Category Archive: ART
All Must Fall
I met a traveller from an antique land Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert…Near them, on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip…sneer of cold command, …And on the pedestal these words appear: ‘I am Rhodes, diamond king and white supremacist: Look on my works, ye begrudged, and despair!’ Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away. [Adapted from Ozymandias with apologies to P.B. Shelley] Shelley’s superb short 1818 poem, slightly cannibalised here, aptly…
Continue Reading →“The Greats”
Lady Agnew daring John Singer Sargent to get on with it
(Art Gallery of New South Wales, January 2016) As if it is not enough to give the world The Witchery, Edinburgh, in the form of her three great galleries (National, Portrait and Modern) has lent 70-or-so important works that Sydney-siders and visitors can see till 14 February 2016. Eclectic but sumptuous, in this selection we get Botticelli’s Weymyss Madonna, Old Woman cooking eggs by Velásquez (above)… …works by Landseer (above), Reynolds, Titian, Rembrandt, and Watteau (his chocolate-box Venetian scene is below). A modest and immodest brace of Gainsboroughs, a luminous little piece by Corot, and a mighty Lorrain-style landscape by the proto-impressionist…
Continue Reading →“I do not seek, I lie in wait”
Corot's Entrée du bois à Ville d'Avray
Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (1796 – 1875) Corot was an important bridge between neo classical landscape painting and impressionism. His landscapes as well as his figures were informed by scrupulous use of colour and design. His personal torch he took from Lorrain and Poussin and he handed over to the Impressionists. Dirk Stroeve, a character in Maugham’s The Moon and Sixpence, declares that Corot never sold a picture, but this is probably a reflection of the early 20th century fancy that Corot was ‘passé’. In fact, after initial indifference by the Salon and the market, he was reasonably successful, and after his death,…
Continue Reading →Peggy Guggenheim
The Life of an Art Addict (Anton Gill) (2002) Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict (Dir. Lisa Immordino Vreeland) She was the Art Groupie par excellence, with more passion and panache than learning or taste, but she brought work to the attention of her rich friends and thereby both sustained talent and helped corrupt the art market. Gill’s work is like a non-fiction Apes of God: bitchy, knowing and a huge laugh. Ms Vreeland, in presenting an essentially linear, coherent, and interesting documentary, has unearthed some biographical material taped in the late 1970s (the subject died in 1979) and padded it nicely with film,…
Continue Reading →Everything is Happening
(by Michael Jacobs, with an introduction and coda by Ed Vulliamy) (2015) Diego Velázquez (Summer 1599 – 6 August 1660), one of Spain’s greatest painters, created Las Meninas (“The Ladies in Waiting” or “Maids of Honour”) in 1656. A large work, a masterpiece of High Baroque, it seems to be the painter casting his patrons (King Philip IV and Queen Mariana) as a camera, they surveying the room in which Diego is painting them, with its royal domestic scene. With brilliant use of light and shade, peerless brushwork and tasteful use of colour, Velázquez provides a series of highlights that float around the…
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