Aug 8, 2012

Read this book. Revised edition, 1991, no designer credited. “Robert Hughes”: those were the first words I wrote in the first post for this blog, six years ago, referencing a piece Hughes had written about Rembrandt for the Guardian that week. Re-reading his polemic Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America earlier this year I [...]
Apr 23, 2009

Robert Helpmann, Moira Shearer and Léonide Massine; The Red Shoes (1948). Jack Cardiff, who died this week, was one of the great cinematographers from the postwar era, a period when British cinema was raised for a time to world-class level. His three films for the Archers, aka Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger, are masterpieces of [...]
Oct 12, 2007

Still from Blowjob by Andy Warhol (1963). Seduced: Art and Sex from Antiquity to Now opens today at the Barbican Art Gallery, London, and runs until 27 January 2008. Seduced explores the representation of sex in art through the ages. Featuring over 300 works spanning 2000 years, it brings together Roman sculptures, Indian manuscripts, Japanese [...]
Jul 16, 2006

The Netherlands celebrate four hundred years of Rembrandt’s genius. While looking around for links I noticed this story for the first time: Margaret S. Livingstone and Bevil R. Conway, neurobiologists at Harvard Medical School, say Rembrandt’s many self-portraits reveal that his eyes are focused in slightly different directions, depriving him of the “stereo” effect that [...]
Feb 13, 2006

Robert Hughes writing in The Guardian about Rembrandt this weekend had this to say about one of the painter’s later works: He had done pictures of himself that fairly radiate a gloating success, but the deepest was saved for the last decade of his life, when he painted himself as a painter at work, holding [...]