26 Mar 2015
Ssh! The Secret of Picasso’s Ear
Ears make sense as one of the five: touch, taste, sight, sound and smell. But who thinks about Picasso's ears? We mostly remember his eyes: deep, dark and powerful. Yet he himself - as I don't think has been noted before - seems to have been very
24 Sep 2014 | 2 Comments
Reading Art: Manet, Picasso and Alfonso Ponce de Leon
My vision, like most people’s, is often cloudy which is why when the sun breaks and I gain some understanding, I get excited. You must excuse me. It may sometimes seem as if no-one before me has made similar observations. After all, all my ent
03 Sep 2014 | 1 Comments
Leonardo’s Skull Rocks
Art is visual which means, contrary to a lot of theoretical discourse, so are its secrets. And if you train your eyes to search for similarity rather than difference, you'll be amazed at what you can discover.
Few paintings have b
01 May 2014 | 1 Comments
An Intriguing Self-portrait, c.1345 BC
One of the earliest surviving self-portraits from antiquity is that of Bak, chief sculptor to the Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaten. It is beautifully preserved in Berlin (above) and is very intriguing given Western art history’s traditional descript
14 Apr 2014
Joseph Cornell gives birth to a box…
Birthing, physical birth, is one of poetry and art’s most powerful metaphors used for many centuries, perhaps ever since art first appeared. It plays on the relationship between sexual conception and mental conception while often conveying that
13 Mar 2014
Flat Noses on a Frontal Face
A year ago I used this early portrait drawing by Ingres (left) to demonstrate that Picasso's combination of faces from differing viewpoints, a hallmark of Cubism, was a technique practiced by earlier artists for a similar reason. Ingres, for ins
10 Mar 2014
Egon Schiele’s Green Belly
There is no such thing as art for art’s sake. It is a contradiction in terms. The early 19th-century art historians could see little beyond narrative so when art started to lose its connection to an apparent subject, they assumed such works we
10 Feb 2014
The Poet’s Eye
What you see may not be all you see because somewhere inside most true artworks one form is laid over another. Here's a simple example from a print made by Robert Motherwell (1915-1991), a leader of the New York School in the mid-twentieth century
05 Jan 2014 | 2 Comments
How God became Woman
Art is so pregnant that it can take months for its hidden meaning to emerge in your thought. That’s why we try to enter the artist's mind, not just through social customs and the religious dogma of a period but also through art's own culture w
17 Jul 2013 | 1 Comments
Michelangelo Rocks in The Battle of Cascina (1504)
This post explains additional obervations not included in the original article here on Michelangelo’s The Battle of Cascina, a 1504 cartoon for a never-completed mural in the civic heart of Florence. It is one of the most celebrated and influe
13 Jul 2013
Hockney Draws Rain or Shine
When an artist paints a subject, what is most likely to dominate their thoughts: the subject, the process of creating it or both? Well, you all know the answer to that one. Still, it was sweet to read David Hockney confirm it while discussing
11 Dec 2012
Memory Holloway and Picasso
Memory Holloway, an art historian at the University of Dartmouth, Massachusetts, has written a wonderful book on a magnificent group of etchings by Pablo Picasso. It is titled Making Time: Picasso's Suite 347. Suite 347 is the name given to
09 Nov 2012
Creation Theology
The painting above by an artist little known outside of Italy, Benedetto Bonfigli, is often titled The Annunciation of the Notaries and is dated to the middle of the fifteenth century. St. Luke who can be seen writing his gospel between the Virg
29 Oct 2012
Leonardo’s Hurricane Sandy
With Hurricane Sandy bearing down on the East Coast of the United States tonight, I thought I should take the opportunity to tell our users there that we are thinking of them and wish them well. We're in it too. If you have a second to take
25 Oct 2012
Jackson Pollock’s Poetry of the Self
“Painting is a state-of-being….Painting is self-discovery. Every good artist paints what he is.” Jackson Pollock (1912-56)1
Like hundreds of artists since the early Renaissance, and probably from even before then, the true m
The EPPH Blog features issues and commentary.
