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No matter how profound or how complicated the philosophical aspects of the work of Pieter Bruegel the Elder may be, the popular Bruegel shares with the other Bruegel one characteristic vital to both; a tremendous gusto, a full blooded heartiness, an ebullient curiosity about the visual world and an irrepressible appreciation of its rich physical [...]
”Innovate as a last resort” was a famous quote from Charles Eames, and considering the knack of innovation of Charles( 1907-78) and wife Ray Eames ( 1912-88), seems almost counter intuitive and against the grain of their virtuosity.To them, everyday objects acquired a unique charge that can only be described as Eamesian.Charles Eames was once [...]
Even more extremely than most great painters, Pieter Bruegel the Elder exists at two levels. At the popular one, his rollicking peasants are taken at face value and bought by the thousands in reproduction. A curious and delightful painter; obvious charms as a pictorial skin. At a higher level, Bruegel is an exceptionally complex painter-philosopher [...]
The central incident in El Greco’s painting, ”The Burial of Count Orgaz” is a vulgar and morally pointless miracle. The painting was done to remind a reluctant parish of its feudal duty. Most of the proceedings preceding and surrounding the execution of the work smell of money; literally to high heaven. Yet the work became, [...]
When Disney‘s Mary Blair was working to design ”Its a Small World” for the 1964-65 World’s Fair in New York, she was up to date and well aware with the art and design trends of the era, and was able to appropriate and synthesize the cutting edge into Disney designs for a mass market. Blair [...]
Siena is Italy’s other eternal city. The Sienese avoided progress, faddishness and adventurousness. Here it was that art and wealth were married and lived happily ever after. Siena, in a sense missed the Renaissance bus. However, Siena, the city that flourished off and on from the beginning of the thirteenth century to the middle of [...]
The arts had come under grave suspicion as offenders against dignity, restraint and decorum. The tide was running toward a new puritanism in the Roman Catholic Church when the council of the church fathers, originally summoned to set the Church’s own house in order in the face of Protestant attacks, reopened at Trent in 1562. [...]
Something very strange happened in the world of the visual arts during the sixteenth century. Its opening years were the golden age of the Italian High Renaissance and the arts seemed to have attained a perfection. Da Vinci, Raphael and the young Michelangelo had shown that there was little that the artist could not do. [...]
E.L. Doctorow’s novel Homer and Langley, is based on the real life story of the two Collyer brothers of Harlem who lived alone in their childhood home on Fifth Avenue. Homer narrates the story, which takes place over the course of most of the 20th century. In this fictionalized account, Doctorow weaves numerous historical events [...]
It was all about the goodies, the girls and the games. Pop art, according to Lawrence Alloway, the critic who invented the term, is ”the use of popular art sources by fine artists: movie stills, science fiction, advertisements, game boards, heroes of the mass media”. Pop art swept like a cyclone over the art field [...]
