"The Master of the Blue Jeans"

This Thursday, January 20, 2011, a show entitled "The Master of the Blue Jeans" opens at Didier Aaron Gallery in New York City.

Wrote Pilar Viladas in the New York Times,

"Originally organized by Gerlinde Gruber, a curator at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, for Galerie Canesso in Paris,

the exhibition includes seven late-17th-century Italian paintings that show poor people dressed in denim fabric, which was made then in Genoa and known by the French name for that city, Gênes.

The paintings [a total of 10 are known], which had once been attributed to artists like Velázquez and de la Tour, are now thought to be the work of a single, unknown artist.

The catalog even has a brief essay by that 20th-century master of stonewash, François Girbaud."

Above, the seven paintings featured in the show, from the top down: "Woman Sewing with Two Children"; "A Frugal Meal with Two Children"; "Frugal Meal"; "Woman Spinning with Two Children"; "The Barber's Shop"; "Woman Begging with Two Children"; "A Beggar Boy with a Piece of Pie".