pablo picasso

At his first Pan-Australia Dada exhibition, Barry Humphries had packages printed up bearing the name Platitox, which allegedly contained a poison to put in creeks to kill the platypus, that much-loved, much-protected and playful native animal. “So why have an exhibit which offers a pesticide to destroy these animals? Because...
> culturalelsewhere/2168/barry-humphries-on-the-record-the-early-life-of-an-agent-provocateur/

Of all the monuments a man has built to himself few, if any, are more bizarre than the grand conceit Salvador Dali designed in a burned-out theatre in his birthplace of Figueres. A little more than an hour north of Barcelona by local bus, Figueres is a modest, not especially interesting town of some 35,000 people. But it is the...
> culturalelsewhere/1785/salvador-dali-his-museum-in-figueres-the-disneyland-of-the-disturbed/

If we believe that, as is commonly said, great art is born of great suffering then Norwegian painter Edvard Munch (1863-1944) was born to make great art. He certainly exceeded his quota of great suffering. Munch's mother died of tuberculosis when he was 5 and his sister Sophie - the subject of his first major work, The Sick Child -...
> writingelsewhere/2701/the-story-of-edvard-munch-by-ketil-bjornstad-death-at-his-shoulder/

Should Venice sink beneath the sea, it is possible the city could be reconstructed exactly by referring to the millions of photographs tourists have taken of every palazzo, piazza, corner and calle. On any given day -- in bitter winter or the smelly humidity of summer -- Venice is crammed with visitors snapping and filming. ...
> culturalelsewhere/2627/the-venice-biennale-2009-art-for-arts-and-its-curators-sake/

In his last self-portrait -- a crayon on paper work done nine months before his death in 1973, at age 91 -- Pablo Picasso created a disconcerting image: the eyes wide as if terrified, the mouth taut and drawn tightly over the teeth, and the face gaunt with defined cheekbones quite unlike what his bowling ball face actually looked like. It...
> culturalelsewhere/363/picassos-last-works-the-final-mask-essay-2003/

It can happen anywhere: in Miami you hear OMC's How Bizarre, on late-night television in London Smash Palace turns up, in a Japanese park you come across Maori carvings, in Hong Kong a woman is wearing a bone pendant of familiar design ... This not the shock of the new, rather the frisson of the familiar.Our culture, inchoate some say,...
> culturalelsewhere/1783/colin-mccahon-in-melbourne-context-is-everything-2001/

Antoine Wiertz was one pretty sick bastard all right. The gallery he demanded be built to house his gigantic paintings in his adopted hometown of Brussels is  testament to an artist obsessed by death, disembowelment, rape, damnation and a virulent sexuality. Everywhere flesh is impaled or torn, eyes glisten with horror, and spears...
> culturalelsewhere/1993/antoine-wiertz-rape-damnation-and-the-art-of-darkness/

An intimate relationship between creative people may be as volatile and destructive as it can be productive and rewarding. And almost inevitably one partner, for reasons of success or force of personality, can dominate at the expense of the other. This illustrated collection of nine essays (which eschew the obscurantism of much academic...
> writingelsewhere/1978/between-the-lives-partners-in-art-edited-by-deborah-shepard-reviewed-2005-lives-in-the-margins/

Out here in this bleached-brown landscape the wine is fine, and so are the views. Gazing across the rolling Yarra Valley less than an hour from inner-city Melbourne, the eye can take in columns of grape vines marching in orderly lines over low ridges, expensively manicured golf courses, and huge steroid-expanded homes running to many...
> culturalelsewhere/1846/tarrawarra-gallery-in-the-yarra-art-in-the-landscape/

Popular culture loves nothing so much as the early death of an obvious talent. We are left with questions and the speculation on just what direction the gift might have moved in had the artist lived. Some of that discussion will doubtless be aired with the Auckland exhibition of works by Thames-born painter Rhona Haszard, who fell to her...
> culturalelsewhere/1761/rhona-haszard-portrait-of-the-artist-as-a-young-woman-2004/

Art Spiegelman – like many authors one suspects – can’t resist looking for his book in stores. But the categories bookshops have are seldom very useful he says, and his book Maus, a 160 page paperback-sized comic, defies convenient pigeonholing. Store owners think it is “humour” because it’s a comic...
> writingelsewhere/1760/comix-artist-art-spiegelman-interviewed-1991-the-maus-that-rawed/

Lazlo Moholy-Nagy would argue that our eyesight was defective and limited. He would cite the pioneering 19th-century German physiologist Hermann von Helmholtz, who told his students if an optician made a human eye and brought it to him he would say, "This is a clumsy piece of work".The punchline for Moholy-Nagy would be that we have a...
> culturalelsewhere/1683/moholy-nagy-and-the-bauhaus-photography-exhibition-essay-2003/

"Nothing in this life that I've been trying,can equal or surpass the art of...
> culturalelsewhere/247/an-essay-on-the-inevitable-the-art-of-dying/

Sex fascinated Stanley Spencer. But so did angels, the transcendence of the spirit through faith, and life in his home village of Cookham where, as a child, he believed biblical events had taken place and been witnessed by local folk.This confluence of religious and rural influences, and his belief that sexual and spiritual desire were...
> culturalelsewhere/233/sir-stanley-spencer-essayed-2003-of-angels-and-dirt/

Gazing across the rolling Yarra Valley less than an hour from inner-city Melbourne, the eye can take in columns of grape vines m in orderly lines over low ridges, expensively manicured golf courses, and huge steroid-expanded homes running to many millions of dollars. In the distance lie the blue shimmering hills of the Great Divide.This is...
> travelstories/298/yarra-valley-victoria-australia-art-in-the-hills/