Praeterita

On November 9th, the day after the US presidential election, I had just arrived in England to attend a conference, and I spent the first few hours wandering around in a daze at the unexpected result. "These are dark times, these are the dark times" was a phrase I kept repeating in my head. They are from a poem by Bertholdt Brecht that seemed appropriate for the occasion: Truly I live in dark times! An artless word is foolish. A smooth forehead Points to insensitivity. He who laughs Has not yet received The terrible news. The translation is by Scott Horton, from 2008, and his discussion of the meaning and context of the poem is unsurpassable, so I recommend you follow this link and read what he had to say. My personal knowledge of this poem ('To Those Who Follow in Our Wake,' from 1939) goes back to a long phase of devouring Brecht's plays and poems when I was in my twenties. This poem, from his Svendborg poems, was one of the only German poems that I cou...

The next print that stood out for me during my visit to the Tucson Museum of Art was this etching by Goya (above). It's from his series Desastres de la Guerra (The Disasters of War), a series of etchings he made between 1810 and 1820 depicting the horrors of the Peninsula War that ravaged Spain during the previous decade. This print shows a tangle of corpses in a house that has been destroyed by cannon fire. I notice how Goya still uses classical drawing techniques even while he draws a violent subject form real life: the legs of the man lying on his back in the foreground could easily have come straight from a Renaissance painting. Next, this beautiful etching by German artist Kathe Kollwitz, from the 1890s: The wall text said "etching", but the areas of rich dark tone indicate that she also used aquatint -- and in a brilliantly expert way, too. Look at all that variation in the textures of the shadows between the figures: any printmaker will tell you how much...

My favourite artist (Goya). My favourite medium (etching). My latest meditation (web talk on art). Put all three together and what have you got? Audio-visual dynamite, that's what.   Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader

A list of works of art that I saw in a museum or gallery (rather than on the internet or in a book) that drew me towards art or transformed my ideas about art: ‘Pieta’ (1499), by Michelangelo ‘The Execution of the Emperor Maximilian’ (1867-69) by Manet ‘La Romeria de San Isidro’ (1819-23) by Goya ‘Man with a Guitar’ (1911) by Braque ‘Les Demoiselles d’Avignon’ (1907) by Picasso ‘Deutschlands Geisteshelden’ (1973), by Anselm Kiefer ‘The Three Crosses’ (1653), etching by Rembrandt ‘Australia’ (1951), by David Smith ‘Limehouse Basin’ (1990), by Jock McFadyen ‘Altar to the Chases High School’ (1987), by Christian Boltanski What pictures changed your life in some way?   Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader

Meditation on Goya's 'El Tres de Mayo' from Philip Hartigan on Vimeo . This is the first of what will be a weekly series of short meditations on individual works of art. Please leave a comment and let me know what you think.