I was watching The Last Czars docuseries about the demise of the Romanov family, when it dawned on me that tragedies and revolutions do not happen overnight. Rather they’re the culmination of a series of unfortunate decisions trickling into ever larger events. We stumble our way through history not with reason and judgment, but with…
Watch Your Step: Creepy Staircases in Art History
Scary staircases are not there just for decorative purposes – they hypnotize, they challenge the intellect, they set a morbid tone that lingers long after you’ve averted your gaze. They have personality.
Death and the Maiden. From Schubert to Schiele
“I feel myself the most unhappy and wretched man in the world,” confided Austrian composer Franz Schubert to his friend, artist Leopold Kupelwieser, in a letter dated March 31, 1824, as he was struggling with poor health, financial woes and lack of recognition. “Think of a man whose health can never be restored, and who…
Max Kurzweil – Lady in Yellow Dress (1899)
Max Kurzweil was miserable. The Austrian artist had spent his life vacillating between passion and depression, excess and withdrawal. Like Gustave Caillebotte he was stuck between the conservatism of his bourgeois upbringing and the changing tides in art. But Kurzweil couldn’t feel too sorry for himself, for his playground was bohemian Vienna at the turn…
Caspar David Friedrich – The Monk by the Sea (1808 – 1810)
“I am not so weak as to submit to the demands of the age when they go against my convictions,” a defiant Caspar David Friedrich declared as his art and the Romantic ideals of the early nineteenth century were falling out of favor towards the end of his life. “I spin a cocoon around myself;…
Cry Me a River: The ‘Bad Art Friend’ in Art History
A few days ago the New York Times published “Who Is the Bad Art Friend?”, an enthralling narrative piece that took social media by storm. The premise seems straightforward from the onset: one woman (Dawn Dorland) donates a kidney, the other one (Sonya Larson) writes about it in a short story. I’m expecting a Netflix…
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