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Bangs, shakings and floodings (Masters of Faits Divers – Painting V)
Faits divers-coverart was a transformation of history painting into the realm of urban civil culture, with the middle class-reader as sovereign.
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Scenes from the Armenian Massacres of 1896
These first near-genocidal series of atrocities committed against the Armenian population were carried out during the reign of Abdul Hamid II, the last sultan effectively to rule over the Turkish state. The police responded to a demonstration held in Constantinople in September 1895 by Armenian political organizations which sought to pressure the government and the […]
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“The Boy who Spat in Sargrenti´s Eye.” A postcolonial Melton Prior novel by Manu Herbstein. A review.
Special artist Melton Prior plays a leading role in a new novel by distinguished South African writer Manu Herbstein. Composed in the form of a fictitious diary, the historical background of the adventurous story is provided by the second campaign of the British Empire against the powerful Asante nation, located in the regions of present-day […]
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Urban Apaches: Torture, Blood & Thunder (Masters of Faits Divers – Painting IV)
“Les Apaches” can be considered as an early manifestation of rebellious youth culture in Paris. They were organized in street gangs with special idioms and dress codes very similar to those of the London costermonger-subculture. In 1907 “Le Petit Journal” called the ruffian Apaches “the sore of Paris. More than 30.000 blighters standing against 8.000 […]
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Remember Korea / Gondolj Koreara (1952), Budapest, 1952
-The key issue of the graphic portfolio created by the Hungarian artist Bencze László is the massacre near Sichon, North Korea, in the autumn and winter of 1950 with more than thirty thousand victims, mainly civilians. From the Communist side, these war atrocities were attributed to the American invading forces. Like Picasso’s famous painting Massacre […]
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Evil Empires I: Concentration camps in the Transvaal
During the Second Boer War the prestige of the British Empire sank to an all-time low. The main reason was the establishment of concentration camps in South Africa as a measure against the guerrilla war led by the local farmers against the Empire. Over 26,000 Boers, mainly women and children, died of hunger and diseases […]
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Death in the Shadows. “Black.Light Project”
The Black.Light project, which was initiated by war photographer Wolf Boewig and his companion, the travel writer Pedro Rosa Mendes, togehter with the graphic designers Henning Ahlers and Christopher Ermisch, is in many respects an adventurous one and, when it comes to openness and extension, without precedent: Ten comic artists, which are renowned for their fictitious work […]
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Heinrich Ehmsen: artistic witness of the Munich Revolutionary Days
I began my preoccupation with Heinrich Ehmsen at the end of the 1970s when I was studying at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Munich. In a study group concerned with exploring the image production during the Munich soviet republic, I took over the research on the topic of reportage drawing. It quickly became clear […]
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On Luis Camnitzer’s etching cycles, especially “Agent Orange “(1983-84)
At the end of the 1960s, the Uruguayan sculptor, graphic artist and art critic Luis Camnitzer (born 1937 in Lübeck), living in exile in America, founded the New York Graphic Workshop together with his colleagues Liliana Porter and José Guillermo Castillo. The aim of this venture was to remove the aura of elitism from artistic […]