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@simongood999 Her big reference point was the wonderful Soutine!
How is Britain not a republic?!! 🤔
‘The nation fretting over beards’.
On the left, a beautiful dress by Renoir in The Swing. On the right, Rita Ora on The Masked Singer. I wonder if by any chance they are related?
I’ve got a bad leg. Torn meniscus in my knee. So I’m anchored in front of the telly. I wish I was watching an art adventure with @arthistorynews. But as there isn’t one, I’m watching The Masked Singer! And I think Rita Ora’s dress is modelled on Renoir!
Happy New Year art lovers. It’s the birthday of the wonderful Chinese painter Qi Bashai (1864-1956). Let’s celebrate the delicacy of nature with him, even if we live in the city - PARTICULARLY if we live in the city! He was a great painter of shrimps!
Beep beep. It's the birthday of Henri Matisse(1869-1954). One of my problem artists. I get him - the pictures below are unarguably brilliant. But much of his work lacks grit. And I don't like how he fled to Vichy in WWII. Give me Picasso any day. Still, Dec 31 is a good birthday!
Beep beep. It's the birthday of David Alfaro Siqueiros (1896-1974) the fog horn of the Mexican Revolution. Boy was he loud! Too loud for me. I can forgive him his politics - hardcore Stalinist communism - but not the absence of pictorial subtlety. His art bullies you. End of.
The best saint? Well, St Sebastian is certainly up there! He only really became popular in the Mannerist epoch. Why was that? It's something else to ponder in my upcoming TV series about the movement. In the meantime, art lovers, who did these? NO GOOGLING! I'LL NOTICE!
1/One of the biggest turnarounds I have witnessed in my (long!) stretch as an art critic has been the explosion of interest in contemporary art. It was engineered chiefly by the auction houses who needed a bottomless supply of goodies to flog. As a result, no one seems to care..