Art History Today

A Few Things

Just a few things: interesting stuff that might interest some people.

The organiser of a forthcoming conference in Amsterdam has asked me to publicise their event, which I’m very happy to do. It’s a conference on the Nabis, or Symbolist painters, to be held on 27th-28th October. 

The conference has been booked for the Thursday 27th and Friday 28th of October 2011 and will take place in Amsterdam, ABN AMRO Bank HQ. The conference will open with a plenary lecture on Thursday and a chance to visit the exhibition with a full day of 8 speakers on Friday. There are no registration charges but please contact Craig Landt (craig.landt@ed.ac.uk) to confirm your place.

Please find the conference programme here Nabis programme

 

 

Lily Ann Pop is an artist who lives in Turin; she has a sacred art project underway called “The Man of the Shroud.” this is always a fascinating subject, and Lily Ann covers it using photography.

From the Artist’s biography:

In March 2009 graduates in painting with the thesis: A mirror of the psyche: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari by Robert Wiene. An analysis of the scenographic aspects. Along with that presents the following four paintings: Square in Holstenwall, The Hallucination, Caesar the Somnambulist.The Awakening from the Grave, Caesar's death.
In May 2011 participates at the Sacred Art exhibition organized by the New Artemisia Gallery, located in Bergamo, Italy, with two photographs titled The Man of the Shroud (#1 and #2).
In October 2011 participates at the collective exhibition Art Italy in London at SW1 Gallery.
The artist is currently represented by Agora Gallery from New York.

The artist is keen to promote this project in the U.K., so if any museum people are reading this. Lily Ann’s full biography and portfolio van be found here.

 

Since I participated in a conference on Rubens last year I’ve kept an eye on all things Rubensian. This is the latest issue of the Rubens periodical, the Rubenianum Quarterly; topics include “ A Rubens University” and “Palazzo Rubens: The Master as Architect.”  You can download it here.

Spirit of Romanticism

There's an exhibition of photographs of jazz giants just opened in London. Marking the 50th anniversary of the legendary Ronnie Scott's club, The Spirit of Jazz will be on display at the Getty Images Gallery. Whilist looking at one of the exhibits- a study of Theolonius Monk- I couldn't help thinking of Courbet's Self-Portrait, better known as Man with a Pipe- placed next to Monk here. To me they seem to both convey that introspection associated with the artistic process. What they undoubtedly both show is the idea of reverie: a state of reflection, neither totally in this world nor out of it. Courbet seems less oblivious of the world, a bit too contrived, but Monk seems to have completely gone.

They're also representations of drug-taking: the hashish of 19th century romanticism in Courbet's case; the smoke-filled exhalation of some 20^th century variant in Monk's. Mention of hashish leads me to free associate from images of drug-taking to Baudelaire, a colleague of Courbet for a time. He was immortalized in the artist's titanic The Artist's Studio where he reads a book.

   
 
 
Still within the frame of 19th century romanticism, I move from Baudelaire to Edgar Allan Poe, whose works Baudelaire translated into French, whilst using Poe to sustain his own gloomy, boudoir meditations. This link gives me the opportunity to mention an exhibition dedicated to the author of the Fall of the House of Usher, just started in Baltimore. Edgar Allan Poe: A Baltimore Icon, features works by such faithful interpreters of Poe as Manet, Gauguin and Redon. There's even a strand that considers drugs and madness in the context of Poe's art.