Category Archive: ART
At the Guggenheim
NYC, April 2018 – We have written previously on the pleasing facade and innards of the building. Now to the guts, namely the hanging lute of the art, and its reverberations. This was not quite as splendid, unfortunately. The main exhibit appeared to be a collection of rubbish from a garage, otherwise described as ‘Take My Breath Away,’ a series of “contemporary sculptures, works on paper and installations” by someone called Danh Vo. A minor showing featured tired Mike Rothko imitations by Josef Albers from his wanderings in Mexico, and there were a few pieces by Constantin Brancusi (1876-1957) that…
Continue Reading →Perhaps They’ll Listen Now
Vincent Van Gogh (30 March 1853 to 29 July 1890) – A “crazy middle-aged Dutchman working away in southern France…”* “In July 1890 Van Gogh put an end to his life – he was thirty-seven like Raphael, and his career as a painter had not lasted more than ten years…”* “…the paintings on which his fame rests were all painted during three years which were interrupted by crises and despair.”* “Van Gogh used the individual brushstrokes not only to break up the colour but also to convey his own excitement.”* “Van Gogh was in such a frenzy of creation that…
Continue Reading →Raphael
28 March 1483 to 6 April 1520 – Raffaello Santi’s “greatest paintings seem so effortless that one does not usually connect them with the idea of hard and relentless work…there is nothing strained or sophisticated in the composition. It looks as if it could not be otherwise, and as if it had so existed from the beginning of time.”* Quoth Vasari: “O happy and blessed spirit, in that every man is glad to speak of thee, to celebrate thy actions, and to admire every drawing that thou didst leave to us!” And the Count said, “…both painting and carving are…
Continue Reading →More from the Lower Shelf – Anton Raphael Mengs
Mengs (22 March 1728 to 29 June 1779) – He was talented, but tended to the mediocre, especially in executing large commissions (he was like a Bohemian Luca Giordano), and his go-for-baroque style reveals his inadequacy, compared to the true greats. That middle-name of his is a bit rich! He did big, creamy, faux-classical confectionery, including these less-than-inspired bookends: Goethe, apropos the Mengs oeuvre: “so much learning…allied to a total want of initiative and poverty of invention, and embodied with a strained and artificial mannerism.” Have a look at his manic-street preacher of a John the Baptist (c. 1775): The…
Continue Reading →10 Birthdays and A Funeral
'We have to make a birthday tea for 10 and a funeral tea...'
20 March – a big day in cultural history: 43 BC – Ovid “Take your fill of amusement, but cast the veil of modesty over your peccadilloes. Never make a parade of your good fortune, and never give a woman a present that another woman will recognise.” [The Art of Love] “Death is not accustomed to injure genius, and greater fame arrives after we have become ashes…” [Epistle to an Envious Man]. 1828 – Henrik Ibsen “SOLNESS: Human beings haven’t any use for these homes of theirs. Not for being happy in. And I shouldn’t have had use for a…
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