Category: Art Essays
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Ensor’s use of emesis in art
Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden The Belgian artist James Ensor (1860-1949) was born to a Belgian mother, Maria Catherina Haegheman, and an English father, James Frederick Ensor. He was born and spent his entire life in Ostend, a summer resort town on the Belgian North Sea coast. The senior Ensor was not successful in business. He had…
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Depiction of defecation in the works of Pieter Bruegel
Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden “Civilization rests upon two things – the discovery that fermentation produces alcohol, and the voluntary ability to inhibit defecation.” —Robertson Davies, The Rebel Angels The life of the peasant in the sixteenth century was hard. There were wars of religion, war taxes, and Spanish troops occupied the Lowlands. Peasants also had the…
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Arthur Bispo do Rosário: Creation in psychosis
Rebecca Grossman-KahnMinneapolis, Minnesota, United States In a sprawling, cavernous art museum in Buenos Aires, I turned a corner and my eye caught on what appeared to be, from across the room, cardboard. As I walked closer to the display, I saw a large brown rectangle plastered with smaller blue rectangles in two rows. Each blue…
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Mark Rothko and the dialogue in his mind
Mildred WilsonDetroit, MI “The mind is what the brain does—and more. The mind has a mind of its own. The main business of the mind is to mind its own business.” Edwin S. Shneidman1 Mark Rothko was one of the most celebrated abstract expressionist painters in the twentieth century. In 1961, he opened a two-month…
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Stitches as mending, stitches as healing
Kelley SwainOxfordshire, England Knitwear designer and disability-access advocate Kate Davies writes of discovering her love of knitting at university: “The movement of your hands helped you to find a different kind of mind space. You lost yourself in the rhythm of your own industry. You made a thing.”1 There is something extraordinary about taking one…
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The Portrait of Doctor Gachet
Nicholas KangAuckland, New Zealand On a spring evening in New York, a portrait is unveiled before a crowded auction room. It pictures an older man wearing a dark blue coat with luminous green buttons. His elbow rests on a red table beside two yellow books. In front of him is a glass with faded purple…
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How black turned white
Kateryna TsoiKharkiv, Ukraine In 1876, the World’s Fair was held outside Europe for the first time, taking place in Philadelphia and coinciding with the centenary of the US Declaration of Independence. Thomas Eakins, not yet a well-known artist, decided to present a large-scale canvas at the exhibition of a subject he knew well. An ardent…
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Pieter Bruegel and The Parable of the Blind
Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden “Let them alone. They are blind leaders of the blind. And if the blind lead the blind, both will fall into the ditch.”—Matthew 15:14, King James Version 21st Century The Netherlandish painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder (b.ca.1525-d.1569), who lived and worked in Brussels, was considered “the most perfect painter of his century.”1…
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Love and death; Painting the farewell
Giovanni CeccarelliRome, Italy When Ferdinand Hodler met Valentine Godé-Darel, a thirty-five-year-old woman divorced from a Sorbonne professor ruined by gambling, at the Kursaal in Geneva at the end of 1908 or beginning of 1909, he was already a famous painter. His two paintings Nighta and Day,b in which “the same spirit permeates all things, manifesting…