William Koch on the Disciples of Ugliness
Tags/ Posted by Mark KerstetterSuppose you are Dick, or any man, smitten with a certain woman.continue reading this poem
In the early half of the eighteen hundreds the French Neo-Classical painter Ingres sneeringly described the younger Romantic painter Delacroix as “a disciple of ugliness”. A century later the French novelist Jean Genet claimed that “Ugliness is Beauty at rest.” Between these two events stretches the Romantic revolution in art.
The Strange Worlds of M C Escher
Tags/ Posted by Tony ThomasA half-naked woman dove into this pool in December.continue reading this poem
I try in my prints to testify that we live in a beautiful and orderly world, not in a chaos without norms, even though that is how it sometimes appears. M C Escher
Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning
Tags/ Posted by Mark KerstetterI came at a wee hour into my miniature existence.continue reading this poem
Robert Rauschenberg, Untitled, 1955 In 1953 Robert Rauschenberg, a young, little known artist, took a box of erasers and set to rubbing out a densely layered drawing by Willem de Kooning, the king of Abstract Expressionism, and he did it with the Master’s permission. Rauschenberg has said that he was “trying to find a way [...]
Odilon Redon: Prince of Dreams
Tags/ Posted by Tony ThomasI was ready to open: dew hung from my leaves. I was like all the otherscontinue reading this poem
Redon was born into a prosperous Bordeaux family and began drawing at the age of ten. As a young child he suffered from epilepsy and was sent away to live with his Uncle on the family vineyard at Peyrelebade in the Medoc, where he experienced the “full solitude of the countryside”. It was perhaps here that he formed the fusion of the natural and the fantastic that characterised his work as a graphic artist.
