Caspa, Love Madonna, 2020. Spray paint / acrylic / airbrush / gel pen / marker / pastel / ink on canvas, 100 x 100 cm.
How did Madonna's interest in the fine arts come about?
Madonna, the undisputed queen of Pop music, has demonstrated, throughout her artistic career, a fervent and eclectic interest in the figurative arts, aimed at ranging from tag-making, performance and artwork design to marked patronage and fervent collecting. This interest seems to be due to multiple factors, first and foremost, the artist's family "background," as the Ciccones transmitted to little Madonna Louise Veronica a passionate transport for drawing and painting, arts that they used to practice with great involvement. It was precisely the influence exerted by these relatives that led the Pop star to visit, since her youth, multiple museums, among them, the Detroit Institute of Arts, an institution where Madonna discovered her great love for Frida Kahlo. In addition, the singer's passion for dance certainly contributed to her openness and predisposition toward other forms of artistic expression, so much so that in the very school of performing arts, she studied dance and music theory, accompanying them with courses in art history. Madonna's interest in the performing arts definitely developed in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when the singer, pursuing a career in modern dance, moved to New York, a metropolis where, in addition to frequenting numerous museums and posing as nude models in art schools, she came into contact with photographers and painters from the Lower East Side and SoHo clubs, becoming friends with Futura 200, Fab Five Freddy, Daze and Keith Haring, as well as Jean-Michel Basquiat's girlfriend. From this very moment on, the Pop Madonna would begin to externalize, through more concrete ways, her multifaceted love of the fine arts.
Pierre Olié, Queen Madonna, 2022. Oil / acrylic / airbrush / spray paint / conté / ink / charcoal / graphite / marker / pigments / stencil / digital print / lithograph / silkscreen / digital painting / photomontage on aluminum, 80 x 60 cm.
Ora, Madonna. Spray paint / acrylic on canvas, 116 x 89 cm.
Madonna: the visual artist
It was in the aforementioned context that Madonna began to create her first "official" works of art, namely graffiti, aimed at "daubing" the subway and the walls of the Big Apple, through the use of the tag "Boy Toy," a nickname given to her by her writer friends. Later, this iconic signature would become the name of the artist's copyright company, as well as a decorative theme on the belt buckle of her iconic dress, worn for the Like a Virgin era. With regard to the visual performing arts, however, it is well known how many scholars have attributed to the Pop star Madonna the creation of an innovative performance poetics, marked by an uncommon conceptual and artistic imagination, which comes to life within an organized sequence of events, scripts, texts and movements, aimed at illustrating sometimes conflicting social and political ideas. These performances also come to life in the artist's music videos, which, together with Michael Jackson, transformed this genre from mere commercial products to a kind of "video art" in which the music serves as a soundtrack for the studied images. Added to the above is the Pop star's revolutionary ability to have been able to enrich the video experience with the language from painting, a figurative art par excellence. Indeed, in Bedtime Story, Madonna's 1994 video directed by Mark Romanek, there are numerous references to the work of iconic surrealist artists, such as, for example Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo. Speaking, on the other hand, of Madonna's relationship with photography, it is impossible not to mention the book Sex (1992), which, expertly crafted through Steven Meisel's shots and Fabien Baron's art direction, brought to life the Pop star's erotic fantasies, aimed at figuring as a model and interpreter of sensual shots, which helped redefine the language of erotic photography at the time. Finally, among the singer's more recent figurative projects are: the X-STaTIV installation X-STaTIV Pro=CeSS (2003), created with U.S. photographer and filmmaker Klein, and the much-talked-about NFT work, which, titled Mother of creation (2022), represents a series of three metamorphic videos signed in collaboration with record-breaking artist Beeple.
Patrice Fligny, Madonna double face, 2021. 3D modeling on metal, 70 x 50 cm.
Christophe Joseph, Madonna, 2020. Plexiglass photomontage, 100 x 100 cm.
Madonna: the collector and the patron
The love nurtured by Madonna for art is not only limited to that creative impulse that leads to producing it, but also explores that desire aimed at owning and supporting it. Speaking of collecting, it is well known how the Pop star has been collecting artworks since the early 1980s, that is, when, still an unknown dancer, she began to associate with artists in New York. Since then, Madonna, who has said on several occasions that she does not passively collect works of art but uses them as sources of inspiration, has put together a collection estimated at least $100 million, including works by Frida Kahlo, Fernand Léger, Tamara de Lempicka, Man Ray, Pablo Picasso, and others. Speaking instead of the patron Madonna, there are many occasions when the singer has supported art, contributing not only to the enrichment of museum collections, but also to highlighting the work of more or less unknown artists, who have also been sponsored through the organization of charity events.
Bazévian Delacapucinière, Portrait Madonna Pop, 2021. Oil / acrylic / spray paint / ink on canvas, 80 x 80 cm.
Julijana Voloder, Madonna, 2022. Acrylic on linen canvas, 130 x 100 cm.
Madonna: muse of art
Madonna's image has been featured not only in performances, videos, photographs and NFTs, but also in more traditional paintings, as evidenced by the works of Peter Howson, Alberto Gironella and Mikel Belascoain, aimed at immortalizing the features of the female Pop icon par excellence. This authentic figurative cult of the American singer's eclectic and popular personality has also enchanted Artmajeur artists, who, like Paul Stowe, Annejole Jacobs - De Jongh (Jole), and Iryna Kastsova, have not shied away from depicting her.
Paul Stowe, True Blue - Madonna, 2022. Drawing, graphite / pencil on paper, 50 x 36 cm.
Paul Stowe: True blue - Madonna
Paul Stowe's hyperrealist drawing True blue - Madonna reveals, most likely, the musical tastes of the artist from Artmajeur, who wanted to celebrate the unique and undisputed Queen of Pop by re-proposing, in an unprecedented and original way, a specific image from the American artist's career, namely the one immortalized by the cover of the 1986 album True Blue. Just such a "version" of Madonna, an artist known for her varied stylistic changes, turns out to be extremely captivating to use as a figurative model, as it represents one of the most evocative images of the singer, who appears with a decidedly more mature look than her previous ones. Speaking of the history of the aforementioned cover, the iconic vertical photograph, which depicts Madonna in profile, with her chin lifted, eyes closed and wearing a leather jacket, was taken by Her Ritts, a well-known American photographer and filmmaker, whom the Pop star met back in 1984, when he took the movie poster photo for Desperately Seeking Susan, a film in which Madonna played the eponymous character. Finally, returning to the well-known True Blue image, it is important to make known how it was made in black and white and, only later, hand-colored by turning to blue hues. Therefore, Stowe's drawing would seem to allude to the original version of the well-known photograph, aimed at portraying a Madonna who, while emanating sensuality, turns out to be less provocative than other more transgressive images of the same.
Annejole Jacobs - De Jongh (Jole), Take your time - 'Eighties', 2020. Acrylic / ink on canvas, 100 x 100 cm.
Annejole Jacobs - De Jongh (Jole): Take your time – “Eighties”
The intense close-up of Annejole Jacobs - De Jongh's (Jole) painting is aimed to celebrate a living icon, such as Madonna, highlighting her features and gaze, through an energetic use of chromatics, which tends to stand out vividly against a background in which the gray of 1970s and 1980s photographic images triumphs, predominantly. Similarly, in the history of art, the undisputed master of Pop art, Andy Warhol, enhanced the face of Marilyn Monroe through the serial repetition of the subject, aimed at transforming the actress into a symbol of American society at the time. In fact, the very depiction in the foreground represented for Warhol the condition according to which it was possible to give life to an icon, while through seriality came to transform the effigies into symbols of commercial or, as in this case, media products. In a kindred way, the work of the artist from Artmajeur, through the use of the foreground, seems to cite all those peculiarities for which Madonna has distinguished herself within the world of music and art, reminding us that these very unforgettable actions will make her immortal. As for the lack of repetitiveness of the singer's image, on the other hand, it is likely that Annejole Jacobs - De Jongh (Jole) did not feel the need to allude directly to the consumer society, deeming it more appropriate to dwell on the mere celebration of a myth, contextualizing it within a specific historical context.
Iryna Kastsova, Madonna 2, 2022. Acrylic on canvas, 120 x 60 cm.
Iryna Kastsova: Madonna 2
Iryna Kastsova's colorful painting repurposes in an original, unprecedented and innovative way a cult photo of the American Pop star, extremely representative of "the essence" of Madonna in the 1980s, which was expertly captured by photographer Deborah Feingold. In fact, it is important to highlight how, at the time of the shot, that is, during 1982, the singer signed, at the age of 24, her first contract with Sire Records, which released her well-known hit single Everybody. It was precisely on the wave of this popularity that Feingold immortalized Madonna for Star Hits magazine, highlighting the artist's ambition, style and strong stage presence within decidedly self-conscious, sensual and determined shots. This episode is to be contextualized in the hectic New York City of the time, a hub of international music, where the said photographer also portrayed other well-known musicians, including, the Beastie Boys, James Brown, Keith Richards, Sinead O'Connor, Cindy Lauper, Annie Lennox, Billy Idol and Mick Jagger. Therefore, the Artmajeur artist's work seems to take us to a glorious and iconic past of world music, where the "Material Girl" is the undisputed star of the scene.
Olimpia Gaia Martinelli
