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Algerian Guerrilla War II: Les Portes de fer – The Iron Gates of Subjugation
Pictorial Reports from the Algerian Guerrilla War II After a series of devastating defeats against the insurgent Arab militias led by Abd el-Kader, the French tried to gain valuable time through the Treaty of Tafna to consolidate their military. The agreement, concluded in May 1837, granted Abd el- Kader sovereignty over the largest part of […]
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William James Linton – A Life in the Collections
On the Formations of Political Art and Wood Engraving William James Linton has left behind an immense body of artistic work. He executed thousands of commissioned and autonomously conceived engravings, a number of paintings and watercolours; moreover, he served as editor to several journals, ran his own private presses, contributed hundreds of poems and polemics […]
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Slavs and Tatars Presents “Molla Nasreddin”
In a second-hand bookstore in Baku, Azerbaijan a group of international artists named Slavs and Tatars came across some volumes of the once wide spread historial Azeri magazine Molla Nasreddin. “It was bibliophilia at first sight. Its size and weight, not to mention the print quality and bright colors, stood out suspiciously amongst the meeker and dusty […]
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The cartoonist and the president. Ali Ferzat and Bashar al-Asad.
In August 2011, Ali Ferzat, the well-known Syrian cartoonist, was molested in Damascus. Returning home from work in the middle of the night, he was dragged from his car, beaten up and dumped along the airport road outside of town. His attackers especially targeted his head, eyes and hands. On YouTube one could see photographs […]
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Painting in Damascus (MePri-News)
9.10.2011 Damascus I: The invisible insurrection Dutch artist Theo de Feyter recently published some of the paintings and drawings which he created in April this year in the streets of Damascus. “The situation was very tense due to the demonstrations that took place allover the country.” ——————————————————– 14.10.2011 Damascus II: Portrait Studio From September 18th […]
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Dangerous Drawings: Cartoons in the Arabian Revolution
21.3.2011 The Power of Image – International Conference on Caricatures in Egypt Caricatures as vehicles of political and social propaganda are the subject of an international conference organised in Egypt by Heidelberg University’s Cluster of Excellence “Asia and Europe in a Global Context”. It is organised by research project B1 “Satire”, supervised by Prof.D. Hans […]
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Algerian Guerrilla War I : Auguste Raffet & Horace Vernet – Pictures of Dynamized Masses and the Art of Reconstruction
Pictorial Reports from the Algerian Guerrilla War I The occupation of Algeria was initiated by Charles X in June 1830 with the capture of Algiers, just a few weeks before the collapse of the Bourbon Restoration regime. At first, the bourgeois July Monarchy under Louis-Philippe had a bit of a hard time warming to this […]
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Never stop working – Die unübersehbare Ankunft des Mr. James Castle
Hier ist nun einer im Museum (an-)gelandet, der wohl kaum je darauf abzielt hat, dortin zu gelangen. Weil er womöglich gar nicht wirklich wusste, was ein Museum ist: der taub geborene, “self-taught artist” James Castle ( geb.1899 in Garden Valley/ Idaho – gest. Boise/Idaho 1977), von dem wir nicht wissen, ob er sprechen, lesen konnte […]
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Examples of handdrawn photo-views and photo-graphic hybrids [Handdrawn Photo-Views by Louis Glaser] (Recommended by Ben Katchor)
Souvenir postcards are a major source of visual documentation, in some cases the only surviving images of places and things.There are several souvenir albums online published by Louis Glaser from Leipzig in the last decades of the 19th century. The Catskill archive explains that these views were made to simulate photographs in texture and tone, […]
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“… The World Was Becoming Numerical.” Informational Graphics and Art in Dierk Schmidt´s “Die Teilung der Erde”
Informational Graphics and Art in Dierk Schmidt’s “Die Teilung der Erde” The essay is part of the comprehensive project documentation “Dierk Schmidt: The Division of the Earth – Tableaux on the Legal Synopses of the Berlin Africa Conference.” Edited by Lotte Arndt, Clemens Krümmel, Dierk Schmidt, Hemma Schmutz, Diethelm Stoller, Ulf Wuggenig, Cologne 2010. Dierk […]