Figuratively Speaking

July 12, 2016 | Posted by Peter Jakobsen | ART, LIFE |

The SA Art Gallery has set up a bust that anyone can have a go at drawing, and the more confident can pin their effort to the wall.   A live study is better of course (unless you’re Dan Boleyn in The Apes of God), but this is a nice way of encouraging folks to draw using their senses. Drawing from imagination comes later.  

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Better Never Than Late

July 7, 2016 | Posted by Peter Jakobsen | ART, HISTORY, POLITICS, RELIGION |

Joan gets the Call (by Jules Bastien-Lepage, 1879)

July 7, 1456: an ecclesiastic court of appeal acquits Joan of Arc of all and any ‘crimes’. Only hitch: she’d been burned at the stake on May 30, 1431.  Some French folks maintain that Jeanne d’Arc was the last thing the English cooked properly. George Bernard Shaw, who wrote Saint Joan (she was canonised in 1920), called her “the most notable Warrior Saint in the Christian calendar, and the queerest fish among the eccentric worthies of the Middle Ages.” In GBS’s play, the final scene has King Charles VII of France encounter Joan in a dream, circa her successful appeal.  He tells her:…

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The Raft of “The Medusa”

July 3, 2016 | Posted by Peter Jakobsen | ART, HISTORY |

3 July 1816: the French frigate “The Medusa” founders off Cap Blanc.  Two and a bit years later, Theodore Géricault exhibited his classic romanticist work; a grim and sombre depiction of hope turning to despair, as possible rescue, seen in the distance, fades away. The loss of 150 people in this wreck, and abandonment of some, and evidence of cannibalism by survivors, became a national scandal, and Gericault’s melodramatic treatment did nothing to calm the citizens down.  “This was a great subject, gory and gasp-making.”* [Sue Roe, The Private Lives of the Impressionists, 2006, p. 9.]

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Paris – The Moveable Feast

June 23, 2016 | Posted by Peter Jakobsen | ART, HISTORY, POLITICS, WAGNER |

How to take the gloss off the Eiffel Tower

June 23, 1940: Herr Hitler strolls around his shiny new toy, Paris, taking in the architectural marvels under the tutelage and guidance of those well-known art lovers, Albert Speer and Arno Breker; the former a drawer of nightmare-constructions that never took shape, thank goodness – the latter a grafter of dubious, neoclassical trash that would make Phidias and Alexandros laugh (we except Breker’s bronze bust of Wagner at Bayreuth). The Nazis represented the worst threat in memory to art.  They were thieves, of course.  And what they did not understand, or disliked, they simply destroyed. They spun idiotic theories and practised…

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An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Modern Culture

'When shall the Culture descend from on high?' (cultural theorist, Mladen Dražetin)

(By Roger Scruton) (1998) This is great fun and contains plentiful pearls of wisdom, but the pearls remain scattered over the floor – there is no golden thread herding them into finished or coherent form.  High culture is venerated, low culture ridiculed, but Scruton is not able to extol culture as a bridge over the river that has washed faith away, to obtain high, dry, clear ground, on the other side from enlightenment, modernism, post-modernism, kitsch, deconstruction, etc., etc.  He seems, actually, jaundiced – far too doctrinaire for our good. Skip the early definitional chapters, I would, and immerse yourself in the…

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