On Oct 14, 2022, two young women from the eco-extremist organization “Just Stop Oil” entered London’s National Gallery in Trafalgar Square. The duo wore coats to hide their matching black and white T-shirts reading Just Stop Oil. Their plan was to attack Sunflowers, the famous painting by Vincent Van Gogh. When they entered Room 43 where Sunflowers is displayed, the…
On Oct. 9, 2022, three extremists from Extinction Rebellion assailed a Picasso painting on display at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, Australia. It was the last day of the museum’s exhibit The Picasso Century, which ran from June 10, 2022 to Oct. 9, 2022. The show featured 80 works by Picasso and 100 artworks from contemporaries like Henri…
Perhaps we can understand our jingoist present by examining our warring past. Natalia Goncharova (1881-1962), was the first woman artist in the avant-garde of Russia. She was a painter, print maker, writer, and provocateur. She created costumes and set backdrops for the Ballet Russes of Sergei Diaghilev. She married fellow avant-garde artist Mikhail Larionov, the two becoming inseparable life partners….
I can’t recall such an unending fuss about a presidential portrait. The hoopla at the 2018 unveiling of the portraits of former President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery was fairly understandable, but then came the media blitz. Every magazine and paper in the US celebrated the portraits. Likewise “The Obama Portraits Tour”…
In my childhood a large framed reproduction of the painting The Milkmaid hung in my family’s humble working class abode; the original painting was by the famed Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer (1632-1675). Even as a child I was infatuated by the image; it was one of the first artworks by an Old Master painter I had been exposed to. I…
A faction of the environmentalist movement has developed new plans for combating climate change. They’ve decided that disrupting art institutions with acts of “civil resistance” is a path to a sustainable future. The actions these “activists” engage in consists of spray-painting anti-oil graffiti on museum property and gluing themselves to the frames of masterpiece oil paintings. Few things describe cultural…
Regarding the ghastly assassination of Former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe (1954-2022). I found the illustration for this essay in a far corner of the internet. Created by New Zealand based illustrator Joseph Qiu, it’s an artwork created in the style of a traditional Japanese woodcut. The red-sun in the background alludes to Abe’s brand of Japanese nationalism, the crashing…
