Summary:

Vincent Van Gogh stares at the viewer from behind steely eyes, his face turned at a three-quarter view. His skin, pallid and yellowed, gives him a slightly jaundiced look. He wears a short red beard that rises to meet the red hair on his head. Intense brush strokes and slathered paint carve out his facial features; the strokes' fury subsides only within Van Gogh's eyes.

He wears a blue cape tied around his neck, the right side of which is painted as distinctly separate from a background of similar color. The other side of his cape more easily fades into the patterned blue background that swirls like a whirlpool around Van Gogh's head. A painter's palette dabbed with various paints occupies the foreground.

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Alice’s Bailly’s "Self-Portrait" takes a traditional three-quarters pose. The artist’s rendition of herself occupies the foreground and is colored in drab hues. One of her elongated and thinned hands holds a brush; the other droops downwards. Dabs of ambiguous color comprise the middle ground of the painting, and an abstract halo of red and green hangs behind the figure’s head. One half of the face is defined and in shadow; the other half that occupies the light is only half-sketched. The background on one side of the figure reveals the corner of the room. On the other side of the image is an abstract blend of colors.

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A variety of figures, all of them Tahitian, sprawl across the wide frame of the painting, each engaged in a particular and significant act. In the center of the image, a man wearing a simple loincloth picks an apple from the top edge of the image. To his right, a nude person examines his or her underarm, two clothed women in the background walk together with their arms around one another, three women sit together around a babe, and a dog looks inward from the exterior of the right edge.

On the left of the apple-picking man, two white kittens play with one another next to a clothed young girl who eats an apple. Behind her lies a goat. In the far background stands a blue religious statue, to the right of which stands a lone fully clothed woman. At the far left of the painting, a dark-skinned unclothed old woman sits with her head in her hands, next to a seated, nubile young woman with firm, full, bare breasts. A white bird sits to their immediate left.

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A 110-ton, 33 foot by 60 foot elliptical sculpture of stainless steel plates welded together with almost invisible seams, polished into a smooth rounded shape like an enormous glob of mercury. It rests in Millenium Park in Chicago, where its organic form has earned it one of those epithets so damningly accurate it becomes an endearing nickname: informally, the piece is called The Bean. The concave shape has a 12 foot high arch, through which spectators can walk into a 27 foot high chamber.

This central curvature is called the "omphalos": omphalos is a term that can mean center or hub, or a raised prominence within the base of an object (its literal meaning here), but also has connotations of a navel or a belly. Like a mercury Henry Moore, this piece refines the human form into its most basic curves: "Cloud Gate" is so titled by Kapoor because it invites the sky and clouds into the city, but it is also a body, kneeling perhaps, with the sky above and the reflected bodies of those walking under it cupped in its belly.

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This is the meticulously researched and beautifully constructed catalogue for a 1999 exhibition at the Duke University Museum of Art. Over one hundred items originally produced to serve the science of medicine were culled from the history of medicine collections in four North Carolina institutions: Duke, East Carolina University, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Wake Forest.

Covering a wide range of time periods, media, and nationalities, the exhibit was coordinated by Suzanne Porter, librarian and curator of the History of Medicine Collections at Duke University Library, and Julie Hansen, an art historian. Martin Kemp, Professor of Art at the University of Oxford, supplies a foreword to the catalogue.

The rich and unusual yield of materials is grouped thematically rather than chronologically in five sections: "Art and Anatomy," "The Surgical Arts," "The Doctor's Practice," "Obstetrics and Gynecology," and "Non-Western Medicine." All images and objects are accompanied by historical information, biographical detail, thoughtful analysis, and precise description.

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Reproduced in the blood-red and black of horror films, this series of prints shows the electric chair in the death chamber at Sing Sing prison, arranged as twelve identical images: three across and four down. Warhol frequently repeated silkscreens with variations in colour, size and number of repetitions of the image.

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In 17th Century Dutch depictions of "scenes from everyday life," the so-called genre paintings, the single most popular medical representation is the "Doctor's Visit." Among the most comical and complex are those of Jan Steen, who painted at least 18 works with this theme. Typically the patient is a young female, often suffering from a variety of illnesses related to love, either "love sickness," erotic melancholy, or pregnancy. [See relevant paintings by Steen at the Web Gallery of Art: "The Doctor and His Patient," "Doctor's Visit," and "Love Sickness," at http://www.wga.hu/frames-e.html?/welcome.html. Select "S" from Artist Index, scroll down for Steen, select "Page 1".)

In this painting, the doctor looks with concern at his patient, a young girl, dressed in silk and leaning on a table, as he takes her pulse. Behind her stands a smirking young man who holds a holds a herring in one hand and two small onions in the other. At her feet is an opened letter, alongside a bowl with a piece of burnt ribbon, and a heating box filled with coals, known as a brazier. Behind the physician, a woman playing a harpsichord smiles at the young girl. Behind her, a maidservant beckons a tall, dark, and handsome young man in a red cloak to enter the room.

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A sick woman (dying mother) in a comfortably made-up bed serenely occupies the center of the canvas's diagonal composition. She lies between a seated doctor focused on his hand-held watch while he takes her pulse, and a nun who holds the woman's child and extends her a drink (tea, medicine). The simple, calm, orderliness of the sparse setting is echoed in the postures and countenances of the four figures.

In his biographical study, Robert Maillard documents that Picasso's father--art teacher and model who posed as the doctor--worked out both the composition and the title of the painting for his 16-year-old son (Picasso. New York: Tudor, 1972, p. 180).

An earlier watercolor draft of this work sketches the child with arms outstretched reaching forward to the sick mother. In the draft, the physician and nun, too, are more concerned with the mother's condition. Though strengthening the allegorical significance of this academic composition, the dramatic intensity is lessened if not lost in the final version (1897), which was awarded an honorable mention in Madrid and a gold medal at the Exposición de Bellas Artes in Málaga.

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Framed on one side of the painting by a luxurious fabric curtain, a doctor, wearing the robe and hat of a degreed physician, stands in the centre of a well-appointed room, examining a specimen of urine in a glass flask. To his right the patient, an older woman, sits languidly with her face turned towards the light of an arched glass window.

A well-dressed middle-aged woman has evidently been feeding the patient, leaning towards her, concerned and attentive, holding a spoon. She is looking at a young girl who is seated on the floor holding a cloth with one hand and the patient’s hand with the other and looking anxiously at the face of the patient. The patient is possibly a grandmother being cared for by her daughter and grandchild.

The triangle of women is physically close, and the emotional intimacy of the two caregivers, their anxiety for the health and physical comfort of the patient, are finely rendered; the disengagement of the patient is conveyed in her gaze beyond the figures in the room towards the light. The physician, whose gaze is directed to the flask, is part of a second triangulation of caregivers surrounding the patient.

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The haunting eyes of a beautiful young woman stare directly at us as we witness the final moment of her plummet from a New York skyscraper to the sidewalk, a stage-like platform in the lower foreground. Her barefoot body and its shadow protrude into the inscription panel where blood-red lettering records the facts: "In the city of New York on the 21st day of the month of October, 1938, at six o'clock in the morning, Mrs. Dorothy Hale committed suicide by throwing herself out of a very high window of the Hampshire House building. In her memory [words apparently painted out] this 'retablo,' executed by Frida Kahlo." Though her blood flows from her morbidly erotic body and seeps through the canvas into the painted wood frame, the bright yellow corsage of tiny roses pinned to the black velvet dress on her intact, virtually undamaged body and face eerily insinuate vitality and sensuality.

Two stages of her fall from the window of her apartment building, as in a multiple-exposure freeze-frame photograph, are surrealistically softened by swirling blue, white and gray cloud-like sky coloring which covers the entire background and the rest of the wooden frame. Barely visible, in the top of the frame is the suggestion of an angel holding a banner on which [now erased or whited-over] was proclaimed "The suicide of Dorothy Hale, painted at the request of Clare Boothe Luce, for the mother of Dorothy."

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