Art Movements

The Shock of the New

Many years ago the BBC was a world class broadcaster; politically neutral, comedy that was actually funny and unafraid to broadcast high brow content. Unlike today where it is just […]

Macchiaioli, Impressionism 10 years before the Impressionists?

The Macchiaioli were a group of Italian painters who predated the Impressionists with whom they had many very striking similarities. Named “Macchiaioli” as an insult by a critical journalist writing in  in November […]

Was modernism only about style?

Paul Cézanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire, 1902-04, oil on canvas, 73 x 91.9 cm (Philadelphia Museum of Art) When discussing style we have to look at what the word actually means. A […]

Northern Renaissance and Religion

In the mid fifteenth century there were very few media that suspended human disbelief, just visual art and acted plays, so the power of a virtual window into an alternate […]

Facade, 10b Elizabetes iela, Riga

Serendipity brought a number of factors together in the early 1900 to propagate an unprecedented building boom in Latvia that created the largest concentration of Art Nouveau architecture in the […]

Berthe Morisot, her Subjects and Reception

Berthe Morisot (1841-1895) spent her entire adult life (except for vacations) living in the Passy district of Paris. She was one of the founders of Impressionism, one of its greatest […]

Gustav Klimt. Three Ages of Woman

This is a square oil painting on canvas, 180cm X 180cm, completed in 1905, when Gustav Klimt (1862-1918) was at his artistic peak. It won the gold medal at the […]