I first discovered the works of Black American artist Jacob Lawrence, as a teenager in the late 1960’s. Inspired by the Civil Rights Movement and the rising tide of dissent all around me, I was naturally enthusiastic over Lawrence’s epic series regarding the great Haitian slave rebellion of 1791. Lawrence was only twenty one when he completed his forty one…
Ben Shahn was one of my earliest inspirations as an artist. He believed art was “one of the last remaining outposts of free speech,” and his dedication to social realism led him to paint and draw the American experience of the 1930’s as he lived it. Shahn captured the poor and the working class with his pen and brush, and…
Back in December I wrote that Universal Pictures was going to produce, No True Glory: Battle for Fallujah, a pro-war film with Harrison Ford starring as Lt. Gen. James Mattis. Well the news just keeps getting stranger and stranger. At a recent forum Gen. Mattis publicly said: “Actually, it’s a lot of fun to fight. You know, it’s a hell…
When the US Army captured Iraq’s capital of Baghdad in April of 2003, people around the world were shocked by the whirlwind of looting that followed in the wake of liberation. Quick to seize and guard Iraq’s Oil Ministry, US forces left other government buildings unprotected and open to pillage by throngs of impoverished Iraqis. The country’s art and history…
Pioneering American architect Philip Johnson died on Tuesday, January 25th, 2005, he was 98 years old. His controversial designs encompassed everything from magnificent corporate headquarters to the Crystal Cathedral in Los Angeles. Johnson coined the architectural term international style and invented the role of museum architecture curator at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in 1931. Terrence Riley, the…
In Berlin Germany, the Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art opened a major exhibition on January 29th, 2005 – Regarding Terror: The RAF Exhibition. Through the works of some 40 contemporary artists working in various media, the exhibit focuses on Germany’s infamous terrorist organization, Red Army Faction (RAF). In the 1970’s and 80’s, the communist urban guerilla group conducted a violent…
In 2004 the California Science Center in the Exposition Park of Los Angeles, presented Body Worlds: The Anatomical Exhibition of Real Human Bodies. In the words of the museum, “Thanks to the breakthrough process of plastination, more than 200 real human specimens are displayed to reveal an extraordinary new look inside the human body.” As a realist artist I naturally…
Charles Saatchi set up the British advertising agency, Saatchi and Saatchi, the firm hired by the Conservative party in 1978 to catapult Margaret Thatcher to power. By the late 1980’s Saatchi was one of the most powerful figures in the art world, and he used his millions to create a personal stable of postmodernist young Turks, the so-called Brit Art…
