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”An additional street sign reference to an ancient God is the word EROS, written in red neon across the street as Bill is buying entry into Milich’s costume shop. Eros is no less than the Greek god of lust, love and intercourse. So with these references to Gods in street signs, including a sun-god, perhaps [...]
Jean Dubuffet ( 1901-1985 ) was one of the few artists devoted to ”keeping it real” and this involved a deliberately anti-psychological and anti-personal approach to art.All of his work stands aesthetically somewhere between the beautiful and the awkward, the sophisticated and the mundane, and the sane and the insane, but it all displays intense [...]
Eugene Delacroix characterized Jacques Louis David as the founding father of the modern school of art. His challenging of established aesthetic vision, bold experiments in subject and style, and at the end of his career, mythological compositions that explore complex and nuanced psychological states, lend credence to the view of David as an artist dragged [...]
During the century that followed Jacques Louis David’s death, three forces struggled for position in French art; classicism, romanticism, and realism. But their initial struggle took place in the art of David. His heroic style, suppressing passion beneath a hard chilly surface, made him the artistic dictator of Europe. Louis XVI, Robespierre, and Bonaparte were [...]
It was a turning of the tables and an example of fate changing quickly and hinging on a bureaucratic judgement. Emil Nolde ( 1846-1956 ) was an anti-semite and German jingoist. By an ironic turn of history, he got what he deserved in 1937; Hitler declared his art as ”degenerate” confiscated 1,052 of his works, [...]
Hell, the devils and the torments of the damned. From fire and brimstone Christianity, to the murky byways of Judaism’s deepest recesses, the horrifying separation of moral wheat from the chaff and the swift descent into hell have always been artistically captivating because of the varities of tortures; infinite in ingenuity, infinite in pain, and [...]
The guitar has never had it so ubiquitous. In its Iberian heydey when, after a battle between Spaniards and Portuguese, the losing army took to the hills, and left, it was said 11,000 guitars upon the battlefield. In the process of becoming universal, the guitar has lost most of its social connotations and extra-musical overtones. [...]
Its the presence of the body in a state of decomposition, as locale of transgression that places the tropical tragedy of Haiti at the center of an imaginary contemporary world; marked by its upright and righteous treatment of the human debris and the cult of the organic. In front of a televised world, the country [...]
” Oh East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet…” he wrote. ” But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed nor Birth,/When two strong men stand face to face”. The famous phrase is often used in a sense opposite to that which Kipling intended. It could be [...]
In Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s picturizations of proverbs and parables, the Netherlandish peasant is employed only as a pantominist, but in the paintings of peasant life he comes into his own as Bruegel’s symbol of significant man. People who are potentially noble, and whose existence is legitimized by their position as an integral but not [...]
