couch sweet potatoes

Two undraped ladies; each with troubles enough of their own. Not only look-alikes but contemporaries, each of them took a prominent part in a minor revolution. Adah Menken was a kind of nineteenth-century Marilyn Monroe, and like her a peripheral figure in sporting and literary circles. She brought nudity, or at least a reasonably facsimile of it, to the Victorian stage.

Adah Isaacs Menken. Read More:http://ahistoryofnewyork.com/2010/03/adah-isaacs-mencken/

Olympia was the painting that helped the young Edouard Manet stir the Paris art world of the mid-nineteenth-century. It was Manet who stood at the center of a protest in 1863 against the Paris Salon jury. This protest marked the beginning of the modern artist as a person whose creative independence was subject to no internal verification beyond their own conscience.

Read More:http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/manet/olympia/ ---In this famous painting, Manet showed a different aspect of realism from that envisaged by Courbet, his intention being to translate an Old Master theme, the reclining nude of Giorgione and Titian, into contemporary terms. It is possible also to find a strong reminiscence of the classicism of Ingres in the beautiful precision with which the figure is drawn, though if he taught to placate public and critical opinion by these references to tradition, the storm of anger the work provoked at the Salon of 1865 was sufficient disillusionment. There is a subtlety of modelling in the figure and a delicacy of distinction between the light flesh tones and the white draperies of the couch that his assailants were incapable of seeing. The sharpness of contrast also between model and foreground items and dark background, which added a modern vivacity to the Venetian-type subject, was regarded with obtuse suspicion as an intended parody.---

ADDENDUM:

Francis Bacon ( 1597): … Beauty is as summer fruits, which are easy to corrupt, and cannot last; and for the most part it makes a dissolute youth, and an age a little out of countenance; but yet certainly again, if it light well, it maketh virtue shine, and vices blush….“And yet Boldnesse is a childe of ignorance and basenesse, farre inferiour to other parts, and binde hand and foot those, that are either shallow in judgment or weake in courage, which are the greatest part: yea prevaileth with wise men at weake times.” … “that Boldnesse is ever blinde; for it seeth not dangers and inconveniences.”


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