Summary:

Draped in blue rags, an emaciated old guitarist sits cross-legged, strumming his guitar in a desolate setting. He is WRAPPED in his music and grief. Like the blind prophet, Tiresias in the Greek tragedies, he has seen all and knows the tragic destination of our strivings--all result in loneliness and death. Painted in Barcelona, the distorted style is reminiscent of the drama found in Spanish religious painting, particularly that of El Greco. The melancholy and pathos of Picasso's works from his Blue period reflect his sadness at the suicide of his young friend, Casagemas.

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Gilbert and George's work over the past three decades has largely consisted of grid-like photomontages - note, they consider their work to be "sculpture". These often massive works are at once easily identifiable as part of Gilbert and George's oeuvre (in part because they often have Gilbert and George in them) and unflinchingly referential: to the manufactured sheen and unnaturally bright neons of Warhol, to the confrontational exposure of Mapplethorpe's photography, and, of course, to cathedral stained glass. They draw upon these same influences in their creative self-creation, their transgressive aesthetics, and their repetition and reworking of religious and secular motifs intertwined with abstractions. Gilbert and George are insistently doubles: original and derivative, repetitive and evolving, reactionary and visionary.

The Fundamental Pictures consists of a series of some 39 scultptures, most involving juxtapositions of bodily execretia - sputum, tears, urine, semen, feces - in monumental close-up; the tears, urine and semen are captured through a microscope, dessicated and crystalized. The sensational titles of the individual works, such as 'Piss Faith' and 'Spit on Shit', are fairly accurate in describing the central themes of each work. In some of the montages, Gilbert and George appear, pink and naked, against a kaleidoscopic backdrop of bright, magnified bodily fluids; in others, they are dressed in their familiar suits. They were exhibited at the Lehmann Maupin Gallery, New York, in 1997.

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One of Gilbert and George's very few specific portraits, this is a collage of images culled from their photographs of their friend David Robilliard. Its title, "A.D.", can be taken to mean "Anno Domini" or "After David" or, as the artists suggest, "AIDS David". It is at first an extraordinarily ugly piece, even by Gilbert and George's standards: the uniform flesh tone with pearly globules of moisture (sweat, semen), broken up by the black of shadows, the black bristles of stubble, and the black grid. The image looks like it emerged from one of William S. Burrough's novels, a nightmarish combination of mouth, orifices, bodily cavities.

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This powerful book of black and white photographs contains four sections labeled: I. The End of Manual Labor, 1986-, II. Diverse Images 1974-87, III. Famine in the Sahel, 1984-85, and IV. Latin America, 1977-84. In addition, photographs accompany the prose-poetry opening essay, "Salgado, 17 Times," by Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano and the concluding essay, "The Lyric Documentarian," by former New York Times picture editor Fred Ritchin. This oversize book concludes with a list of captions for the photographs and a detailed two-page biography of Salgado. Essentially the photographs cover Salgado’s impressive work from 1974-89.

Every image is of a person or people. Many are suffering, many are starving, grieving, keening, dying, displaced. Many are children. Many are laboring under impossibly harsh conditions such as the teeming, mud-coated manual laborers of the Brazilian Serra Pelada gold mine. An Ethiopian father anoints the corpse of his famine starved, skin and bone child with oil. An old man, squinting in the sun, leans over to touch the arm of an equally thin and weak man in a Sudanese refugee camp. Rarely, the people are smiling or celebrating.

The photographs are global: Angola, Bangladesh, Bolivia, Brazil, Chad, Cuba, Ecuador, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Mali, Mexico, Portugal, Sudan, Thailand, and more. As Galeano notes, "This much is certain: it would be difficult to look at these figures and remain unaffected. I cannot imagine anyone shrugging his shoulder, turning away unseeing, and sauntering off, whistling." (p. 7) [156 pp.]

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Japanese American artist, Henry Sugimoto, depicted life in the Arkansas internment camps into which he and his entire family (including wife and child) and many others of Japanese descent were forced, following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. Sugimoto's life and his painting were profoundly influenced by his incarceration experience during World War II. During and after this period his subject changed from landscapes to scenes of camp life and the Japanese emigration/immigration experience; these works often had social and political purpose.

Dominating this picture are five brown-skinned, black-haired babies clad only in diapers, who are sitting or standing on a white sheet. Remarkably, the babies are featureless, although one appears to be crying. Another is standing, waving a tiny American flag. Looming in the lower left of the picture is an MP (military police), also brown-skinned, but with Caucasian features. He stands guard, not facing the children, and prominently holding a rifle to which a bayonet is attached.

Separating the babies from the MP is the barbed wire fence that stretches along the painting's foreground. In the background is the watch tower often depicted in Sugimoto's paintings, more barbed wire fences that enclose the children, and a menacing dark brown sky.

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Summary:

Japanese American artist, Henry Sugimoto, depicted life in the Arkansas internment camps into which he and his entire family (including wife and child) and many others of Japanese descent were forced, following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. Sugimoto's life and his painting were profoundly influenced by his incarceration experience during World War II. During and after this period his subject changed from landscapes to scenes of camp life and the Japanese emigration/immigration experience; these works often had social and political purpose.

This painting is bleak, almost colorless, with its shades of gray and beige; the sky is cloudy. In the foreground there appears to be a marshy area, with water, wooden boards strewn about, and tall grass at the water's edge. Barracks stretch behind the marsh, on either side of a narrow road, the repetitive monotony reinforced by telegraph poles that line one side of the road. There are no people or animals in sight and the only vegetation detectable, besides marsh grass, is the sketchy outline of tree tops in the distance.

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Summary:

Japanese American artist Henry Sugimoto depicted life in the Arkansas internment camps into which he and his entire family (including wife and child) and many others of Japanese descent were forced, following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. Sugimoto's life and his painting were profoundly influenced by his incarceration experience during World War II. During and after this period his subject changed from landscapes to scenes of camp life and the Japanese emigration/immigration experience; these works often had social and political purpose.

In the foreground of this painting, her back to the viewer, a woman waves a handkerchief in farewell to her husband, who wears an army uniform. The children wave goodbye with her as their father turns around to wave back. The road on which the soldier walks is flanked by the barbed wire of the camp, and in the distance stands a watch tower. The woman and her children are separated from the husband/father by a sign that seems suspended in front of them and says in large letters, "STOP." A guard soldier with bayonet stands next to the woman and children, facing them and the viewer with a stern expression on his gray-white face.

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Summary:

Japanese American artist Henry Sugimoto depicted life in the Arkansas internment camps into which he and his entire family (including wife and child) and many others of Japanese descent were forced, following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. Sugimoto's life and his painting were profoundly influenced by his incarceration experience during World War II. During and after this period his subject changed from landscapes to scenes of camp life and the Japanese emigration/immigration experience; these works often had social and political purpose.

In the center of this painting stands a woman bending down toward a young girl who is facing her. Both are wearing colorful (yellow and red, respectively) dresses and the girl is wearing boots. The child stretches her right arm toward the woman while her left arm points upward toward structures --a suspension bridge, parts of buildings --that are angled, overlap each other, and are placed within a light blue background.

What appear to be two transparent light beams emanate at an acute angle from the right vertical border of the painting. The angled beams and the angled overlapping buildings simultaneously break up the picture and unite its various elements. In the lower left corner a coiled rattlesnake stretches its head toward the child, while in the lower right corner, a squirrel is sitting on a log viewed end on, an ax resting propped up against the log. A large sunflower stretches along the right vertical border of the picture toward the triangle of the upper right hand corner. In this triangle is the ubiquitous watch tower of Sugimoto's camp paintings, tilted (see "Send Off Husband at Jerome Camp" and "Nisei Babies in Concentration Camp" in this database); a camp building, green trees, and a dark blue-black sky through which a lightning bolts tears vertically.

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A man wearing a dark suit and shirt with clerical collar, his head bowed, knees buckling, his forehead and cheek dripping blood, is being held from behind by a young man whose arms reach under the cleric's shoulders to restrain him. To the left of these two men, and moving into the center of the picture with his lifted outstretched leg, a third man, his sleeves rolled up to reveal his muscular arms, punches and kicks the cleric. All three have Asiatic features.

In the background is a drab gray wooden building that says "Mess" while in the foreground a small wooden stake carries a sign saying "Block." The cleric's hat and glasses have tumbled to the ground next to his feet, and a book that appears to be a bible also lies there. The ground, like the Mess Hall, is drab and colorless; the sky is a bleak darkish brown.

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Among the "scenes from everyday life" which constitute so-called "genre" painting in 17th Century Dutch art, the profession of medicine was often lampooned. In Gerritt Dou’s painting, the doctor is depicted as a deceiving charlatan, marketing his products with impressive but unsubstantiated claims about their effectiveness. In Dou’s hometown of Leiden, with the Blauwpoort (Blue Gatehouse) in the background left, the quack has set up shop outside the studio of a painter. [At the Web Gallery of Art on-line site, select "D" from the Artist Index, scroll down for Dou, select "Page 2".)

The artist gazes out of his window, holding the tools of his trade, a pallet and brushes. Directly beside him the quack stands under a Chinese umbrella, with stopper in his hand, and presents the patent medicine in a large glass vial to his audience. On his table is a document with a large and authoritative red seal, indicating his credentials and bolstering his credibility. On one side is a barber- surgeon’s basin, on the other is a monkey.

A crowd has gathered around, including a huntsman with a dead rabbit suspended on his rifle, a man with vegetables in a cart, and a woman with a pancake griddle and batter in a large bowl in the right foreground; she is cleaning and diapering a child. In the right foreground a woman gapes at the doctor and his medicine, unaware that her pocket is being picked. In front of her sprawls a child who holds a bread crust to bait and capture a small bird. In the left foreground is a tall, twisted and dead tree; across from it at the corner of the artist’s studio is a living tree lush with foliage.

While Nicolas Tulp (see Rembrandt’s "The Anatomy Lesson of Nicolaes Tulp") enjoyed a reputation as the "Vesalius of the North," this painting is more typical of the prevailing popular depictions of the doctor, not just in the Netherlands but elsewhere in Europe and equally subject to mockery and suspicion. At this time medical care was provided by local physicians, but also by traveling barber-surgeons whose skills and knowledge were dubious.

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