art

Noli me tangere

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Noli me tangere … she turned around and saw Jesus there, but did not know it was Jesus. Jesus said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you looking for?” She thought it was the gardener and said to him, “Sir, if you carried him away, tell me where you laid him, and I … Read more

901 West Kinzie Street, Chicago in 2016 and 2017

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With the summer 2023 opening of the Guinness Open Gate Brewery Chicago announced just head of this St. Patrick’s Day week, I’m taking the opportunity to look back at the 901 W. Kinzie Street location. These are the “before” pictures, if you will, of the site before its redevelopment. This building used to be along my bike commute route to and from River North. 2017 photos show intensive mural art decoration—and the 2016 photo below shows that the murals hadn’t been there all that long. (And from the current photo accompanying the Sun-Times story, it looks like the murals are already largely gone—and there’s already an adjacent residential highrise.)

Whitewashed: Church Mural Of Soviet Military Defeat Painted Over By Belarusian Authorities

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Whitewashed: Church Mural Of Soviet Military Defeat Painted Over By Belarusian Authorities In late 2022, a report on Belarus’s state-funded media singled out the mural in the Soly church, accusing it of “inciting national and religious hatred.” The report also claimed priests of the church “do not care about saving souls, but about returning western … Read more

But Beauty Revealed is not a ‘self-portrait with … breasts exposed’

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Photograph of Beauty Revealed watercolor painting on ivory, a portrait of a woman's vertically centered bare breasts surrounded by white flowing cloth, in an open hinged red box
Beauty Revealed, Sarah Goodridge, American, 1828. “According to descendants of the statesman Daniel Webster (1782-1852), this miniature is a self-portrait Goodridge made for him.” Photo and caption details from The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

“Whether Webster had any sexual involvement with [Goodridge] cannot be proved one way or the other,’ Webster’s biographer Robert Remini says cautiously, before adding: ‘although the fact that she sent him a self-portrait with her breasts exposed raises suspicions.’ ¶ But Beauty Revealed is not a ‘self-portrait with the [Goodridge’s] breasts exposed’; it’s a self-portrait exclusively of her breasts.”

Source: publicdomainreview.org

Updated November 20, 2023: Added the photo of the painting in its box along with the photo caption.