The Rabbit Dreams of Dr. Freud's Niece - An illustrator of children's books, Sigmund Freud's niece Martha went by the name Tom, wore men's clothing, and died by her own hand in her late 30s, a year after her husband's suicide. BibliOdyssey recently featured some of her early work from
Das Baby-Liederbuch, noting that because she was Jewish, many of her books were destroyed in the Nazi era and are scarce in the book trade. More about the artist and her work at
Tom Seidmann-Freud.
posted by madamjujujive
on Dec 18, 2011 -
14 comments
Did many of the "great masters" of Western art, well, cheat? Not exactly, says David Hockney, but they were close. In his
new book, entitled
Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters, Hockney fleshes out a theory that he's been
toying with for years: that artists from Raphael to Caravaggio used devices similar to a
camera obscura (specifically, a
camera lucida), to "assist" them in making near photograph-quality reproductions of their subjects. The
theory (and the resulting
debate) is fascinating: if these artists did, in fact, benefit from "technical assistance," how should this affect our view of them, and of art history in general?
posted by arco
on Nov 10, 2001 -
16 comments
