02 Sep 2011
Art Bulletin’s Bumper Issue
This month’s Art Bulletin, the magazine of the U.S. College Art Association, is a bumper issue as far as we are all concerned. One article by Michael Lobel reveals how John Sloan, a member of the Ashcan School in early twentieth-century Americ
31 Aug 2011
The Importance of Source-Hunting
Source-hunting, searching for the origin of a form in an earlier artist’s work, is one of the most maligned activities in art scholarship. John Shearman, a professor of the history of art at Harvard, wrote:
‘The study of sou
29 Aug 2011
Petrarch on Imitation
I have always doubted whether the poets and writers in an artist's social circle have any greater understanding of visual art than we have. They are, of course, deeply familiar with poetic techniques in writing but seem blind to them in art.
26 Aug 2011 | 2 Comments
Quotation of the Week #1
"For a painter, it is probably twice as interesting if, while painting a nest, he dreams of a cottage and, while painting a cottage, he dreams of a nest. It is as though one dreamed twice, in two registers, when one dreams of an image cluster su
19 Aug 2011
Two Medieval Churches
Ever since I became aware that masterpieces of Western art tend to make more sense viewed through the ideas of esoteric Christianity than through the Secular Church’s religious dogma, I have been curious why art historians write as though ther
20 Jul 2011
A Musical Eco
Umberto Eco once wrote that “Every Broadway musical is, as a rule, nothing other than the story of how it is put on.”1 His insight into what the various plots have in common is striking because it is equally true of great paintings. The
12 Jul 2011
Introducing Bellini’s “Eyes”
I have recently introduced the argument that a significant number of compositions by Giovanni Bellini are not just representations of the apparent scene but, on another level, are representations of giant “heads”, “faces” or parts of fac
04 Jul 2011
Left Right, Open Closed: Eyes and Perception
I have explained under the theme Insight-Outsight how poetic painters often distinguish between two different modes of perception: outwards to see the exterior world of matter, inwards for insight into the soul and imagination. It is such a comm
20 Jun 2011
EPPH’s Principal Principle 1: What is Art?
I’ve received criticism from a frequent viewer that this site is too devoted to portraiture. Certainly the discovery about portraits is the simplest new idea to grasp and, for that reason, is featured on the video. It is only, though, one smal
13 Jun 2011 | 1 Comments
Breaking out of the World
For aeons men and women have thought that the stars in the night sky were pin-prick size holes in the fabric of the cosmos and that the bright light pouring in through these holes was visual evidence of a truer reality beyond. Above, in what is
05 Jun 2011
Woody Allen’s a Great Master
I've just seen Woody Allen's latest film, Midnight in Paris. Spot on. Exactly as we explain great masterpieces. It's about an American writer, clearly Woody's alter ego, who gets lost in his own imagination. A car from the 1910&#
01 Jun 2011
What Art is Not
Wassily Kandinsky, said to be the first artist to paint complete abstraction, is an interesting milestone on our way to understanding art. After all, from the development of truly figurative and illusionistic art in the Renaissance up to the arr
29 May 2011
Gormley on Art
Contemporary art is not my specialty. I do, however, keep my eyes open and I can't help getting the sense that many prominent artists today practice every painter paints himself in one way or another. The British sculptor, Anthony
15 May 2011
Wisdom and Leonardo’s Self-Portrait
One of the mysteries surrounding Leonardo’s so-called self-portrait (above center) is that it only emerged in the early nineteenth century. It was then decreed to be a self-portrait based on its likeness to the frontispiece portrait of Leonard
07 May 2011
Ballasteros and Art’s Bubble
Artists when they conceive their images, even before they begin to paint, are in their studio. The word studio comes from the little room in which Renaissance princes went to study and think. At a time when most people’s lives were played
04 May 2011
Picasso on Art vs Painting
I hoped to show in the last entry [“Picasso’s Pain on Being an Artist”] that Picasso’s distinction between a painter and an artist matches our own – that on the underlying level art depicts the creation of the work
27 Apr 2011
Ratatouille and the Great Masters (of all genders)
What do Raphael’s La Fornarina and Ratatouille have in common? Much more than you might think, their superficial differences disguising their fundamental similarity. The idea that significant art depicts a moment of its own making within t
20 Apr 2011
Celebrating Good Friday
Isn’t it rather morbid and paradoxical for Christians to celebrate the death of Christ on Good Friday? What’s so good about killing your God? Ah, you’ll be told, that was the day He died for our sins for all humanity? But doesn
19 Apr 2011
Why Artists Execute Themselves
Time and again we have shown how an execution in art depicts an artist executing his picture, even when the genders are switched. Judith executes Holofernes' head, David Goliath's head. That is, in part, why so many artists have portrayed themse
15 Apr 2011
Bizarre but True!
I’ve just placed a short essay on the site titled “How Forms in Art Work.” It describes as far as we can tell how images appear in an artist’s mind and in their art. I wrote it a few years ago to correct a mistaken view a
08 Apr 2011
Art vs. Illustration
Art is not illustration. We all know that. Illustration simply depicts a verbal story and that alone cannot be art. We call those image-makers “illustrators” because they copy reality or a written story. We should not give them the grander t
28 Mar 2011
The “Open Drawer” Question
I’m traveling and don’t have much time to go into explanation. For more than ten years I have been bugged by the “open drawer” question: why do so many still-lifes by artists as different as Picasso (above) and Chardin ha
23 Mar 2011
Poetry from Libya’s Descent into Hell
We spend so much time studying art here that hours reading literature are rare. So I was intrigued by the story of the New York Times reporters (one, a woman) captured by government troops in Libya and recently released. Their account in to
15 Mar 2011 | 2 Comments
Leo Steinberg and Christ’s Organ
Leo Steinberg died two days ago in New York City at the age of 90. He was an art historian who wrote English clearly and had an unusual eye. His most important contribution was not, as is generally believed, his book Other Criteria in which he c
01 Mar 2011
A round of cheers for Michael Fried, please!
I have just finished reading Michael Fried’s The Moment of Caravaggio published last year. What a book! A compilation of his A.W. Mellon lectures at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC he applies to Caravaggio the same kind of th
30 Jan 2011
Note on Style
Style, the traditional method of classifying art, is rarely mentioned on this site because it has little effect on interpretation. Mark Roskill, the late art historian, wrote in his book The Interpretation of Pictures:
‘Discussion[s]
28 Jan 2011
Reality, History and Minor Masters
If you want to learn about the history and culture of a period, you’d be better off studying minor painters like the one above. They generally copy reality faithfully like an art student painting a landscape. Great masters, however, design
17 Jan 2011
Manet’s Errors
Edouard Manet would have been amused by his critics, then and now. In the 1950’s Clement Greenberg placed Manet at the center of his theory that modern painting had no meaning beyond emphasizing its own essential character. Thus the “flatnes
14 Jan 2011
What do Contemporary Artists Know?
Why do so many contemporary artists place themselves at the center of their work? Think about it. Yasamusa Morimura paints himself into his copies after old masterpieces; he’s not the only one to do so either. Cindy Sherman has photographe
08 Jan 2011
Picasso and Paul McCartney’s Two Fingers
Alberti’s Window, an art history blog, has an intriguing video of Paul McCartney discussing the origin of his song Two Fingers. McCartney was in the waiting-room of a hospital staring at a poster of Picasso’s painting, The
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