Résultats de "Edward Smithies" dans Toutes les catégories

The Gale Dictionary of Psychoanalysis defines ‘self-representation’ as “the image the subject has of him or herself based on his or her own interpretation.” The hugely influential 20th century psychoanalytic researcher and philosopher Jacques Lacan enlarges on this by speaking of “the finally donned armor of an alienating identity that will mark [the subject’s] mental development with its rigid structure.” Not surprisingly, psychoanalysts see this construct as a manifestation of the ego, and also as something intimately linked to narcissism.

Eminent art historian and writer Edward Lucie-Smith discusses an ambitious digital art book series called 100 London Artists, designed to celebrate London as an art city.

Every now and then, an exhibition comes along that hits you in the solar plexus. The compact Daumier show at the Royal Academy in London is one of those. It is housed in the moderately sized Sackler Galleries on the top floor of the building, not in the main exhibition rooms below, where it would be swallowed up. Most of the works on view are quite small. Very few are more than medium sized. For the most part, the color is subdued. Indeed, some of the paintings seem monochromatic until you examine them more closely, The range of subjects is, if not exactly restricted, not hugely wide.

When Beryl Cook died, she was the subject of a large number of obituaries. Some of them were predictably condescending, which I suspect she would not have minded a bit. The really telling thing, however, is what has happened since then on the web. If you go to the site maintained by The Times, still regarded as the British paper of record, and look for the paper’s obituary archive, you will find a section within it devoted to "Artistic Genius". The subtitle is "Artists and makers who changed the way we see".

This year sees the 300th anniversary of the foundation of St. Petersburg, an event that is being widely celebrated here in London as well as in Russia. And today The Times of London carried a story about the "widespread sleaze" that is hampering the restoration of Russia's former capital city. Though Oleg Kulik is not a Petersburg artist, these two facts help to provide a context for his career. Western interest in and curiosity about Russia is acute. The tendency is, however, to look at the Russian past, not at the present.

The monograph publishes a study of Rembrandt van Rijn and JMW Turner at the National Gallery and Tate Britain in exhibitions of their later works.

The tendency for art to detach itself from any duty to reflect observed reality manifested itself in avant-garde art production almost from the beginnings of the Modern Movement in art. It is already present in pure form in Malevich’s drastically reductive Black Square, which consists of exactly that, a black square on a white ground. It is interesting to note the way in which this work was exhibited when it was first put before the public.

The first body art performer, as well as the first professional bodybuilder, was the showman Eugene Sandow (1867-1925). Though Sandow’s heyday occurred before the birth of the Modern Movement, there are compelling reasons for giving the primacy to him. Sandow, born Friedrich Wilhelm Müller in Prussia in 1867, left his native country in 1885 in order to avoid military service and first appeared on the London stage in 1885. His real celebrity began when the American impresario Florenz Ziegfield hired him to appear at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exhibition in Chicago.

Hammershoi is, in a certain sense, the Danish Vermeer, an artist whom he occasionally paraphrased. That is to say, a quietist painter obsessed by subtle effects of light, forgotten very soon after his death, but rediscovered and turned into a demi-god by a later generation.

The word avant-garde, so much used in connection with the various manifestations of contemporary art, is starting to have a strange, ironic ring to it. One might even claim that it is starting to signify what is behind the times, rather than in front of them. Like all such terms, it is in fact a metaphor, rather than a direct description. Borrowed from old-fashioned military terminology, it seeks to describe a situation where social norms are being perpetually challenged by artists. In the military sphere, where it originated, it is long out of use.

An anthology of essays and reviews by the eminent art historian and writer, Edward Lucie-Smith. The articles cover a broad span, from the Italian Renaissance of Giotto and Antonello da Messina, Leonardo, and Michelangelo, progressing to Rubens, Velázquez, and Ingres, with essays on William Hogarth, John Constable, and John Everett Millais for British art. With the experience of his landmark publications on modern art, which remain in print, the author sweeps the listener on a fabulous journey of perception.

The story of David Burliuk, now generally regarded as the father of Russian Futurism, is in some ways one of the strangest in the history of the Modern Movement in art. He was immensely influential in the years immediately before the Russian Revolution, at a time when the whole of the Russian cultural world was in ferment. And fairly soon after that, he was almost forgotten in his own country. This exhibition is, among other things, an attempt to correct an injustice.

Art in Puerto Rico occupies a kind of bridge position, between the North American art world one the one hand and the various Latin American and Caribbean art worlds on the other. Puerto Rican artists have easy physical aspects to the United States, and large Puerto Rican colonies in major American cities, notably New York and Chicago, have led to the birth of mixed vernacular cultures. The one in New York is sometimes referred to as Nuyorican, and has a populist downtown vibe that swings the spotlight toward it every time graffiti art returns to fashion.

There are three things that we have to take into account when attempting to assess the impact of the contemporary sensibility in art on the culture of the various countries bordering the Mediterranean. First, the way in which each of these territories responds to the idea of the contemporary is bound up with its own cultural history. Every Mediterranean coastline possesses a hinterland, and this hinterland exercises an enormous influence on what is seen on the coast itself.

Andrea Palladio is the most influential architect who ever lived - much more so than those heroes of the Modern Movement - Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe. It is significant that buildings we call "Palladian" are still being built today - for example, by the British architect Quinlan Terry. Palladio’s ideas were disseminated not only by his buildings, but also, even more effectively, by his writings, most notably by his didactic masterpiece, I Quattro Libri dell’Architettura (The Four Books of Architecture), published in 1570.

This article is essentially a follow-up to a piece by The Jackdaw’s revered editor, David Lee, published in The Times on July 25, 2013. In it, he detailed just what a fiasco the Arts Council’s contribution to an otherwise successful Olympic year was, with £5.4 million spent and nothing to show for it.

Philip Pearlstein is a paradox. He is one of the great survivors from a time when American art was at its most creative and influential. And at the same time, he seems to oppose everything that the two major revolutions in American art - Abstract Expressionism and Pop - seem to stand for.

"Gothic Nightmares" at Tate Britain in London was an important exhibition, but not entirely for the reasons that its organizers thought. They clearly saw it as a stage in mapping an episode in British art - the rise of the Sturm und Drang, hand-in-hand with a new age of Gothic sensibility in literature - that has, until now, been relatively uncharted. What they almost entirely failed to perceive was its relevance to recent, and even current, developments in British and American art.

Wifredo Lam is by far the most celebrated, and most people would say the greatest, artist produced by the Caribbean region in modern times. His relationship with where he came from is, however, extraordinarily complex - much more complex than most of his admirers suppose, largely because they usually have no direct experience of the region and little knowledge of its social history.

More than 30 years ago - in 1977, to be exact - I co-authored a book called Work and Struggle: The Painter as Witness. Its subject was one aspect of the academic painting of the late 19th and very early 20th century - art which dealt not with the comfortable lives of the rich but with all the social problems of the time. There were over 200 illustrations, most of them drawn from publications issued in conjunction with the official Salons of the period, but when we searched for these, they were largely missing.