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blue period of Picasso

Portrait of Mateu Fernández de Soto

Just letting you know I will not be uploading any more confronting art, so you can relax.

I don’t like most of the art from Picasso, and I don’t like the man either, but I do like this painting from his blue period.

I don’t care about any painting’s value because value in art is completely arbitrary. I would love to own Rothko paintings but will never ever be able afford them.

If you enjoy some art, enjoy it. It doesn’t need to have any external value for it to be good.

Gavin.

more confronting paintings (part two)

Gerard David – The Judgement of Cambyses 1488

Flaying has always both terrified me and made me curious ever since I saw the film Martyrs 2008, by Pascal Laugier.

Jean-Léon Gérôme – The Execution of Marshal Ney. (I really like this painting. The soldiers are walking away, and Ney is dead with his face in the mud. The silence is deafening.)

C. R. W. Nevinson – A taube (1916)

Death of Alan Kurdi

more confronting paintings

With my recent adventure into morbid paintings I discovered these interesting art paintings…

Eugène Trigoulet – Le Précurseur (1894) 

Caravaggio – Judith Beheading Holofernes 1598. Judith gets Holofernes drunk, then seizes her sword and slays him: Approaching to his bed, she took hold of the hair of his head.

Franz von Stuck – Lucifer 1890

here you can clearly see the wings of Lucifer.

Ilya Repin – Ivan the Terrible and His Son 1885

Parricide is the deliberate killing of one’s own parent, spouse, child, or other close relative. However, the term is sometimes used more generally to refer to the intentional killing of a near relative. It is an umbrella term that can be used to refer to acts of matricide, the deliberate killing of one’s own mother and patricide, the deliberate killing of one’s own father.

Nicolai Abildgaard – Nightmare 1800

My Dream, My Bad Dream by Fritz Schwimbeck

Hans Holbein – The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb 1521

Caravaggio – The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist  1608

Jakub Schikaneder – Murder in the house, 1890

Rembrandt – The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp 1632

Rembrandt – The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Deijman (alternative spelling Deyman) 1656

racism in an enlightened world?

I watched a DVD last night by PJ Harvey. A Dog Called Money.

The quote that she said as she was filming in Washinton USA…“when white people plant a tree, they imagine black people hanging from it”.

She was being ironic… But also pointing out the endemic racism in America. We have lots of it here too, but in the twenty-first century, how can racism still exist???

For me I find racism very odd. It’s so much like once you see something you can’t unsee it. People who have black skin can’t help it, so why would you want to be angry with them for having different color skin?

Here in Australia, I judge people on their behavior, not their skin color….so I see behavior not skin color.

I enjoyed the DVD. She is an amazing artist and singer.

Video

The Most Macabre Painting in Art History

In 1672, the De Witt brothers were beaten, mutilated, and hanged before a crowd. It is even said that the people themselves committed an act of cannibalism with their severed body parts.

Tongue and finger of the De Witt brothers

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Supporters of the De Witt brothers kept Johan’s tongue and a Cornelis’ finger as relics in lead boxes. It also contained documents explaining its contents. Based on these notes, we know that Nicolaas Witsen, mayor of Amsterdam, owned the relics between 1672 and 1717. In 1889 D.J. Cockuyt from Leiden gave the tongue, finger and the accompanying evidence to the museum. The then director had a “small coffin made of old oak wood, with a glass lid” made to display “these important historical objects”. Many museum visitors were shocked at the sight of this new acquisition. On October 23, 1893, the city council of The Hague banned the exhibition of the tongue and finger. Despite this, the body parts of the De Witt brothers have been on display in the gallery for the last thirty years.

In 2011, researchers from the Netherlands Forensic Institute (NFI) determined that the alleged big toe of Cornelis’s left foot was a finger. On the television program ‘Historisch Bewijs’ (Historical Evidence), the tongue and finger were once again scrutinized, this time to investigate their authenticity. It was not possible to draw up a DNA profile with material from the tongue and finger, but it could be established that ‘the finger was forcibly removed from the body and belonged to a man between 40 and 50 in the year 1672’. This makes it a lot more likely that the body parts do indeed come from the brothers Johan and Cornelis de Witt.