Category: English

Tribute to Antonio Machado

12/3/2023

Antonio Machado Ruiz died of sadness and exile on February 22, 1939 in Collioure, a small coastal town in the south of France, close to the Spanish border. It had been barely a month since he had left the country that he had loved so much and that had made him suffer a lot in recent years. Accompanied by his mother, family, friends, acquaintances and many anonymous people who fled in despair from a country torn apart by a Civil War that was approaching its imminent end after the capture of Barcelona by fascist coup leaders.

Gerardo Diego had said of him that "he spoke in verse and lived in poetry." His art is so transcendental for Spanish poetry that it will always live in our collective memory. When he died, in the pocket of his overcoat was found a piece of paper on which he had written those who were his last verse: "these blue days and this childhood sun." [Estos días azules y este sol de la infancia]. Join me on my journey through the places that were important in his life.

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Nuda Veritas (Tribute to Klimt: Chapter 7)

26/2/2023

At the end of the 19th century the art movement of the Secession was in full swing. Driven by the desire to fight against the most conservative vision of art, which until then had been dominated by the bourgeois and censoring elite, they intended to universalize it by making it more mundane and bringing it closer to all social strata. A new century came to Vienna with them.

In 1897 they created the Ver Sacrum magazine. After having been elected as president of the Secession by his fellow artists, Gustav Klimt took the reins of the third number of the magazine, for which he created some illustrations among which Nuda Veritas and The Envy (Der Neid) stand out.

Originally conceived as an ink drawing for the magazine, these illustrations became the featured image of the third issue. With a forceful and revealing stroke, it came to confirm that Klimt was an excellent sketcher. As he did with other works throughout his career, some time later he took up the idea again, resulting in the giant canvas that, with wavy and sensual lines so typical of Art Nouveau, claims an integral eroticism that ends with a quote from Schiller that the painter makes his own:

Nuda Veritas, Der Neid, Nuda Veritas, 1897

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The Hope (Tribute to Klimt: Chapter 6)

12/2/2023

Made in its heyday, The Hope I and II constitute one of the greatest praises to women in all their dimensions. Flags of Gustav Klimt's style in the eyes of the art world, vindicate the female empowerment as the central figure on which the new art revolves, charged with sensuality and not for that reason stripped of the naturalness with which the Austrian artist intends to vindicate the role of women.

A notable difference can be seen between the two works whose completion is four years away in time.The first of these appears to us overwhelmingly erotic. We find ourselves with the complete nude of a shameless redhead, in fact, the exuberant reddish pubic hair only increases the feeling of perversity. Loaded with symbolism, the shapes and currents that adorn the painting allude to life and death, sensuality and sexuality.

Die Hoffnung, 1903 - II, 1907-08

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The Girlfriends (Tribute to Klimt: Chapter 5)

5/2/2023

Retired on the outskirts of Vienna, the late Klimt gives us a series of fresh and colorful artworks, far removed from the exaggeratedly ornate baroque style that had been so characteristic of his classical work. However, it does not abandon the motives that had been its emblem: the woman continues to be the central axis of his creative universe, focused from eroticism and lesbian love.

Having become a portraitist of bourgeois women, we appreciate in the works of his final stage a substantial change in the color palette, in the style and in the influences. Here we are presented with a clearly calmer Klimt. The mosaics, the golden ornaments and the baroquely charged prints have given way to an appeased use of color and in chromatic harmony with the content, revealing clear Asian and Impressionist influences.

Die Freundinnen, 1916-17

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Kerouac's belief and technique

29/5/2022

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