Picasso’s Guernica painting turns 75 years old this year, and in order to have it restored, Madrid’s Reina Sofia museum has designed a robot capable of scanning the entire painting for signs of wear and places where restoration is needed the most. The museum teamed up with Spanish telecommunication company Telefonica to build Pablito, as it’s now called, and the robot goes to work every night taking thousands of high-resolution pictures of the famous black and white anti-war painting.
Normally, when a painting the size of Guernica needs to be restored, it is taken down and worked on in a laboratory. But, because Guernica has been moved so many times, and even altered, curators thought it would be best to leave it hanging in the museum, and turn the first part of the job over to a technological master. The oil-on-canvas painting depicts tormented and distorted human and animal figures, a representation of the horror of modern warfare. It was inspired by the Italian and German bombing of a Spanish town in the Basque region during the Spanish Civil War in 1937.
Source: nocontxt
Extremely weird, but kinda cool at the same time. Illustration of dissection of conjoined twins from the 1665 edition of De Monstris by Fortunio Liceti (1577-1657). Image courtesy of the National Library of Medicine. Via. Wikipedia
Source: nocontxt
At MoMA, A Look At De Kooning's Shifts In Style : NPR
Wish i could check this show out. One of my all time favorite artists…. “Although it might not be immediately obvious, de Kooning’s abstractions, unlike, say, Pollock’s or Mark Rothko’s, are almost always based on figures or objects or places. Several years after his first big New York success in the late 1940s with a dazzling series of black and white abstractions, he returned to one of his favorite subjects — women — and was attacked for abandoning abstraction. To which he responded: “After a while all kinds of painting becomes just painting for you — abstract or otherwise.” “Being anti-traditional,” he told his critics, “is just as corny as being traditional.”
Source: omgawesomeposters
