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Bilder aus Syrien
Not translated: Die Schilderungen kontinentaleuropäischer Stadtlandschaften und Alltagssituationen des niederländischen Künstlers und Archäologen Theo de Feyter haben wir bereits in einem zurückliegenden Beitrag vorgestellt. In seiner aktuellen Ausstellung in der Amsterdamer Galerie De Rietlanden Exposities, die noch bis zum 18. Januar 2009 zu sehen ist, zeigt de Feyter nun Arbeiten, die in den letzten Jahren […]
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Van Goghs Favorites III: Arthur Boyd Houghton – Our One-eyed Artist in America
«Until now I never knew Boyd H[oughton] was so interesting (…) Very strange. (…) After you have seen my Boyd Houghtons from the first year of the Graphics you will understand more clearly what I wrote about the importance of this master’s work.» Vincent van Gogh to Anton van Rappard, February and April 1883 (Letters […]
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Laptop in Chinese
Matthias Reinhold attended a six-month course dealing with traditional Chinese painting at the China Academy of Arts in Hangzhou, in southeast China. He presents a report for the MePri on the teachings conveyed at the art academy in the field of tension between classical landscape painting and the present-day reality of life, and on the […]
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The Recorded Other: Ethnographic Drawing, 1800-1900
In 1800, the Swiss educational reformer Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi found drawing to be “a general human matter,” “eine allgemeinmenschliche Sache.” This maxim is at once both a claim and a vision. Pestalozzi raised drawing to the rank of a fundamental anthropological fact supposedly preceding all ethnic, cultural, social, and professional differentiation. Seen before the backdrop […]
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The Privatized Subcontinent. On John Corbet Anderson and C.R. Francis:”Sketches Of Native Life In India” (1848)
Among the innumerable illustrated travelogues about India directed to a primarily British audience in the18th and 19th centuries, „Sketches of Native Life in India,“ a book that was published in London in 1848,has gained a special reputation for its exceptional visual impressiveness and its idiosyncratic qualities.Today, even single illustrated sheets from this work are almost […]
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Tinted India. Day & Son and the Photolithographs in “Tent Life in Tigerland”
In his 1888 collection of stories bearing the somewhat excessive title „Tent Life in Tigerland. Being Sporting Reminiscences of a Pioneer Planter in an Indian Frontier District“, we find former Australian Minister of Education James Inglis looking back to an adventurous stretch of his life as an indigo planter in the mangrove forests of Northern […]
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“Air Line” or The Unchosen Motif
The Dutch word “onverkoren” is a fictive, ambiguous term. It can mean both “not selected” and “not chosen.” Motifs not selected are motifs I came upon by chance. I am a painter who works outdoors, “in front of the motif.” My search for motifs in nature or in the city is influenced by the usual […]
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From Berlin to Danzig [Excerpts from: Daniel Chodowiecki’s Drawn Account of a Journey from Berlin to Gdansk in 1773]
Sorry, not translated yet. Der Abschied. Nach monatelangen Reisevorbereitungen verabschiedet sich der Künstler am Morgen des 3. Juni 1773 von seiner Familie im Hof seines Berliner Hauses in der Brüderstrasse. Der Aufenthalt in Pyritz. Am Morgen des zweiten Tags erreicht er Pyritz, wo das kränkelnde Pferd anfängt zu lahmen. Während es von einem Schmied beschlagen […]
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Robert Weaver II – Split-Level Books
In the 1980s, frustrated by the increasing restrictions in the field of magazine design, Weaver shifted the focus of his activities more and more to teaching at the New York Visual School of Arts and expanded a loose sequence of diary-like motif books he began with in the 1970s to form an independent complex of […]