https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXETztMZjZI Pablo Picasso lived to the age of 92. His total painting output is estimated to number over 4000 works. It’s conceivable that he could have produced 120 paintings between the ages of 20 and 25. At that time the...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nj_FQj_faHw Imagine a world where the most popular slogan among young people is “peace and love”, a world where chemically induced paradises are the norm, where the orderly and materialist virtues of the capitalist middle...
Jackson Pollock, Napoleon, Hirohito, Marie Antoinette, Oscar Wilde, Adam Smith, Malcolm X, Amadeus Mozart, Albert Einstein, Sir Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Vincent Van Gogh, Michelangelo, Sigmund Freud, four twelfth-century popes, Andy Warhol, and many...
It has become customary in the world of politics (with one glaring exception) for voters to elect leaders who are reasonably good looking, comfortable in their own skin, and well dressed. France has recently provided us with such an example. Michael Govan (born in...
If there is an ultimate narcissistic being, it is surely the artist. Yet when the artist turns to evoking his fellow artists’ work, provided that it consumes him with passion, it becomes exceptional. Currently showing in Antwerp at the MHKA, the city’s museum of...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IkclGz3JOgc Bruce Nauman is a towering figure in the art world but Bruce Nauman is also a mystery, for he is a complex artist. From 21 October, Moma in New York is dedicating its entire sixth floor as well as its PS1...
It is altogether highly unlikely. 660 km from Paris, deep in the heart of Aveyron in the South of France, there’s a town that cannot be accessed by motorway or by the TGV – neither of them travel through here – where you can visit the most substantial exhibition in...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K43H-AvZXtc It’s a huge shock. It’s a major exhibition driven by a universal message. It’s a piece of the history of modern art. In Paris there’s a place that is little known for its exhibitions, the Shoah Memorial located...
In Spain they love to eat. And when the most famous modern Spaniard, Picasso, sits down at the dinner table it would be easy to imagine it as an excessive affair. For the Malaga-born painter was a glutton. He consumed women one after another and seized upon images...
Two of the greatest artworks of the twentieth century were almost conceived in a brothel. The masterpiece “Les Demoiselles d'Avignon”, Picasso’s cubist manifesto now on display at Moma, doesn’t depict pretty girls from the south of France but rather creatures...
Being a homosexual and a successful writer at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries could lead to dangerous situations. In France it wasn’t until 1982 that homosexuality was decriminalized. In England one of the most skilled wordsmiths in the land, Oscar...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UiYqoZrZJ8E An exhibition doesn’t need to be large for it to be sublime. Right now, the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris is staging an exhibition of this kind. It is in this institution, the setting for what could be called...