Color
An illuminated manuscript from eighteenth-century Pennsylvania -- beautiful full-sized image here.
How Guernica flopped: “By nearly every measure, Picasso’s huge, dark painting stalled at the starting gate. Le Corbusier, the architect who reviewed all the murals at the World’s Fair, wrote that Guernica alone ‘saw only the backs of visitors, for they were repelled by it.’ Sert, who was by his own account at the pavilion constantly during its four-month run, was struck by the almost-universal disdain. ‘The people came there, they looked at this thing and they didn’t understand it,’ he said.”
The Met is showing ancient sculptures in color -- in what curators hope are the original colors.
“The letters IKB stand for International Klein Blue, a distinctive ultramarine which [Yves] Klein registered as a trademark colour in 1957. He considered that this colour had a quality close to pure space and he associated it with immaterial values beyond what can be seen or touched. The announcement card for his one-man exhibition at the Galleria Apollinaire, Milan in 1957 described IKB as 'a Blue in itself, disengaged from all functional justification' (quoted in Stich, p.81). By this time Klein had arrived at a means of painting in which the incandescence of IKB could be maximised. First he stretched his canvas or cotton scrim over a wooden backing, which had been treated with a milk protein called casein. This assisted the adherence of the paint when it was applied with a roller. Then he applied an industrial blue paint, similar to gouache, which he mixed with a highly volatile fixative. When the paint dried the pigment appeared to hover over the surface of the canvas creating a rich velvety texture and an unusual appearance of depth.”
An illuminating essay by my friend Richard Gibson on what a paragraph is, or isn’t, or was, or might be.
A really lovely 90 seconds of guitar playing by Mateus Asato.
On the blog:
- Over the years, I’ve written a good bit about climate and linked to people who write better and more wisely than I do
- I wrote about the intensifying, narrowing world of Better Call Saul
- Here’s a piece explaining why Jacques Ellul’s book on anarchism and Christianity is a poor one
- “People can only think they like something for so long”
- One thing I can count on
- The joy of doing hard things with friends
- The invitation to critique
- And finally, I wrote a post at my Buy Me a Coffee page about what I’m up to and why