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In God We Trust No More : les peintres américains des années 1930
29 octobre 1929. Le krach financier connu sous le nom de Black Tuesday (« mardi noir ») marque pour de bon la fin des Roaring Twenties et l’entrée des États-Unis dans la grande Dépression. La décennie à venir, contrecoup des « années folles » qui ont suivies la fin de la Première Guerre mondiale, sera l’une des périodes les plus sombres de l’histoire américaine. Les efforts du président Herbert Hoover peinent à contenir les conséquences du krach financier. Les banques ferment les unes après les autres, incapables de restituer les économies de tant de foyers. Pauvreté et chômage deviennent le lot commun de nombre de familles, pour beaucoup obligées d’abandonner leur maison, chassées par…
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Musings… and Matisse
How does one gain immortality these days? No, this is actually a serious question! For the Ancient Egyptians, they took the important person’s corpse, removed the intestines and the other major decomposable parts (excepting the heart of course… every rookie embalmer knows that!), dried the body out with natron*, stuffed it with sawdust, wrapped it in linen, placed it in a couple of coffins, and then put it inside a large sarcophagus**. Easy. Then, they left the now-mummified body, erected a gigantic marking stone (obviously why the pyramids were built), and voila: today practically everybody and their grandmother knows the name of Tutankhamen. Not bad for a 5,000 year-old mummy!…
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Bernini: The Beauty and The Beast
Rome is the city of light, certainly, but it is also the city of water. Tourists may visit for the city’s celebrated history and architecture, but they leave entranced by the babbling fountains which dot the city like stars. What most don’t realize is that most of those fountains were designed by the same man: the astoundingly talented Gian Lorenzo Bernini. Immortalized in countless great works of cinema, from Frederico Felini’s La Dolce Vita to Woody Allen’s To Rome With Love, Bernini’s fountains are essential to the character of this most romantic of cities. His Fontana della Barcaccia on the Spanish Steps even provided the backdrop for Gregory Peck and…
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