Tag: ART
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No comments on Joseph and the value of ordinary lives
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The Doctor was sitting in his easy-chair by the fireside, and his young wife was on a stool at his feet. The Doctor, with a complacent smile, was reading aloud some manuscript explanation or statement of a theory out of that interminable Dictionary, and she was looking up at him. But with such a face as I never saw; it was so beautiful in its form, it was so ashy pale, it was so fixed in its abstraction, it was so full of a wild, sleepwalking, dreamy horror of I don’t know what.
The eyes were wide open, and her brown hair fell in two rich clusters on her shoulders, and on her white dress, disordered by the want of the lost ribbon. Distinctly as I recollect her look, I cannot say of what it was expressive. I cannot even say of what it is expressive to me now, rising again before my older judgment. Penitence, humiliation, shame, pride, love, and trustfulness —I see them all; and in them all, I see that horror of I don’t know what.
Charles Dickens, David Copperfield -
I’m getting more and more interested in the (impressively technically advanced) Aztec and Mayan civilizations.
Historians have a hard time trying to explain how HernĂ¡n CortĂ©s, with a meager troop of a couple hundred soldiers, managed to defeat Moctezuma and effectively take possession of Mexico.
Painters Miguel and Juan GonzĂ¡lez depicted the Conquest of Mexico in a series of 24 canvas that one can see at the Museo del Prado website when entering the search term ‘Aztec’.
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J. and I are big fans of Benito PĂ©rez GaldĂ³s. If you enter the term ‘Trafalgar’ on the Museo del Prado website, you get these three:
Justo Ruiz Luna, Combate naval de Trafalgar
Eugenio Alvarez Dumont, Muerte de Churruca en Trafalgar
Francisco Sans Cabot, Episodio de Trafalgar
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There’s an established way, in literature and in pictures, as epitomized in Maugham’s The Moon and Sixpence, of portraying artistic passion as an inescapable, self-destructing, unstoppable, amoral urge to create.
Two films I’ve recently seen conform to this pattern. La Belle Noiseuse (Jacques Rivette, 1991) tells the story of a painter. It’s three hours fifty-eight minutes of painting. A naked model, for your information, who must surely hold the record of more time nude in a single scene. Not that the film’s great —but it conveys the passion, the need, the insanity.
A little more morbid but equally effective is Philip Kaufman’s Quills (2000), which freely portrays the Marquis de Sade at the mental asylum he was secluded in sometime in his life, privileged as an inmate as long as he’s allowed to write, until that comes to an end.
P.S.
PUZZLE (2018), directed by Marc Turtletaub. Not the typical tale of a woman realizing her potential, but rather a subtle, and remarkably not moving, portrayal of the different natural ways, good or bad, useful or harmful, in which ordinary men and ordinary women see the world around and interact with it.
You can also take the symbolic path and see here the story of Adam and Eve, retold, with the divine retribution being that of I’ll make it harder for you male to understand female, and for you female to understand male.
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This picture by Frederic Edwin Church deserves an entry