Wide World of Arts

July 19, 2015 | Posted by Peter Jakobsen | ART, PETER'S WRITING, Ulalume |

Velázquez looked down on his sitters

They thought to hold a contest for The grandest forms of portraiture To accommodate the talent-free And cash in on celebrity. So the call to paint was made, A grateful nation’s light and shade Was wielded and the packing crates Swept in as if on roller skates.   The problem was, the open field Like an open mind, often concealed Hard work forsworn, the sweat that stings And shows the empty state of things.    

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Bastille Day

July 14, 2015 | Posted by Peter Jakobsen | HISTORY, Ulalume |

Bastille in trouble: La Bastille dans les premiers jours de sa démolition, by Hubert Robert

14 July: La fête nationale On this day in 1789, a bunch of disaffected Parisians gathered at Number 232 rue Sainte-Antoine, address of that pygmy-monolith, the Bastille, formerly a fort, now a prison for marginal types.  They wanted a symbolic victory and eventually, the Governor, M. de Launay, would hand it over: a paper surrendering control, on the basis of clemency. This mercy was promised, and then ratted-on, in a piece of barbarity that would sum up the French Revolution in general.  De Launay’s head was soon off his neck and sat atop a pike.  As Carlyle recounts in his superb…

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Dumb and Dumbest

July 9, 2015 | Posted by Peter Jakobsen | Ulalume |

"You were a wonderful Goneril at Eton." (Painting by Edwin Austin Abbey, 1902)

In Tom Stoppard’s play Travesties, the character Henry Carr is suggested to play the leading role in The Importance of Being Earnest because he’d been ‘”a wonderful Goneril at Eton.”  This line has recently been dusted off, again, in the context of Stoppard’s bemoaning the decline in cultural literacy.  As The Wall Street Journal records, Stoppard said the joke was understood and appreciated in 1974 but materially less so in the early 1990s.  Tom claims half of the more recent audience didn’t know who Goneril was.  A generation later, they fail to get his latest work at the National Theatre…

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Treasure Ships

July 6, 2015 | Posted by Peter Jakobsen | ART, Ulalume |

4 frigates capturing Spanish Treasure Ships (Francis Sartorius, 1804) Not in this collection

(Art in the Age of Spices, Art Gallery of SA July 2015) P, liking ‘boaty’ paintings, was prompted to see this exhibition collecting some of the good things to come of the spice age and the tender mercies of the Dutch East Indies Company.  Our favourite pieces:  the sumptuous Scholar in his Studio c 1655 by Abraham Van Den Hecken;a glowing St Cecilia:an allegory of music, c. 1650 by Francesco Fieravino, some 15th C ‘pop-up’ books showing the world as known before they closed the circle on Terra Australis, a reliquary from Goa containing a thorn from the Crown of…

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Vale Mr Walsh

July 4, 2015 | Posted by Peter Jakobsen | Ulalume |

The Varnished Culture has a modest yet passionate interest in Australian Rules Football; thus we comment on the dreadful passing of Phil Walsh, Senior Coach of the Adelaide Crows.  He called himself a ‘Bogan from [the southern Victorian region of] Hamilton’, yet cited (superbly) Van Gogh as an exemplar of the frustrating chase to achieve perfection, suggesting that he had soared beyond the mundane to reach the varnished culture.  Our condolences to Mrs Walsh.

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