Paintings come to mean different things in different times.
Recently the ArtDaily Newsletter wrote about The Courtauld Gallery’s collection of Impressionist masterpieces. The report featured an
image of Pierre Auguste Renoir’s La Loge (The Theater Box), an 1874 oil painting.
The Impressionists were celebrated for their modernity, their study of society. What impresses me, studying an [...]
There are certain gewgaws, doodads and gimcracks I can’t seem to resist. So over the recent holidays I bought two green-flame candles at The Museum of Modern Art. (More about MoMA later). It turns out the flames are lovely in the near-dark, my usual state, but almost invisible in a brighter environment, and the wicks [...]
Read More...I’ve been opening the wrong doors lately—well, maybe it’s nothing new—but what is new is that I expect to walk into rooms I don’t live in anymore. I expect them to be just as they were when I lived in them. I don’t think I expect myself to be just as I was, no, [...]
Read More... I lead a walking around life, one reason I don’t need to travel much. Hudson, New York, my county’s seat, is one of those towns fraught with chance encounter. It could be with someone, something, or an idea.
One day recently, when our Canadian friends had whooshed a cool breeze our way, I was walking [...]
We know a lot about Modthryth, the awful queen in Beowulf who has men who look her in the eye put to death gruesomely, but we don’t know how to say her name.
My wife Marilyn and I searched the worldwide web for hours last night. We found enough to fill a mountain of hard [...]
The first thing you see when you walk into the very first gallery of
the always fascinating Dahesh Museum in Manhattan is Gustave Doré’s
Black Eagle of Prussia, 1887 (inset). A fallen France, symbolized by a mature woman wearing a Phrygian cap and bearing a sword, is menaced by a huge black eagle, representing Prussia.
Prussia had [...]
Good artists always see the same things we see in uniquely different ways. But once in a great while an artist completely re-imagines the world. It’s not a godlike act, it’s a necessity. It’s the only way such an artist can come to terms with what he sees.
Armando Reverón (1889-1954) was such an artist. [...]
I have architectural dreams. Every once in a while I find the setting in a book or a movie. One sleepless night I turned on the television set and
watched The Sicilian, a 1987 film directed by Michael Cimino. It opens on a misty morning in Palermo—and there was the morose, dripping architecture of one of [...]
Stunning new information, says Wolf Blitzer on CNN. Shocking revelations, says another anchor. We’re stunned and shocked 24/7. We need some algorithms for talking about just how stunned, shocked and entertained to a fare-thee-well we are.
Our wonderful young men and women are coming home depressed, with post-traumatic stress disorder and brain damage that we’re [...]
Some things are so perfect that in the midst of our most grotesque behavior they instill calm, proportion and decency. In Washington, DC, where grotesqueries are a pestilence, two such triumphs of human striving are the Jefferson Memorial (inset) and Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot’s painting, Ville d’Avray, in the National Gallery of Art.
No matter how mad or [...]