In the year ahead, Gustav Klimt, Ferdinand Hodler, Tintoretto, Egon Schiele, and several others: anniversaries which I will celebrate here.
history of painting
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 world looks very different now, compared with the past. This explores differences in lighting, from candlepower to the excesses seen in modern cities, and their effects on painting.
The Eclectic Light Company 