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Beer vs Art; which would you choose?
Picture this: it’s 1876 and you’re a dapper young heir to the Guinness name, fortune, and business – beer! You recently turned 29 years old, just bought your brothers’ shares of the company because you’ve got big plans for it, and you’ve got your whole life ahead of you. When it comes to culture and art, you’ve ensured that you are just as important as the Rothschilds, J.P. Morgan, and Henry Clay Frick. However, rather than collect a harem of courtesans and countesses, you’ve chosen to collect paintings of such ladies from the Belle Époque. Is it because you’re an Irishman in England and long to feel closer…
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Goya: A model for ‘those that don’t succeed, try try again’?
Francisco de Goya: 18th Century Spanish bad boy? Overlooked Political Commentator? A sufferer for his art? Yes, yes, and yes. Goya is all of the above. Ok, let’s start with the ‘Bad Boy’ charge. This aspect of his personality may be tracked back to his time studying under a master popular with Spanish Royalty of the time. It’s fair to say that he and his teacher didn’t exactly see eye to eye, which resulted in his receiving poor results in his examinations. Later on, he experienced further disappointment when he submitted entries to the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in San Fernando. These were rejected, not once, but twice, in…
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Let them eat ice cream!
The 17th century was a busy one. Full of territorial disputes around the world, English colonisation of the Americas, Japanese isolation, the fall of the Ming Dynasty in China… I could go on. But I won’t. More importantly, the world was (still) heavily focused on religious art, though many artists started to branch out and become a bit more narcissistic, here’s lookin’ at you Rembrandt and your many self-portraits. Do you know what else came to be in the 17th century? Ice cream. You (probably) read it here first! No proper recipe for ice cream, though various other versions previously existed in Persia, China, and Italy for example, appeared until…
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Die Olympischen Spiele in London – Zeit für Kultur
Wer bei den Olympischen Spielen ausschließlich an Sport denkt, liegt völlig falsch. Nicht nur der Sport und die Kunst, sondern auch die Musik, die Literatur und die Religion waren wichtige Pfeiler der antiken Kultur, die seither eng miteinander verknüpft sind. Der Ursprung der Olympischen Spiele lässt sich bis weit vor Christi Geburt zurückverfolgen. Bei den antiken Spielen stand, anders als heutzutage, nicht der Sport, sondern die religiöse Feier im Vordergrund. Die Wettkämpfe wurden zu Ehren des Göttervaters Zeus und des göttlichen Helden Pelops ausgetragen. Die Eröffnung mit verschiedenen kultischen Zeremonien und dem festlichen Einzug der Athleten in den heiligen Hain von Olympia dauerte einen ganzen Tag. In den darauf folgenden…
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Titian: not overthrown by the Olympians
The National Gallery is exhibiting three of Titians most famous paintings from his Metamorphosis series, as well as reactions to it by contemporary artists, poets and choreographers, as part of the Cultural Olympiad, a “summer”-long festival in the UK celebrating Britain’s cultural landscape. Nowhere does it say that the events, acts, performances and exhibitions of this Cultural Olympiad are for British self-promotion, but with a bouncy castle Stonehenge and 37 Shakespeare plays performed in 37 languages, not to mention the patriotic opening ceremony, you have to assume that promoting Britain and her diverse cultural landscape is indeed the aim of the Games. I was surprised, then, to see that…
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Doodling with Picasso
The British Museum has managed to wheedle the donation of all one-hundred of Picasso’s etchings which make up the Vollard Suite – no, not the name of a room in a curiously themed hotel, but a massive series of prints created in exchange for a couple of paintings, including two by Cézanne and Renoir. The critics are clambering all over each other to fawn, simper and gush about the prints and to offer their unsolicited opinions about what the lines and shading could possibly mean, squabbling like children over who can kiss the most arse. I agree that the series does reveal the inner workings of the mind of the…
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