MONET
While not the originator of the movement, Matisse’s poetic work of light and atmosphere gave the Impressionist’s their name. Painted in the wake of France’s emergent industrialization, Monet’s painting was a statement of individuality. When reproduction has become easy, and exact copies are the domain of machines, expression must come in the form of spontaneity and feeling. The work is not unfinished, but instead full of potential for what could be as modernity starts to infringe on the present. Thus, the hazy, rich colours, relaxed, free flowing brush strokes, and luminous palette that depict the port of Monet’s native town make no attempt at representing the real, but instead serve as a vision of utopia.
SARGENT
Not as much a portrait of girls as a portrait of childhood, Sargent’s most psychologically compelling work moves between beautiful and unnerving with each view. The four sisters are placed in their Parisian front room, ordered by age, with the youngest at the front and the oldest retreating into the shadows, a dark passageway behind her. The girls are wooden in their poses, so much so that the work has been called a still life, while the scenery, particularly the large Japanese vases, seem alive and dynamic. The work is temporal, time unfolds away from us as the children grow up and are moved away from the clarity of innocence into the dark unknowing of adolescence.
BRANCUSI
Two lovers are dissolved into a pure, single, abstract form in the first sculpture of modernism. Brancusi’s choice of a kiss to make this radical, revolutionary action was no mistake. In a fell swoop he was situating himself in pantheon of art history and making all the painted and sculpture depictions of romance that came before him seem old fashioned. Throughout the rest of his life he would come back again and again to this sculpture, creating new versions that were simpler, more formalistic than the ones before. Yet here is the first, a proto-cubist rendering that reduces the most natural of acts into art that approaches geometry. Inspired by African, Assyrian and Egyptian art, ‘The Kiss’ created a new language of Western Sculpture by subverting one of its most sustained motifs.
Lamia Priestley April 25, 2024
In 1978, Mark Pauline founded a new San Francisco based arts organisation called Survival Research Lab (SRL). The organisation puts on large-scale performances, which through extreme engineering, seek to liberate industrial machines from their own functionality. Machine Sex was their first performance…
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Robin Sparkes April 23, 2024
In my youth, I trained with a professional ballet company. Through the experience of being a dancer, learning the semiotics of ballet, I began to understand movement as a structural medium. The classical arabesque pose, for example, embodies suspension…
Thursday 25th April 2024
Today, Mercury concludes its retrograde orbit, an event often interpreted as emerging from a period of confusion and attaining clarity. This signifies its return to its regular west to east motion in the sky, alongside all other planets, after 25 days of retrograde movement. The conclusion of Mercury's retrograde phase harmonizes well with the balancing aspect of the constellation of Libra, which the moon will soon move beyond. It heralds a favorable time for socializing and nurturing relationships, especially now that the communication challenges brought about by retrograde Mercury have dissipated.