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Tag Archives: Jonathan Jones Guardian
all together now
Group portraits represent one of the most vexing problems a painter is ever required to resolve requiring as it may, expressive ingenities that defy standard compositional devices… In a group portrait each member must be awarded their proportionate measure of … Continue reading
hagel: bring it on home to zion
Is there any reason for this kicking the nominee for Defense secretary down the road? Like a Bruegel painting, the monstrous and deformed are indeed symbols of moral corruption as the lobbyists against Chuck Hagel’s nomination have tried to attach … Continue reading
high on the hog: boastful splendiferous types
…Of what there is no doubt is that this life was wasteful, extravagant, ostentatious- an appalling contrast, as Dr. Samuel Johnson noted, to the human wretchedness of rural or urban slums; yet it was saved both by its humanity and … Continue reading
Posted in Art History/Antiquity/Anthropology, Feature Article, Ideas/Opinion
Tagged David Garrick, Dr. Samuel Johnson, Earl of Egremont, George Macaulay Trevelyan, George Stubbs, Henry Fielding, James Boswell, Johann Zoffany, John Berger, Jonathan Jones Guardian, Madame Pickwick, Sir Robert Walpole, Thomas Gainsborough, William Hogarth
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lap of luxury
Let them eat falafel. It’s a lot of money. But Arafat had big bucks too. All this smoke signals and noises about statehood from the Palestinian Authority could just be hot air used as a pretext for money. Blackmail. Or, … Continue reading
decided and optimistic views
Josiah Wedgwood and his friends were the most brilliant group in England in the eighteenth-century- brilliant if highly eccentric. Most are forgotten today, but collectively they changed the world… Devotion to science and a respect for the arts were not … Continue reading
Posted in Art History/Antiquity/Anthropology, Feature Article, Ideas/Opinion
Tagged Anna Seward, Desmond Clarke, Erasmus Darwin, George Stubbs, James Brindley, James Watt, Jenny Uglow, Jeremy Bentham, Jonathan Jones Guardian, Joseph Priestley, Josiah Wedgwood, Lichfield Group, Madame Pickwick, madame pickwick art blog, Matthew Boulton, Richard Lovell Edgeworth, Robert E. Schofield, Sir Joseph Banks, The Lunar Society, Thomas Day, Thomas Day Sandford and Merton, William Rosen
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slave: barbarians and barter for the buck
Slavery. A peculiar institution of the Old World. The Greeks and Romans practiced slavery and condoned it; that is, condoned it for war, condoned it for luxury and condoned it for business. But even then, they knew it to be … Continue reading
Posted in Art History/Antiquity/Anthropology, Feature Article, Ideas/Opinion
Tagged Ancient Roman slave trade, ancient slave revolts, Capua gladiator school, Cicero, Edward Gibbon, Flavius Josephus, Florentinus Roman Jurist, Horace Roman poet, Jacques-Louis David, Jonathan Jones Guardian, Marcus Aurelius column Rome, Roman Retiarus gladiator, Slavery Greek history, Slavery in the Roman Empire, Sparatacus slave revolt, Spartacus
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a little piece of heaven?
Prostrate anxiety? the thingamagig complex. Objectifying the human body as part of splitting off the corporeal from the spiritual and convicting poor Eros of demon status, branding her forever with the unfavorable P.R. she has had to endure. The short … Continue reading
closet painter
A “flamboyant homosexual” as Dan Brown labeled Leonardo is misleading and irrelevant unless the author was searching for a DNA code for gay tendencies and not the other trail of splatter leading to the holy grail. Although a kind of … Continue reading
Posted in Art History/Antiquity/Anthropology, Feature Article, Ideas/Opinion
Tagged cynthia fuchs epstein, Da Vinci Burlington House Cartoon, da Vinci London Cartoon, dan brown da vinci code, Donald Kuspit, Giorgio Vasari, Jonathan Jones Guardian, klaus herding, Leo Bersani, Peter Paul Rubens, Sigmund Freud, sigmund freud leonardo
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kids play: just tickety-boo
There is the theory of Walter Benjamin on the discarded object, the former fetish object of capitalist consumer culture that becomes re-animated and re-contextualized after attaining junk and discard status. Transformed into a toy. It becomes re-emancipated with revolutionary potential … Continue reading
mad men
There was really no resemblance to social man. Artistically, a soul at war with the body in such visceral representations had heretofore gone unrepresented. The depiction of unreason in all its unfathomable, compelling, yet repulsive splendor. It was the beginning … Continue reading