Emil Filla — Reader of Dostoevsky (1907)

The first time I saw Reader of Dostoevsky I laughed. It looked exaggerated, like a meme of someone who had just spent the last thirty minutes scrolling through Twitter. Mind you, it’s possible that my reaction was due to my mixed feelings for Dostoevsky himself. Anyone who has struggled through the Russian’s long winded paragraphs […]

Paula Modersohn-Becker: When Life Imitates Art

The name Paula Modersohn-Becker may not say much to you outside of Germany, but at 30 years old she was the first woman to paint herself in the nude, in Self-Portrait at Sixth Wedding Anniversary. Here, one quarter turned with her face flushed, she exposes two small, perky breasts crowned by an amber necklace, one […]

A Room with a View: Gustave Caillebotte’s Paintings

I dwell in Possibility – A fairer House than Prose – More numerous of Windows – Superior – for Doors – Emily Dickinson It’s been a long year of repeated lockdowns and painfully drawn-out hours, when the only escape is looking out the window — anything to gain a break from the day and stop […]

Of Chess and Art

Chess is a beautiful game. Like artists painting their worlds within the confines of a canvas, so do chess players build their vision within the square-format of their board.

Félix Vallotton – The Bath. Summer Evening (1892-1893)

Vallotton intended ‘The Bath. Summer Evening’ to be a satire of the bourgeoisie idling its days away around a modern day fountain of youth. But behind the thin veil of irony we get a refreshing glimpse of truth — the female body presented in its diverse, non-idealized forms, with all its idiosyncrasies.

Henry Fuseli and the Nightmare of Unrequited Love

I have long stared at the question of unrequited love and what makes this particular type of love so painful and obsessive. I started drafts. I discarded them. I came back to this question and gave it another go only to find my writing out of touch. The truth is I do not know much […]

The Journey Within: František Kupka’s Self-Portraits

One of the saddest things I’ve learned in recent weeks was that as we grow older a yellow pigment accumulates on our retinas and changes the way we see the world. Colors fade, dimness increases, the blue sky loses its crispness. We’re stuck in a 1960’s Polaroid. And even though there are countless indignities to […]

Toyen, a Tale of War and Friendship

“In front of our house in the former Husova třída in Žižkov, usually at the time when workers from the Karlín factories were going home, I often encountered a strange but interesting girl,” recalls Czechoslovak Nobel prize-winner Jaroslav Seifert in his 1982 memoir All the Beauties of the World. At a time when women’s attire […]

Thomas Cooper Gotch – The Exile (1930)

She could be anyone, so you get close to see her. The fiery monotone background does not steal away from her mystery and, in fact, recedes as your gaze fixates on her. She looks like a rag doll dressed up hastily by her child-mother and abandoned carelessly on a chair quickly afterwards, slouching under the […]

Emily Carr – Church in Yuquot Village (1929)

She couldn’t believe it. In fact, she could barely lift up her eyes to look at the thing! There it was, her painting, hanging in the dining room of one of Canada’s most talented artists, a man whom she greatly admired. People were gathered all around it, gasping with delight — quite an unusual reaction […]