Category Archive: ART
Onward!
Onward...(photo, South side of Chicago, by John H. White)
Muse upon the Muses! Track the progress of the arts and sciences here! Comedy Groucho Marx → Bob Hope → Woody Allen → Adam Sandler Dance Hindu Classical Dance → Formal Court Ballet → Nijinsky → Nureyev → Baryshnikov → Free Form Frog-leg Elegiac Poetry Tristia (Ovid) → ‘O Captain! My Captain!‘ (Whitman) → Duino Elegies (Rilke) → ? Epic Poetry The Odyssey by Homer → The Aeneid by Virgil → The Comedy by Dante → ? The Cantos by Ezra Pound → ? Historical writing The Peloponnesian War (Thucydides) → Annals (Tacitus) → The Twelve Caesars (Suetonius) → Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed…
Continue Reading →Anita Brookner
(photo courtesy BBC)
(16 July 1928 – 10 March 2016) Before carving out a long and worthy career writing novels of clean, quiet, accomplished prose (mostly involving lonely, intelligent, reserved, single, upper-middle class women a lot like Anita Brookner), she was Slade Professor of Fine Art at Cambridge, a lecturer at the Courtauld, and a recognised expert on 18C & 19C painting, with excellent books to her credit on Greuze, Watteau and David. One wishes she’d continued in that vein, but we admit that her best novels (Hotel du Lac, Look at Me, The Bay of Angels) were a pleasure. Often her stories built around…
Continue Reading →The Midnight Watch (David Dyer)
'Wreck and sinking of the Titanic.....a graphic and thrilling account...
David Dyer’s dissipated newspaper correspondent, John Steadman, defines Philip Franklin, Vice President of J P Morgan’s International Mercantile Marine, which owned the Titanic, by one word – “fear” – when the missing ship’s fate is uncertain and by the word “courage” when its fate is known. The word for The Midnight Watch is “gripping”. Although Steadman is fictional, Franklin is not. The real people from this infamous event – the failure of the SS Californian to come to come to the aid of the sinking Titanic – are effectively imagined by Dyer. None are superfluous. Franklin, a good and caring man, sobs when he has to deliver the news that the…
Continue Reading →The Horse’s Mouth
Gulley Jimson could paint this at Glenelg Football Club (Home of the Tigers), under strict supervision of course.
(Dir. Ronald Neame) (1958) Alec Guinness plays Gully Jimson, struggling artist, in this off-beat and very amusing film (adapted virtually beyond recognition) from Joyce Cary’s novel. Jimson lacks recognition and cash but he is supremely assured of his genius (or John Bratby’s genius – he did the ugly but oddly impressive works) and willing to exploit anyone and everyone in the service of his art. To that end, he flouts convention and disregards personal discomfort. He’s even willing to lie to rich amateurs. But as he suggests, “Don’t look at the picture, feel it with your eyes.” …
Continue Reading →Modern Art Theory
(Bosslet Public Art, 1988)
Here’s a a link (see below) to a highly entertaining and rather persuasive rant from Paul Joseph Watson, about the essential bogus nature of much modern art. It’s a fight no-one can win, of course – you can debate aesthetics till the sun blows up. But it is true that expensive modern art carries a strong whiff of elitism about it. Style is loosed from substance. Then style is discarded, as a rhetorical flourish. What is left? Modern art. In a piece entitled “The Perils of Painting Now”*, Jed Perl reports, possibly ironically:”A few years ago, the Luxembourg & Dayan gallery…
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