by Jeanne Willette | Jul 8, 2016 | Modern, Modern Art
Making Parade (1917) Pablo Picasso during the Great War Part One Pablo Picasso was bored. Paris was empty of the stimulating company he had grown accustomed to. His partner in Cubism, its invention, its evolution and its four year development, Georges Braque, had...
by Jeanne Willette | Jul 1, 2016 | Modern, Modern Art
Henry Tonks (1862-1937) Surgery as Art An examination of the oeuvre of the feared and respected teacher, who dominated the lives of fledgling students at the famed Slade School of Art, reveals that Henry Tonks was not a great artist himself. Unlike Walter Sickert, he...
by Jeanne Willette | Jun 24, 2016 | Modern, Modern Art
John Singer Sargent (1856–1925) The Unlikely War Artist, Part Two Made towards the end of his career as an elite portrait painter to the elite families of America and Europe, the famous painting of a scene the artist actually witnessed, Gassed (1919) became one of...
by Jeanne Willette | Jun 17, 2016 | Modern, Modern Art
John Singer Sargent (1856–1925) The Unlikely War Artist, Part One John Singer Sargent had the singular honor of being the official portraitist for the Gilded Age in America Europe, painting the last decades of a slightly decadent and negligent peace before the fabric...
by Jeanne Willette | Jun 10, 2016 | Modern
David Bomberg (1890-1957) The Canadian Sappers in an Underground War The Great War is known for its technological innovations, from the release of mustard gas to the invention of the flamethrower to the unexpected presence of the tank, but this war is also known for...
by Jeanne Willette | Jun 3, 2016 | Modern, Modern Art
Paul Nash (1889-1946) Death Stalks the Artist War is a very intense experience. For poets, war inspires a torrent of words tumbling out in anguish, for novelists, fiction provides a thin veil though which they can filter their fears and terrors. For artists the war is...
by Jeanne Willette | May 27, 2016 | Modern, Modern Art
John Nash (1893-1977) Dispatches from the Trenches The famous English artist and painter of the Great War, Paul Nash, had a brother named John Northcote Nash (1893-1977), who was also an artist. Although Nash the younger was also an official artist of the Great War,...
by Jeanne Willette | May 20, 2016 | Modern
Stanley Spencer (1891-1959) The Artist: Between Sex and Religion Part Two Stanley Spencer lived just long enough to be knighted. Or perhaps the British Empire decided to recognize the original and remarkable artist only by 1959. Queen Elizabeth II, then early in her...
by Jeanne Willette | May 13, 2016 | Modern, Modern Art
Stanley Spencer (1891-1959) The Artist at Sandham Part Two Unlike many artists of the Great War, Stanley Spencer remained silent and refused to translate his experiences into paint. His reticence as an artist, while unusual, can be explained in part by the fact that,...
by Jeanne Willette | May 6, 2016 | Modern, Modern Art
Stanley Spencer (1891-1959) The Artist in the Balkans Part One There was no possibility that Stanley Spencer, recently graduated from Slade School of Art in 1914, would ever join up the be a soldier in what would be named The Great War. The painter was too small and...
by Jeanne Willette | Apr 30, 2016 | Postmodern, Reviews
PATRICK MCELNEA at the Daniel Weinberg Gallery Los Angeles, CA 90048 The Artist and Bricolage The postmodern artist was often referred to as “belated,” meaning that s/he comes “after” modernism. In the post-avant-garde art world, nothing could be new and astonishing....
by Jeanne Willette | Apr 29, 2016 | Modern
Irish Artists at War Part Three William Orpen (1879-1931) Orpen at Versailles The career of William Orpen, Irish artist, both before and during the Great War gave the British government little hint of what was truly going on behind his so-far acceptable works of art....
by Jeanne Willette | Apr 22, 2016 | Modern
Irish Artists at War Part Two William Orpen (1879-1931) Orpen in Flanders What would it take to make an Official War Artist go rogue? At the end of the Great War, Irish artist, William Orpen was asked to remember the sacrifices of the British Army, albeit, in an...
by Jeanne Willette | Apr 15, 2016 | Modern
Irish Artists at War Part One John Lavery (1856-1941) Apparently Sigmund Freud never said of the Irish, “This is one race of people for whom psychoanalysis is of no use whatsoever,” but the idea that it is pointless to attempt to fathom “the...
by Jeanne Willette | Apr 8, 2016 | Modern, Modern Art
Christopher Nevinson; Painting the War The Future of Futurism On April 23rd in 1915, the poet Rupert Brooke died on the island of Lemnos from a mosquito bite on his lip. Already weekend by dysentery and heat stroke, he fell victim to blood poisoning, a soldier to the...
by Jeanne Willette | Apr 1, 2016 | Modern, Modern Art
Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson (1889-1946) The Young Futurist Goes to War 1914-1915 In 2011 English art historian, James Fox, the very cute successor for Michael Wood, discussed Christopher Nevinson in his British Masters series. He explained that Nevinson was...
by Jeanne Willette | Mar 26, 2016 | Reviews
THE LONG TAIL: MUSIC AND THE GIFT Amanda Campbell is not exactly a household name, but the singer has a loyal following and many fans like her mellow bluesy rock style, marked by a strong and self-assured piano, driven by Susan Ferrari, who writes all the songs....
by Jeanne Willette | Mar 25, 2016 | Modern, Modern Art
Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson (1889-1946) The Artist as a Futurist, Part One Although it may sound counter-intuitive, outside of Italy, it was on the soil of England that Futurism found most fertile. After being attacked by Umberto Boccioni in the catalogue for...
by Jeanne Willette | Mar 18, 2016 | Modern, Modern Art
Edward Wadsworth (1889-1949) The Artist at War: The Dazzle Ships If the Great War can be characterized by any one metaphor it would be that of the Closed Mind and a Determined Refusal to accept the mechanization of war. On land, strategy and tactics remained fixated...
by Jeanne Willette | Mar 11, 2016 | Modern, Modern Art, Modern Culture
Artists at War Hide and Seek and Camouflage One of the odd aspects of the Great War is the surprising fact that it was during these four years that the British artists not only met the challenge of depicting a new kind of war but they also left behind a unique legacy...
by Jeanne Willette | Mar 4, 2016 | Modern, Modern Art
Edward Alexander Wadsworth (1889-1949) In 1914, Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957) writer, pointer and leader of a band of English radical artists issued the Manifesto for a new avant-garde movement, Vorticism, designed to counter the exhortations of Futurism. In “Long...
by Jeanne Willette | Feb 26, 2016 | Modern, Modern Art
Percy Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957) Wyndham Lewis was born on a yacht named “Wanda,” attended the famous Rugby School in England and was educated as an artist at the Slade School in London. He began well but he ended badly, labeled a fascist, who scuttled back...
by Jeanne Willette | Feb 19, 2016 | Modern, Modern Art
Jacob Epstein: Taylorism and Masculinity on the Eve of the Great War The origins of Jacob Epstein’s Rock Drill (1913) and its meanings have been historically confused by two historical coincidences: the date of execution is the same as that of Marcel...
by Jeanne Willette | Feb 12, 2016 | Modern, Modern Art
Jacob Epstein and Sensational Art Modernity and the Male Nude in Sculpture One of the most promising and interesting artists of the new century was the Anglo-American artist, Jacob Epstein (1880-1959), until he simply ceased to be interesting. Although he had a long...
by Jeanne Willette | Feb 5, 2016 | Modern, Modern Art
Walter Richard Sickert (1860-1942) Part Three Perhaps because of the interference of the Great War, the term “New Woman” came to become attached to the changing roles of woman after 1918. However, this term had its origins in the fin-de-siècle period as...
