Banksy's Exit Through The Gift Shop

Exit Through the Gift Shop, a film by Banksy (2010)

A few days ago I was finally able to see the street artist Banksy's newest venture, his film Exit Through The Gift Shop. A few weeks ago I posted an article detailing some of the fabulous movies that have recently come out about art, the art world and the marketing hype that so often surrounds this industry. However, if you really want to understand how hype can build an artist literally from the ground up in about a week, you need to see this movie.

Beginning with a bit of a history lesson on street art and the graffiti artists who made it the huge phenomenon it is today. If you are a street art aficionado this will be a bit of a review, but what a review! Actual footage of the heroes of the movement working their craft on buildings, billboards, roads, and anywhere else with a flat surface (sometimes it doesn't even have to be flat!) is a stunning example of unprecedented access to a very secretive society. Following the beginning of Mister Brainwash, aka Thierry Guetta, a crazy man on a mission with a camera. Though Guetta is initially quite likable in his own way, he becomes a bit of an enigma you don't really want to understand. The movie follows his journey into the secret world of street artists and their daily battles with police.

Featuring the biggest names in the movement, this movie is absolutely fantastic and I have no problem buying into Banksy's latest statement. Though in his own words this movie began as a documentary about him and was turned back on the videographer when he became a more interesting, or at least scintillating, topic. The movie is rife with insane footage of the artists doing their thing, but it also has poignant moments of suspense when what was supposed to be a quick work turns into a fiasco.

The ultimate subject of the movie is Guetta and his made dash for fame that ends the tale is a insightful critique on the art world and its susceptibility to hype, reputation, and need to be ahead of the crowd.

Two thumbs up, see this movie.

Exhibition Alert: Richard Feigen, New York

Richard L. Feigen & Co., “Richard Wilson and the British Arcadia” through June 25.

I am posting a review today from the New York Times of a wonderful exhibition going on right now at Richard L. Feigen & Co. in New York. A good friend of mine, Ann Guite, put the show together and it was really such an educational and moving exhibition that showed one of the most unrecognized pioneers in early modern painting. Not the most exciting artist or the most visually appealing at all times, Richard Wilson was an innovative and creative artist who changed the course of British painting in the 18th-century. It is definitely worth stopping in!

June 4, 2010
The Mystery of the British Landscape Master
By SOUREN MELIKIAN

Richard Wilson and the British Arcadia. Richard L. Feigen & Co.Through June 25.

Museum Mile Festival in New York, TONIGHT!

Museum Mile Festival Going on Tonight!

Calling all New York readers!! Today is the Museum Mile Festival! An amazing opportunity to spend the evening hanging around some of the best art in the world while enjoying a street festival on some of New York's most beautiful streets!
Details below, I am so jealous of anyone that is in the vicinity and I hope you will all go and write me about your fabulous time!

Have fun! I'm wishing I was there right now. Click on the title of the post to be taken to the Festival's website!


MUSEUM MILE FESTIVAL
Tuesday, June 8th, 2010, 6pm - 9pm
Featuring:

Museums Participating:
Nine Museums. One Destination.

* El Museo del Barrio
* Museum of the City of New York
* The Jewish Museum
* Cooper Hewitt, National Design Museum, Smithsonian Institution
* National Academy Museum and School of Fine Arts
* Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
* Neue Galerie New York
* Goethe-Institut/German Cultural Center
* The Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Festival Includes:
* FREE ACCESS 6pm - 9pm to all the museums along the mile
* 23 car-free blocks
5th Avenue between 82nd & 105th
* Live bands
* Entertainment
* Art-in-the street
activities for kids

"One day a year, for the past 31 years, nine of the country's finest museums, all ones that call Fifth Avenue home, collectively open their doors from 6pm - 9pm for free to New Yorkers and visitors for a mile-long block party and visual art celebration. This traffic-free, music- and art-filled celebration fills the street and sidewalks of Fifth Avenue from 82nd to 105th street, the mile now officially designated as Museum Mile. Over 50,000 visitors attend the festival annually.

In celebration of their 40th anniversary, El Museo del Barrio will kick-off the Festival at 5:45pm on the steps of their museum at 104th street!

Plus, follow the mile with street muralist De La Vega – grab a piece of chalk and make your mark!"

Who Are Your Favorite Visual Artists? Guest Post by Lauren Fliegelman

Guest Post: Lauren Fliegelman's Favorite Visual Artists

At first I thought this might be an impossible task. Similar to when asked what are my favorite movies or songs are, I immediately have to ask my inquisitor for further specifics such as genre or decade. So, according to the rules and regulations as defined by Lydia’s post, this list is, for better or worse, my selections at this time and place in my life.

1. Edouard Manet
2. Fra Angelico
3. Gustave Caillebotte
4. Anselm Kiefer
5. Pollaiuolo Brothers
6. Petrus Christus
7. Giovanni Bellini
8. Emile Nolde
9. Mies van der Rohe
10. Anish Kipoor

Who Are Your Favorite Visual Artists?

Who Are Your Favorite Visual Artists?

I was recently asked by a friend who my favorite artist was. This question comes up all the time, though in the art world it is most often asked in the much more pretentious tone of, "So who do you like?" or "Who interests you?" This question is also somewhere between the two extremes of obvious and inexplicable. Similar to "what is your favorite color?" one knows exactly who the artists are that really speak to you but it is rarely just one and many usually speak just as strongly to you but maybe in different languages. Also, it is inexplicable because, inevitably, the next question is "why that artist?" Instead of a long drawn out debate/argument/discussion, I have decided to simply give you a list, in the order which I would spend the most time and effort to see these artists' work in person at this particular moment. This means that though I dearly love these artists at this precise moment, it is likely to change in the next days or weeks. I already feel myself leaning towards more contemporary artists and so, undoubtably, artists like Bosch or van der Weyden will change positions with artists like Jasper Johns, Robert Rauchenberg, or Magdalena Abakanowicz in the near future Those are my qualifying terms. HOWEVER, this post demands interaction. If I am exposing my heart to the world, I want to know who are the artists, or works of art, that make your heard pound and your eyes tear. I already know some of them, from comments and emails I have received, but I would love to know more about my readers. So please, for me, tell me your art secrets :)


1. Egon Schiele (the image at the top of the post is a collage made by another blogger of numerous different works by Schiele)



2. Mark Rothko



3. The Italian Mannerists: Rosso Fiorentino / Jacopo Pontormo / Agnolo Bronzino



4. Pablo Picasso



5. Francis Bacon



6. Caravaggio



7. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner



8. Rogier van der Weyden



9. Henri Toulouse-Latrec



10. Hieronymus Bosch

Honorable Mentions:
Jasper Johns
Robert Rauchenberg
Magdalena Abakanowicz
Auguste Rodin


I hope you will take my pleas seriously and let me know who you love and who you would go to the ends of the Earth just to see a work by.

Best,
Lydia

Obituary: Louise Bourgeois dies at 98

An artist I previously covered has died today. For the post on Louise Bourgeois' Maman see THURSDAY, April 8th, 2010. For a slide show of her work, please either click on the title to this post or go to: http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2010/05/31/arts/design/20100601-bourgeois-ss.html

Louise Bourgeois, Influential Sculptor, Dies at 98
By HOLLAND COTTER for the New York Times, May 31, 2010 (Article taken from website)

Louise Bourgeois, the French-born American artist who gained fame only late in a long career, when her psychologically charged abstract sculptures, drawings and prints had a galvanizing effect on the work of younger artists, particularly women, died on Monday in Manhattan, where she lived. She was 98.

The cause was a heart attack, said Wendy Williams, managing director of the Louise Bourgeois Studio.

Ms. Bourgeois’s sculptures in wood, steel, stone and cast rubber, often organic in form and sexually explicit, emotionally aggressive yet witty, covered many stylistic bases. But from first to last they shared a set of repeated themes centered on the human body and its need for nurture and protection in a frightening world.

Protection often translated into images of shelter or home. A gouged lump of cast bronze, for example, suggested an animal’s lair. A tablelike wooden structure with thin, stiltlike legs resembled a house ever threatening to topple. Her series of “Cells” from the early 1990s — installations of old doors, windows, steel fencing and found objects — were meant to be evocations of her childhood, which she claimed as the psychic source of her art.

But it was her images of the body itself, sensual but grotesque, fragmented, often sexually ambiguous, that proved especially memorable. In some cases the body took the abstract form of an upright wooden pole, pierced by a few holes and stuck with nails; in others it appeared as a pair of women’s hands realistically carved in marble and lying, palms open, on a massive stone base.

Among her most familiar sculptures was the much-exhibited “Nature Study” (1984), a headless sphinx with powerful claws and multiple breasts. Perhaps the most provocative was “Fillette” (1968), a large, detached latex phallus. Ms. Bourgeois can be seen carrying this object, nonchalantly tucked under one arm, in a portrait by the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe taken for the catalog of her 1982 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. (In the catalog, the Mapplethorpe picture is cropped to show only the artist’s smiling face.)

That retrospective brought Ms. Bourgeois, in her early 70s, the critical and popular acclaim that had long eluded her. In 1993 she represented the United States in the Venice Biennale. In an art world where women had been treated as second-class citizens and were discouraged from dealing with overtly sexual subject matter, she quickly assumed an emblematic presence. Her work was read by many as an assertive feminist statement, her career as an example of perseverance in the face of neglect.

Ms. Bourgeois often spoke of pain as the subject of her art, and fear: fear of the grip of the past, of the uncertainty of the future, of loss in the present.

“The subject of pain is the business I am in,” she said. “To give meaning and shape to frustration and suffering.” She added: “The existence of pain cannot be denied. I propose no remedies or excuses.” Yet it was her gift for universalizing her interior life as a complex spectrum of sensations that made her art so affecting.

Louise Bourgeois was born on Dec. 25, 1911, on the Left Bank of Paris, the second of three children born to Louis and Josephine Bourgeois. Her parents, financially comfortable, owned a gallery that dealt primarily in antique tapestries. A few years after her birth the family moved out of Paris and set up a workshop for tapestry restoration in Choisy-le-Roi. Ms. Bourgeois remembered as a child drawing fragments of missing images to help in the repairs.

Ms. Bourgeois often spoke of her early, emotionally conflicted family life as formative. Her practical and affectionate mother, who was an invalid, was a positive influence. Her father’s domineering disposition, as well as his marital infidelities (he had a 10-year affair with the children’s English governess), instilled a resentment and an insecurity that Ms. Bourgeois never laid to rest.

Her nightmarish tableau of 1974, “The Destruction of the Father,” for example, is a table in a stagily lighted recess, which holds an arrangement of breastlike bumps, phallic protuberances and other biomorphic shapes in soft-looking latex that suggest the sacrificial evisceration of a body, the whole surrounded by big, crude mammillary forms. Ms. Bourgeois has suggested as the tableau’s inspiration a fantasy from childhood in which a pompous father, whose presence deadens the dinner hour night after night, is pulled onto the table by other family members, dismembered and gobbled up.

Similarly, for a 1994 exhibition titled “Louise Bourgeois: Locus of Memory, Works 1982-1993,” she created a single sculpture and suite of drawings in which the central image was a spider, a creature she associated with her mother, a woman of ever-changing moods.

Drawn in orange and flesh-pink gouache, it here stalked across the page and there shrunk to the size of a pea. As an immense sculpture of soldered metal tubing, it loomed ominously over the viewer but was delicate enough to quiver and sway at a touch. Fragility and fierceness were, in fact, the twin poles of Ms. Bourgeois’s art.

Often there was a precise association in her work. After she had created a number of vertical spirals that seemed to twist in space, she evoked childhood memories of the tapestry business and her family: “When a tapestry had to be washed in the river, it took four people to hoist it out and twist it. Twisting is very important for me. When I dreamt of getting rid of the mistress, it was by twisting her neck.”

At the age of 20, she entered the Sorbonne to study mathematics and geometry, disciplines that she valued for their stability. “I got peace of mind,” she later said, “only through the study of rules nobody could change.” But she left to enroll in a succession of art schools, and counted Fernand Léger among her teachers.

In 1938 she married Robert Goldwater, an American art historian noted for his pioneering work in the field then referred to as primitive art. They moved to New York City that same year, and Ms. Bourgeois attended the Art Students League, where she studied painting with Vaclav Vytlacil and also produced sculpture and prints.

She knew many of the European surrealists then arriving as refugees in New York (she later dismissed them as “smart alecks”), but the artists to whom she felt closest were the American painters who would come to be known as Abstract Expressionists.

Ms. Bourgeois had a solo show of paintings in New York in 1945 and her first exhibition of sculpture — an installation of tall, polelike figures that she intended as abstract portraits of family members and friends — four years later at the Peridot Gallery, at which time she gave up painting for good.

She enjoyed some professional success as a sculptor thereafter (she participated in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Annual Exhibition almost yearly until 1962). But a significant shift in her career came in 1966, when she was included in an exhibition at the Fischbach Gallery in New York, “Eccentric Abstraction,” organized by the critic Lucy Lippard.

Ms. Bourgeois’s long involvement in the nascent feminist movement, about which she had passionate but ambivalent feelings, began at this time. In the following year she made her first of many trips to the marble works in Carrara and Pietrasanta, Italy, where she produced dozens of major marble pieces over several years.

After her husband’s death in 1973, she began teaching at the School of Visual Arts and elsewhere, including Columbia University, Cooper Union, New York Studio School and Yale University, which awarded her an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree in 1977. She also received an honorary doctorate from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn in 1993.

By the mid-1970s, with shifts in art-world trends, her reputation was steadily growing. Although she had been given only four one-woman shows in 30 years after her debut as a sculptor in 1949, from 1978 to 1981 she had five in New York alone. Her retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art the following year, the first retrospective of a woman at the museum, secured her place as an influential figure. Her reputation grew even stronger in the context of the body-centered art of the ’90s, with its emphasis on sexuality, vulnerability and mortality.

Ms. Bourgeois’s first European retrospective was organized by the Kunstverein in Frankfurt in 1989. In 1993 she was chosen to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale. Her exhibition, organized by Charlotta Kotik of the Brooklyn Museum of Art and titled “Louise Bourgeois: The Locus of Memory, Works 1982-1993,” later traveled to the Brooklyn and to the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington.

A second international retrospective was organized by the Tate Modern in London and the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 2007 and traveled to New York, Los Angeles and Washington the following year. The Museo Nacional Centro de Arte/Reina Sofia in Madrid and the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg mounted retrospectives.

She also was included in four Whitney Biennials, the first in 1973 and the most recent in 1997, and a number of major international shows, including Documenta and the Carnegie International.

A survey of her prints was organized by the Modern in 1994, and a survey of her drawings by the University Art Museum at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1995. At her death, two films about her had been completed. She was represented by Cheim & Read Gallery in Chelsea.

Ms. Bourgeois was named Officer of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French minister of culture in 1983. Other honors included the Grand Prix National de Sculpture from the French government in 1991; the National Medal of Arts, presented to her by President Bill Clinton in 1997; the first lifetime achievement award from the International Sculpture Center in Washington; and election as a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Certainly her personal style contributed to her mystique. Petite in size, gruff of voice and manner, outspoken but suspicious of interviewers, she spent much of her time either in her home in the Chelsea section of Manhattan or in her studio in Brooklyn, where she worked with Jerry Gorovoy, her assistant since 1980.

Ms Bourgeois is survived by two sons, Jean-Louis, of Manhattan, and Alain, of Brooklyn; two grandchildren; and a great granddaughter. Her son Michel died in 1990.

A lifelong insomniac, she often stayed up drawing or writing in her journal, in the same plain, epigrammatic style in which she spoke. (Her writings and interviews were published under the title “Destruction of the Father/Reconstruction of the Father” by the MIT Press in 1998).

“I have a religious temperament,” Ms. Bourgeois, a professed atheist, said about the emotional and spiritual energy that she poured into her work. “I have not been educated to use it. I’m afraid of power. It makes me nervous. In real life, I identify with the victim. That’s why I went into art.”

Art in Quotations

Picasso is the reason why I paint. He is the father figure, who gave me the wish to paint.
- Francis Bacon

Otto Dix, The Dancer Anita Berber (1925)

Otto Dix, The Dancer Anita Berber (1925). Oil and tempera on plywood, 120 x 65 cm. Currently in New York city at the Neue Galerie, on loan from the Landesbank Baden-Würtemberg in the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart.

Otto Dix (1891 – 1969), as mentioned earlier this week, is currently having his first major exhibition in the United States at the Neue Galerie in New York. An artist that before I was not unaware of but rather did not hold great appeal for me is now ranking among one of my current favorites. His show brings together works from his most important periods and allows one to fully understand his development. From his early dreams of being an artist through his military career in WWI and its large effect on his artistic output to his resistance to the Nazis and his subsequent conscription into the Nazi army, the exhibition does a wonderful job of chronologically situating some of his more well-known works among those that speak more clearly about his biggest influences.

Though his most famous works are portraits of some of Wiemar society's more eccentric members, his work spans numerous mediums from painting to prints and collage while also spanning themes of the effects and aftermath of war, political critique, the German underworld and sexual murders. A key member of the New Objectivity movement, he was also part of the Dresden Secession and later the Berlin Secession. One of the many artists declared degenerate by the Nazis, Dix continued to paint critical works though legally obliged to only paint landscape works.

The work above, The Dancer Anita Berber (1925) is one of Dix most well-known paintings. The subject, Anita Berber (1899-1928), was an infamous figure in Berlin Wiemar society. A burlesque dancer with a scandalous sex life (she swung both ways and often appeared in pornographic reels), a nasty drug habit (lots of cocaine), and her constant state of dishabille (she liked to go around dressed only in a mink coat) made her a unique and polarizing figure. She is shown above in the red costume of her "Morphine" dance, one of a few performances named after various substances. A known addict of both cocaine and opiates, and having married three times, Berber was also closely associated with another dancer, Sebastian Droste, and they often performed together.

Berber is shown here near the end of her tragically short life. Dying before she reached the age of 30, the dancer was known for a destructive lifestyle. The violent red of her costume and hair, the color it was often dyed, frame her stark features and rebellious expression. The violence of the color and the contrast between the overwhelming tone and her pale skin allows the viewer to understand some of the key aspects of the subject without even knowing her background. This is not a light-minded woman with few cares. Though her heavy makeup and costume were part of a persona of the stage, the careful application of makeup can not hide the fact that the young woman looks much, much older than her years. The fast living and dangerous edge on which she lived shows in her face and the explicitly sensual pose. Another aspect that particularly intrigues me is that the background is the same tone as her dress. This is very rare in art and especially portraiture and it seems very ill-fitting here.

This subject, a woman known to have stood out like a sore thumb because of her clothing and behaviors, is shown as part of a backdrop. Where she would never conform in real life she is immortalized as part of a larger whole. The unease one feels at the overwhelming red and the drastic contrasts elicits the type of reaction and response that one must believe the woman herself produced. Like people in Berlin during the period, the viewer is drawn in and repulsed at the same time. Who is this prostitute? The woman in the red dress? Is she an actress in character or was this the true girl behind the makeup? My favorite aspect of this painting is that what you take away from it depends wholly on the preconceptions you have before you view it. The red could mean a prostitute, an actress, a woman out on the town, a costume party. That the truth is a scandalous courtesan of the Wiemar Republic is not obvious. Her portrait remains one of the things she is most famous for, and I have to wonder how she felt about it and how she would want to be viewed by history.

Georges de La Tour, The Penitent Magdalen (1638-43)

Georges de La Tour, The Penitent Magdalen (1638-43). Oil on canvas, 52 1/2 x 40 1/4 inches. Metropolitan Museum, New York.

As you may have guessed, I'm on a bit of a New York kick and am going to be posting about some of my favorite works that I was able to see while there. The Penitent Magdalen by Georges de La Tour was one of them, a painting I make sure to always visit when I am in the city. Its emotional resonance for me comes in the contemplative pose of the sitter and the deep shadows that seem to recall any night one has spent sitting alone, awake, lost in your own thoughts. A lifelong insomniac, there is much in this picture that speaks to me and I hope it will have some emotional pull for you as well.


Georges de La Tour, a painter from eastern France (the duchy of Lorraine) who lived from 1593–1652, is not an artist who much is known about. His history is a bit sketchy at times and many aspects, like his early training, remain largely undocumented. Much is known, however, about the level of fame he garnered during his life. He was the main painter in the court of the French King for some time, and also painted numerous works for aristocracy. However, his religious works, and even some of his more secular scenes, were more often purchased or commissioned by the middle classes. His work was very popular, and he rose to prominence among his peers. Though documentation points to the fact that his output was quite large, what survives is sadly a small number of works.

De La Tour's style was very much in the Baroque style of the Italian Michelangelo Merisi, known more famously as Caravaggio. Though whether de La Tour studied in Italy, and was thus exposed to Caravaggio's work, or if promulgation of the the Caravaggisiti of the Utrecht School in the Northern countries exposed the French artist, the influence of Caravaggio is evident in the dramatic lighting, strong contrast of color, and the lack of idealization of the female figure. The Magdalen is not shown as a beautiful woman or in an idealized form, rather she is a portrayal of regular features and common looks. However, de La Tour's most beautiful technique is the simplification of form. There are no grand gestures or intricate details. His work shows a remarkable constraint not often seen in early modern French art. The shape of the woman, her desk and even the skull is pared down to basics and allows the other elements of the work, such as the strong contrast of light, to speak for it. The constraint is powerful in its revelation of emotional sentiment or feeling. The expression of the subject is the defining characteristic rather than a grand gesture or minute aspects.

Below is an excerpt taken from the Met's catalogue, a brief summary of the scene depicted:
"A sinner, perhaps a courtesan, Mary Magdalen was a witness of Christ who renounced the pleasures of the flesh for a life of penance and contemplation. She is shown with a mirror, symbol of vanity; a skull, emblem of mortality; and a candle, that may stand for spiritual enlightenment."

The scene is an emphasis on contemplation. Whether the Magdalen is shown repenting her past sins or if she is simply pondering on aspects of the Christian religion as they may pertain to her, the painting is simply a portrayal of a woman wondering. Her deep concentration and gaze toward the candle give her an air of subdued and controlled contemplation, a thinker deep in thought. However, her attention is absolutely moved inward, her gaze on the candle is unseeing, as if she looks right past it to the mirror behind. Is she contemplating her reflection? The viewer is left to wonder at what she is thinking of and is able to take away from the work whatever they please. If the painting's audience is religious then it would seem that they are viewing the Magdalen repenting her sins, moving from her lascivious past to a pure future. If the audience is secular, the skull seems to bring to mind a woman reflecting on death, morality or the brevity of life. The voyeristic quality this painting has allows the viewer to insert their own thoughts into the Magdalen and gives the audience a freedom to possess a moment of contemplation on their own worries or vanities.

Angelika Kauffmann, Cornelia Presenting Her Children, the Gracchi, as Her Treasures (1785)

Angelica Kauffmann, Cornelia Presenting Her Children, the Gracchi, as Her Treasures (1785). Oil on canvas, 3'4 inches x 4'2 inches. Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond.

Known as one of the first female Academicians, Angelica Kauffman is one of only a few female artists of the Royal Academy to attain fame on a similar level to her male counterparts. Born in Switzerland, her father recognized her creative talents early on and she was considered a prodigy in both painting and music by age 11. She ultimately chose painting as her career path but was considered an extremely gifted musician. Her training began when she was quite young, and she traveled all over Europe, including a prolonged stint in Italy, to continue her studies and was widely considered a great talent with nobles commissioning portraits before she had turned 20. Her works began in the style of the French Rococo but quickly gained the classicizing elements of the Grand Manner Portraiture and History paintings that were popular at the time

Kauffman moved to London in 1766, and soon after was introduced to Sir Joshua Reynolds. The two were firm friends for their entire lives and her name is alongside his on the formal petition submitted to the King to create the Royal Academy in London in 1769. Though one of the founding members, she and Mary Moser were the only female members of the Academy, and women were soon excluded entirely. She was one of the most sought out artists at the Academy and exhibited annually for many years. Her strengths lay in her portrait painting and her History paintings, such as Cornelia (above). Her later years were spent on the continent and she married a Venetian painter by the name of Antonio Zucchi.

The work, Cornelia Presenting Her Children, the Gracchi, as Her Treasures, is a large scale painting depicting an exemplum virtutis from Roman history. Cornelia Africana, the daughter of the general Scipio Africanus, was a Roman matron who exemplified the virtues praised in that society: modesty, chastity, and honor. Her family was of consular rank and she was considered one of the preeminent matrons. However, her importance stems mostly from her two sons and their enduring political legacy. Her sons, Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus, who are often referred to as the Gracchi, were politicians in the 2nd century BC . They are remembered for attempting to pass land reform and other progressive measures to ease the hardship of the lower classes, effectively attempting to reform the Roman Republic. Both were assassinated, during their tenures as tribunes, by their peers of the patrician class for their actions.

In this work Cornelia is shown conversing with another matron. The other woman has come to Cornelia's home on a social call and is showing off her new jewels and fancy adornments. When the visitor asks to see Cornelia's gems, Cornelia calls for her two sons, the Gracchi, to come forward, presenting them as her greatest treasures. Her loyalty to her sons and their political careers is well-documented by Roman histories such as Plutarch. Her enduring loyalty and great humility were both often used in art as devices to show the traits most prized in women, and have often come under discussion in debates on gender roles. Kauffman's beautiful and touching rendering of the work is suffused with maternal feeling and sentiment. Her works, often depicting scenes of motherhood, are beautiful in the clarity and pose with which she portrayed people and the emotions driving them.