One livid final flame
Ruin Lust, the Tate exhibition curated by Brian Dillion, is reviewed in the Guardian.
The pleasure the human mind takes in ruins is not easy to explain. It has something to do with time. In JMW Turner’s sketches of decayed abbeys that come like Soane’s broodings from the Romantic age, the artist lingers over the details of each crumbly, broken stone. Looking at his studies you get a powerful sense of the time he spent on them and the escape from daily care this involved. A ruin, in other words, is a time machine that releases the mind to wander in nooks and crannies of lost ages – and ages to come. That is why John Constable finds the ruins of Hadleigh Castle so grimly consoling in his painting of this medieval heap quietly decaying, the wars and oppressions it once embodied long forgotten.
The fashionables
A.N. Wilson on the new biography, Whistler: A Life for Art’s Sake
Bohemianism is inherently snobbish, because its practitioners believe they are more interesting than the conventional majority. Whistler made it his creed, to scandalise the middlebrow and middle-minded. His famous “aesthetic” lecture, “The Ten O’Clock”, claimed that art itself was a science. The lecture had a huge influenced [sic] on Marcel Proust, whose friend Robert de Montesquiou (model of the Baron de Charlus in In Search of Lost Time) was one of Whistler’s best subjects – Sutherland detects Whistler in Proust’s fictitious painter, Elstir.
Tatlin doesn’t live here anymore
Rick Poynor on Raoul Hausmann, collage (‘the most important innovation in the art of the twentieth century’) and Pinterest.
But Tatlin at Home is a historical artifact, not a throwaway image, so which pin was the most accurate as a representation? There were large differences in color and small but nagging variations at the edges of the image. The right-hand edge seemed particularly unlikely in all the pins I looked at. Having cut out the dressmakers’ dummy containing body organs and the fire extinguisher underneath, why would Hausmann then choose to slice and crop them so awkwardly? On the other side of the collage, the man’s hand and foot comes and goes and the crop on the ship’s propeller at the top also varies. Not for the first time it seemed I would have to leave Pinterest to find the most reliable online source and with art, as a rule, this tends to be the museum that owns the piece. Before doing that, I consulted some books, seven in all, that reproduce Tatlin at Home. From William S. Rubin’s Dada & Surrealist Art (1968) to Dawn Ades’ Photomontage (revised ed. 1986), it became clear that in the original the complete edge of the dressmakers’ dummy could be seen, as well as most of the fire extinguisher (though both of these older reproductions are in black and white).
Cucina conrumore
The New Inquiry on Futurist dining.
In a room whose walls are lined with aluminum, nimble waiters flit past diners, spritzing the air with perfume. A Wagner opera blares from a phonograph somewhere hidden. On each table sit four plates, each containing a small morsel. A quarter of a fennel bulb occupies the first, a single olive the second, the third holds a minute pile of candied fruit, and the fourth, a “tactile device” of red damask, velvet, and sandpaper, which the diners fondle as they eat.