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Koloman Moser: Content Or Context ?
One of the decisions I had to make in choosing the layout for this website was whether the background should be dark or light. Which would better complement the images and which would make the text...
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Garish Days
“Now I am 31, or so they say,With a small poetry business of my own.Alas, my hair is starting to go gray,And all my friends are getting overblown.” - Erich Kastner Two of the best books to appear in...
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February At The BNF
“Fat lot I care, husband, about your loveNow that I have a friend!He looks handsome and nobleFat lot I care, husband, about your love.He serves me day and nightThat is why I love him so.” - one...
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Gallerinas
TO MADAME M. ON HER WAY TO BUY A PLATE"1.There are generations, and cities, and peoples,Sad and old – That left us no great masterworks,But - a few pots!2.In a museum a lady stands with a...
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The Paradox That Is Emil Orlik
What strikes me about Emil Orlik's Japanese Garden is how like a Secessionist's dream it is, with not a cherry tree in sight. Orlik’s prominent placement of a flowering bush and seemingly random...
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Autocrats Of The Autoroute
L'automobile, c'est francais!Americans think of Henry Ford, but the automobile's early development was a competition between French and German inventors. There was Leon Bollee who invented the...
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Loie Fuller & Joseph Paget Fredericks
A swirl of blues and greens....an ocean wave....a woman in motion. By all accounts, when she danced, Loie Fuller dominated the stage as definitively as The Great Wave Off Kanagawa dominated Mount...
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March At The BNF: Mardi Gras
At first glance it looks like the cover of Vogue or Vanity Fair but Bal de la Fourrure is a poster. By 1930, when this was printed, magazines had taken over from the poster as the medium where new...
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Beauty Manifested In Use: Charlotte Perriand
"Lenin is seated at the Rotonde on a cane chair; he has paid twenty centimes for his coffee, with a tip of one sou. He has drunk out of a small white processional cup. He is wearing a bowler hat and...
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Dreaming Of Spring
"In Nature's temple living pillars rise, And words are murmured none have understood, And man must wander through a tangled wood Of symbols watching him with friendly eyes. As long-drawn echoes heard...
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From Fukagawa To Munich: Peter Behrens
He did his best work as an architect and designer but, whether you recognize his name or not, Peter Behrens (1866-1940) is most familiar for a woodblock print from Pan. a short-lived literary magazine...
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Nouveau Risque
For those who don't read French, the poster at left announces an exhibition of pictures and drawings in Paris, but you probably recognize the artist Jules Cheret's style. Cheret chose to include this...
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Rhone Maiden: Marguerite Burnat-Provins
It has been three years since I wrote something about the accomplished and underrated French artist Marguerite Burnat-Provins (1872-1952). It may be that the years she lived in Switzerland that...
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La Depeche: When Radicals Met Avant-Garde Art
It's Marthe Meunier, not yet married to the artist Maurice Denis, posing for the poster La Depeche de Toulouse in 1892. Although Marthe posed frequently for her painter husband, her first appearance...
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April At The BNF: Japanese Picture Scrolls
They look like 19th century ukiyo-e prints, but these images are scenes from a Japanaese picture scroll and therefore part of a story, analogous to pages in a book. Their nearest western counterpart...
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It's Beautiful Here Isn't It: Luigi Ghirri
In 2009, the aperture Gallery in Manhattan hosted the retrospective It's Beautiful Here, Isn't It?, devoted to the work of the Italian photographer Luigi Ghirri (1943-1992). Now, the Matthew marks...
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The Cinematic Art Of Marcel Gromaire
Painter, printmaker, tisserand (tapestry maker), film critic. It was that last unexpected item that caught my attention, in connection with French artist Marcel Gromaire (1892-1971). Gromaire began...
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Late Hours: William Degouve de Nuncques
"Without the Belgians, the French would have been second rate symbolists." - Arthur Rimbaud “Everything they don’t understand is mythology. There’s a lot of that.” - Charles Baudelaire on the...
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The Italian Hours: William Degouve de Nuncques
“In the arts feeling is meaning.” – Henry James, quoted by Leon Edel.“To make a painting, all you need to do is take some paints, draw some lines, and fill the rest up with feelings.” – William...
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Daniel Boudinet: Colorist
Camera Lucida (La chambre claire), the last book published by Roland Barthes before his death in 1980, introduced the photographer Daniel Boudinet (1945-1990) to the world at large. Boudinet, a...
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