July 11

Nash and the Neo-Romantic Landscapel

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On the 11th of May 1889, English surreal war artist Paul Nash was born in London. Malcolm Yorke identified him as part of a group of nine British artists who worked in what he defined as a ‘neo-romantic’ vein. The Neo-Romantic landscape was a reaction to naturalism, and stressed external observation, by focusing on feeling and […]

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July 10

Bernard Buffet – Picasso’s Nemesis?

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On the 10th of July 1928, French artist Bernard Buffet was born in Paris. Buffet belonged to a group – “L’Homme Témoin (The Witness)” – along with Bernard Lorjout and André Minaux, considered as a new school of figurative painting. Going against the emerging trend of abstraction in modern painting, Buffet remained an Expressionist through […]

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July 09

Warhol, Pop Art, and Autism: Case Unravelled

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On the 9th of July 1962, Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans exhibition opened at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles. It was Warhol’s first solo gallery exhibition as a fine artist. The size of the show was determined by the number of varieties of Campbell’s soup available at the time. The 32 paintings were presented […]

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July 08

The Raw Art of Käthe Kollwitz

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On the 8th of July 1867, German artist Käthe Kollwitz, nee Schmidt, was born in Königsberg (Prussia), now Kaliningrad (Russia). “The artist grew up in a liberal middle-class family and studied painting in Berlin (1884–85) and Munich (1888–89). Impressed by the prints of Max Klinger, she devoted herself primarily to graphic art after 1890, producing […]

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July 07

Suzuki Harunobu and Japanese Erotica

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On the 7th of July 1770, allegedly, Japanese woodblock print artist Suzuki Harunobu died of a sudden illness. The place and real cause of his death remain unknown. In fact, except for his artistic endeavours, very little is known about his life at all. Born in Edo (modern Tokyo), Harunobu was the first to successfully produce […]

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July 06

Marc Bloch on Thaumaturgy

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On the 6th of July 1886, French Jewish historian Marc L. B. Bloch was born in Lyon, France. Known as the cofounder of the Annales School of French social history, Bloch is considered a quintessential modernist. Born into an academic Alsacian family, he studied in Berlin and Leipzig, fought in the trenches of the Western […]

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July 05

Chuck Close: The Master of Photorealism

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On the 5th of July 1940, American painter Chuck Close, broadly known for his photorealist portraits,  was born in Monroe, Washington. His adventures in Photorealism began in the late 1960s when he started using photography to help him paint large-scale portraits, mostly in acrylic. The artist method consists of applying a grid on the photo and on the canvas and […]

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July 04

Alice in Wonderland and Photography

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On the 4th of July 1865, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was published in London. Written by Victorian author Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832-1898) under the pseudonym Lewis Carroll, author, mathematician and Oxford don, this fantasy novel has since made him famous all over the world. Less known is the fact that Dodgson was also an avid […]

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July 03

Delia Derbyshire’s Dr Who: Feminism in Electronic Music?

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On the 3rd of July 2001, British composer of electronic music and musique concrète (a form of electroacustic music) Delia Derbyshire died in Northampton, England. Alongside Daphne Oram and Maddalena Fagandini, she was one of the key female figures in the development of electronic music in the twentieth century. In 1962, she joined the BBC […]

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July 02

Émile Coué: Autosuggestion and Self-Improvement

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On the 2nd of July 1926,  French self-help guru Émile Coué de la Châtaigneraie died in Nancy, France. Working as an apothecary at Troyes at the turn of the century, Coué came to know the placebo effect and used encouraging words to recommend medicines to patients, pinning small notes with positive messages to various remedies when handing […]

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