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Index: Art & Architecture

Models.

Anthony Rudolf: ‘Posing for months on end for one statuette, with great pride and high hopes that it would be completed and cast and displayed in a glass case, Pauline watched the artist desperately try to improve and complete it. No such luck.’

The Round Church, Cambridge.

Christopher Landrum: ‘Whatever was not said, I felt it important for my memory to try to mark the events that had unfolded there that day…’

Donatello on the beach.

David Berridge: ‘I remember  ‘Dead Christ supported by Angels’ from the National Gallery’s 2018 Bellini and Mantegna show, the jolt it provided there of a familiar iconography suddenly appearing in a new medium. I hope to see it again in better company than Victorian kitsch’

From ‘Corot’s Walk’.

John Taylor: ‘Did Corot have a story to tell? Nearly all his paintings tell of the absence of a memorable story: only a mother and her child, only two peasant women gathering herbs or flowers, only a peasant leading his cow down the road.’

African art.

Garreth Byrne: ‘Today’s indigenous travelling vendors trade in lighter woodcarvings and folded-up colourful patchwork quilts and paintings. They know what fits into suitcases and sells easily.’

India Objectified.

Tom Lowenstein: ‘This, in sum, is a book that could not have been written or presented differently. It is bewildering in both its wealth and diversity, and no single “native” devotee could know about or understand so many other traditions.’

Martyrdom.

Anthony Howell: ‘With manipulation, the fault-lines can be re-opened, just as they were re-opened in Yugoslavia, where NATO capitalised on Croatia’s Ustasha (pro-Nazi) back-story and sponsored Muslim fanaticism.’

A book of Bessie and Sallyann.

Paul Holman: ‘So I stand before this master of all the king’s horses, who has diminished over the centuries to become a transmission through a ghost box, a spook to prank kids. His face, beheld at last, is that of a patrician bully, smooth with the untroubled assumption of power…’

Looking at pictures.

John Welch; ‘I’m standing at the bus stop by the roundabout on Lea Bridge Road, looking back at the roundabout itself which has been thoughtfully planted. In front of some conifers are some stone shapes and I start to think of a painting by Poussin. There are elements in his work that people have compared to Cezanne.’

Seeing with Words.

Hoyt Rogers: ‘In Bonnefoy’s estimation, the deserted landscape, in which a few scattered human beings merely throw the solitude into deeper relief, is one of the major inventions of the Seicento, championed by Poussin and his followers such as Dughet.’

The School of Giorgione.

Walter Pater: ‘All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music. For while in all other kinds of art it is possible to distinguish the matter from the form, and the understanding can always make this distinction, yet it is the constant effort of art to obliterate it.’

The Seicento and the Cult of Images.

Yves Bonnefoy: ‘We look at these rivers, these cities in the light; at these beings, haloed by an astounding dignity. We say to ourselves: that world is, perhaps. And within us, soon the ‘passion’ flames up, which is nothing but a love that has its object in our dreams—and we feel tempted to devote a ‘cult’ to certain images, at least.’

Macanese Concrete

Peter McCarey: ‘But here’s the thing: a poem can explain itself, a concrete object can’t. Like a garden it allows the visitor to wander — without imposing an interpretation — except when the helpful glosses do just that, and in the process turn an autonomous object into the illustration of an explanation, which seems a shame.’

A Note on Inscape, Descriptionism and Logical Form.

Alan Wall: ‘They have achieved a significant form that grafts them on to one another, as though they were organically related, or at least symbiotically fused. The space between them ceases to be homogeneous, and becomes shaped instead. Homology signifies a shared origin in function and development. For example, pectoral fins, bird wings, and the forelimbs of mammals – all are homologous, whereas bird wings and insect wings are merely analogous.’

Candid Camera.

Christopher Landrum: ‘“Greater love,” says the Gospel of John, “hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” I don’t know if Chris Arnade crossed the threshold into feeling love for his subjects (though he did rescue the body of a dead back row acquaintance from the anonymity of a pauper’s grave). But no reader of ‘Dignity’ can deny that its author did lay down his career and dared to listen to back row individuals and let them speak for themselves.’