Blog
TRUMP AND THE TYRANS OF ANCIENT ROME
He looks like a strong man, the strongest. Holding a huge club to beat his enemies with, the Roman emperor Commodus wears a lion skin over his bearded, empty-looking face in a marble portrait bust made in the second century AD, which is one of the treasures of Rome’s Capitoline […]
Wassily Kandinsky, also engraver
Born on December 16, 1866 in Moscow (Russia), Wassily Kandinsky was a painter, printmaker, stage designer, art theorist, and a central artist in the development of 20th century abstract art. Kandinsky studied economics, ethnography and law in Moscow from 1886 to 1893, and wrote a dissertation on the legality of […]
Monsters in/and art
Want to make a monster? Well, grab a big bag, head out to the countryside, and find the strangest creatures you can: bats, dragonflies, lizards, birds, snakes. Then lock yourself in your room, kill the animals and chop them up, keeping the most interesting bits: a bat’s wings, a serpent’s […]
Prints and London buildings disappeared in the 1666 Great Fire
350 years ago, the Great Fire of London burned through 400 of the city’s streets. Matthew Green reveals, in The Guardian on 30 August 2016, the extraordinary structures lost in the blaze – from old St Paul’s to a riverside castle – and what survived, only to vanish later.
How Japan Inspired Monet, Van Gogh, and Other Western Artists
Claude Monet owned more than 200 Japanese prints and once told a critic, “If you insist on forcing me into an affiliation with anyone else … then compare me with the old Japanese masters; their exquisite taste has always delighted me.” Vincent van Gogh thought of Japan, a country he […]
Remembering Forgotten Female Printmakers from the 16th to 19th Centuries
In the 19th century, Henrietta Louisa Koenen, wife the Rijksmuseum Print Room’s first director, took a prescient interest in acquiring prints by women artists. These works date from the 16th century, such as a woodcut by Marie de’ Medici, daughter of Grand Duke of Tuscany Francesco I de’ Medici, to the 19th, with hand-colored engravings by Madame Alliot. In […]
Delacroix, an influencer
Eugène Delacroix today holds, for many people, a somewhat peripheral place in the pantheon of 19th-century artists. That he was a powerful influence on the likes of Manet, the impressionists and Seurat is taken for granted, but so too is the idea that they went on to outstrip him. For […]
Brueghel and painted engravings
It will soon be Fat Tuesday. Eggy batter will sizzle heartily in pans across the land. One of modern Britain’s last lovely echoes of pre-industrial life, our pancake festival on the last Tuesday before Lent is a homely relic of the great carnivals that once rocked every village in Europe, […]
Matisse and the Book Arts
In Paris during 1946, Henri Matisse made a series of portrait drawings of a notoriously splenetic theater critic named Paul Léautaud. One of the images was to be made into a lithograph for the frontispiece in a book of Léautaud’s writings. Over a number of days that August — a […]
Ruscha, prints and Tate
The celebrated American pop artist Ed Ruscha is donating a collection of prints to Tate in what its director, Nicholas Serota, called “a wonderful Christmas present to the whole nation”. Ruscha will donate 18 recent print editions and has also promised to give one impression of all future prints he […]