The Shock of the New
Many years ago the BBC was a world class broadcaster; politically neutral, comedy that was actually funny and unafraid to broadcast high brow content. Unlike today where it is just […]
Art Movements
Macchiaioli, Impressionism 10 years before the Impressionists?
The Macchiaioli were a group of Italian painters who predated the Impressionists with whom they had many very striking similarities. Named “Macchiaioli” as an insult by a critical journalist writing in in November […]
Was modernism only about style?
Paul Cézanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire, 1902-04, oil on canvas, 73 x 91.9 cm (Philadelphia Museum of Art) When discussing style we have to look at what the word actually means. A […]
Northern Renaissance and Religion
In the mid fifteenth century there were very few media that suspended human disbelief, just visual art and acted plays, so the power of a virtual window into an alternate […]
Facade, 10b Elizabetes iela, Riga
Serendipity brought a number of factors together in the early 1900 to propagate an unprecedented building boom in Latvia that created the largest concentration of Art Nouveau architecture in the […]
Berthe Morisot, her Subjects and Reception
Berthe Morisot (1841-1895) spent her entire adult life (except for vacations) living in the Passy district of Paris. She was one of the founders of Impressionism, one of its greatest […]
Gustav Klimt. Three Ages of Woman
This is a square oil painting on canvas, 180cm X 180cm, completed in 1905, when Gustav Klimt (1862-1918) was at his artistic peak. It won the gold medal at the […]