Ernst Neizvestny


"There are certain bacteria-very small, soft ones-which can live in a super-saline solution that could dissolve the hoof of a rhinoceros"

Pieter Saendrelam-The Interior of the Grote Kerk at Haarlem (1636)
Distinctive whitewashed church interiors (Gothic and Later Romanesque), but those which had been stripped bare during the iconoclasm of the Protestant Reformation. He memorialises religious upheaval through these careful depictions.

Ink and Bleach
Transparency Film

Kyoko Kumai

Modernism-increasing insistence on the separateness of art. Preoccupation with form, design, colour and the flat painted surface.

"The representative element in a work of art may or may not be harmful; always it is irrelevant. For, to appreciate a work of art we need bring with us nothing from life, no knowledge of its ideas and affairs, no familiarity with its emotions. Art transports us from the world of man's activity to a world of aesthetic exaltation. For a moment we are shut off from human interests; our anticipations and memories are arrested; we are lifted above the stream of life." Clive Bell, Art, 1914

vs Bernard Smith, who demanded for this type of art to be renamed the Formalesque, as later movements such as Dada sought to clarify this aesthetic with meaning.

Ilya Repin, Saint Nicholas Saves Three Innocents from Death, 1888

Thematic approach to categorising paintings
French Royal Academy 1648

highest: historical painting for its moral purpose and the demands it made on the artist both in imagination and intellect.
lowest:still life, which was seen as imitation of reality observed by any.


Nicolas Poussin, 'et in arcadia ego', 1637-8

Genres are not so clear-cut; allegory can appear even in still life painting, raising its moral value.