Contemporary, portrait, landscape, painting, best, top ten, paintings, oil, artist, artists, gallery, life, figure, graphite, sketch, Snowdonia, drawings, pencil, Art, geometry, composition, Master, Masterpiece, Welsh, Wales.
Palmyra
Contemporary, portrait, landscape, painting, best, top ten, paintings, oil, artist, artists, gallery, life, figure, graphite, sketch, Snowdonia, drawings, pencil, Art, geometry, composition, Master, Masterpiece, Welsh, Wales.
Like millions of other people across the world I recently felt sick to my stomach when I heard about the Daesh destruction of Palmyra, the UNESCO World Heritage site in Syria.
According to UNESCO, Palmyra offers the 'consummate example of an ancient urbanized complex', with its 'grand colonnaded street of 1,100 metres in length forming the monumental axis of the city'.
Palmyra's other outstanding features are its magnificent temples of Baal and Bel, the Camp of Diocletian Roman military complex and its imposing triumphal arch at the entrance of the main street.
The city is particularly well known for its unique funerary sculptures and statues - special because they combine Greco-Roman forms with local elements and Persian influences in a highly original style.
It has now been destroyed simply because some ignorant and bigoted fanatics cannot contemplate the idea that others do not share their religious beliefs.
I was similarly upset when I heard about the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddha statues by the Taliban. Before they were blown up they were the tallest such monuments in the world and had been carved out of the sandstone in the 6th century when Bamiyan was a Buddhist centre.
Gone in a second!
I've never been to Palmyra or Bamiyan personally, and obviously now I never will.
Their destruction sits nicely within a long, and ever-increasing, list of iconoclastic barbarities that stretch back over the centuries.
Religious :
Unsurprisingly, it's in the area of religion that we find the worst cases. Examples include the recent ones mentioned above, but there are many more instances found all the way through history. These include the drive to abolish icons and other religious images by supporters of the 8th and 9th century movement in the Byzantine Church, where the term iconoclasm comes from.
The conquistadors and their rampage across the various cultures of the americas is another notable case. If I remember correctly there are only four Mayan codices, of the thousands that were originally found, that have survived the deliberate attempt to eradicate the Mayan culture by the Catholic invaders.
There was widespread destruction of religious artworks by the puritans during the reformation.
Driven by a desire to end the corruption of the Catholic Church they embarked on a rampage which resulted in the loss of artworks across many countries where the reformation flourished.
Recently I asked an expert at York cathedral why had so much pre-reformation artwork survived in the cathedral when the city was besieged and fell to the forces of Cromwell in 1644, and he explained to me that it was saved by Thomas Fairfax who, although a warrior for protestantism was, fortunately, a local born and bred!
Political :
"The urge for destruction is also a creative urge"
Mikhail Bakunin.
As part of his drive to rid the world of whole peoples and cultures that he detested, Hitler, with his clear understanding of the power of art and culture, destroyed many works of art across Europe, which were considered to be degenerate.
The Degenerate Art Exhibition (German: Die Ausstellung "Entartete Kunst") was an art exhibition organised by Adolf Ziegler and the Nazi Party in Munich from 19 July to 30 November 1937.
After this exhibition (plus a second 'degenerate art exhibition) closed, 5000 artworks were burned. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, who had 350 of his paintings destroyed, committed suicide in 1938.
I'll continue this short list in the next posting.
According to UNESCO, Palmyra offers the 'consummate example of an ancient urbanized complex', with its 'grand colonnaded street of 1,100 metres in length forming the monumental axis of the city'.
Palmyra's other outstanding features are its magnificent temples of Baal and Bel, the Camp of Diocletian Roman military complex and its imposing triumphal arch at the entrance of the main street.
The city is particularly well known for its unique funerary sculptures and statues - special because they combine Greco-Roman forms with local elements and Persian influences in a highly original style.
It has now been destroyed simply because some ignorant and bigoted fanatics cannot contemplate the idea that others do not share their religious beliefs.
I was similarly upset when I heard about the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddha statues by the Taliban. Before they were blown up they were the tallest such monuments in the world and had been carved out of the sandstone in the 6th century when Bamiyan was a Buddhist centre.
Gone in a second!
Bamiyan.
I've never been to Palmyra or Bamiyan personally, and obviously now I never will. Bamiyan.
There appears to be a range of different motivations behind these barbarous acts. Someone should write a book!Here are a few that spring to mind :
Religious :
Unsurprisingly, it's in the area of religion that we find the worst cases. Examples include the recent ones mentioned above, but there are many more instances found all the way through history. These include the drive to abolish icons and other religious images by supporters of the 8th and 9th century movement in the Byzantine Church, where the term iconoclasm comes from.
Byzantine Iconoclasm, 9th Century
Page 9 of the 'Dresden' Codex
Driven by a desire to end the corruption of the Catholic Church they embarked on a rampage which resulted in the loss of artworks across many countries where the reformation flourished.
Recently I asked an expert at York cathedral why had so much pre-reformation artwork survived in the cathedral when the city was besieged and fell to the forces of Cromwell in 1644, and he explained to me that it was saved by Thomas Fairfax who, although a warrior for protestantism was, fortunately, a local born and bred!
Destruction of religious images
in Zurich 1524
in Zurich 1524
"The urge for destruction is also a creative urge"
Mikhail Bakunin.
Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin was a Russian revolutionary anarchist, and the founder of collectivist anarchism. He is considered to be among the most influential figures of anarchism, and one of the principal founders of the social-anarchist tradition. His take on destruction-creation differs sharply from the later similar sounding ideas of Marx and Schumpeters formulations in it's focus on the active destruction of the existing social and political order by human agents (as opposed to systemic forces or contradictions in the case of Marx/Schumpeter).
I seem to remember that in 'Homage to Catalonia' George Orwell talked about the semi-mystical motivations of the anarchists who were fighting in the Spanish Civil War who believed that if they destroyed the whole fabric of society and culture, that from the ruins, everything would start again and, magically, something pure and good would necessarily arise.
I seem to remember that in 'Homage to Catalonia' George Orwell talked about the semi-mystical motivations of the anarchists who were fighting in the Spanish Civil War who believed that if they destroyed the whole fabric of society and culture, that from the ruins, everything would start again and, magically, something pure and good would necessarily arise.
As part of his drive to rid the world of whole peoples and cultures that he detested, Hitler, with his clear understanding of the power of art and culture, destroyed many works of art across Europe, which were considered to be degenerate.
Exhibition poster for "Kunst" (Art)
(Note the sarcastic quote marks).
Goebbels visits the exhibition.
The exhibition presented 650 works of art, confiscated from German museums, and was staged in counterpoint to the concurrent Great German Art Exhibition. The day before the exhibition started, Hitler delivered a speech declaring "merciless war" on cultural disintegration, attacking "chatterboxes, dilettantes and art swindlers". Degenerate art was defined as works that "insult German feeling, or destroy or confuse natural form or simply reveal an absence of adequate manual and artistic skill". One million people attended the exhibition in its first six weeks.
(Wikipedia)
After this exhibition (plus a second 'degenerate art exhibition) closed, 5000 artworks were burned. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, who had 350 of his paintings destroyed, committed suicide in 1938.
I'll continue this short list in the next posting.
quiz quiz quiz quiz quiz “details, details............” quiz quiz quiz quiz quiz
What's this, and who painted it?
(The answer will be in the next posting.)
And here's the answer from the last posting -
'Charles 1'.
by Sir Anthony Van Dyck, 1641.
quiz quiz quiz quiz quiz “details, details............” quiz quiz quiz quiz quiz
"Duchamp is a hugely overrated artist.
Duchamp was the first artist who really became a great master at the art of curating his own reputation. Other artists had done it before, but Duchamp was the first modernist artist to do it."
Robert Hughes
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. . . . and now, a Recommended Read . . . .
The Brothers Karamazov:
A Novel in Four Parts and an Epilogue
by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Translated by David McDuff
Translated by David McDuff
I hesitate to recommend this book, simply because it is such a famous classic that everyone has probably already read it.
But if it has managed to evade you, then it's well worth searching out, and getting stuck in. It's powerful and gripping, has a story which pulls the reader along and a range of believable and well-defined characters.
I've read this book several times over the years and each time it's richer and more intense. If there's a better novel around, I haven't come across it yet!
'There is no writer who better demonstrates the contradictions and fluctuations of the creative mind than Dostoyevsky, and nowhere more astonishingly than in The Brothers Karamazov' Joyce Carol Oates. 'Dostoyevsky was the only psychologist from whom I had anything to learn: he belongs to the happiest windfalls of my life' Friedrich Nietzsche. 'The most magnificent novel ever written' Sigmund Freud.
Published on Penguin Classics
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