Hello there, DU! Ready for today’s art quiz? It’s “Another Back Story Challenge!”
Can you figure out the back story, some recent, connected with each one of these art treasures?
And please remember...cheating is not OK...
1.
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2.
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3.
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4.
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5.
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6.
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= new reply since forum marked as read
I don't travel much and have never had a passport. At 65, I know that's shameful.
Oh! And the Wichita Art Museum, which is nice, albeit small. I was a good friend of the head curator and her husband, both good Democrats. 
They're all in places I've lived.
Oh! And a long time ago I went to the Nat'l Gallery in DC, but I was a pre-teen and went with my family on vacation, so I don't remember much of it. The Capital and White House tours linger to this day.
Much more recently was the Jefferson Building at the Library of Congress. Unforgettable!
The view as one first walks into the main hall (ones jaw drops):
Ceilings!
Art is everywhere. Here's (who else!) Minerva:
It's one of the best tours in DC. Certainly unforgettable and visually stunning.
Jackie Kennedy pulled it out of a White House storeroom, one of many restorations of the mansion during JFK's brief presidency. I am now researching it further. She wrote a guidebook which I am guessing is out of print since my library doesn't know where a copy could be found, but they are looking...I think I've got the reference librarian pulling her hair out, kind of like what I do here with you guys...gotta keep in practice, ya know...
P.S., Baby knocking on the door! All's well.
It is that hope that brings me back.
Friday is art challenge day.
Sunday morning is LOLcats day... (Need LOLcats after Saturday night... )
And you got there off the top of your head, without the help of Penn & Teller! 
They were all Dutch bricks. But Penn & Teller forgot to hide the signature, low left. After that it seemed somehow unfair to post it.
Prost!
that I might send to my nephews. It's called "The Hero of Little Street" by Gregory Rogers.
When a boy playing in the streets of London is attacked by bullies, he runs into the National Gallery to escape them. While near Jan van Eyck's The Arnolfini Marriage, a dog jumps out to play with the boy, and together they find themselves in the seventeenth-century Netherlands through Vermeer's The Little Street. Though this story's main action occurs as a result of interacting with paintings, no knowledge of fine art is required to enjoy the narrative. The main entertainment from this narrative is a result of the boy and dog interacting with the new places they visit, as the art and comics-style format lend themselves to easily allowing readers to feel the characters' joy and excitement. Furthermore, Rogers tells this story without any words, so the reader must closely look at the pictures in order to follow the story, and the pictures definitely allow for rereading. Horning agrees that this is a fun book for multiple audience, calling it "[a] superb, witty book that will appeal both to squirmy, clueless kids and educated art connoisseurs." This book should be appropriate for all audiences and could be a good introductions to the comics format. Found via Horn Book Magazine, reviewed by Kathleen T. Horning.
Okay, off to continue the search (I really love that painting, by the way).
"Happy little boobies..."
There's an obtuse guess up thread, but I don't think the poster got it.
So what is #3?
I hate it when there's no closure on the Friday afternoon challenge. How late does on have to stay up on a Friday night to resolve the dischord?
on edit: I know. Like Charles Ives said to a patron sitting next to him at Boston Symphony Hall for a Bartok premier, "Be still; shut up and take your dissonances like a man."
Fun thread every week.
This might be the one you were aiming at:
http://www.timesargus.com/article/20131207/NEWS03/712079926
The third canvas, “Walking to Church,” sold for $3.2 million to Rick Lapham, a U.S. paintings dealer who said he had bought it for a client. Lapham was one of two bidders for the painting, from the April 4, 1953, cover of The Post.
Rockwell based its composition on a Vermeer painting, “The Little Street,” translating the scene to fit his idealized vision of an urban street scene, with family members in their Easter best, each clutching Bibles. He used a composite of buildings in Troy, N.Y., and a church steeple in Vermont, a state he lived in for about 15 years. The painting sold for $3.2 million with fees. It had been expected to fetch $3 million to $5 million.
Asked why there had not been more competition for the painting, Lapham replied, “It’s stylistically different,” referring to Rockwell’s translation of an old-master painting.
If I had to choose, I'd prefer the less constructed, less sentimental view.
There's also this bit of inspiration for new art, of a sort:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/12/06/can-you-paint-like-johannes-vermeer-too.html
A brilliant documentary, directed by Teller of Penn & Teller fame, chronicles a 5-year quest to solve a 350-year-old mystery—and gets to the heart of what it means to be an artistic genius.
...
Those are the questions at the heart of the brilliant new documentary Tim’s Vermeer, which was released Friday in New York and was just shortlisted for an Academy Award. (It opens in L.A. on Dec. 13 and nationwide on Jan. 31.) Directed by Teller, the silent half of the legendary Penn & Teller magic team, Tim’s Vermeer tells the story of a tech geek named Tim Jenison who embarks on a quixotic 5-year-long quest to solve the 350-year-old mystery of how Vermeer achieved the unparalleled light effects that made him one of the most revered and unfathomable painters of all time—and to try to achieve the same effects himself, even though he doesn’t really know how to paint.
Experts have long theorized that the 17th century Dutch master relied on some sort of optical technology—a camera obscura, perhaps—to create his enigmatic yet photorealistic scenes of middle-class life because the unaided human eye is unable to register the shifts in light that he so meticulously reproduced on his canvases. In fact, British painter David Hockney wrote an entire book, Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters, on the subject. But when Jenison, the founder of a groundbreaking visual imaging company called NewTek, began to tinker with the kind of devices Hockney describes in his book, he quickly discovered that they were relatively blunt instruments that could never help anyone capture the subtleties of color and tonality that define Vermeer’s work.
And I'm sure there are more, unknown, but I wouldn't have thought Norman Rockwell.
I think Rockwell was pretty interested in Vermeer. After I read the Times article I searched other Rockwell works and was intrigued by this:
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Now look at this:
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esp. with poses. Here:
Seurat
and
Piero della Francesca
of course, Vermeer stole his window treatment of light comingi in from left to right on the canvas from Piero, didn't he?
