Paintings on walls and ceilings created a virtual reality long before the term was coined. Even now, they can be breathtaking in effect.
history of painting
In the year ahead, Gustav Klimt, Ferdinand Hodler, Tintoretto, Egon Schiele, and several others: anniversaries which I will celebrate here.
A look back at some of my favourite articles on painters and painting, from Moreau and Salome, to Merson’s tame wolf.
He was remarkably successful, a truly self-made artist, who rose from nothing to international renown. But did he ‘occasion a revolution in the art’?
We’re easily convinced of the reality of 2D images – as when early audiences panicked as the Lumières’ train ran at them in a movie. How has our exposure to pictures changed, though?
What to our ancestors would have been blurred and defective images are now accepted as depicting motion. How our perception has changed, thanks to photography.
The mental images which we perceive are created in the brain, which has some fixed ideas about how to do that. They’re not the same as optical laws used in cameras and related devices.
Exposure to colour was, for centuries, determined by class. The poor lived in largely drab worlds, but the rich surrounded themselves with vivid hues. This all changed in the late 19th century and the 20th.
The Norwegian landscape painter who loved his fjords invites Munch to Berlin, and causes a furore. It makes Munch’s career, and changes the history of art.
Strange coincidences build a chain of events. From the Baltic German who painted the coast, to a Norwegian who sold paintings of Norwegian fjords in Germany.
The Eclectic Light Company 