German Expats, particularly those hailing from Dresden, played decisive and undervalued roles in the development of Neoclassicism in the eighteenth century…
Tag: art
See with Your Heart
The first time I saw Gustaf Fjaestad’s magnificent pastel, The Boy Who Sees with His Heart (1898), it was love at first sight…
Detective Work
Last week, a major museum asked for my help in locating a work of art I adore and about which I’ve written…
Midsummer
Swedish artist Anders Zorn (1860-1920) painted Midsummer Dance (1897) at a moment when, throughout Europe, many felt it important to assert and reify one’s geographical identify—local, regional, national…
Dresden
I’ve been coming to Dresden regularly (at least every other year) since the mid-1990s and it’s been fascinating to observe the city’s transformation following the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989….
Caspar David Friedrich
I currently find myself residing at a house in a rural German village tucked into the corner where Germany meets the Czech Republic and Poland. It’s a region where one of my first art historical loves, Caspar David Friedrich, often wandered. He captured the rolling hills, distinguished by pale nuances even at sunset, in many of his paintings, although Cross in the Mountains (painted in 1808 and now in Dresden) depicts the nearby, pointier, red sandstone peaks a few kilometers southeast….
Vision: Motif from Visby
As a staunch Social Democrat from the bourgeoisie, Bergh hoped to dissolve social demographic barriers, establish common ground, and generate empathy among social layers…
Light, Solstice, Tradition
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…
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