Lust Facebook Paintings Observations

[The S Squared]

Two of my favorite things are art history and repeating patterns, so when I began to click back through all the Facebook quote paintings I noticed lots of repeating themes which might (or might not) have some bearing on larger events. I’ve compiled everything I noticed here. Note: this is a quick and dirty compilation of what I noticed.

1. The only painting not in the collection of (as far as I can tell) any museum or gallery is the recently discovered Judith painting by Caravaggio.

2. A good chunk of the artists are french, and include such luminaries as Regauld, Gerome, Ingres, Davide, and Robert, although there are German, English, and Italian artists represented as well.

3. The paintings are all Neoclassical, which I find interesting because prior to this all the works paired with quotes were greek and roman sculptures. It makes me wonder if the next cycles of art will include increasingly modern iterations of Greek and Roman themes.

4. The most represented museum on the list is the Louvre, but the paintings can be found in museums ranging from the Getty to the National Gallery of Indonesia, to my own home-town museum: The Indianapolis Museum of Art. “Mars and Venus Surprised by Vulcan” by Guillemot is currently on display in the French Baroque and Neoclassical galleries there!

If people are interested I can make a spreadsheet that I can update as new images are released. While it’s possible that the images are picked entirely at random, part of me feels like there’s enough patterns that I feel like the images are selected deliberately in some fashion. I hope this has been a fun read!

[Maranda]

Whoa, these are really interesting observations. The one that catches my attention the most is your point about everything being neoclassical. I am curious to see if your hypothesis about the next set of images (chapter 2, anyone?) will indeed pan out. Thanks for sharing!

[The S Squared]

I just wanted to add that I was correct. The paintings have been progressively been getting newer as they’ve been posted. The one I just saw on Facebook was a Georgia O’Keeffe.

[Jackie]

@ssquared
Or do you mean the Bridge from yesterday? Today, people are having trouble with the painting, a vague man with a white/green torso. It doesn’t seem to show up anywhere and lacks the smoothness of yesterday.

[The S Squared]

Whoops! I wasn’t paying attention to the date. The painting looks cubist to me, which places it correctly in the timeline of art with Georgia O’Keeffe’s painting. I could make some educated guesses about who painted it, but I don’t wanna commit.

[Author]

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