20 Nov 2012 | 1 Comments
Bellows’ River Rats At the Metropolitan Museum.
George Bellows’ exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum opened last week and is well-deserved, showing us for the first time in modern memory the full scale of what he achieved in twenty-something years. He died at 42. The success of h
19 Nov 2012
Seeing Through the Artist’s Eyes
Michelangelo's Art Through Michelangelo's Eyes (2005) was my first publication because it demonstrates how important it is to look at poetic art that way, through the eyes of the artist. I have continued to show how the same method works wi
13 Nov 2012
Six Tips on How to Look at Art
The idea, peddled by many, that you can just stand in front of a work of art and let it speak to you is wrong. What, for instance, happens inside you when you look at the Mona Lisa? Probably not much. Indeed, as an adolescent trying to figure ou
29 Oct 2012 | 1 Comments
Andy Warhol: The Only Way Out is In!
Here for those familiar with the site is a late print by Andy Warhol. It provides the quotation of the week: "The only way out is in!"
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
22 Oct 2012
Tiepolo’s Magic Well
I, a complete novice, was in an art class the other day copying as a watercolor a drawing done in ink by Giambattista Tiepolo. The copy is illustrated above (lower image). While working on the shadows, though, in the lower left corner where the
18 Oct 2012
The Power of an Artist’s Imagination
Remember when you look at art that artists can do almost anything. They are not like you and I (apologies to any artists out there). Their imaginations are all-powerful. Take, for instance, this 1776 etching of the Colisseum in Rome by Giambatti
10 Oct 2012 | 1 Comments
Art, Generalization and Sight
One of the keys to understanding art is generalization because many of the most creative artists donate their ideas not to contemporaries or to those in the generation afterwards, who might not even understand, but to other great artists centuri
11 Sep 2012
Wisdom in Illustration
Academic art history is not the only place to turn to when seeking help understanding art. There is another group who understand art equally well: illustrators. The best graphic illustration done today is a step-by-step guide to the methods of t
30 Aug 2012
Manet’s Modern Methods
I was crossing the road when a delivery truck owned by a prominent online grocery in the New York area stopped at a light. It displayed a poster of their managers holding a blow-up of the product each specializes in (right). One of the meat mana
28 Aug 2012
Microbes & Man: The Essence of Art
Who we are, or rather who each artist was, is crucial to our understanding of art in ways that the literature on art rarely, if ever, addresses. Yet once the concept every painter paints himself is seen as central to understanding the artist&rsq
04 Aug 2012
Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty
I've been reading the Bhagavad Gita, India's gift to the world, and discovering how the themes and principles of good living that Krishna teaches are remarkably similar to those that both Christ and Buddha taught centuries later. No-one
25 Jul 2012
Manet’s Little Cavaliers
Major artists are often inspired by earlier masterpieces yet when the young Edouard Manet entered the Louvre to copy whatever he wanted he chose an insignificant little painting. Yes, it was then attributed to Velazquez but Manet, with an in-dep
22 Jul 2012
Anthropomorphic Landscapes
Visual metamorphosis. It's my term to describe a compositional method long used by major artists but virtually unknown to the art world except in a few rare cases. The only major exceptions I can immediately think of are Martin Schöngau
18 Jul 2012
Errors! Errors! Errors!
This is a piece of advice that I need to keep giving in case some newbies on the site have missed it. Even I sometimes forget it but Its importance cannot be overstated and is regularly overlooked in conventional art history. Look for the passag
05 Jul 2012
Higgs boson and the Arts
The Higgs boson may have been found. The news today is circling the globe faster than the speed of light, attracting elementary fascination. Everyone has their own twist on its significance to them even those, like me, whose knowledge of science
29 Jun 2012
Should we look for Originality or Similarity?
Some of the interpretations revealed here are so self-evident that you might wonder why art scholars never saw them before. I think there are many reasons but one is key. While we look for what art has in common with earlier art, academics tend
28 May 2012
Coins, tablets and Dürer
Coins draw groans. Walk into a roomful of coins in a museum and even the most ardent art lovers hurry through in the hope of finding some painting or sculpture on the other side. Nevertheless the designs on coins are one of the glories of Greek
19 May 2012
Every sculptor…....
Following one medieval image with another, Villard de Honnecourt’s 13th.-century sketch (above) of a stone-cutter sculpting his own foot conveys a message that every craftsman knew by heart, even in a different medium: every painter paints
18 May 2012
Joseph Leo Koerner and the Artist as Christ
Occasionally I see an image that turns on a light and helps illuminate an artist's way of seeing quite concisely. Fittingly, an illumination is one of them. The best book ever written on self-portraiture is probably Joseph Leo Koerner’s The Mo
26 Apr 2012
Canvas is Canvas
Most of the visual metaphors for an artist’s implements revealed here are related to their referent in art through their form, their function or some other more abstract link. A rifle or sword is long and thin like a paintbrush. They must be a
01 Apr 2012
Eureka! My Last Judgement on Michelangelo’s
Eureka!
For years I have struggled with the meaning of Michelangelo’s Last Judgment. The essay “Michelangelo’s Art Through Michelangelo’s Eyes” explains my overall understanding of the Sistine ceiling and the altar wall on whi
31 Mar 2012
Shakespeare’s Triggers
One of Shakespeare’s semantic tricks is to change the function of a word but still have it make sense. In the lines “To lip a wanton in a secure couch / And to suppose her chaste” the noun lip becomes a verb while wanton,
25 Mar 2012
Quotation of the Week #7
Edward R. Murrow, the famous American radio and TV journalist, did not have great portraits in mind when he said:
“The obscure we see eventually.The completely obvious, it seems, takes longer.”
22 Mar 2012
Johan Zoffany
I just missed, by all accounts, a landmark exhibition at the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, the first major exhibition devoted to Johan Zoffany (1733-1810). It just moved to the Royal Academy in London where it will stay until June 10
21 Mar 2012
The Beauty of Concision
Just as brevity is the soul of wit, so concision in composition is beauty in art. A lyricist could have put that better but you get my point. Even if you don't, please take a look at how the little corner illustrated above, from Manet's
13 Mar 2012
Titian as Raphael
I've just added an entry on a little-known but very intriguing portrait by Titian, known simply as Titian's Portrait of a Gentleman. Painted around 1520, it is, I believe, Titian's tribute to the recently-deceased Raphael. Hanging in the Palazzo
09 Mar 2012
Turner Online
So many of Turner’s canvases are eye-shaped and his viewpoint so clearly Romantic and mystical that I cannot understand how so few people recognize that these images are taking place inside Turner’s mind behind his eyes. Simon Schama
06 Mar 2012
Quotation of the Week 6
Plotinus' advice on how to see God is equally, or you might think even more, true about art:
‘For one must come to the sight with a seeing power made akin and like to what is seen. No eye
04 Mar 2012
Advertising Art
Two prints by different artists, both American admittedly but more than thirty years apart, were in the same auction this week (top and bottom)1 using the same “hint” – for want of a better term – that the actual su
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