Many paintings of Shakespearean scenes feel mawkish or literal-minded, flat-footed or lacking in emotional depth.
John Everett Millais
Posted inArt
Hieronymus Bosch and Ophelia Drowning Get a Gucci Remix
Gucci has also installed mannequins that lifelessly watch video versions of appropriated art.
Posted inArt
The Grisly and Heroic Propaganda of the Doomed Franklin Expedition
This month, the infamously ill-fated Franklin Expedition returned to the headlines with the discovery of the missing HMS Terror.
Posted inBooks
The Mouse, an Unexpected and Enduring Art Muse
As one of the most common mammals on our planet, the diminutive mouse has been scurrying its way into art for centuries. The rodent has now finally received its own art compendium with Lorna Owen’s Mouse Muse: The Mouse in Art, out next week from Monacelli Press.
Posted inOpinion
Bad Art Definitely Bad, Science Confirms
A study in the latest edition of the British Journal of Aesthetics portends to determine whether aesthetics are assessed through exposure, as held in a widely cited prior work of research, or if there’s a discernibly innate common component to human judgments of visual value.
Posted inArt
Pre-Raphaelites With Guns
When Italian revolutionaries made an assassination attempt on Napoleon III in 1858, and it turned out that they’d been refugees in Great Britain, the British looked at their outnumbered army and rightly wondered if they should beef up their forces in comparison to the enraged French. One of these volunteer regiments came from an unlikely group: the Pre-Raphaelite painters.
Posted inArt
Shock of the Old: The Pre-Raphaelites Go Back to the Future
In its first iteration in London, Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Art and Design, the survey now on view at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, bore the edgier title Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant-Garde. We may not customarily think of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB) — founded in secret in September 1848 by William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and soon attracting other artists — as an avant-garde, but the label does seem apt. The PRB painters and their affiliated artists were an embattled band of refuseniks, rejecting the standard practices of modern painting, and with it modernity itself, as corrupt and unsustainable.