Horner's Corner

The Ancient of Days

Isaac Newton

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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

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

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da Messina: St Jerome in his Study (15th century)

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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.

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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″

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Listening to the Piano Concerto Op. 42 by Arnold Schoenberg

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David: Death of Marat

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“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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• Share/Save

From top: The Meeting, The Pursuit, The Confession (a.k.a. Love Letters), The Lover Crowned. More on these pictures: here

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Isenheim, Alsace -painted about 1512. Hindemith’s Mathis der Maler symphony (which was inspired by Grunewald’s life) came on the radio and it reminded me of this amazing work of art. Grunewald seems to have been clear about what death and suffering look like -and a few other things.

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Joseph Anton Koch: The Schmadribach Falls, Bernese Oberland (1821-2)

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Photo by CH -2009

Photo by CH -2009

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The Blind Leading The Blind

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Our System

Jaroslaw Miklasiewicz

Paintings of Jesters, Irony, Village Idiots

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

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