Category Archive: ART
The Getty Center
Los Angeles, April 2018 It’s slightly under an hour from Hollywood to John Paul Getty’s multi-pavilioned complex in the hills above Bel Air and Brentwood, but when you arrive, a whole array of art and artefact (some, it is fair to say, makes you wish, to paraphrase Paul Keating about David Roche, he could have put down his scatter-gun) is free. He only employed classicists but we fear, in his collecting, he may not have always consulted them. Some of the eccentricity of Getty’s collecting can be seen in this sequence of busts; genuine Ptolemaic renderings of Alexander, c. 200BC…
Continue Reading →It Was Wonderful – Ludwig Bemelmans
Bemmie's bar at the Carlyle
Born 27 April 1898, Bemmie was the classic bon vivant. Read his essays and autobiographical pieces, La Bonne Table and Tell Them it was Wonderful for a literate glass of the driest, coolest champagne.
Continue Reading →Guernica Blitzed
26 April – today in 1937 the Basque town of Guernica, civilians along with members of the Resistance, was bombed by the Luftwaffe and Italian Air Force at the behest of General Franco. Picasso’s expressive work commemorates that ugly act, which killed between 300 and 1600 people (tallies vary), mostly women and children. Largely washed clean of colour, the stark and tormented figures, twisted, pleading and prone, testify to the horror of the attack, a precursor to the terror of blitzkrieg to come. But the Guernica oak-tree survived (well, more or less);
Continue Reading →The Little Village
New York City, April 2018 – The Whitney moved from the upper East side to the charmingly-named meat-packing district, swelling the capacity to display its great stock of American art, but it left behind, over the road, a little piece of pixie masterpiece. The elegant building on 940 Madison Avenue is now an ‘Apple’ store, and nestled in the top right office ledge is a tiny village… This is one of several created by Charles Simonds. “Since 1970 Simonds has created Dwelling places for an imaginary civilization of “Little People” who are migrating through the streets of neighborhoods in cities throughout…
Continue Reading →Little Miracles: the Thorne Gallery
English Roman Catholic Church model, portraying a standard of its type as at the late 13th Century (recent addition)
Art Institute Chicago, April 2018 – The Thorne Miniature Rooms were painstakingly built, on a scale of one inch to one foot, according to models conceived by Mrs. James Ward Thorne of Chicago and constructed between 1932 and 1940. They are presented in framed booths in the Thorne Gallery in the lower level of the Chicago Art Institute, which have, in addition, superb, tasteful and realistic back-lighting. These are wonderful in their detail, whether we are offered a paper-walled Japanese room: …or early American interiors, in all their homely glory, whether kitchens: …or this Virginia parlour: French style is also beautifully presented,…
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