Horner's Corner

A classic cover by Robert Frank for what may have been The Rolling Stones’ best album (nothing after it was as good, certainly):

The heroic version by David

Read more about David’s five versions of the painting via Napoleon Crossing the Alps – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

The more realistic version by Delaroche

 A Danish ‘realist’ painter with a taste for the melancholy and the infinite that the visible world seems to suggest to the receptive mind

The child and his wood

via ::: wood s lot ::: “the fitful tracing of a portal”.

An amazing picture. I think it may be El Greco’s best, displaying the mannerist style in the service of a visionary, metaphysical depiction of the meaning of death in Christian theology.

The Count had been a notably devout christian in the late medieval period. He appears in this painting as a 16th century nobleman; he is being held tenderly by  a father of the church (notice the way he is being held: almost like a child).

When one looks above, the painting itself seems transformed -glowing with an intense, ecstatic light, with all the forms flowing. We see St. John interceding on behalf of the deceased.. and there is a figure up in heaven there looking like King Philip  II of Spain himself, which is odd if it is him, as he was alive when this was painted. Since Orgasz’s (anachronistic) armour is like that of the King’s, as shown in a contemporary portrait, perhaps he was the true subject of the painting we see here.

Finally (not finally really, as there is so much else to see) -see the way Orgasz’s soul, here seen as a child, is moving up a kind of birth canal to heaven. For the vision here is truly of death as the start of the new life

Adolph Fassbender The Sentinels, 1937

Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840)

Moonlit Landscape

(watercolor; with moon cut out and inserted on a separate piece of paper)

via Crashingly Beautiful.

In Valences of the Dialectic Fred Jameson comments on the dialectical character of Mondrian’s art. It made me think of this.(CH)

“A Mondrian does not consist of blue rectangles and red rectangles and yellow rectangles and white rectangles. It is conceived – as is abundantly clear from the unfinished canvases – in terms of lines – lines that can move with the force of a thunderclap or the delicacy of a cat.

“Mondrian wanted the infinite, and shape is finite. A straight line is infinitely extendable, and the open-ended space between two parallel straight lines is infinitely extendable. A Mondrian abstract is the most compact imaginable pictorial harmony, the most self-sufficient of painted surfaces (besides being as intimate as a Dutch interior). At the same time it stretches far beyond its borders so that it seems a fragment of a larger cosmos or so that, getting a kind of feedback from the space which it rules beyond its boundaries, it acquires a second, illusory, scale by which the distances between points on the canvas seem measurable in miles.

” ‘The positive and the negative are the causes of all action … The positive and the negative break up oneness, they are the cause of all unhappiness. The union of the positive and the negative is happiness.’ The palpable oneness of the solitary flower or tower, being subject to time and change, had to give way to the subliminal oneness of a vivid equilibrium.”

- From David Sylvester, “About Modern Art: Critical Essays, 1948-1997″

Immanuel Kant

Check out this FIVE MINUTE guide to Kant’s Critique of Aesthetic Judgment, illustrated with comics.

(Kant’s “Critique of Aesthetic Judgement”: Drastically Abridged Awesome Version – lacunae.)

Douglas Wolk

“His body on the cross was therefore fully and entirely subject to the laws of nature.  In the picture the face is terribly smashed with blows, swollen, covered with terrible, swollen, and bloodstained bruises, the eyes open and squinting; the large, open whites of the eyes have a sort of dead and glassy glint. . . .

Looking at that picture, you get the impression of nature as some enormous, implacable, and dumb beast, or, to put it more correctly, much more correctly, though it may seem strange, as some huge engine of the latest design, which has senselessly seized, cut to pieces, and swallowed up–impassively and unfeelingly–a great and priceless Being, a Being worth the whole of nature and all its laws, worth the entire earth, which was perhaps created solely for the coming of that Being!  The picture seems to give expression to the idea of a dark, insolent, and senselessly eternal power, to which everything is subordinated, and this idea is suggested to you unconsciously.  The people surrounding the dead man, none of whom is shown in the picture, must have been overwhelmed by a feeling of terrible anguish and dismay on that evening which had shattered all their hopes and almost all their beliefs at one fell blow.  They must have parted in a state of the most dreadful terror, though each of them carried away within him a mighty thought which could never be wrested from him.  And if, on the eve of the crucifixion, the Master could have seen what He would look like when taken from the cross, would he have mounted the cross and died as he did?”

Feodor Dostoevsky: Spoken by Ippolit in The Idiot (Penguin 1955, tran. by David Magarshak, 446-7)

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