Category Archive: HISTORY
The Raft of “The Medusa”
3 July 1816: the French frigate “The Medusa” founders off Cap Blanc. Two and a bit years later, Theodore Géricault exhibited his classic romanticist work; a grim and sombre depiction of hope turning to despair, as possible rescue, seen in the distance, fades away. The loss of 150 people in this wreck, and abandonment of some, and evidence of cannibalism by survivors, became a national scandal, and Gericault’s melodramatic treatment did nothing to calm the citizens down. “This was a great subject, gory and gasp-making.”* [Sue Roe, The Private Lives of the Impressionists, 2006, p. 9.]
Continue Reading →Paris – The Moveable Feast
How to take the gloss off the Eiffel Tower
June 23, 1940: Herr Hitler strolls around his shiny new toy, Paris, taking in the architectural marvels under the tutelage and guidance of those well-known art lovers, Albert Speer and Arno Breker; the former a drawer of nightmare-constructions that never took shape, thank goodness – the latter a grafter of dubious, neoclassical trash that would make Phidias and Alexandros laugh (we except Breker’s bronze bust of Wagner at Bayreuth). The Nazis represented the worst threat in memory to art. They were thieves, of course. And what they did not understand, or disliked, they simply destroyed. They spun idiotic theories and practised…
Continue Reading →Wagner and Modernism
Wagner by Albrecht Leistner, 1911 (photo by Koernerj2000)
Modernism has many adherents and many parents. It began, more or less, in the late 19th century (particularly in France) and flourished in the 20th century (early on, particularly in Italy – Ezra Pound’s admonition to ‘make it new’ probably reflected his italianate longings). Although some point to Kant as the great begetter of modernism, there are folks who were closer to home that can stake a better claim. In France: Édouard Manet, Gustave Flaubert and especially Charles Baudelaire, and rather more globally, Richard Wagner. Nietzsche regarded Baudelaire in this context as Wagner’s ‘intelligent adherent.’ But surely Wagner takes the prize, both in…
Continue Reading →An American Deity
Young he was and sound ‘in wind and limb’, Fit and tanned, bareheaded, toothy, slim, Rich he was of vocabulary and purse, Bore away he be in a wagon, not a hearse, Draped in a flag his form, of garish stripes and stars Followed slowly by lesser men in motor cars. It all began they say, in a killing frost, A cold replicated later when he was lost, Abbreviated poesy marked the spot On which commenced the reign of Camelot, Where a bogus royalty came into view As desideratum, thus embraced as true. …
Continue Reading →Theatre of the World
The map-maker, by Rubens
May 20, 1570: cartographer Abraham Ortelius published the world’s first known atlas, the Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (or “Theatre of the World”). There had been maps before of course, and bundles of maps, but only Ortelius thought to bundle them all in a logically-ordered compendium, paving the way for all atlases to come, till the time of Google. There is nothing lovelier than a good map. They are art. And there is no better way to study the development of geography, and indeed the course of geopolitics, than look over a few centuries’ worth of them. Ortelius pushed back the territories known as Here…
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