Monday's Madonna & Child is by Francesco d'Ubertino Verdi (1494 – 1557)

IT'S ABOUT TIME
By Barbara Wells Sarudy

Francesco d'Ubertino Verdi, called Bachiacca [also known a
s Francesco Ubertini, il Bacchiacca] (1494 – 1557) Mary and Child

In this blog, I try to begin each day with a painting of the Madonna & Child. It centers me; connects me to the past; & encourages me to post some of the religious paintings which were the core of early Western art. [link]

Monday's Madonna & Child is a 2014 special weekly feature for A&O. 

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Monday's Madonna & Child is by Gay British Artist and Minister Richard Stott

ALPHA OMEGA ARTS NEWS
By Tahlib

“Untitled” by Richard Stott. Courtesy of Jesus in Love Blog

Monday's Madonna & Child is by Richard Stott. He painted the Madonna with rainbow robes in fall 2013 during a conference organized by Changing Attitude, an Anglican LGBTI group, accordingt to Kittridge Cherry's Jesus In Love Blog. In a reflection about the image on his blog, Stott writes: "The church had been festooned in rainbow flags and the way the fabric curved as it hung beguiled me. They echoed the folds of cloth on a statue of the Virgin Mary with her child at the opposite side of the church to me. So I brought them together and this image emerged. It was only at the end, when I stepped back to look at what I’d done that I began to reflect on the meaning of the picture. What started as a study of a very material and ordinary thing, the shadows in hanging fabric, became an image laden with significance…"

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Monday's Madonna & Child by Catherine Opie

ALPHA OMEGA ARTS NEWS
By TAHLIB

Catherine Opie, Self Portrait/Nursing, 2004, C-print, 40x32in. Courtesy of the artist and Regen Projects.

NEW YORK---It's not your conventional "Madonna & Child" but why start your week out with conventional Christian art? The Leslie-Lohman Museum's "After Our Bodies Meet: From Resistance to Potentiality" explores queer feminist artists' responses to dominant notions about the body from the 1970s to the present day through August 3. Reflecting the ever-growing diversity of feminist art, this exhibition provides a cross-cultural examination of how artists represent the body to challenge past and present forms of oppression and to envision a queer future.

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Monday's Madonna & Child is by Hannah Kunkle

ALPHA OMEGA ARTS NEWS
By TAHLIB

Kim as Mary, and baby North as Jesus

Graphic designer Hannah Kunkle shocked NYC, and much of the Christian world with her depictions of the celebrity-hunting Kim Kardashian as May of the Virgin mother of Jesus. Outside of the celebrity factor however, the image isn't half-bad and so it's Monday's Madonna & Child.

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Indianapolis Episcopal Diocese Raises $425,000 From Auction of Rare Painting

ALPHA OMEGA ARTS NEWS
By TAHLIB

INDIANA---A religious artwork long held by the Indianapolis Museum of Art and returned last year to the Episcopal Diocese sold for $425,000 at Christie's Old Masters sale in NYC on June 4. The painting of the Madonna and Child with the Infant Saint John the Baptist was identified by Ginger Bievenour, vice chair of Alpha & Omega Project for Contemporary Religious Arts as a rare work by Francesco Botticini (Florence 1446/7-1498). "In his mature career," according to Christies, "Botticini enjoyed tremendous popularity as a painter of private devotional images, such as the present example, which treats a theme to which the artist returned on several occasions." The painting was gifted to the Diocese of Indianapolis in 1968, and the sale will benefit the mission's program.

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Monday's Madonna & Child by Diego Rivera at the Detroit Institute of Arts

ALPHA OMEGA ARTS NEWS
By TAHLIB

Detail from the "Detroit Industry Murals" by Diego Rivera

This Monday's Madonna & Child outraged religious fundamentalists in Detroit in 1933. It is a small portion of the "Detroit Industry Murals" by Diego Rivera at the Detroit Institute of Arts unvieled. Many local church leaders saw the murals as promoting atheism, in part for his portrayal of the holy family in a scene known as the "vaccination." Father Charles Coughlin, a Roman Catholic priest even demanded the work be destroyed. Today,  Rivera is regarded as one of the most influential painters in Mexican history. According to Adherents.org, "Diego Rivera was a Converso, a member of an ethnic group comprised of Jews whose ancestors had been forced to convert to Catholicism. Diego Rivera was raised as a Catholic, but was aware of his Jewish heritage. As an adult, Rivera was a self-proclaimed atheist."

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Monday's Madonna & Child: "The Family" by Marisol Escobar at El Museo del Barrio

THE NEW YORK TIMES
By Holland Cotter

"The Family” (1969), a mixed-media work by Marisol Escobar that is
expected to be part of her career retrospective at El Museo del Barrio this fall.

LOS ANGELES----A little over a year ago, El Museo del Barrio, the oldest museum in the United States devoted to Latino art, had the equivalent of a nervous breakdown in public. A new director, Jorge Daniel Veneciano, took over in March. Mr. Veneciano admires the early version of El Museo. “I’m a student of democratic theory,” he said. “I believe museums are one of three fundamental democratic institutions: libraries, museums and schools, with museums in the middle, because, like libraries, they have collections, and like schools they have an educational function, to teach with those collections.” El Museo began in 1969 as a city-supported art initiative in a public school classroom on East 116th Street, at the center of the barrio, Spanish Harlem, at the time largely Puerto Rican. [link]

El Museo del Barrio, 1230 Fifth Avenue, at 104th Street, is open Wednesdays through Saturdays from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.; 212-831-7272, elmuseo.org. Its current exhibition, “Museum Start Kit: Open With Care,” runs through Sept. 6.

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Monday's Madonna & Child is by Raphael via the Prado Museum

ALPHA OMEGA ARTS NEWS
By TAHLIB

"Holy Family with Saint John" (c. 1516) by Raphael 

Last month, one of the finest collections of Italian masterpieces ever to come to Australia were unveiled at the National Gallery of Victoria on May 16th. The collection includes Raphael's "Holy Family with Saint John or Madonna of the Rose" as today's Madonna & Child.

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Monday's Madonna & Child from 16th Century at Auction

THE NEW YORK TIMES
By Scott Reyburn

Detail of The 16th-century German painting ‘‘Virgin and Child on a grassy bank.’’ Credit Sotheby’s

UNITED KINGDOM---Up until the 1980s, paintings by canonical figures such as Rembrandt, Rubens and Velázquez were the main income-generators for Sotheby’s and Christie’s. Since then, they’ve fallen out of fashion with wealthy collectors, who increasingly want to buy instantly recognizable works by “brand” artists rather than connoisseurs’ paintings whose authorship might be open to question. Now 20th- and 21st-century art, and even Chinese antiques, are more lucrative categories for the salerooms. Last year, worldwide auctions of Old Master paintings raised 1 billion euros, or about $1.4 billion. Unlike the supercharged market for contemporary art, auction sales of Old Masters have actually contracted; in 2011, they stood at €1.4 billion. [link]

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Sotheby's to Sell a Rare Life-Size Mother & Child in terracotta by French Artist Aimé-Jules Dalou

ARTDAILY

UNITED KINGDOM---Sotheby’s announced today that it will offer a supremely rare life-size masterpiece in terracotta by the great 19th-century French artist Aimé-Jules Dalou in a London sale of 19th & 20th Century Sculpture on 21 May 2014. Boulonnaise allaitant son enfant (A Young Mother from Boulogne feeding her Child) was acquired directly from the artist in 1876 by George John Browne, 3rd Marquess of Sligo, before being exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts in 1877. It was subsequently installed at Westport House, in Westport, Ireland, where it was on view until last year. Estimated at £300,000-500,000 (€360,000-600,000), the terracotta is one of the last museum-quality life-size works by Dalou in private hands and is being sold by Jeremy Browne, the 11th Marquess of Sligo. [link]

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Monday's Mother & Child by Arthur Szyk

ALPHA OMEGA ARTS NEWS
By TAHLIB

"Baby Moses" (1935) by Arthur Szyk

Best known for his World War II anti-Nazi political art and his beloved Passover Haggadah, 20th century artist Arthur Szyk (pronounced “shik”) single-handedly revived the medieval tradition of illumination. The Szyk Haggadah above features "Baby Moses" a visual-telling of the story where Pharaoh's daughter finds the baby floating in a basket in the river. The full collection of originals are currently on display at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco.

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