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Laurence Cossé: Le Coin du Voile

Aug 14, 2025 / terry / No comments

Laurence Cossé’s 1996 novel Le coin du voile (A corner of the veil) describes the effects of a new and irrefutable proof for the existence of God. A priest who had resigned his calling to spend months in prayer and abstinence submits the proof for publication in Outlooks, the lay journal of the French Casuists. All those who read it are completely convinced. On seeing its effects, the Provincial of the Casuists decides to keep the proof secret until its effects can be more clearly understood. Finally, the Secretary of State at the Vatican arranges for all those who had read the proof to retire from any contact with the public and for the proof to be kept hidden. The proof becomes a pontifical secret – “a piece of information the Holy Father must not learn under any circumstance.”

Category: Art, Ethics, Literature, Painting, Politics, Religion / Tags: Alfred North Whitehead, Anselm, Antonio Escobar y Mendoza, Arthur Peacocke, Averroes, Benozzo Gozzoli, Blaise Pascal, Causistry, Charles Hartshorne, Ibn Rushd, Jacques Gaillot, Jesuits, panentheism, process theology, Thomas Aquinas

Paul-Émile Borduas: Le Refus Global

Aug 7, 2025 / terry / No comments

Paul-Émile Borduas (1905-1960) was a Quebec artist who became world-famous in the 1950s for his striking abstract paintings. In the early 1940s he had founded Les Automatistes, a group of artists interested in Surrealism. In 1948, he and his colleague had published the Refus Global (Total Refusal), a manifesto urging his fellow Québécois to throw off the oppressive authority of the Union Nationale Party and the Catholic Church. His call to freedom antagonized those in power. After being fired from his teaching position, he left Canada to work in New York and Paris. Shortly after his death in February 1960, the Liberal Party defeated the Union Nationale in the Provincial Election in June, 1960, and La Révolution Tranquille (Quiet Revolution) began to modernize Quebec society.

Category: Art, History, Painting, Politics, Religion / Tags: abstract expressionism, André Breton, Jackson Pollock, La Révolution Tranquille, les automatistes, Marie Alain Couturier, Ozias Leduc, Quebec, Riopelle, Surrealism

Black Square: The Russian Avant-Garde

Jun 8, 2025 / terry / No comments

At the Last Futurist Exhibition of Paintings 0,10 in Petrograd in 1915, Kazimir Severinovich Malevich (1879-1935) presented a set of Suprematist paintings. Among them was a small (80 cm square) canvas showing a black square on a white background. The painting was the final step in the rebellion against representational art: pure form without content. Black Square became emblematic of the Russian Avant-Garde, a modernist movement in Russian art, which predated the Russian Revolution, and then enthusiastically celebrated the new world brought forth by that revolution. However, the new politics did not embrace the new art. In the 1920s, the Avant-Garde was criticized as “formalist,” and replaced by the more politically amenable art of Socialist Realism.

Category: Art, History, Painting, Politics / Tags: Abstract Art, Constructionsim, Cubism, El Lissitsky, Futurism, Kazimir Malevich, Lyubov Popova, Mark Rothko, Modernist Revolution, Rosa Luxemburg, Russian Revolution, Socialist Realism, Suprematism, Vladimir Tatlin, Wassily Kandinsky

Sakura Hanami: Cherry Blossom Viewing

May 29, 2025 / terry / No comments

Sakura Hanami (桜花見, cherry blossom viewing), an age-old tradition in Japan, derived from the Chinese practice of enjoying wine and poetry beneath plum blossoms. In Japan cherry trees were more common and by the Heian period (794–1185) Japanese emperors held sakura hanami parties for the court. The custom soon spread to the samurai, and later to the common people. In the early 18^th Century, the shogun Tokugawa Yoshimune planted cherry trees in Asukayama park in the northern reaches of Tokyo, and opened up the park to its citizens. Nowadays thousands of people visit this and other parks to enjoy the blossoms, drink sake and feast on dumplings and cakes. In many places, temporary paper lanterns are hung to allow yozakura (夜桜, night sakura). Read more

Category: Art, History, Music, Painting, Poetry / Tags: Asukayama, Basho, Buson, haiku, Hiroshige, Hokusai, Japanese cherry, koto, Kunisada, Onitsura, Prunus serrulata, Santoka, Ukiyo-e, Yonishida, Yoshino

Robert Davidson: Serigraphs

May 24, 2025 / terry / 2 comments

Robert Davidson, one of Canada’s greatest artists, is one of the Haida people, whose ancestral territories are in the Haida Gwaii archipelago off the coast of British Columbia and the southern half of Prince of Wales Island in Alaska. His Haida name is G̲uud San Glans, which means “Eagle of the Dawn.” Davidson is a talented carver of argillite, jewelry and totem poles, a creator of striking masks, and a master of silkscreen printing (serigraphy).

Category: Architecture, Art, Ethics, History, Painting, Poetry, Sculpture / Tags: Bentwood Box, Bill Reid, Charles Edenshaw, cultural genocide, Haida Gwaii, Haida people, Masset, potlatch, Raven, Skidegate, Smallpox epidemic, Thunderbird, Totem Poles

Rembrandt: Self-Portraits

May 11, 2025 / terry / No comments

Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn (1606-1669) was one of the greatest painters of the Dutch Golden Age, that century following the establishment of the Dutch Republic free of Spanish rule. Among his many works were about 80 self-portraits – about 40 paintings, 30 etchings and 7 drawings – far more than any other painter before him. These works were created for several purposes: to provide examples of his art for prospective buyers, to work out techniques for visually representing emotions and ideas, and to record the passage of his own life. The illustration shows a small self-portrait from 1630, painted on copper: the discerning gaze.

Category: Art, History, Literature, Painting, psychology / Tags: Albrecht Durer, bankruptcy, Daniel Martin, Geertje Dircx, Giotto, Hendrikje Stoffels, Holbein, John Fowles, Kenwood House, Saskia van Uylenburgh, standard-bearers, Titian, Titus Rembrandt, tronies

Leading Ladies: Sarah Bernhardt, Eleonora Duse, Ellen Terry

May 2, 2025 / terry / No comments

In the latter half of the 19^th Century three actresses ruled supreme in the hearts of theatre-goers: the French Sarah Bernhardt (1844-1923), the Italian Eleonora Duse (1858-1924), and the English Ellen Terry (1847-1928). They played all parts: from the classics of Shakespeare and Racine, through the romantics such as Dumas and d’Annunzio, to the new naturalists such as Ibsen. They toured the world but acted only in their mother tongue. Their emotional intensity and stage presence communicated with their audiences even when their words were not understood. They were the first superstars: idolized by their public, celebrated by artists, and honored by poets.

Category: Art, Literature, Painting, Photography, Poetry / Tags: Alphonse Mucha, Anton Chekhov, Cleopatra, Eleonora Duse, Ellen Terry, Felix Nadar, Gabriele d'Annunzio, George Watts, Hamlet, Henrik Ibsen, Macbeth, Merchant of Venice, Much Ado About Nothing, Phedre, Sarah Bernhardt

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

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

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

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