by Jeanne Willette | Jan 29, 2016 | Modern, Modern Art
Walter Richard Sickert (1860-1942) Part Two In 1911, Walter Sickert was the leader of a small but hopeful group of young male artists in London, including August John, Lucien Pissarro, Henry Lamb, who wanted to make art outside of the confines of the Royal Academy....
by Jeanne Willette | Jan 22, 2016 | Modern, Modern Art
Walter Richard Sickert (1860-1942) Part One At the beginning of the twentieth century, with a war looming just beyond the horizon, every major European city seemed to be engrossed with Modernism and modern art. All but London, that is. Perhaps because England is an...
by Jeanne Willette | Jan 15, 2016 | Modern, Modern Art
Welcome to the Vortex One hundred years before Europe began to industrialize and enter into the modern age, England was already totally involved in what would be called the Industrial Revolution. This Revolution, one of those rare historical events that change...
by Jeanne Willette | Jan 8, 2016 | Modern, Modern Art
Creating a Modern Visual Vocabulary of War Part Two The Great War caught everyone by surprise. The avant-garde movement, once international, was shattered and artists were scattered across Europe. Some were killed, some went into exile, others found neutral territory...
by Jeanne Willette | Jan 1, 2016 | Modern
Creating a Modern Visual Vocabulary of War Part One In 1911, the Futurist artist Umberto Boccioni (1882-1916) organized an exhibition of fifty Futurist paintings for the working class. Called Esposizione d’ate libera, the show featured Carlo Carrà (1881-1966)...
by Jeanne Willette | Dec 25, 2015 | Modern
War and Glory The Art of Valiant Defeat, Part Four By any measure the Franco-Prussian War was a disaster, not just for France but also for Europe and the future. This war cemented the rising destiny of Prussia as a major power on the continent and the defeat of France...
by Jeanne Willette | Dec 18, 2015 | Modern
War and Glory From Meissonier to Detaille, Part Two In attempting to explain and understand the attraction of the French nation to the memory of the recently deposed, defeated and deceased disgraced Emperor Napoléon Ier (1769-1821), the Viscount François-René de...
by Jeanne Willette | Dec 11, 2015 | Modern
War and Glory From Meissonier to Detaille, Part One Born during the revolutionary year of 1848, Jean-Baptiste Édouard Detaille (1848-1912) did not live to see the fate of the French army during the Great War. Riding the nostalgic wave of the cult of Napoléon, which...
by Jeanne Willette | Dec 4, 2015 | Modern
War and Glory Lady Elizabeth Butler Since the dawn of time, war has been one of the favorite topics for artists. From the Egyptians to the Assyrians, war has been depicted as glorious and victorious, with the rulers smiting enemies and slaying any army foolish enough...
by Jeanne Willette | Nov 27, 2015 | Modern
The End of the World: Ludwig Meidner and the Apocalyptic Paintings The avant-garde arrived late in Germany. Not only was modern art late, it also landed in the cities of Germany unchronologically, in bits and pieces, entirely lacking sequence, reft of developmental...
by Jeanne Willette | Nov 20, 2015 | Modern
The Coming Apocalypse: Ludwig Meidner and the Poets In the winter of 1912, the German poet Georg Heym fell through a hole in the ice and drowned. The strange death of the twenty-four year of poet was surrounded by an odd mixture of conjecture and fact. It was thought...
by Jeanne Willette | Nov 13, 2015 | Modern
The Coming Apocalypse: Kandinsky and Marc Never such innocence, Never before or since, As changed itself to past Without a word — the men Leaving the gardens tidy, The thousands of marriages Lasting a little while longer: Never such innocence again. ...
by Jeanne Willette | Nov 6, 2015 | Modern
From Photo-Secession to 291 There is an old question, what came first, the chicken or the egg? For the history of photography, the question can be re-written: what come first Camera Work, the journalistic organ for the Photo-Secession or Photo-Secession itself? The...
by Jeanne Willette | Oct 30, 2015 | Modern
Photo-Secession as Pictorialism Part One At the turn of the century, as the nineteenth century waned, it was quite possible to speak of a “beautiful photograph” or, more precisely, of a photograph of something “beautiful.” But that photograph...
by Jeanne Willette | Oct 23, 2015 | Modern
Naturalistic Photography It all started with George Davison (1854 – 1930) and a deceptively simple image,originally titled, An Old Farmstead. This charming photograph, reminiscent of an Impressionist landscape, was awarded a medal at the annual exhibition of the...
by Jeanne Willette | Oct 16, 2015 | Modern
The Annans, Father and Son From Document to Art Around 1890 the world of photographers changed. Before the end of the nineteenth century, photography had been very much an individual enterprise. The practitioner, whether amateur or professional customarily was...
by Jeanne Willette | Oct 9, 2015 | Modern
The Brotherhood of the Linked Ring Part One, Becoming Artists In 1913 Henry Chapman Jones published a very useful book with a rather long title, Photography of to-Day. A Popular Account of the Origin, Progress and Latest Discoveries in the Photographer’s art,...
by Jeanne Willette | Oct 2, 2015 | Modern
Fairies and Spirits: Resisting Modernity Part Two: The Fairies Arrive In Strange and Secret Peoples. Fairies and Victorian Consciousness (1999), Carol Silver, explained that fairies were a uniquely English phenomenon, part of the folklore of the British Isles. The...
by Jeanne Willette | Sep 25, 2015 | Modern
Fairies and Spirits: Resisting Modernity Part One: The Spirits Return The English fin-de-siècle was quite different from the French fin-de-siècle. A mere glance at the art of London in comparison to that of Paris shows a French society racing ahead to the twentieth...
by Jeanne Willette | Sep 18, 2015 | Modern
Photography as Collage In the halls of the history of photography, the name of William Notman (1826-1891), does not often appear, and yet he is one of the most adept practitioners of the Victorian phenomenon known as “composite” photography or...
by Jeanne Willette | Sep 11, 2015 | Modern
(Not) Picturing the Poor It was no accident that Frederich Engels (1820-1895), a twenty-four year old German social scientist, visited England to study the effects of the Industrial Revolution upon its population. In 1844 no other nation was as industrialized as Great...
by Jeanne Willette | Sep 4, 2015 | Modern
(Not)Picturing the Slums The London of the twentieth century imagination is based upon Merchant-Ivory film productions or Masterpiece Theater, or both. Here in these nostalgic realms, upper class life is recreated and evoked through elegant horse drawn carriages...
by Jeanne Willette | Aug 28, 2015 | Modern
Jacob Riis and the Other Half During a period of open borders, the Age of Mass Migration, which extended from 1850 to 1913, brought thirty million individuals, men, women, children, and families to the New World. They came in ships that were built increasingly larger...
by Jeanne Willette | Aug 21, 2015 | Modern
Photography as Re-Enactment Part Two When photographer Edward Curtis began his monumental twenty volume project on the Native American Tribes of North America, the term “documentary photographer,” had yet to be invented. Such was the certainty that a...
by Jeanne Willette | Aug 14, 2015 | Modern
Photography as Re-Enactment Part One It is difficult to know what to do with Edward Curtis (1868-1952)–was he a photographer, an anthropologist, an ethnographer, a film director, a historian? Did he combine all of these disciplines or did Curtis participate in...
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