Category : Musings

The Formal Nude

The Formal Nude

  It occurred to me one afternoon in Paris what made some female nudes shocking - it depends on what they are wearing, or, on their hair. The occasion was the Felix Vallatton exhibition in January. The artist was perhaps best known for his curious conversation pieces of couples in which the...

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Private View

Private View

  In London over Christmas I paid a visit to the London Museum with my wife and 10 year old daughter and what did we run across quite unexpectedly? This, the actual placard that the so called Protein Man paraded up and down Oxford St, London for 25 years. His name was Stanley Green, a...

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Karshed

Karshed

  I have just finished the first biography I have ever read of a photographer, the Canadian Yousuf Karsh (1908-2002)*. So well known in the immediate post-war period that to have one's portrait taken by him was referred to as being 'Karshed'. He was an émigrée from Armenia, a survivor of...

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Fact and Phantasm

Fact and Phantasm

  Do artists still work from poetry? In the past it was common for a painter to be inspired by the poets, but is there poetry in Hirst's The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living' (AKA The Pickled Shark) ? I ask this as I have just finished a biography of Samuel...

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Untitled…..grrrrr

Untitled…..grrrrr

  I was on my annual visit to the Bologna Art Fair  recently and I thought if I see another art work titled "Untitled" then I am going to go on a visual strike and just not pay any more attention to the art work. This diatribe of mine was triggered by seeing a photograph on a blog that...

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Just a Chipolata

Just a Chipolata

  This photo was taken in 1989 and inspired not by work of art but an aftershave advertisement. I have blogged it because this picture taken over 20 years ago has become topical.  The caption reads,   'Men's Perfume, Stories about Women'. I built a set as best I could with five friends...

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