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I keep telling you about all these people, like Kahlo and Picasso, Hemingway and Graves, plus my bits about Gandhi, and Elvis, and I do not even know whether you are interested in the slightest.

Oh well, never mind. I wouldn’t tell you, if I wasn’t interested. I suppose that has to be my guideline.

Today I’ll offer you an entry about Federico García Lorca. He was born in Fuente Vaqueros, Granada, Spain, 5th June,1898; he died near Granada, 19th August,1936. Killed. Executed. Murdered. That is 71 years ago, today.

One does not know who killed him, or why. Perhaps it was a political murder, because García Lorca was considered left-leaning. Or it was a Fascist murder, because Lorca stood for the arts and the intellect and for freedom of the mind. Or it was, because Lorca was said to be more interested in men than in the opposite…

Guilhermina Suggia by Welsh artist Augustus John (1878-1971)

Postcard by H.A. Weiss, circa 1900

Photograph by Thomas Eakins (1844-1916)

Miss M. Frank of Vienna

By American painter Joseph DeCamp (1858-1923)

By American painter Lilla Cabot Perry (1848-1933)

By American artist John White Alexander (1856-1915)

After I read Germinal a couple of years ago (see my review), Émile Zola became one of those authors that I really wanted to read more of, but it was not until I saw the BBC series based on The Ladies’ Paradiseand read the novel (see my review) that I decided to begin a long-term project to read them all. I’ve enjoyed reading this one, The Fortune of the Rougons, which puts the whole sequence into perspective.

With Les Rougon-Macquart, Zola apparently set out to emulate Balzac’s La Comedie Humaine but his 20-volume cycle differs in two significant ways: it consists of novels rather than short stories and novellas, and it focusses on a single family rather than a whole society. Zola believed in the fatalistic effects of heredity and environment, and so the novels trace three branches of the Rougon-Macquart family: the aspirational…

This series of posts comprises a few loosely translated extracts from Bolshoi Gorod, a fine Russian magazine of art and culture. In April this year, they did a small series on pre-Revolutionary private dwellings in Moscow, and these seemed of artistic interest in this blog. The tragedy is that it’s impossible for the average man-on-the-street to enter these residences, which are closed to the public even on the two days of the year (April 18, May 18) that are named Days of Culture, and it took nearly half a year of attrition and persuasion for Bolshoi Gorod to obtain access.

Alexandrinsky Palace

In 1754, Matryona Demidova, the wife of Prokofy Demidov, son of the Ural-based factory-man, bought lands from the Countess Repnin. Two years later, the baroque Demidov palace was constructed under the aegis of the Prague-based architect Jecht (I’m not sure I’m spelling this right and can’t find any…

Lecture Sponsored by Judy Seed

In 2012 I wrote twice about the Peace of Utrecht, the series of treaties which ended the War of the Spanish Succession (1702-1713). The first post looked in great detail at the textual tradition of the Westphalian Peace of 1648, the Peace of Utrecht and the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle (1748). The post contains an overview of treaty collections and relevant websites for historical treaties. In my second post I looked at Early Modern peace treaties more generally and I tried to summarize the results of my first post and to bring together some elements for a search strategy. One of my main points was these peace treaties are indeed treaties in the plural. The Peace of Utrecht consists of 22 treaties, counting also the treaties concluded at Baden (1714) and Rastatt (1715). On April 11, 1713 seven separate treaties were concluded. Last week it was exactly 300 years ago that…

By Theadora Brack

I’ve said it once, and I’ll play it again, Sam. The mere sight of the Paris rooftops at l’heure bleue has never failed to give me a thrill. Larger than life, I’m transfixed. I tumble flat.

Reaching for Henry Miller: “In Paris, on the asphalt, I have often walked saying: wild, wild, wild. You just say it, and walk, walk, walk. It makes everything rise, swell, burst. Then I am so happy I cannot bear it any more and I begin to sing. It is cause for bliss. You can get drunk on walking.” Oh, Henry!

[Loose paraphrase from Woman power русского авангарда, by Elena Fedotova, on Colta.ru.]

Between October 16, 2013 and February 16, 2014, the State Tretyakov Museum holds an exhibition titled ‘Between the East and the West’, dedicated to the works of Natalia Goncharova (1881-1962).

Natalia Goncharova has been variously called an Amazon of the avant-garde, a great Russian artist, a left-wing painter of the Russian avant-garde. And yet a 100-odd years ago, conservative critics were deprecating her as an blasphemer and an untalented dauber. When you look at the amazing power of her spiritual cycles, her refined theatrical sketches, her decorative still lifes, it is difficult to understand why so much criticism clung to her, and why her works were snatched right off their displays.

Goncharova’s solo exhibition in 1914 (in Nadezhda Dobychina’s ‘Art Bureau’, at the time, the fashionable gallery for modern art in St Petersburg) created a scandal. An anonymous…