As you may have noticed, we’ve spent much of the last month poring over art history’s best mustaches, like the would-be surgeons curiously leaning over the corpse in Rembrandt’s “The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp” (1632, above), which was the penultimate pick in our Movember series. Now, for the sake of convenience, we’ve gathered all 17 featured artworks in one convenient place. (more…)
By way of marking the end of Movember — the month-long, facial hair-centric male cancer awareness campaign — and our chronicle of art history’s best mustaches, we caught up with Patrick Waldo (aka street artist “Moustache Man“) to chat over vegan sandwiches about his days of drawing mustaches on subway billboards, his one-man show chronicling the experience at the Upright Citizens Brigade, his personal facial hair persuasion, and his upcoming solo exhibition. (more…)
For the penultimate entry in our month-long chronicle of art history’s best mustaches — in honor of male cancer awareness campaign-cum-facial hair contest Movember — we’ve selected a masterpiece that is neither for the squeamish, nor for the ’stache-averse. All eight living figures, and even the solitary dead one, depicted in Rembrandt’s “The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp” (1632) sport phenomenal beard-mustache combos, making this quite possibly the most facial hair-saturated work in all of art history. (more…)
Today’s next-to-penultimate entry in our month-long comb through art history’s best mustaches in honor of Movember, the male cancer awareness campaign, brings us another piece of gender-bending performance art by a woman artist whose ’stache-augmented work is undeniably political. As part of her 1973-75 performance series “The Mythic Being,” then-New York-based conceptual artist Adrian Piper roamed the city streets sporting what can best be described as a very porny handlebar mustache. (more…)
Though our month-long chronicle of art history’s greatest mustaches — in honor of male cancer awareness campaign Movember — has only sporadically ventured outside the genre of portrait paintings, we’d be remiss not to feature a sculpture or two, and we’d be hard pressed to find one more fittingly epic than Jeff Koons’s “Moustache” (2003). (more…)
As we enter the final week of our month-long brush through art history’s best facial hair — in recognition of Movember, the mustache-growing competition and male cancer awareness campaign — we mark our second entry featuring a female subject, and like our first it involves a bit of aesthetic surgery. Marcel Duchamp’s “L.H.O.O.Q.” (1919-65), which consists of the titular letters, a mustache, and a beard applied to a postcard of Leonardo Da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa,” exists in at least eight different versions spanning more than four decades and may feature art history’s most controversial ’stache. (more…)
While facial hair lends itself just as readily to being portrayed with either smooth or frenzied brushstrokes — as we’ve seen throughout our Movember-long survey of art history’s best mustaches — the idea of painting a hyperrealist ’stache with every bristle and whisker sharply defined and delineated seems, with good reason, excruciating. That has never dissuaded Chuck Close, whose oeuvre includes beards and mustaches aplenty, foremost among them the fellow in “Robert/104,072” (1973-74). (more…)
Today’s top-notch art historical mustache in recognition of the month-long male cancer awareness campaign Movember comes to us from the Norwegian master of modern malaise (and current auction record-holder), Edvard Munch, who sports a ’stache in this self-portrait he made at age 31. (more…)
The latest entry in our chronicle of art history’s greatest mustaches during the entire month of Movember — the month-long campaign to promote awareness of male cancer issues by letting one’s facial hair grow — seems all the more appropriate for its medical context (albeit one far removed from the treatment of cancer). Dr. Heinrich Stadelmann, the mustachioed subject of Otto Dix’s arresting 1922 Expressionist portrait painting, was an expert at treating nervous diseases using hypnosis, hence his transfixing gaze. (more…)
Our month-long chronicle of art history’s tip-top mustaches — in recognition of the male cancer awareness campaign and facial hair-growing competition Movember — has thus far been dominated by classical, pre-modern portraiture, but with our remaining days we’re making an effort to include more recent upper lip hairstyles. Hence today’s set of bushy whiskers, Joyce Pensato’s monumental “Flying Mustach” (2012). (more…)
