nickkahler reblogged
Hans Erni, Spirals, Twigs, and Matches, 1956 (via mythofblue)
Joseph Ducreux, Self-Portrait (Yawning), c. 1783
America [is] a country obsessed with realism, where if a reconstruction is to be credible, it must be absolutely iconic, a perfect likeness, a 'real' copy of the reality being represented.
Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyperreality, c. 1986 (via hoekstra)
"The painting was first exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1850. It was destroyed during World War II, along with 154 other pictures, when a transport vehicle moving the pictures to the castle of Königstein, near Dresden, was bombed by Allied forces in February 1945."
nickkahler reblogged
"One of a series of 3 kinetic paintings meant to be viewed from all sides, rotating counter-clockwise. For more information, listen to Naum Gabo + Noton Pevsner’s The Realistic Manifesto."
There are idiots who define my work as abstract; yet what they call abstract is what is most realistic. What is real is not the appearance, but the idea, the essence of things.
Constantin Brancusi, "On Art," c. 1920
The rise of modernity is the development and exacerbation of an historical consciousness; some form of historicism thus essentially inheres to it. To be modern, moreover, is not so much a matter of committing oneself to the new conditions from a realist point of view, as it is to engage in an act of separation: “to move away from something, to cut oneself off,” as Octavio Paz wrote in Children of the Mire. One of the principal modes of criticizing the present is to invoke the past.
Gustav Klimt, Two Girls With An Oleander, c. 1900