Erich Heckel: In a lunatic asylum
Erich Heckel (1883–1970) was one of the founding members of Die Brücke (“The Bridge”), formed in Dresden in 1905 as a bohemian group of artists in rebellion against the older, established norms. In this painting, he depicts four inmates confined to a mental institution for reasons not explained. The squalid and disheveled man in the […]
A very early Picasso painting
Pablo Picasso was sixteen years old and obviously was not yet famous when he made this painting. His father, an artist himself, had encouraged his son to paint but favored traditional forms such as country scenes and conventional portraits. He himself sat as model for Science and Charity (1897) and is depicted as the conventional […]
Beauty actualized
Vincent P. De Luise New Haven, Connecticut Psyche Revived by Cupid’s Kiss, Antonio Canova, First version, completed 1793, Louvre Museum “First of all, move me, surprise me, rend my heart; make me tremble, weep, shudder; outrage me; delight my eyes afterwards if you can . . .” – Denis Diderot What is beauty? […]
The last illness of Édouard Manet
George Dunea James L. Franklin Chicago, Illinois A Bar at the Folies-Bergère. Édouard Manet. 1881-1882. The Courtauld Institute of Art. Accessed via Wikimedia. Édouard Manet (1832–1883) was one of the most famous modernist painters of nineteenth-century France. He painted life as creatively and elegantly as he lived in it, translating onto canvas the fashionable […]
Arthritis in Albrecht Durer’s “Praying Hands”
Ariana Shaari New York, New York, United States Figure 1. Life of the Virgin 4: The Birth of the Virgin. Alfred Durer. 1503, Woodcut, Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Munich. Source Albrecht Durer is considered one of the masters of German Renaissance art and has been dubbed “the da Vinci of the North.” He is especially […]
Christ at the bedside
Jesus sits by the bedside of the girl he has just raised from the dead. He is holding the girl’s hand and looks tenderly into her eyes. He has just truly affected a cure, unlike the physicians of old confined by necessity to the dictum of “guérir parfois, soulager souvent, consoler toujours”*—usually attributed to the […]
Unnamed surgeon
In this painting an unknown Netherlandish artist features some of the attributes of a surgeon’s profession: a skull, a tool for cauterizing skulls, a saw, and several keys on the surgeon’s belt. The unnamed surgeon seems composed, serious, with a firm jaw and wrinkled eyes. This is fitting of his position and reputation among the […]
Lovis Corinth and the sick father
Franz Heinrich Lovis Corinth (1858-1925) began his career as a realistic painter, showing things on canvas as they are seen in reality. Thus in His Father on his Sickbed (Stadel Museum, Frankfurt) we see the father in bed, sick but perhaps not mortally so. His loving daughter keeps watch by the bedside. She has arranged […]
Did Salvador Dali follow the prolactin discovery in his painting of the fountain of milk?
Michael Yafi Houston, Texas, United States Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Artists Rights Society © 2019 The Fountain of milk spreading itself uselessly on three shoes by Salvador Dali remains one of his most enigmatic works. It shows a nude woman on a pedestal, milk flowing from her breasts, while an emaciated man is […]
Ford Madox Brown: his model and his medical grandfather
Few ladies would look their best when painted in bed with their hair down while recovering from a dangerous infection. But Emma Hill looks beautiful, resting, her coiffure immaculate, sheets unruffled, a flower in her hand. In 1848 while still in her teens, she had become the model and then mistress of Ford Madox Brown, […]