Author Archive: Peter Jakobsen
“I do not seek, I lie in wait”
Corot's Entrée du bois à Ville d'Avray
Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (1796 – 1875) Corot was an important bridge between neo classical landscape painting and impressionism. His landscapes as well as his figures were informed by scrupulous use of colour and design. His personal torch he took from Lorrain and Poussin and he handed over to the Impressionists. Dirk Stroeve, a character in Maugham’s The Moon and Sixpence, declares that Corot never sold a picture, but this is probably a reflection of the early 20th century fancy that Corot was ‘passé’. In fact, after initial indifference by the Salon and the market, he was reasonably successful, and after his death,…
Continue Reading →The Martian
We'd rather watch Marvin (thanks to Warner Bros.)
(Dir. Ridley Scott) (2015) The one where the rocket takes off, but leaves the botanist behind by mistake, to tend his potatoes. It is easy to overlook quibbles (about, say, wind-cut sand dunes and big storms in an almost airless planet, consequence-free exposure to massive radiation, etc. – in other words, the fact that Mars doesn’t look or act as presented here) if you get a compelling story with real wit and feeling attached. Unfortunately, we don’t. What we do get is the old Hollywood ‘bake ‘n’ shake’. Recipe: Ingredients & method Let’s mine a bit of Interstellar but this time, Matt Damon…
Continue Reading →Happy New Year
The Varnished Culture wishes humans and wee beasties a Happy New Year, excepting mosquitos and humans that insist on acting like animals. As artist Francis Bacon toasted, ‘Champagne for our real friends, and real pain for our sham friends!’ And at midnight, when the moment hopefully arises, rather than croaking Auld Lang Syne, better to murmur to your loved one a good Robbie Burns poem: Till a’ the seas gang dry, my dear, And the rocks melt wi’ the sun: I will luve thee still, my dear, While the sands o’ life shall run.
Continue Reading →Peggy Guggenheim
The Life of an Art Addict (Anton Gill) (2002) Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict (Dir. Lisa Immordino Vreeland) She was the Art Groupie par excellence, with more passion and panache than learning or taste, but she brought work to the attention of her rich friends and thereby both sustained talent and helped corrupt the art market. Gill’s work is like a non-fiction Apes of God: bitchy, knowing and a huge laugh. Ms Vreeland, in presenting an essentially linear, coherent, and interesting documentary, has unearthed some biographical material taped in the late 1970s (the subject died in 1979) and padded it nicely with film,…
Continue Reading →Everything is Happening
(by Michael Jacobs, with an introduction and coda by Ed Vulliamy) (2015) Diego Velázquez (Summer 1599 – 6 August 1660), one of Spain’s greatest painters, created Las Meninas (“The Ladies in Waiting” or “Maids of Honour”) in 1656. A large work, a masterpiece of High Baroque, it seems to be the painter casting his patrons (King Philip IV and Queen Mariana) as a camera, they surveying the room in which Diego is painting them, with its royal domestic scene. With brilliant use of light and shade, peerless brushwork and tasteful use of colour, Velázquez provides a series of highlights that float around the…
Continue Reading →