Interview on the Yaron Brook show 8/16/18 – Dianne L. Durante, Writing Addict + Adept

I had great fun appearing on the Yaron Brook show on 8/16/18. It’s available on YouTube at

Yaron’s channel is https://www.youtube.com/ybrook

We had some technical issues on both ends – I ended up on my husband’s laptop, without the images I’d gathered. Here they are, a belated supplement to the show. (But better resolution than they would have been on video!) NOTE: These are not in the order the appear in the video, but they do all have titles, if you want to search for a particular work.

Keep in touch

Facebook: ForgottenDelights and Dianne Durante
Instagram series on outdoor sculptures in NYC, in chronological order
Twitter @NYsculpture –> As of 4/5/2020, I seldom post on Twitter

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Mentioned in the interview

John Singer Sargent. Lady Helen Vincent, Viscountess d’Abernon, 1904. Birmingham Museum of Art.

Michelangelo, David, 1501-1504. Accademia, Florence. Image: Jörg Bittner Unna / Wikipedia. Higher res here.

Frishmuth’s Vine, 1921, at the Metropolitan Museum (more here and here)

Works on how to look at paintings & sculptures

My goal in writing about art is to help you spend more time with art you already love, and find more that you can fall in love with. These are my how-to books for looking at sculptures and paintings.

*How to Analyze and Appreciate Paintings*. On the cover: Holbein’s Thomas More, Vermeer’s Officer and Laughing Girl, Bellini’s St Francis, all at the Frick Collection in New York.

Movies

The three essays I wrote on analyzing film are

“Movie Reviews and How to Write Them” (part 1 of 3) – Thinking through how to write reviews, with Chronicles of Narnia as a sample.
“Best Picture: Says Who?” (part 2 of 3) – On the Academy Awards.
“Analyzing and Evaluating Films as Works of Art” (part 3 of 3) – Standards for judging films esthetically.

Outdoor Monuments in NYC

New York University Press published (and the NY Times reviewed favorably) Outdoor Monuments of Manhattan: A Historical Guide, which includes a discussion of Ayn Rand’s theory of esthetics.

I gave a talk in summer 2018 entitled “Artist-Entrepreneurs: Saint Gaudens, MacMonnies, Parrish,” at the Cordair Gallery in Napa, California. Most of the examples are works that stand outdoors in New York City. As of late 2019, the talk is available in print and as a Kindle book: see here. Works by Saint Gaudens and MacMonnies are also included in my 2020 book Getting More Enjoyment from Sculpture You Love and in Outdoor Monuments of Manhattan.

Frederick MacMonnies, *Nathan Hale,* dedicated 1890. City Hall Park, New York.

This is Sherman, by Augustus Saint Gaudens, one of America’s greatest sculptors.

Augustus Saint Gaudens, *General William T. Sherman*, dedicated 1903. Fifth Avenue at 60th St., New York. More in this blog post.

Saint Gaudens’s Lincoln in Chicago – a brilliant work, and yes, much earlier than French’s Lincoln in the Lincoln Memorial. On the right: a New York sculpture of Lincoln done very soon after his death, and much less evocative of the man.

A great Lincoln and a not-so-good one. Left: Augustus Saint Gaudens, *Standing Lincoln*, dedicated 1887. Lincoln Park, Chicago. Photo: Andrew Horne / Wikipedia. Right: Henry Kirke Brown, *Abraham Lincoln*, dedicated 1870. Union Square, New York. Photo copyright © 2018 Dianne L. Durante

An example of a sculpture that requires some knowledge before you might fall in love with it: Daniel Chester French’s America, 1907.

Daniel Chester French, America, 1907. Former U.S. Customs House at Bowling Green, New York City. Photo copyright © 2018 Dianne L. Durante

America is one of a set of four Continents, including Asia, Europe, and Africa. For a discussion of these sculptures as representations of states of mind rather than geographical locations, see this post (adapted from Outdoor Monuments of Manhattan: A Historical Guide). Here’s Asia, just to the left of America, which I think represents religion.

Daniel Chester French, Asia, 1907. Former U.S. Customs House at Bowling Green, New York City. Photo copyright © 2018 Dianne L. Durante

Innovators in Sculpture and Innovators in Painting

Innovators in Sculpture is available as a Kindle book. Innovators in Painting will, I hope, be available in 2020.

Innovators in Sculpture. On the cover: *Hatshepsut* (Egyptian) and Frishmuth’s *The Vine*, both at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Leonardo, Adoration of the Magi, 1481. Florence, Uffizi Gallery. Image: Wikipedia. Leonardo made at least 2 major innovations in art: this unfinished but extremely influential painting shows one of them.

Impressionists &c.

Seurat’s A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, 1884-1886: pic is here.
Monet’s Water Lilies series is here.
Monet’s garden at Giverny is here.
Works by Kandinsky, who was inspired by Monet’s “series paintings” to paint abstract art, are here.
My book on what the hell happened to French art over the course of the 19th century (a look at painting and philosophy) is here.

Seismic Shifts in Subject and Style: 19th-Century French Painting and Philosophy

Mary Ann Sures, “Metaphysics in Marble”

Museums

Brookgreen Gardens, including Diana of the Chase: official page and Wikipedia and Wikimedia pages (with more pics)
Frick Collection, NYC
Cincinnati Art Museum, with several Frishmuth sculptures
Museo de Arte de Ponce, Puerto Rico, with Leighton’s Flaming June
Tate Britain – not Tate Modern, whose Turner Prize inspired my essay on Artspeak (I don’t rant often, but damn, it’s fun)
Copenhagen: Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek – 19th-c. Scandinavian sculptures
Art Institute of Chicago
Metropolitan Museum of Art: the display of things not-quite-in-storage is the Henry R. Luce Center for the Study of American Art, which is just off the American Wing Courtyard (where Frishmuth’s The Vine lives)

A few things we didn’t get to on the show:

On the controversy over outdoor sculptures in Charlottesville, New York, and elsewhere: “Politics and Portrait Sculptures,” as a blog post and video
Outdoor Monuments of Manhattan: A Historical Guide has been adapted into a videoguide by Guides Who Know. It’s currently available for Android users in the Amazon store: preview here, full app here.

Guides Who Know Monuments of Manhattan app

I’ve done a series of books on Alexander Hamilton. They were inspired by Hamilton: An American Musical, but turned into an in-depth look at Hamilton’s life and policies via a deep dive into primary sources. More on those here.

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