One woman has her breasts showing through her white, nearly transparent shirt as she hacks away with a sword amid great spurts of blood at a man who only moments earlier was perhaps her lover. The other’s neckline dips low to reveal a milky-white neck, her head tilted...
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...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLpiHClll00 “I am Madame Bovary”. These vague words are attributed to Gustave Flaubert, but they do express a truth of paramount importance in terms of creativity. The raw material for artists is the artists...
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=DftPH89bSyg In his youth, before earning his living as a painter, he taught drawing but he also worked as a psychic medium. This is a way of situating the figure of Frantisek Kupka, born in 1871 into a modest family from...
When we were little, one of the most exciting activities proposed to us during summer camps or as one of our extracurricular activities was to go on a treasure hunt. These days, the only kinds of treasure hunt on offer to us poor adults with boring schedules are...
You won’t escape Van Gogh in Arles. While he has indeed been buried since 1890 in Auvers-sur-Oise, he has never been so present in the Camargue city where he stayed for little over a year. Never mind the sunflowers growing in the surrounding fields, as though designed...