Tag: Arthistory
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01 Work, The Art of War, Bogdan Willewalde’s the battle of Fère-Champenoise, with footnotes
The Battle of Fère-Champenoise (25 March 1814) was fought between two Imperial French corps led by Marshals Auguste de Marmont and Édouard Mortier, duc de Trévise and a larger Coalition force composed of cavalry from the Austrian Empire, Kingdom of Prussia, Kingdom of Württemberg, and Russian Empire. Caught by surprise by Field Marshal Karl Philipp, Prince…
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01 Work, The Art of War, Frank Brangwyn’s Mater Dolorosa Belgica (Our Lady of Sorrows), with footnotes
Painted in 1915, Mater Dolorosa Belgica (Our Lady of Sorrows) conveys Brangwyn’s deep concern for Belgium in the midst of war. The cathedral is on fire, smoke rising from its roof. On the left are a group of refugees, and on the right a row of soldiers marching on. In the centre of the composition…
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01 Work, The Art of War, Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson’s Ypres after the First Bombardment, with footnotes
Nevinson depicts a desolate scene of the smoking, burning carcass of the Belgian city of Ypres after it was first bombed in 1914. Nevinson would have witnessed the scarred remains of the city while enlisted with the Friends’ Ambulance Unit as a driver on the Western Front. The skeleton of the once magnificent city, with…
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01 Work, The Art of War, Eugenio Álvarez Dumont’s Malasaña and his daughter fight against the French, with footnotes
The painting illustrates the moment when the guerrilla Juan Manuel Malasaña Pérez (1759–1808) kills the French dragoon who has just murdered his daughter, the embroiderer Manuela Malasaña Oñoro (1793– 1808), who was supplying her father with rifle cartridges to fight the French troops from her house during the assault on Monteleón Park. The scene takes…
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01 Work, The Art of War, Diego Rivera’s The Uprising, 1931, with footnotes
You see the men wearing workers’ overalls and the women wearing modern day short dresses and short hair cuts and even earrings. It’s an urban industrial scene, and it’s a workers’ demonstration. In the very center of the composition is a woman actively asserting herself against the forces of oppression. She is pushing back the…
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01 Work, The Art of War, Jack Kevorkian’s The muse of genocide, with footnotes
“Go ahead, destroy this race! Destroy Armenia; see if you can do it. Send them from their homes into the desert. Let them have neither bread nor water. Burn their homes and churches. Then see if they will not laugh again; see if they will not sing and pray again. For when two of them…
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01 Work, The Art of War, Jules Monge’s the last of the battalion, with footnotes
All the soldiers present are French line infantry. The fighter writing with his blood “for France” is a sergeant, the one in the corner of the door is a corporal, the officer seems to be a lieutenant and finally next to him is a corporal-bugler. Given the uniforms, this scene takes place at the start…
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01 Work, The art of War, Suhair Sibai’s Damascus Queen #3, with Footnotes
Originally listed for C$9,108 Suhair Sibai was born in Syria in 1956. Through her work, Suhair explores the concepts of identity and the Self, using the female form as her preferred medium. According to Suhair, who was educated as an artist in the sprawling metropolis of Los Angeles, the level of multiculturalism and diversity to which…
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01 Work, The art of War, József Molnár’s Warrior Dezső Sacrifices his Life for King Charles Robert, with Footnotes
King Charles Robert of Anjou fleeing from the Battle of Posada (November 9-12, 1330). Romantic painting Charles’ army wear hussar clothes of the 17th century. The Basarab I of Wallachia’s army ambushed Charles Robert of Anjou, king of Hungary and his 30,000-strong invading army. The Vlach (Romanian) warriors rolled down rocks over the cliff edges…
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01 Work, The Art of War, Sliman Mansour’s Prison, with footnotes
Prison (1982) depicts five men, their hands cuffed behind their back and their heads covered so they cannot see. They are huddled together, back to back, confined within the walls of a prison. Most likely Palestinian and although faceless, the men appear strong, youthful and resilient in their stance. Yet melancholy undertones run throughout, as the…
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01 Work, The Art of War, Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson’s A Taube, with footnotes
The Taube (Taube translates as ‘Dove’, taub as ‘death’) was a German reconnaisance plane but carried bombs that could be thrown from the cockpit. The casual violence of the scene marks the increasing vulnerability of the civilian population. Both the title and the evidence of an explosion imply that this was the cause of death…
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01 Work, The Art of War, Sliman Mansour’s crowd, with footnotes
Mansour is a committed Palestinian artist. Here he paints a compact crowd, seized with fear and hampered by the barbed wire of the occupation. Beyond the Palestinian question, this image has, thirty years after its execution, a more universal scope: we see the people confronted with conflicts and the migrations which are their consequence. More on…
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01 Work, The Art of War, Howard Pyle’s A Wolf Had Not Been Seen at Salem for Thirty Years, with footnotes
Pyle’s image is rather sparse, between the snow and the cloudy sky he leaves the viewer’s eye to latch onto the people and the wolf. Your eye falls upon the people in the front, and the mix of fear and of the unknown is very strong here. Pyle creates his people, the landscape and even…
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01 Work, The Art of War, Elmars Mageramovs’ Victims of War, with footnotes
“The theme is relevant in our troubled time. I think it is worth thinking about our attitude to the world, to suppress in oneself everything that leads to war, instability in society, in the family, in nature. We should learn for analysis and thinking to be objective political processes understanding. The main victims of these…
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02 Works, The art of War, Louis Gallait’s War and Peace, with Footnotes
When this pair of allegorical paintings (together with Walters 37.124) was completed in 1872, a Belgian critic wrote: “M. Gallait just finished two paintings forming a pendant pair that rank among the best things he has ever done. They are allegories of peace and war, but allegories conceived in a new order of ideas, substituting…
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01 Work, The art of War, Benjamin West’s Edward III Crossing The Somme, with Footnotes
English offensives in 1345–1347, during the Hundred Years’ War, resulted in repeated defeats of the French, the loss or devastation of much French territory and the capture by the English of the port of Calais. The war had broken out in 1337 and flared up in 1340 when the king of England, Edward III, laid…
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01 Work, The Art of War, Afifa Aleiby’s Gulf War, with footnotes
Gulf War reflects Aleiby’s pain for the suffering that had resulted from the Persian Gulf War, which happened between 1990 to 1991 and was triggered by the Iraqi invasion of the State of Kuwait. The conflict resulted in the death of thousands, damage to infrastructure and cultural loss. Notably, The painting were painted while the…
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01 Work, The Art of War, Sue Coe’s Bomb Shelter? with footnotes
With access to the outside world choked off the superb painter Hanaa Malallah, developed varieties of ruggedly handmade books that are like the dream diaries of constricted personal lives and thwarted artistic aspirations. Malallah immigrated to the U.K. in 2006. A new work by her, “She/He Has No Picture” (2019), amplifies the aesthetic to generate…
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01 Work, The Art of War, George Bellows’ The Germans Arrive, with footnotes
A German soldier strangles a civilian while another woman is attacked near a burning cottage. Artists played a role even before 1917. Reports of German atrocities galvanized George Bellows, initially an opponent of the war, into action. Bellows, channeling Goya, painted and made prints of rape, forced labor and the murder of children by gleeful…
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