getty beat out five other bidders for “Modern Rome – Campo Vaccino.” The auction house had priced the painting sell for between $18 million and $27 million.

Turner, a Romantic artist known for painting wispy clouds and roiling waves, painted “Modern Rome” in 1839, a decade after he visited the city for a final time. Eschewing any telltale signs of modernization, Turner presents an ethereal view of the Italian capital as seen from atop Capitoline Hill. Women in blue and yellow skirts herd goats in the rocky foreground as the city’s ruins fan across the sun-drenched expanse below. The Coliseum, painted in cappuccino colors, even appears to glow. (more)

Previously on Skandalon

Si on en croit la Bible, c’est Caïn qui créa la première ville, pour avoir, selon la remarque de Bossuet, où étourdir ses remords. Quel jugement ! Et combien de fois n’en ai-je pas éprouvé la justesse dans mes déambulations nocturnes !

Quoted from De l’inconvénient d’être né by Emil Cioran, Paris:Gallimard, coll. Quarto, [1973]1995, p. 1307

About Fernand Cormon:

At an early age he attracted attention for the perceived sensationalism in his art, although for a time his powerful brush dwelled with particular delight on scenes of bloodshed, such as the Murder in the Seraglio (1868) and the Death of Ravara, Queen of Lanka at the Toulouse Museum. The Musée d’Orsay has his Cain flying before Jehovah’s Curse; and for the Mairie of the fourth arrondissement of Paris he executed in grisaille a series of panels: Birth, Death, Marriage, War, etc. A Chiefs Funeral, and pictures having the Stone Age for their subject, occupied him for several years. He was appointed to the Legion of Honor in 1880. Subsequently he also devoted himself to portraiture. (wikipedia)

All Things Amazing: José Benlliure y Gil, ” La Barca De Caronte”

“José Benlliure y Gil (1858 – 1937), Spanish painter, was born at Valencia, studied painting under Domingo, and showed from the first such marked talent that he was sent to the Spanish school in Rome.” (wikipedia)

“Drawing on the influence of anime, comic books, Otaku culture, and animal compendiums, the work of Nicholas Di Genova features an encyclopedic range of constructed creatures ranging from soft and nurturing to calculating and military. A vast and intense fabricated history acts as a backdrop to the hundreds of interconnected species, families and rival clans that find themselves projecting their habits, relations and environments to their viewers. Working with ink and animation paints, Di Genova’s paintings on mylar highlight his skill with line and his ability to manipulate colour. Always intense and intricately executed, Di Genova’s work rivals the quality of any fine art painter while firmly establishing itself on the fringes of contemporary art. The work brings together knowledge of art and design and samples from both fields, resulting in incredible visual and technical impact and an astonishing strong conceptual core which receives respect from both camps, a dichotomy often severely split.” (more at the LE Gallery)

Check his blo: Skeleton Hug.

Explanations from the Scientific American Supplement, No. 598, June 18, 1887:

“We reproduce the picture of Mr. Andre Brouillet, which was in the Salon of 1887; and that the subject may be better understood, we give the accompanying sketch and description. This picture is very interesting, not only from an artistic point of view, but also as a representation of students and spectators of all ages admirably grouped around a great master of science when most interested in his work. We borrow from Matin-Salon Mr. Goetschy’s explanation of the picture:

“The hall in which the lesson is given is lighted by two large windows opening on one of the courts of the hospital. The Professor stands at the right of the picture, his head uncovered, one hand close to his body and the other extended slightly in a gesture which is familiar to him, his audience being before him. At his side is Mr. Babinski, chief of the clinic, supporting a person afflicted with hysteria. Near the latter stands a nurse and assistant who watches every movement of the patient. This is Mother Bottard, a good, intelligent, and devoted woman, who is well known to all those present.

“The auditors have arranged themselves at the students’ tables, some seated on the chairs and stools which furnish the room, and others standing, but all following closely the teaching of the master, and at the same time watching the subject. The picture is full of life and motion, and yet is very exact. The head and shoulders of the subject are beautifully and correctly drawn. The artist has brought together many men who are well known in literature and science.”—Le Monde Illustre.

Previously on Skandalon : Jean-Martin Charcot