Archive for the ‘ Art ’ Category

Abstraction of the Object

I am quoting again from The Condition of Man by Lewis Mumford, page 246. The text is accompanied by a series of paintings. I have chunked up the text into more paragraphs. — Interest in the external world was not confined to the scientist. What the physicist observed in terms of matter and motion, the [ READ MORE ]

Gertrude Stein and the Nazis

NY Review – Missionaries Several books are reviewed in this article. The one I am interested in is Unlikely Collaboration: Gertrude Stein, Bernard Fäy, and the Vichy Dilemma. Here is a quote: Janet Malcolm had much to say about Stein’s relations with Fäy during the Vichy period in her New Yorker essays of June 2, 2003, and [ READ MORE ]

When Art was Ornamental

Harper’s – Byzantium From the first page of this article: Pagan classicism – mamoreal, monumental, certain of the primacy of earthly life – yielded to Christian abstraction and introspection. Art was now the ornamentation and the not celebration of a transitory world; the physical world would never again be heroic. This article has much artwork [ READ MORE ]

Swinging Baby Bonobo

  • April 16th, 2012
  • Posted in Art

PhotoBotos You gotta see this! There is a refuge in Costa Rica where you can share your breakfast with the monkeys (two different species), and they are far and away the best part of the show. I subscribe to this site, and get an excellent photo from it every day[ READ MORE ]

Oskar Koloschka

  • April 6th, 2012
  • Posted in Art

Expressionism aims to do just that: show how people really feel. This is my favorite by Oskar Kokoschka. It is unfired clay painted with tempera. From The Age of Insight: The style Kiloschka perfected in the early portraits has sometimes been called “nerve painting” or “soul painting”, terms which provide a salutary warning that the conventions [ READ MORE ]

Adele Bloch-Bauer

From the opening pages of The Age of Insight: In 2006 Ronald Lauder, a collector of Austrian Expressionistic art the the co-founder of the Neue Gallerie, the expressionistic museum in New York City, spent the extraordinary sum of $135 million to purchase a single painting: Gustav Klimt’s captivating gold-encrusted portrait of Alele Bloch-Bauer, a Viennese socialite [ READ MORE ]

Modernism in Vienna

Gustav Klimt was part of Modernist Art movement in Vienna at the beginning of the twentieth century. I cannot pose as a art expert here, I got this from the book The  Age of Influence. During this period, artists mingled freely with the staff from the medical schools, and frequently witnessed autopsies – thus the skull [ READ MORE ]

Art

I grew up in a world with no art in it – none. My family were Mormons (one of the backward American religions). And I grew up in the Midwest - the great American cultural waste land. I am now reading The Age of Insight – the quest to understand the unconscious in art, mind, and brain [ READ MORE ]

Vermilion Cliffs

National Geographic I miss the desert, living as I do now on the edge of a rain-forest. But I get the National Geographic magazine every month, delivered from my Miami address by air-mail. It is one of my luxuries. I take time to read it – not just look at the photographs – and the [ READ MORE ]

Art and Entertainment

I am frequently reminded of the difference between these two – and that most people have scant interest in art. For example, I recently listened to The Heart of Darkness, and was so impressed by it that ordered Apocalypse Now from Netflix and watched that. By comparison it was spectacular, but stupid – something, I suppose few [ READ MORE ]

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