The Hirschfeld Follies: A charming and generous gallery of Al Hirschfeld's portraits from The New York Times, spanning from 1928 to 2002 (
registration required), indexed by
date,
person and
show. Are there any outstanding young contemporary caricaturists out there who are doing good work (not necessarily in the theatre) we old-timers should know about? [
Be sure to accompany with plep's great post on American cartoon and caricature and PeteyStock's January 2004 obituary post. And while you're at it, if you'll excuse the immodesty, my own David Levine post, with a (superb) still-working link.]
posted by MiguelCardoso
on May 5, 2004 -
7 comments
How I Met And Dated Miss Emily Dickinson: Have you ever wondered what a favourite writer really looked like? Is there any relationship between an artist's face and their art? Hemingway looks like his prose; Ezra Pound like his poetry; Picasso is a dead ringer for his paintings but, say, John Updike doesn't resemble his fiction; T.S.Eliot looks like a bank clerk and Matisse was nothing like his works. How superficial can you get? [
Via Arts and Letters Daily.]
posted by MiguelCardoso
on Jan 2, 2004 -
27 comments
Martin Beck's Last Ten Years: How interesting to be able to look at a painter's
work year by year: patterns and even stories seem to develop, disappear and change before (and after)
our eyes. Are there any other good chronologically-arranged artist's websites out there? Or do painters habitually avoid them to prevent the detection of similarities and obsessions?
posted by MiguelCardoso
on Dec 26, 2003 -
5 comments
The Vertically Inclined Photographer: Shooting Paris, Rome, the French Riviera and the Loire Valley from a low-flying plane is
Patrick Durand's photographic obsession. It's an interesting
flat alternative to
Horst Hamann's [
click on "Gallery" and go to "New Verticals"]
tall vertical New York. There's something very exciting about looking at familiar sights from an unfamiliar point of view. [
Both sites very, perhaps too Flash.]
posted by MiguelCardoso
on Jul 4, 2003 -
14 comments
When Most Of The Reviews (And Indeed Books) Are Long Since Forgotten, David Levine's extraordinary portraits of the public figures and obsessions of the last 40 years will stand as a lasting impression of our literary and political lions, masters, avatars and bugbears. The generous and ever essential
New York Review of Books offers us a complete and fully searchable gallery of the great caricaturist's work since its first issue hit the stands back in 1963 - almost 2,000 cartoons in all. It's fascinating to trace the sequence and evolution of Levine's drawings through the years of particular figures:
Nabokov and
Beckett, for instance.
posted by MiguelCardoso
on May 29, 2003 -
10 comments
Guy Bourdin, Photographer Extraordinaire, 1928-1991 He was the most controversial of the not-really-fashion fashion photographers. "
Too sexy, too necro, too sado, too gratuitously violent, too misogynist", they said.
Now he's on the verge of a big
retrospective, opening Saturday at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London; being
exhibited at
leading galleries; lauded in the
NYT and the object of a website as
excellent as the
one in my
main link. [
These last 3 links go directly to the portfolios.] I just hope - being old enough to remember being severely scolded by my parents for collecting the photographs he published in my generation's
vademecum, the since-degraded French magazine
Photo - that these far more politically correct times (specially in increasingly intolerant, hygienist and puritanical America) won't prove to be even less welcoming of his work than his
own times were.[
*sigh* Probably still NSFW, though most of his work was flipped through by our mothers in Vogue magazine more than 20 years ago...]
posted by MiguelCardoso
on Apr 15, 2003 -
3 comments
Light, Secret Places And Books: Photographer
Sean Kernan's startling and beautifully literary interpretation of Jorge Luís Borges is based on his
The Secret Books album and was
reviewed on
The Garden of Forking Paths, that definitive, ever-fascinating Borges website. It's a small consolation for those, like me, who would have have liked to be in Barcelona today for the opening of the
Cosmopolis exhibition, which celebrates the stormy, but enduring identification of Borges with Buenos Aires. The relationship between writers and places is always interesting whenever they grow into each other to the point of almost
becoming each other. Joyce is Dublin; Kafka is Prague; Pessoa is Lisbon. What other, less obvious identifications are there? Is the relationship more like mutual cannibalism, mythical reinforcement, a touristy marketing scheme or the peaceful symbiosis it's generally made out to be?
posted by MiguelCardoso
on Oct 30, 2002 -
40 comments
Legato and
Avant La Nuit are two exquisite interactive pieces by
Nicolas Clauss, a "painter who stopped 'traditional painting' to use multimedia and the internet as a canvas", working from his
Flying Puppet studio in Paris. [
Requires Shockwave. Use your mouse.]
posted by MiguelCardoso
on Oct 16, 2002 -
10 comments
Artists, Lovers And Art Lovers or Amadeo, Anna and Olga: I was astonished to find such a thorough Modigliani gallery as this on the Web, complete with a
charming piece on his love affair with the great Russian poet
Anna Akhmatova. It's part of
Olga's Gallery, an entirely amateurish
affair mounted by
Olga and Helen Mataev with the intention of opening their children's eyes to the wonders of the (art) world. Its innocence and guilelessness are obvious, but its enthusiasm for painting - and its anxiety to share what's unsettling and magnificent about art - did much to renew my faith in the good ship Internet and in so many who sail in her. Long live amateurishness and its real root,
love! OK, so it's a bit raw around the edges... Who cares? It may be unprofessional, uncool and even awkward - but it's truly lovely.
posted by MiguelCardoso
on Sep 9, 2002 -
8 comments
Do Judge A Magazine By Its Cover: I'm ashamed to say I only recognized one name (Covarrubias) from the list of
illustrators featured in Condé Nast's sparkling collection of
cover art, dating from the 1910s to the 1950s. It's also searchable by
magazine. So now I count myself a fan of Rene Bouet-Willaumez, A.H. Fish, Henry Stahlhut, Carl Erickson and a few others too. All in all, it's good, clean fun - even though the site's commercial and one's fingers often ache to open the damn things and actually read the bastards!
posted by MiguelCardoso
on Sep 4, 2002 -
6 comments
Oh No! Not Another Underrated Artist Who Was Ahead Of His Time... Oh yes: it's
Tom Thompson(1877-1917). This time, though, the Internet has helped exact a sort of revenge. For those unlucky enough not to live in stately Ottawa and be able to visit the exhibition of the great colourist's work there (
through September 8), someone has done a great job of presenting Thompson's paintings on the web, including a wonderful selection of
merchandise and an appropriately quirky little
quiz. So they do win a few, now and again...
posted by MiguelCardoso
on Aug 21, 2002 -
8 comments
Life Is A Magazine, Chum... Come to the Magazine! A lot of us grew up with
Life Magazine and there's a certain nostalgic/narcissistic pleasure in looking at the cover of the
week you (if you're over 30, that is) or your parents were born in. Their
wacky and
classic covers are also worth checking out, even though there are some inevitable repeats. Oh - and never forgetting their astonishing
classic photographs, of course.
posted by MiguelCardoso
on Aug 9, 2002 -
18 comments
A Generous Brazilian Helping Of Cartier-Bresson's Photographs: His work is so vital it's unusually monitor-friendly. This 1999 Brazilian website includes many hard-to-find photographs, interestingly divided by location(Europe, America, India). There's also a nice selection of his classic images on
Photology.com's commercial site and an avaricious but compelling set of portraits of writers
here, courtesy of a Eastman Kodak-sponsored exhibition. [
As far as I can tell, they're all copyright-cleared. Bring your old Leicas out...and despair!].
posted by MiguelCardoso
on Jun 17, 2002 -
14 comments
For All Your Art Needs: My search for a more contemporary and inclusive supplement to
Artcyclopedia has ended.
Artnet is it. It's an amazing resource and its
list of artists, is the longest and most generously illustrated I've ever seen on the Web. Heaven...![
On preview, I see it's been linked twice before, by RJ Reynolds - of course! - but it definitely deserves a post all to itself.]
posted by MiguelCardoso
on May 10, 2002 -
7 comments
Jheronimus! For real connoisseurs of heaven and hell, i.e. life on earth, old
Bosch is still unbeatable. This slightly klunky and perhaps over-ambitious site(
The Bosch Game, for instance, didn't work for me) is thorough, scholarly and absolutely fascinating. [Do not view just before going to bed.]
posted by MiguelCardoso
on Feb 21, 2002 -
6 comments
Real Cinephiles Prefer Reading "Cahiers du Cinema" to Going to the Movies: I stopped reading
Cahiers du Cinema - the famously dogmatic French film journal where Godard, Truffaut, Resnais and Rohmer cut their teeth - a few years ago, when it got too arty-farty for its own good.
Well, it's slowly becoming essential again. Their website is
trés chic, intelectually challenging and a welcome antidote to the usual online movie-reviewing clowns. Or is it still a load of pretentious rubbish?
(In French, but with a lovely intro, lots of cool stills and a Quicktime interview, in English, with underrated director Paul Verhoeven)
posted by MiguelCardoso
on Dec 5, 2001 -
22 comments
Tune In To The Fine Art Search Machine: Artcyclopedia continues to be too good to be true. It's updated regularly and all you have to do is follow your favourite artists around the many participating museums, going "
Aaah..." at every click.
My particular obsession is
Milton Avery. I first saw
a painting of his at the old Tate Museum in London, when I was about 12, and have been intrigued by him ever since. Is he an American Matisse or just a less obviously picture-postcardish Raoul Dufy?
To cut to the chase: what painter keeps
you unable to make your mind up about him or her?
posted by MiguelCardoso
on Nov 29, 2001 -
15 comments
