Free Republic

When you observe renowned landscape artist John Constable’s bucolic painting “Hampstead Heath” above, what feelings does it inspire? Calm? Nostalgia? Spiritual uplift? A surge of white supremacist pride and jingoistic fervor?For some reason – my guess is a toxic mix of colonialist guilt, multiculturalist self-loathing, and pressure from neo-Marxist donors and administrators determined to “deconstruct” Western civilization – England’s Fitzwilliam Museum, owned by the University of Cambridge, recently overhauled its collections with new signage warning sensitive visitors that landscape paintings of the British countryside can evoke dark “nationalist feelings.”Paintings at the Fitzwilliam have been reshuffled into new categories that are...

A bucolic escape from busier ports of call, Aix-en-Provence in the south of France is known for olive oil, lavender, garlicky foods... and the master painter Paul Cezanne. Cezanne's death 100 years ago will be observed this year with art exhibitions in Washington, D.C., and Provence. Cezanne had a complicated personality. He was considered a "lunatic" by fellow townspeople and was known as a loner. He hated his family, calling them "the nastiest people in the world." They were unsupportive of his artistic career. In Paris, Cezanne found a small circle that understood him: the Impressionists. But his hometown gallery...

Time to deal with Cubism and its development. For those who are really intense about all this, there is an excellent book from which many of today’s ideas come from. It’s edited by William Rubin (former curator of the Museum of Modern Art) and is called Cezanne: The Late Work. It’s the essay on Cezannism and the beginnings of Cubism that opened my eyes to how it was not Picasso, but his buddy Georges Braque, who really did the first cubist paintings. Surprised? I think most of the art world was surprised at that and most of them probably still...

There have been some great threads on art lately, and at the (great) risk of overdoing it….I want to continue with this little series on Art Appreciation (or, as some have termed it, Education). Many FReepers just love realism. (If you want to see some recent threads on this, do a search under vannrox as a poster, and you’ll see some lovely images by late 19th century realists.) But what I want to deal with is the beginning of abstraction. Even Monet and the other impressionists are somewhat abstract. Anything that moves away from a strict recreation of reality, to...