News Art Blog

“If you love someone,” pop star Sting sang years ago, “set them free.” Sometimes the first rule of love is forgetting all the rules that constrain the object of one’s affection, while trusting that the beloved will return on their own. Nineteenth century British artist J.M.W. Turner knew all the rules of painting from the Old Master tradition, but once he reached his seventh decade and found himself an Old Master, he began cutting ties to the old rules of his beloved painting and set it (and himself) free. The results, on glorious display at the Tate Britain’s exhibition Late Turner: Painting Set Free, heralded new directions in art followed by the Impressionists and nearly every modern art movement to follow. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "How Turner Loved Painting, So He Set It Free."

In our time of confined specialization, it’s hard to comprehend the multimedia talents of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, whose poetry and painting helped shape the Victorian Age into the paradox-laden, hot mess of an era we know it as today. The recent reissue of Alicia Craig Faxon’s Dante Gabriel Rossetti, her masterful 1989 monograph on the artist—the the first and still the best—along with a new book on sex in the age of Queen Victoria, raises the question of whether a new job description should be added to Rossetti’s resume: sexual revolutionary? Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Dante Gabriel Rossetti: Painter, Poet, Sexual Revolutionary?"

[Image: Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Lady Lilith (detail), 1867. Watercolor on paper, 20 x 16 ¾ in. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Rogers Fund. 1908.]

[Many thanks to Abbeville Press for providing me with the image above and a review copy of Alicia Craig Faxon’s Dante Gabriel Rossetti.]

“If you've just had a bad week at the office,” suggests Keith Broomfield in a recent article in The Scotsman, “then spare a thought for 19th-century artist John Everett Millais whose famous painting of the art critic and social commentator John Ruskin is now being celebrated by a new trail in the Trossachs.” For 140 years, the exact spot where Millais and Ruskin stood to make the painting was lost, but now anyone can find inspiration at that intersection of trail and waterfall. However, can simply standing where Ruskin stood and looking upon nature cure “a bad week at the office”? From the perspective of 2011, can we still see nature through John Ruskin’s Victorian, “Last Romantic” eyes? Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Can We Still See Nature Through John Ruskin’s Eyes?"

[Image: John Everett Millais. John Ruskin (detail), 1853-1854.]