No one looking at the deft and sensitive renderings of the Edwardian era’s wealthy and blue-blooded society would think that John Singer Sargent found portraiture tedious. Yet, had it not been for Sargent’s excellence we would be cheated of his art and of understanding the growth of conspicuous [...]
Archive for the ‘Arts’ Category
May 5th, 2010 - 7:30 am § in Arts
American Woman: Fashioning a National Identity
Introduction The spring 2010 exhibition organized by The Costume Institute of The Metropolitan Museum of Art is American Woman: Fashioning a National Identity, the first drawn from the newly established Brooklyn Museum Costume Collection at the Met. The exhibition, on view from May 5 through August [...]
The Souls of Black Folk: Arts & Literature
Literature Paul Laurence Dunbar James Weldon Johnson Frances E. W. Harper Pauline Hopkins Alice Dunbar Nelson Art Edmonia Lewis Meta Vaux Warrick Henry O. Tanner E. M. Bannister May Howard Jackson Music Harry T. Burleigh E. Azalia Hackley Thomas G. Bethune Scott Joplin James Reese Europe Will Marion[...]
February 3rd, 2010 - 6:00 am § in African American, Arts
Edmonia Lewis’s “Death of Cleopatra”
Critical Response: Miss Lewis is by no means a prodigy; she has great natural genius, originality, earnestness, and a simple, genuine taste. Her works are as yet those of a girl. She has read Evangeline, and some others of Longfellow’s poems, and has caught from them a girlish sentimentality, [...]
Fascinating Women: Belle da Costa Greene
Belle da Costa Greene summed up her individuality and allure in one phrase: “Just because I am a librarian doesn’t mean I have to dress like one.” The library profession was in its infancy, but this attractive and vivacious woman happened to be the curator of a library owned by one[...]
The Armory Show, 1913
Modern and avant-garde art introduced itself to 1913 New York much against the latter’s will. Since the emergence of Impressionism, many other shocking developments in artistic expression set the world afire. However, these movements were smaller, grounded by one or two artists, and usually re[...]
Fortuny’s “Delphos” Gown
Ladies’ fashions had pretty much settled by the Edwardian era. The days when Charles Worth would wreak sensation and havoc upon the lives of his female clients had passed, and for the most part, the silhouettes of the 1880s, 1890s and early 1900s flowed neatly with one another; only minor bump[...]
Promenades Through London: Bloomsbury
Long before Virginia Woolf and her “Bloomsbury Group” became synonymous with the now quaint London neighborhood, the area was a “grimy, sordid, squalid region” where “no nice people lived.” Its boundaries roughly defined by Tottenham Court Road to the west, Euston[...]
