As a child I'd spend hours reading a Reprint Society volume of my mother's called "Paintings of the World's Great Galleries" - you can still find it on ebay. We had to make our own amusement then.
Even before I'd reached the age of discretion (and appreciation of the female posterior) I thought the Rokeby Venus was wonderful.
(For some reason I was also taken with Yves Tanguy. 'Multiplication des Arcs' looked like an organic, futuristic cityscape. And 'From Green to White' is reminiscent of HP Lovecraft's nightmare Antarctic city in 'At The Mountains of Madness'.)
3 comments:
The Venus was slashed and mutilated by a Canadian suffragette, Mary Raleigh Richardson, in 1914.
"The destruction wrought in the seven months of 1914 before the War excelled that of the previous year. Three Scotch castles were destroyed by fire on a single night. The Carnegie Library in Birmingham was burnt. The Rokeby Venus, falsly, as I consider, attributed to Velázquez, and purchased for the National Gallery at a cost of £45,000, was mutilated by Mary Richardson. Romney's Master Thornhill, in the Birmingham Art Gallery, was slashed by Bertha Ryland, daughter of an early Suffagist. Carlyle's portrait of Millais [sic] in the National Portrait Gallery, and numbers of other pictures were attacked, a Bartolozzi drawing in the Doré Gallery being completely ruined. Many large empty houses in all parts of the country were set on fire, including Redlynch House, Sommerset, where the damage was estimated at £ 40,000. Railway stations, piers, sports pavilions, haystacks were set on fire. Attempts were made to blow up reservoirs. A bomb exploded in Westminster Abbey, and in the fashionable church of St George's, Hanover Square, where a famous stained-glass window from the Malines was damaged ... One hundred and forty-one acts of destruction were chronicled in the Press during the first seven months of 1914."
http://www.hastingspress.co.uk/history/mary.htm
Desmod Jones
At The Mountains of Madness. Now you're talking my language Laban. Lovecraft was a genius, albeit a severely messed up one!
'Their hand is at your throat, yet you see them not.'
Always reminds me of the EU, that quote. And for that matter, there's the Constitution too.
'That is not dead which can eternal lie...'
Excellent, DSD.
Like Great Cthulhu or the American South, the Constitution will rise again !
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