Monday, March 30, 2015
Saturday, March 28, 2015
Sunday, March 22, 2015
Malcolm X at a meeting in Paris, November 23, 1964
White interviewer: If it was our white ancestors who bought you and enslaved you, we are their children. We are the new generation. Why don't you call us your brothers?
Malcolm X: A man has to act like a brother before you can call him a brother. You made a very good point, really, that needs some clarification. If you are the son of the man who had a wealthy estate and you inherit your father's estate, you have to pay off the debts that your father incurred before he died. The only reason that the present generation of white Americans are in the position of economic strength that they are is because their fathers worked our fathers for over 400 years with no pay. For over 400 years we worked for nothing. We were sold from plantation to plantation like you sell a horse, or a cow, or a chicken, or a bushel of wheat. It was your fathers who did it to our fathers, and all of that money that piled up from the sale of my mother and my grandmother and my great-grandmother is what gives the present generation of American whites [the ability] to walk around the earth with their chest out; you know, like they have some kind of economic ingenuity. Your father isn't here to pay his debts. My father isn't here to collect. But I'm here to collect and you're here to pay.
- Kasimir Malevich
Honor to the Futurists who forbade the painting of female hams,
the painting of portraits and guitars in the moonlight.
They made a huge step forward: they abandoned meat
and glorified the machine.
- Kasimir Malevich
the painting of portraits and guitars in the moonlight.
They made a huge step forward: they abandoned meat
and glorified the machine.
- Kasimir Malevich
Saturday, March 21, 2015
Tuesday, March 10, 2015
Saturday, March 7, 2015
Leonardo da Vinci
Of the greatest defect in painters. It is the greatest defect in painters to repeat the same movements and the same faces and draperies in a composition and to make most of the faces resemble their author. This has often surprised me, for there are some who have made selfportraits of all their figures, all with the manners and movements of him who painted them. And if he is lively in his speech and his gestures, his figures are equally lively ; and if the master is devout, the figures appear to be the same, with their necks bent ; and if the master does little, his figures seem to be portraits of laziness personified ; and if the master is poorly proportioned, the figures are of the same kind, and if he is mad, this is amply revealed in his pictures, which are deprived of all logic, the figures not attending to what they are doing, but looking here to the right, there to the left, as if they were dreaming. And thus, every characteristic of the painting corresponds to a characteristic of the painter himself.
Having repeatedly thought about the cause of this defect, it seems to me one must believe that the soul, which rules and governs the body, also forms our judgment, even before we have formed it ourselves ; * thus it is the soul that has shaped the whole figure of the man as it judges best, with the nose long, or short, or flat, and in the same way determined the height and general appearance ; and this judgment is so powerful it moves the arm of the painter and makes him copy himself, because it seems to the soul that this is the true way to paint a man, and that whoever does not do as it does, is mistaken. * And when it finds someone who resembles the body it has composed, it likes him and often falls in love with him ; and that is why many men fall in love with and marry women who resemble them and often the children born to them resemble their parents
I was coming back home very late. Suddenly I was attacked by a man with a gun. He wanted to rob me. I prayed to the Virgin of Zapopan, and suddenly a very handsome man decidedly blocked the robber’s way. The robber got scared and ran away. And now I ask you, Virgin, please make so this magnificent man would marry me.
Friday, March 6, 2015
Let's try that again , why don't we...
"IN THE SUMMER of 1937, the twenty-nine-year-old art critic of the
London Spectator went over to Paris to see Picasso’s newly unveiled
“Guernica.” Turbulent acclaim surrounded this great cry of outraged
humanity. The critic’s finding, which was printed on August 6th, was
severely dismissive. The painting was “a private brain-storm which gives
no evidence that Picasso has realised the political significance of
Guernica.” In his column for October 8th, the critic, Anthony Blunt,
reviewed Picasso’s ferocious series of etchings on the “Dream and Life
of Franco.” Again he was negative. These works “cannot reach more than
the limited coterie of aesthetes.” Picasso was blind to the sovereign
consideration that the Spanish Civil War was “only a tragic part of a
great forward movement” toward the defeat of Fascism and the ultimate
liberation of the common man. The future belongs to an artist like
William Coldstream, declared The Spectator’s critic on March 25, 1938.
“Picasso belongs to the past.”"
George Steiner
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