Praeterita

(l-r) Charles Baudelaire, Edouard Manet One of the most significant friendships between an artist and a writer was that between the painter Edouard Manet and the poet Charles Baudelaire in the 1850s-1860s. It was a friendship that didn’t only influence their respective views on art and its relation to society: some historians say it influenced the development of modernism as it emerged over the next forty years from the artistic movements of the late nineteenth century. Baudelaire and Manet met in 1858 at a restaurant in Paris which hosted regular lunches attended by artists, journalists, poets, and hangers on. After that, they saw each other almost daily until Baudelaire went to live in Belgium in 1864. Baudelaire was already known as a writer on art, and as the poet who had published ‘Les Fleurs du Mal ’ in 1857 – vilified at the time, just like many of Manet’s great paintings, but acknowledged by twentieth century poets such as T. S. Eliot as a significant milestone in nineteenth...

As mentioned in an earlier post , here is the latest video Meditation, this time on Picasso's etching 'Blind Minotaur Being led by a Girl':

I've been teaching printmaking classes in the past year, and people have asked me where I studied. I tell them that I learned intaglio etching with a German artist called Thomas Gosebruch, when I was living in London. Thomas told me that he had worked for a while in the workshop of Aldo Crommelynck, who was one of the great master printers of the twentieth century. Crommelynck worked side by side with some of the greatest artists of the School of Paris - Arp, Giacommetti, Miro, Braque - helping them prepare their etching plates, making technical suggestions, etching the plates, then proofing the prints and printing the editions. In the 1960s, Crommelynck helped Picasso produce as many as 750 etchings, including the notorious 347 series, in a final masterful statement in a medium that Picasso had always loved. One of the reasons that I had decided to study printmaking was because of prints such as Picasso's. One in particular, Blind Minotaur Being Led by a Girl, I had known lo...