Women in art

Yes, I know it’s been around for a while but just in case you haven’t seen it yet.

More on that headless plinth

The Royal Academy as its own Ern Malley. It’s beyond satire.

Forget the plinth — that little wooden bangy rolly jigamarooka on its own would have got my vote. It’s one of those things you hit an Irish drum with.

The unpronounceable Bodhran

I bet the judges picked up that Punch head and said, ‘But where’s Judy?’, and chucked it.

Grist for Milligan’s mill

The late, great British comedian Spike Milligan used to scour the daily newspapers for funny stories on which to base episodes of The Goon Show.

What would he have made of this, from yesterday’s ABC News On Line?

British art gallery displays slate as art

One of Britain’s most prestigious art galleries put a block of slate on display, topped by a small piece of wood, in the mistaken belief it was a work of art.

The Royal Academy included the chunk of stone and the small bone-shaped wooden stick in its summer exhibition in London.

But the slate was actually a plinth and the stick was designed to prop up a sculpture.

The sculpture itself - of a human head - was nowhere to be seen.

“I think the things got separated in the selection process and the selectors presented the plinth as a complete sculpture,” the work’s artist David Hensel told BBC radio.

The academy explained the error by saying the plinth and the head were sent to the exhibitors separately.

“Given their separate submission, the two parts were judged independently,” it said in a statement.

“The head was rejected, the base was thought to have merit and accepted.

“The head has been safely stored ready to be collected by the artist.

“It is accepted that works may not be displayed in the way that the artist might have intended.”

Just take a moment to think about this again:

The head was rejected, the base was thought to have merit and accepted.

On the other hand, maybe not.

Quite made my early morning.

(Via Tim Blair.)

Update: For the latest and best in art-iculate (haha!) idiocy check out this commentary on the event from a person by the name of Mark Lawson (possibly a work of art himself. Well, why not?).

Favourite artists

Oskar Kokoschka
1886-1980
Austrian, expressionist

Where Delvaux takes you back into dreams, Kokoschka calls you out of them. In his paintings the waking, everyday world recalls the resonances of the dreams we would rather forget. Behind every brushstroke lie torment, nightmares, horrors. Perhaps his WWI experience of being gassed contributed to his macabre vision. Perhaps it was his succession of traumatic love affairs, not least with Alma Mahler, widow of Gustav, later the wife of Franz Werfel, and the female subject in Windsbraut (Bride of the Wind, also called The Tempest), below. The tortured male is Kokoschka himself, his agony the counterpoint to her serenity.

Landscapes:

Montana, 1947

Lovers:

Windsbraut, 1913

Persian rugs, African cats

Two passionate obsessions that really do not mix.

Get off that beautiful Isfahan, Francesca. I just vacuumed it.

Favourite artists

Paul Delvaux
1897-1994
Belgian, surrealist

Trains du soir, 1957

Delvaux, though not as well known as many, was one the finest of the surrealists. He understood the essence of the genre better than almost any of them, better than Miro, Chagall, the bombastic Salvador Dali. He knew that surrealism was the reconstruction of dreams from the heart of re-entered darkness.

His haunting, enigmatic nudes are ethereal, other-worldly — yes, dreams – but are probably not suitable for posting here.

On the other hand, why not? The Belgians put them on postage stamps.

Sleeping Venus, 1944

From Iran, with love and horror

A rug from Isfahan, Iran. Originally intended, centuries ago, to bring a little colour and wamth to a nomad’s tent, the tradition of the Persian rug blossomed into a huge indigenous manufacturing industry with outlets all over the west.

The greatest centres of manufacture in Iran are Isfahan, Tabriz, Nain, and Qum. Each manufactory has its unique characteristics, using wool, silk and cotton in distinctive combinations. These hand-made, sensual carpets are easily distinguishable from the cheap, machine-made mimicries from Korea and Vietnam — as are the vibrant tribal rugs from the outlying regions of Iran, and those from Afghanistan, Turkmenistan and the peoples of Central Asia.

The modern rugs of Isfahan are particularly prized for the beauty and intricacy of their central medallion motif, their richness and depth of colour — typically deep blue and crimson — and the denseness of their weave. Characteristically, the rugs are woven from wool and silk, on a silk backing. At their best, they glow (depending on the light, thanks to the silk) as a bed of flowers, or a carpet of fire.

More fabulous Isfahan rugs.

The other — ugly, infinitely depressing — aspect of modern Iranian culture is typified by the increasingly alarming rhetoric of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, as seen here, courtesy of the (allegedly Mossad-backed) Middle East Media Research Institute.

What’s the connection? Unhappily, Isfahan is significant to that other side of modern Iran, too: it is the location of one of Iran’s nuclear development sites. If war comes to Iran, which heaven forbid, Isfahan will surely be one of the principal targets.

Beauty will pay the price of horror on that day, if it comes. As perhaps it always did.