When Belgium was occupied by Germany during World War II, René Magritte adopted the style of Pierre-Auguste Renoir and painted images based on popular cartoons.
Author Archives: David Carrier
David Carrier is a philosopher who writes art criticism. His Aesthetic Theory, Abstract Art and Lawrence Carroll (Bloomsbury) and with Joachim Pissarro, Aesthetics of the Margins/ The Margins of Aesthetics: Wild Art Explained (Penn State University Press) were published in 2018. He is writing a book about the historic center of Naples, and with Pissarro he conducted a sequence of interviews with museum directors for Brooklyn Rail.
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What Do Art Critics Actually Do?
Artists, collectors, curators, and dealers are all needed for the system to function, but the role of critics is up for grabs.
Posted inArt
The Importance of Being Delacroix
The last great artist who was not a modernist, Delacroix synthesized very complex visual and verbal traditions in stunning works that open the way to modernism.
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Connoisseurship Is Not a Dirty Word
Connoisseurship, it is often said, is elitist, Euro-centric, and logo-centric, to employ the fashionable jargon.
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Who Really Owns the Elgin Marbles?
However we judge Lord Elgin’s original acquisition of the Parthenon sculptures, it’s easy to wonder whether the Turkish rulers legitimately had the right to allow him to dispose of these artworks.
Posted inArt
The Art of a Fired Cartoonist
What if we interpret Rob Rogers’s wild art cartoons as if they were conventional subjects for art writing?
Posted inArt
The Divergence of Art and Fashion at the Metropolitan Museum
Presenting contemporary garments alongside Byzantine and Medieval artworks underlines the visual differences between the two genres of objects.
Posted inBooks
Sweet, Gritty, Impossible Naples
The other great centers of the Italian art world – Florence, Rome, and Venice – have modernized; Naples mostly has not.