Girl with a kitten 1947
In Engeland is de schilder Lucian Freud op 88-jarige leeftijd overleden. Freud was de kleinzoon van de psychoanalyticus Sigmund Freud, en werd bekend met vervreemdende rauwe realistische portretten. Hij was een van de meest toonaangevende hedendaagse Britse kunstenaars.
Honoré Daumier (February 26, 1808 – February 10, 1879) was a French printmaker, caricaturist, painter, and sculptor, whose many works offer commentary on social and political life in France in the 19th century.
Le Mauvais Moine
Les cloîtres anciens sur leurs grandes murailles
Etalaient en tableaux la sainte Vérité,
Dont l’effet réchauffant les pieuses entrailles,
Tempérait la froideur de leur austérité.
En ces temps où du Christ florissaient les semailles,
Plus d’un illustre moine, aujourd’hui peu cité,
Prenant pour atelier le champ des funérailles,
Glorifiait la Mort avec simplicité.
— Mon âme est un tombeau que, mauvais cénobite,
Depuis l’éternité je parcours et j’habite;
Rien n’embellit les murs de ce cloître odieux.
Ô moine fainéant! quand saurai-je donc faire
Du spectacle vivant de ma triste misère
Le travail de mes mains et l’amour de mes yeux?
— Charles Baudelaire
The Bad Monk
Cloisters in former times portrayed on their high walls
The truths of Holy Writ with fitting pictures
Which gladdened pious hearts and lessened the coldness,
The austere appearance, of those monasteries.
In those days the sowing of Christ’s Gospel flourished,
And more than one famed monk, seldom quoted today,
Taking his inspiration from the graveyard,
Glorified Death with naive simplicity.
— My soul is a tomb where, bad cenobite,
I wander and dwell eternally;
Nothing adorns the walls of that loathsome cloister.
O lazy monk! When shall I learn to make
Of the living spectacle of my bleak misery
The labor of my hands and the love of my eyes?
— William Aggeler, The Flowers of Evil (Fresno, CA: Academy Library Guild, 1954)
There is a myth, some say a science, suggesting people who have more symmetrical faces are considered more “attractive”.
If you are made symmetrical, do you consider yourself more beautiful, less so, or is it just weird? Or is it you at all? Do you have a best side? What is to be said of left and right brain dominance?
“Echoism” plays with the notion of your own identity. Echoism.org is a project by artist Julian Wolkenstein – it started with a series of symmetrical portraits he made in 2010.
You can make yourself symmetrical on Echoism.org or you can download the app.
Portrait of JK Huysmans by Lucien Descaves.
“Dorian Gray had been poisoned by a book. There were moments when he looked on evil simply as a mode through which he could realize his conception of the beautiful.”
The Picture of Dorian Gray
“The yellow book, a gift from Lord Henry, in which “things that he had dimly dreamed of were suddenly made real to him. Things of which he had never dreamed were gradually revealed.” Yellow was the colour of the fin de siécle and a synonym for the bizarre, artificial and modern; the yellow book, which indeed is said to poison Dorian Gray, is only one of many books with a yellow cover that belong to the French school of symbolysts and, last but not least, “The yellow book” was also the title of the most famous magazine for art and literature of that time.” (link)
The yellow book that Lord Henry gives to Dorian is A Rebours by J.K. Huysmans.
Gray later purchases multiple copies of this terrible volume and has them bound in various materials of different shades and hues so a copy will always be at hand which cosmetically corresponds to his current emotional/physical situation.
Detroit, Michigan, circa 1902. “Artist for Richmond & Backus, printers and binders.” A bohemian lair with lots of flair. 8×10 glass negative. Seen at: Shorpy.com.
Bacon in 1951, photographed by Cecil Beaton.
(Photo: Courtesy of the Cecil Beaton Studio Archive at Sotheby’s)
Except for the small patches of grid that indicate the artist’s handiwork, Dan Fischer’s works can almost be mistaken for photographs.
Dan Fischer
Francis Bacon, 2003
graphite on paper
paper: 22.25 x 18.25 inches
image: 11.625 x 9.25 inches
