Category Archive: ART
The National Gallery, London
Photo by Rudolph Schuba
192 years ago today, the National Gallery opened its doors to a public hungry for culture. Over the 2 centuries since, it has amassed a hoard of art to savour. The Brits were imperialists all right, but the National’s collection developed more by osmosis than through seizure of art hoards via conquest (compare and contrast, arguably, the case of the Elgin Marbles). They started back in the pack compared to the Louvre and the Hermitage but made up for it coming down the straight. For a small example, if you want to see these in the flesh… …
Continue Reading →This Whiteley Business
True blue
There’s a fascinating case on in Sydney at the moment, and lots of folks seem to be treating the litigation as a dripping roast. In 2009 an artwork (“Orange Lavender Bay”) attributed to Brett Whiteley, who died in 1992, was sold to a Sydney car dealer for big money. A car dealer being hornswoggled! O, delicious irony. The contentious piece has superficial similarities with Blue Lavender Bay (the Bay was where the Whiteleys lived for some years), namely: the same offhand brush strokes, cartoonish curves, and Ken-Done-infantilism. We feel for Wendy Whiteley, the artist’s Cosima, who said at a launch of a biography of…
Continue Reading →Perpetual Rome
The digs of Octavian (Caesar Augustus) on Palatine Hill (if you look carefully, is that the cave of Romulus nearby? No?)
21 April, 753 BC – The traditional date for the founding of the Eternal City. That makes Rome 2769 years old, roughly. And on this same day in 43 BC, Marc Antony was spooked to a draw by Octavian at the Battle of Mutina, which eventually paved the way for the Roman Empire (not so eternal). Appian, in his The Civil Wars (Loeb edition) describes the game of chess the embryonic triumvirs played: Octavian and Antony composed their differences on a small, depressed islet in the river Lavinius, near the city of Mutina. Each had five legions of soldiers whom they stationed opposite each…
Continue Reading →Napoleon III For Me
'Joyeux 208e anniversaire, mon Roi' (Napoleon III by Franz Xaver Winterhalter)
Happy 208th birthday, Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte! He was a true Frenchman – his instincts on things that matter (except the defence of the Empire) were sound. For example, he stood up for the artists against the salon. Modern governments bleat about public infrastructure – he just did it. Perhaps major infrastructure can’t be built anymore without an emperor. He also appointed an infrastructure guru, M. Haussmann, to rebuild Paris, which, overall, he did brilliantly. He was a fan of the arts! So what if he didn’t see the Prussians coming! He was a fan of the arts! He oversaw Paris’ Palais Garnier,…
Continue Reading →Assumption of Genius
500 years ago, the great Titian began his massive work, The Assumption, at the Church of the Frari in Venice. We recall this, having recently seen the very curiously intriguing documentary on Renoir, which spoke of the Frenchman’s sojourn in Italy, whereupon he commenced his ‘neo-classical’ phase, inspired by the work of Titian. O the cruel downside of inspiration! It can lead to humiliating comparisons. The Age of cultural relativism cannot combat the visceral power of aesthetic comparison, and short of some official arts guru with the instincts, puissance, and paranoia of, say, Stalin, it probably never shall.
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