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Friedrich Hölderlin: Little Knowledge but Joy Enough

Apr 22, 2025 / terry / No comments

Johann Christian Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843) was one of Germany’s greatest lyric poets. He was exquisitely sensitive to the beauties of the natural world, and thoroughly enamoured to the glories of Ancient Greece. His verses are strikingly beautiful in their sound, and have been set to music by many composers. As a young man he was very productive, writing poems and the epistolary novel Hyperion (1799). He also made important new translations of Sophocles’ Oedipus and Antigone. However, in 1806 he lapsed into madness. From 1807 until his death, he lived alone in a room overlooking the Neckar River in Tübingen. He mumbled to himself in many languages, and occasionally wrote brief fragments of verse for visitors, signing them with various pseudonyms and fictitious dates. This posting considers some of his poetry.The text of the poems can been enlarged by clicking on them to get a separate window. Read more

Category: Art, History, Language, Literature, Music, Poetry, Psychiatry / Tags: Alcaic Stanzas, Fates, French Revolution, Greek Independence, Heidegger, Hyperion, Moirai, Nazi Propaganda, Neckar River, Paul Celan, Romanticism, Stefan Zwieg, translation

Mathis der Maler: the Isenheim Altarpiece

Apr 6, 2025 / terry / No comments

Very little is known about the life of Matthias Grünewald, a painter (German Maler) who worked in the early decades of the 16^th Century in Germany. He is renowned for the pictures he created between 1512 and 1516 for the altarpiece of the Monastery of Saint Anthony in Isenheim in southern Alsace. The face of Saint Sebastian in one of these paintings (above) is considered to be a self-portrait.

Category: Art, History, Medicine, Music, Painting, Religion, Sculpture / Tags: Albrecht von Brandenburg, Ergotism, German Peasant's War, Hospital Brothers of Saint Anthony, Isenheim, Martin Luther, Matthias Grünewald, Nicklaus Hagenauer, Otto Dix, Paul Hindemith, Saint Anthony the Great, Saint Anthony's Fire, Saint Paul, Unterlinden Museum, W. G Sebald, World War I

Bridget Riley: Perceptual Abstraction

Mar 20, 2025 / terry / No comments

Bridget Riley (1931- ) came to fame in the early 1960s with her striking black-and-white abstract paintings, which were paintings were included in an important exhibition organized by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, entitled The Responsive Eye (1965-66). After her first success, she moved on to colored abstract paintings and prints that infuse the viewer with a sense of movement.

Category: Art, Language, Literature, Poetry, psychology / Tags: Futurism, Georges Seurat, Giacomo Balla, Kiss, Maurice de Sausmarez, Movement in Squares, Op Art, Perceptual Abstraction, Ruth Padel, The Responsive Eye, Venice, Victor Vasarely

Paul Klee: Color and Music

Mar 16, 2025 / terry / No comments

The paintings of Paul Klee (1879-1940) gave us a new way to look at the world, allowing us to go beyond our immediate perceptions and see the underlying forms.

Kunst gibt nicht das Sichtbare wieder, sondern macht sichtbar.
Art does not reproduce the visible; rather, it makes visible.
(Klee, Creative Confession, 1920/2013, part I).

Color and music were the two great principles underlying his art. The tonal relations between colors and the rhythms of their spatial presentation combine to give us understanding. Many composers have sought to express Klee’s paintings in their music, to complement his colors with their notes. This essay presents some of these compositions. On the right is a portrait of Paul Klee by Hugo Erfurth in 1922

Category: Art, History, Music, Painting, Poetry / Tags: Bauhaus, Blauer Reiter, Cubism, Degenerate Art, Franz Marc, Fugue, Nazism, Orphism, Paul Verlaine, Polyphony, Rainer Maria Rilke, Robert Delaunay, Scleroderma, Walter Gropius, Wassily Kandinsky

Ely Cathedral: The Ship of the Fens

Mar 5, 2025 / terry / No comments

Ely Cathedral was originally situated on a low island in the middle of the Fens, a region of marshland in eastern England lying inland of the Wash. Because of the flatness of the surrounding land the cathedral could be seen from great distances, appearing as the “Ship of the Fens.” The marshes were drained in the 17^th Century, but it is still easy to imagine the building floating above the waters: the embodiment of Auden’s image of the English cathedrals:

Luxury liners laden with souls,
Holding to the east their hulls of stone.
(Auden, 1936, p 43; also McDiarmid, 1978, p 292)

Category: Architecture, Art, History, Photography, Poetry, Psychiatry, Religion, Sculpture / Tags: Augustine of Canterbury, Cathedral, Dissolution of the monasteries, Ethelreda, Gothic, Henry VIII, Lady Chapel, Normans, Philip Larkin, Reformation, Richard Goodrich, Romanesque, Saxons, Sean Henry, Thomas Cromwell, Thomas Wynne, W. H Auden

Frank Lloyd Wright: the Prairie Home

Feb 25, 2025 / terry / No comments

Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959) was one of the great forces in modern architecture. In the early years of the 20^th Century, he designed many beautiful houses in a characteristic style that later defined the Prairie School of Architecture. This post comments on some of these houses.

Category: Architecture, Art, Sculpture / Tags: Darwin Martin House, Falliingwater, Form follows Function, Froebel Blocks, Little House Wayzata, Louis Sullivan, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Nike of Samothrace, Ornamentation, Prairie Home, Robie House, Solomon Guggenheim Museum, Usonian Houses

Looking at the Human Brain: from Vesalius to the Present

Feb 4, 2025 / terry / No comments

Andreas Vesalius (1514-1564) published his De Humani Corporis Fabrica (On the Fabric of the Human Body) in 1543 (O’Malley, 1964). This book, based on dissections of human cadavers, provided illustrations of the human brain that were both anatomically correct and esthetically pleasing. The scientists that followed Vesalius expanded on our knowledge, and produced their own representations of the human brain. This essay traces the evolution of these pictures.

Category: Art, History, Medicine, Neuroscience / Tags: Anne Carson, Brain Stem, Cerebral Cortex, Charles Bell, Christfried Jacob, Corpus Callosum, Diffusion Tensor Imaging, Fornix, Henry Gray, Henry Vandyke Carter, Hippocampus, John Willis, Limbic System, Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Papez, Rembrandt, Vesalius, Vicq d'Azyr

In Search of Form: The Sculpture of Henry Moore

Dec 11, 2024 / terry / 2 comments

Henry Moore (1898-1986), one of the greatest sculptors of the 20^th Century, created striking three-dimensional forms using many different techniques – carving, casting, modelling – and many different materials – stone, bronze, iron, wood, concrete, polystyrene. In the words of Herbert Read (1965, p 259)

He is a maker of images – or, as I prefer to call them because they have material existence – of icons, and he is impelled to make these icons by his sense of the forms that are vital to the life of mankind.

Each of Moore’s works was derived from nature, but Moore simplified and abstracted the experience to provide an emotional understanding rather than a sensory representation This essay comments on the nature of form and considers some of Moore’s works.

Category: Art, Painting, Philosophy, Photography, Sculpture / Tags: Adel Rock, Allegoryof the Cave, Aristotle, Art Gallery of Ontario, Barbara Hepworth, Four Causes, Geoffrey Farmer, Oval with Points, Plato, Reclining Figures, Standing Figure: Knife Edge, Theory of Forms

The Moissac Portal: Masterpiece of Romanesque Sculpture

Nov 27, 2024 / terry / No comments

In the 9^th and 10^th Centuries CE, Europe began to awaken from the has come to be known as the Dark Ages. Imposing churches were erected and many of these were decorated with sculptures. This new style of art and architecture, thought to be derived from that of the Roman Empire, has been called “Romanesque.” The sculpture from this time is full of a tremendous vitality and marked by a rich imagination. Some of the most impressive examples adorn the portal of the Abbaye de Saint Pierre in Moissac in southwestern France.

Category: Architecture, Art, History, Language, Religion, Sculpture / Tags: Abbaye Saint Pierre de Moissac, Ansquitil, Apocalypse, Apostle Paul, Bosom of Abraham, Christ in Majesty, Dives and Lazarus, Durand de Bredon, Flight to Egypt, Gospels, Jeremiah, John of Patmos, Moissac, Monastery, Revelation, Romanesque, Twenty-four Elders, Tympanum

Some of the Evil of my Tale: Lawrence of Arabia

Nov 18, 2024 / terry / 3 comments

In late 1916, Thomas Edward Lawrence (1888-1935), a British intelligence officer stationed in Cairo, was assigned as a military liaison officer to the forces of Hussein bin Ali al-Hashimi, the Sharif of Mecca, who, with his sons Ali, Abdullah and Faisal had initiated the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Turks in June 1916. Lawrence quickly adapted to the ways of his hosts and gained their trust. Under his leadership, the Arabs took the city of Aqaba in July 1917. This allowed the British to supply both their own army and the Arab rebels as they advanced on Jerusalem and Damascus. Lawrence led the Arabs as they disrupted the Hejaz Railway, and harried the Turkish army. His exploits were recorded on film and widely publicized by the American journalist Lowell Thomas, from whom came the epithet “Lawrence of Arabia.” Lawrence published a memoir of his experiences in 1927, Revolt in the Desert. A much more complete and introspective book on the Arab Revolt, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, was not formally published until after his death in 1935.

Category: Art, History, Literature, Painting, Philosophy, psychology, Religion / Tags: Aqaba, Arab Revolt, Asraq, Augustine, Burroughs motorcycle, Damascus, Deraa, Edmund Allenby, Faisal ibn Hussein, Hejaz, Hussein bin Ali al-Hashimi, Iraq, Jerusalem, Jordan, Lowell Thomas, masochism, Mecca, Palestine, Paris Peace Conferences, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Syria, T. E. Lawrence

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