What do the photographers who took the original pictures think of these pictures of their pictures, apotheosized into art but without their names anywhere in sight?
If the copy is an artwork, then what’s the original?
Studio 54 invitations, coffee sachets, Caroline Kennedy’s birthday cake – Andy Warhol’s ‘time capsules’ are finally opened
Warhol’s weird world
Julian Bell has written a tremendous history of world art, one that will inevitably be compared with Gombrich’s The Story of Art, published nearly sixty years ago. Since then image-making technologies that seemed mature have changed and expanded their reach. In 1950 we lived in an image flood. We are now, as Bell puts it, in an image jam. As you turn the pages of Mirror of the World and skip from illustration to illustration you feel the jostle of hundreds of other images that could equally well have been chosen as landing places, while thousands more that make no claim to be works of art still demand attention. The very persistence of art objects can seem a burden. Of a New Ireland mask Bell writes: ‘the mask, like the malanggans, New Ireland’s giant funerary complexes of carving, would probably on principle have been consigned to the fire. That is, until European collectors created a market for “primitive” exotica.’ The plate of available art is piled higher and higher. Will appetite fail?
Global Moods · Peter Campbell: Art, Past and Present
Half-awakened, humans are constantly engaged in a battle to make sense of the world and our experiences within it. And a great work of art, especially music, helps us to do just that.
Art, humanity and the ‘fourth hunger’
News: Pigments used in works postdate artist’s death, says expert, but owner disputes findings
Rediscovered Pollocks may be fakes
More than just a pop sensation | The Australian
The philosophy of wine-tasting – Times Online
What is the evolutionary value of art and why do we humans spend so much time at it?
The Dance of Evolution, or How Art Got Its Start
An exhibition at the National Archaeological Museum in Naples, “Alma-Tadema and Nostalgia for the Antique,” shows the Dutch-born painter’s fascination with ancient Rome.
Alma-Tadema: A painter who brought Pompeii to life again
Giacometti’s sculptures conceal a wider process of both creation and destruction
What lies beneath
Humorous, unafraid of bad taste and drawn to scenes of city life, Edward Burra was a modern master. Jane Stevenson sings his praises.
Jane Stevenson on the underrated art of Edward Burra
A profile of the font that gave shape and tone to our visual culture. By Ryan Bigge
The Official Typeface of the 20th Century
Oct 22: The Mona Lisa’s famously enigmatic smile was originally wider and more expressive, according to new scans of the painting.
Digital scans reveal Mona Lisa secrets
Carole Angier on Leni Riefenstahl by Steven Bach – Literary Review
The Gates of Paradise: Lorenzo Ghiberti’s Renaissance MasterpieceCatalog of the exhibition edited by Gary M. Radke, with essays by Andrew Butterfield and eleven other contributors.
Eros & Death Araki Nobuyoshi, Japan’s most infamous photographer, talks to David McNeill about age, sex and his unflagging work If Araki Nobuyoshi likes you, he will take you to the cramped bar he owns in the Kabukicho red-light district of Tokyo. This is the nighttime lair of perhaps the planet’s most prolific photographer of the female form, a man dubbed a misogynist, a porn-and-bondage-merchant and a genius, so you expect the outré and Araki doesn’t disappoint. The bar is wallpapered with Polaroid snaps of women: young, older, ripened by years in the water trade, some pigeon-toed and shy; others spread-eagled or violently hogtied, thrust up like Sunday roasts and skewered by his camera. The middle-aged mama-san Araki employs to serve drinks flits about in a classy kimono, oblivious. A visitors’ board records the celebrities who have come to pay homage. Bjork, who commissioned Araki to photograph her 1997 album cover Telegram,...
Japan Focus: Social Issues, Culture – Eros & Death
The artists who celebrated Swinging Sixties glamour and consumerism also changed the course of portraiture, says Jane Neal.
The other face of Pop Art
Toward the end of his life Charles Schulz, the creator of “Peanuts,” wished he were Andrew Wyeth. What Wyeth did was fine art, he grumbled, while he was just a newspaper cartoonist, a draftsman, whose work would surely not last. In fact, “Peanuts” is still read, in anthologies and compilations, by many more people than ever looked at a Wyeth, and Schulz’s was arguably the greater talent. He transformed the newspaper cartoon strip, busy and cluttered by the time he turned up in the late ‘40s, by flooding it with white space, and by reducing his childish characters to near abstraction – huge circular heads balanced on tiny bodies – he rendered them far more expressive than their cartoon peers. The strip was able to register grown-up emotions, like anxiety, depression, yearning, disillusionment, that had never been in cartoons before. Instead of the “Slam!” “Bam!” “Pow!” sound effects that were the lingua franca of the comics, it employed a quieter, more eloquent vocabulary: “Aaugh!” and “Sigh.”
Not so comical: The life of Charles Schulz
More than a hundred years after his death, the figure of John Henry Newman continues to fascinate. Read more…
An eminent Victorian
A literary critic discerns pointers towards the transcendent in great works of imagination. Read more…
How James Bond reveals intelligent design
The value of free: Are freebies devaluing culture?
How the Philippines shoots itself in the foot
Asia.view
He played to full houses in the U.S., Germany and other European countries, Australia and Japan, where he was deemed “a national treasure.”
Marcel Marceau, renowned French mime, dies at 84
Few written documents have the power to immerse readers in the mind of an artist — to get at the heart of how an artist thinks. This is partly because nothing can get us closer to art than art itself: Everything else is ancillary or anecdotal. It is also because few artists with literary gifts choose to put pen to paper, when they could be putting brush to canvas or chisel to marble. There are exceptions: Leonardo’s notebooks, Delacroix’s journals, Klee’s Bauhaus teaching notebooks, and van
The Play’s the Thing – New York Times
By Julian Bell
Dutch Portraits: The Age of Rembrandt and Frans Hals
Catalog of the exhibition by Rudi Ekkart and Quentin Buvelot
The Rembrandt Book
by Gary Schwartz
Rembrandt’s Nose: Of Flesh and Spirit in the Master’s Portraits
by Michael Taylor
Abraham Casteleijn, a middle-aged newspaper publisher, holds up his right hand as if he might address us. But the roll of his eyes and his slack-shouldered slouch on the dining chair deprive the gesture of any energy. It resolves into a fond, resigned welcome, inviting us into the urbane muddle of his Haarlem mansion: his globe, the Turkish rug on his table, his hat slapped down on a loose stack of bound folios, a paper or two—perhaps some 1663 copy of the Weeckelycke Courante van Europa—dangling beneath them. The bust of a long-dead local worthy looms over his shoulder, po-faced, rectitudinous, dour. It sets a note of severity that Abraham and his wife Margarieta dutifully observe in their garb of black satin—good, serious folk, adherents to the Mennonite confession.
The Golden Age at Its Best
German Cardinal Joachim Meisner has been labelled a ‘spiritual arsonist’ and faces resignation calls for using the word ‘degenerate’ in a speech about art. The word has strong connotations with the Nazi persecution of artists accused of producing ‘degenerate art.’ Media commentators are taking him to task.
The World From Berlin: Cardinal Under Fire for Using Nazi Term
The greatest art should not be moving – Telegraph
Dance Dilemma: Schlock Triumphs Over Ballet – washingtonpost.com
Cockroaches, or Worlds as Images
A large cast of Latin American artists were extending the reach of abstract art in the years following World War II, including Juan Mele, Alfredo Hlito and Hélio Oiticica. “The Geometry of Hope: Latin American Abstract Art From the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection,” at the Grey Art Gallery at New York University, reviews their work.
Latin American masters of soulful straight lines
The Terracotta Army is the greatest work of mass-production art in history. The platoon visiting Britain is small, but it’s endlessly fascinating, says Laura Cumming.
The soldiers are upon us – and resistance is futile
Da Vinci mixed colors on his canvas as he went along, say scientists.
Da Vinci’s Ad Lib Painting Style Revealed
Ars Disputandi – The online journal for Philosophy of Religion
Image: Art, Faith, Mystery
Sukhdev Sandhu talks to the director of a brilliant documentary about the typeface of choice for everyone from the United Nations to Nestlé and Toyota
Behind the font of all knowledge
Art: In an era when most British officials were interested only in exploiting India, a few celebrated Hindu culture.
William Dalrymple explores the rich legacy of Hindu art and culture
Donny Johnson is a convicted murderer who has been kept in complete solitary confinement for the past 18 years. He started painting in order to stay sane, using dyes extracted from M&Ms and a home-made brush. Now his paintings sell for $500 each.
Still Life: The Jailhouse Jackson Pollock
Art course fine-tunes medical students’ observation skills, talents
The Culture: Behind the felt and fur, a human face
Freud’s goddesses – TLS Highlights – Times Online
Implied World Views in Pictures: Reflections from a Cognitive Psychological and Anthropological Point of View
The history of ‘The Origin of the World’ – TLS Highlights – Times Online
Ian Buruma admires how everyday objects and rituals in Japan are transformed into art.
Ian Buruma on Japanese art
Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics
By Jorge Majfud
Freedom, perhaps, may be the main differential characteristic of art. And when this freedom does not turn its face away from the tragic reality of its people, then the characteristic turns into moral consciousness. Aesthetics is reconciled with ethics. Indifference is never neutral; only ignorance is neutral, but it proves to be an ethical and practical problem to promote ignorance in the name of some virtue
The Terrible Innocence Of Art
Andy Warhol famously flirted with celebrity, but his obsession with violent death teaches us most about the spirit of our age, says Jonathan Jones.
This is a warning
Orientalist art and photography – TLS Highlights – Times Online
Suprealism is a “movement” pioneered by Leonard Lapin that combines suprematism and realism; it mirrors the “suprealist world”, where art is packaged for consumer culture.
Suprealist art, suprealist life
Suprealism is a “movement” pioneered by Leonard Lapin that combines suprematism and realism; it mirrors the “suprealist world”, where art is packaged for consumer culture.
Suprealist art, suprealist life
The New Criterion — Why the art world is a disaster
Ars Disputandi – The online journal for Philosophy of Religion
1894 C.E. Miniature book collector George Salomon of Paris disperses his seven-hundred-title collection, a library that reportedly could be carried in a moderate-sized portmanteau. His spirit lives on today in the Miniature Book Society, an organization whose interests extend only to printed works three inches or smaller. (Pocket Library of Lilliputian Folio Books, London, 1801. Courtesy of The Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana)
A Minor History of / Miniature Writing
June 11: For the first time in more than 200 years, two paintings by Jean-Honoré Fragonard have been reunited.
Link to Fragonards meet
Extreme mathematical origami: the work of Richard Sweeney. And a set of photos.
* Previously in the Proceedings: Papercuts of Peter Callesen, Wonderfold Squares
[Acknowledgments to Cabinet]
Link to Richard Sweeney’s Paper Sculptures
Japan Vies With China for Dominance in Indochina and ASEAN Hisane Masaki Amid intensifying rivalry between Tokyo and Beijing over influence in Asia, Japan is revving up its drive to strengthen relations with countries in Indochina, an economically backward but geopolitically important part of the region.
Link to Japan Vies With China for Dominance in Indochina and ASEAN
When everybody is an artist, what happens to the art?
Forget Andy Warhol’s 15 minutes of fame. That barely covers a YouTube clip.
Link to Amateur hours
A Culture of Improvement – Robert Friedel – Books – New York Times
Fracturing the Marble Façade: Visceral Excavation in Andrzej Wajda’s Man of Marble
Going Beyond Cézanne: The Development of Robert Bresson’s Film Style in Response to the Painting of Paul Cézanne
The Power of Culture – Art is not a beast of burden for good intentions
In Chiang Mai, Thailand, a small group of architects, with help from the local government, is working to preserve existing Lanna-era temples and revive the style in modern buildings.
Link to The struggle to save classic Thai architecture
Edward Hopper was not a great painter. He wielded his brushes with a heavy hand, his colors range from muddy to sour, his human figures are laughably clumsy. Trained as an illustrator, he knew how to exaggerate contrasts of light and shadow to good effect, and he had solid compositional instincts, but he was not an innovative formalist. He was …
Link to The outsider
Masterpiece stirs Spanish tensions 70 years on | International News | News | Telegraph
Much of the work of the Renaissance sculptor Conrat Meit has been lost over the centuries. The Bayerisches Nationalmuseum in Munich has pulled together a goodly collection from around the world which proves Meit to be a master of the pot-bellied feminine ideal of the day. By Birgit Sonna
Link to Bodily finesse
Art School Confidential | Features | The Stranger, Seattle’s Only Newspaper
Seventy years since the bombing of Guernica, we look again at Picasso’s masterpiece and iconic condemnation of the suffering caused by war.
Link to Guernica | openDemocracy
An exhibition of more than 50 paintings at the Museo Carrer casts new light on the society portraitist’s love affair with his spiritual home.
Link to Sargent’s Venice work illustrates an artistic double-life
The show “Renoir Landscapes 1865-1883” on view at the National Gallery until May 20 details a fundamental change in the artist’s perception as he rejected tradition and moved toward abstraction, heralding a metamorphosis that upset a long-established order.
Link to Renoir’s audacious flights into abstraction
The American Interest: Policy. Politics. Culture. Digital.
Manet’s Execution of Maximilian is the exceedingly rare piece of political message art that really delivers.
Link to The Imperial War Museum
Twenty years after his death, Andy Warhol refuses to fade away. His darkness is his legacy.
Link to The Endless Fifteen Minutes
Helvetica delivers its message cleanly and efficiently. And it plays such an important part in our lives that the Museum of Modern Art in New York is celebrating its 50th anniversary by acquiring a set of the original lead type.
Link to Helvetica: The little typeface that leaves a big mark
Leni Riefenstahl’s 1987 autobiography begins with an epigraph borrowed from Albert Einstein: “So many things have been written about me, masses of insolent lies and inventions.” Apparently, the woman best known as “Hitler’s filmmaker” had no misgivings about quoting a Jew who had his citizenship stripped by the Nazis. Perhaps, then, it is unsurprising that in her 700-page memoir, Riefenstahl spins her own “insolent lies” — namely, that she was an apolitical artist who knew nothing of the Holocaust.
Link to The Real Leni Riefenstahl
Enchantments of air and water | Review | Guardian Unlimited Books
‘Leni: The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl’ by Steven Bach – BOOK REVIEW - Los Angeles Times – calendarlive.com
We have been blinded by blockbuster fatigue-Arts & Entertainment-Visual Arts-TimesOnline
In April, 1973, the month that Picasso died, he was asked to choose an image to be used as a poster for a show of recent work at the Palace of the Popes, in Avignon. He picked “The Young Painter,” an oil sketch he’d done a year earlier, at the . . .
Link to Rembrandt’s Ghost
The variety of work that flourished under the Symbolist banner is on show in the exhibit “Symbolism: From Moreau, to Gauguin, to Klimt” in Ferrara, Italy. It features works by more than 60 painters and sculptors from more than a dozen countries.
Link to The elusive Symbolist movement
If new acquaintance tells you that their favorite movie is <i>300</i>, back away slowly—they probably kills cats for fun.
Link to Movie Mix: ‘300’ Flick Is Ready-Made for the Right-Wing Crowd
Louise Baring goes behind the closed doors of a building in Brussels with an extraordinary artistic pedigree.
Link to Glimpse into Klimt’s hidden dream world
Barcelona is celebrated as one of Europe’s finest cultural treasures. Robert Hughes on how a group of architects – in particular Gaudí – created a uniquely Catalan city.
Link to Robert Hughes on Barcelona’s uniquely Catalan architecture
A Real-Life Mystery: The Hunt for the Lost Leonardo – New York Times
Japan Focus
Link to Is Japan a Cultural Looter?
A century ago, they really knew how to spend money.
Link to The Rich Were Different
Link to The Rich Were Different
Why we like the buildings we like – The Boston Globe
Link to Why we like the buildings we like
The year 2007 is set to become the hottest year on record, the U.K. Met Office said. The global temperature during the year could be 0.54 deg Cel above the long term average of 14 deg Cel, the Met Office added.
Link to 2007 could be the hottest year so far, warns U.K. Met Office
In search of lost time : Article : Nature
Read the full story now.
Link to The Curious Genius of Walt Disney
The art of Grandma Moses.
Link to American, Yes; Primitive, No
Art worth millions? An economist offers a theory on creativity and relative value
What makes a piece of art worth $30 million? An art lover and economist has developed something of a theory to explain the relative value of the world’s great paintings.
The Academy of American Poets – My Favorite Poet: Emily Dickinson
For France, Video Games Are as Artful as Cinema – New York Times
How St Francis was restored to grace
Guercino’s religious masterpiece has been stolen, lost for decades – and torn in two. As it goes on show here, Serena Davies charts its astonishing history.