I confess to wanting to live in this idyllic world, one attainable through self-creation. The Larssons do-it-yourself, be yourself ethos guided me once I learned about it…
Tag: art
Swedish Art #1
After the End of a Modeling Session, an 1884 painting by Swedish painter Richard Bergh, reveals a lot about the lives of artists during the Impressionist era….
Vanishing Social Spaces
Recently, I sat in my office preparing a lecture. New slide, copy, paste, insert text. Powerpoint transformed the lives of art historians when it was introduced at colleges and universities circa 2000. It was revolutionary, life-changing, for that discipline in ways unknown to scholars in other fields. Some older art historians even retired earlier than… Continue reading Vanishing Social Spaces
Remembering Christo
The Arc de Triomphe Wrapped offered an inspirational aesthetic experience, a wrinkle in time, that offered a glimpse into an imaginable world of beauty, creativity, harmony, and solidarity….
Greifswald on Sunday
If, on a Sunday morning between 9:30 and 10 a.m. you sit in the leafy park of majestic linden trees beside the Nikolai Dom, the cathedral, you will be treated to a symphony of bells…
Bregenz
If attending a performance of the Bregenzer Festspiele is not on your Bucket List, it should be, opera fan or not. It is always a magical spectacle, the likes of which you will not see anywhere else…
Oh My, Omai!
One of my favorite portraits is Sir Joshua Reynolds’s portrait of Omai, a Tahitian man in his early twenties. Omai had already led an adventurous life before he met Captain James Cook in 1769 and joined his third voyage, which took him to London in October 1774. Although presented as what John Dryden in his… Continue reading Oh My, Omai!
#sadgirl
Do #sadgirl selfies evidence evidence a degree of agency unavailable to affluent 19th-century women, often portrayed as beautifully wan and fragile? Or, do they reinforce Schopenhauerian ideas about feminine psycho-emotional fragility?
The Wise Bird
In 1893, Norwegian artist Gerhard Munthe made a watercolor design for a tapestry, one of many. His subject, The Wise Bird, illustrated a Norwegian legend about a king who sought advice from a Wise Bird living in the chestnut forest beside his castle instead of from his courtiers. Munthe pictured the king engaged in conversation with… Continue reading The Wise Bird
Cultural Misunderstanding
I’m fascinated by the jolts that occur when you assume you’ve understood something, but it turns out you didn’t…