Honore Daumier
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.
Physiognomy
Les fleurs du mal – Le Mauvais Moine
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)
Homme avec livre
Homme avec son livre dans un fauteuil / Man with book sitting in chair – 1915
Anonymous photographer.
Sarina Brewer
The end of history
The End of History: The name derives from the famous work of philosopher Francis Fukuyama, this is to beer what democracy is to history. Fukuyama defined history as the evolution of the political system and traced this through the ages until we got the Western Democratic paradigm. For Fukuyama this was the end point of man’s political evolution and consequently the end of history.
Echoisme
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.
Moscot Lemtosh
What do Truman Capote, Andy Warhol, Johnny Depp and Freud have in common? The answer is that they all bought their sunglasses glasses @MOSCOT.
Renowned worldwide for its iconic eyewear, MOSCOT has established itself as the go-to global lifestyle brand for stylish, timeless glasses. One of the oldest optical shops in New York, MOSCOT was founded by great grandfather and patriarch Hyman Moscot, who arrived from Eastern Europe via Ellis Island in 1899, and began selling ready-made eyeglasses from a pushcart on Orchard Street, in Manhattan’s famed Lower East Side.
A Rebours: J.-K. Huysmans
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.
The Strokes: Angles
The Strokes kick off their new album pre-order with a 48-hour sale at the band’s official music store. Head over to the store today pre-order Angles starting at $7.99 (USD).