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...
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...
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...
ERWIN PANOFSKY AND ICONOGRAPHY Part Three: Icon, Iconography and Iconology As has often been pointed out, the exodus of Jewish scholars from Germany was one of the greatest brain drains of talent of the 20th or any other century. “Hitler shakes the trees, and I...
ERWIN PANOFSKY (1892-1968) Part Two: The System of Meaning: Art History as Symbolic Form Like the anthropologist, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Erwin Panofsky considered social acts to be not natural but linguistic forms, which are cultural, and thus subject to human...
ERWIN PANOFSKY (1892-1968) Part One: The Antecedents of Iconography To be an art historian in Germany or Austria, the sites where the study of the discipline was both founded and developed, was to be a member of an intellectual elite. The study of art in the late...
