Showing results by narrator "Richard M. Pshock" in All Categories

Here can be no doubt that the Chinese exhibition at the Royal Academy in London is more than a merely artistic event. It represents a new stage in the burgeoning relationship between contemporary China and the West. The opening, originally scheduled for January, was brought forward to coincide with a State Visit to Britain by the Chinese president, Hu Jintao. The "Three Emperors" of the title were the second, third, and fourth rulers of the Qing Dynasty, and their period in power spanned nearly a century-and-a-half, from the mid-17th century until the end of the 18th.

Deploraville, the first book in a series, is Mac Balzac's often humorous, sometimes sobering, but never dull take on President Donald J. Trump's first year in office, the agony and ecstasy experienced by his deplorable constituents, deep state shenanigans, fast-unfolding geopolitical developments, and the culture war.

Pablo Gargallo is often described as "Cubist" sculptor, partly thanks to his signature technique of hollowing out or reversing volumes, and partly due to his links with Picasso, one of the two undoubted inventors of cubism. In the strict sense, the idea of cubist sculpture is an oxymoron. Despite its undoubted early links to the African tribal sculptures that partly inspired Picasso’s transition to a new and radical style, cubism was essentially an attempt to find a better and more complete way of representing forms on a flat surface.

The Antonello da Messina exhibition now at the Scuderie del Quirinale in Rome is one of those rare occasions that takes place only once in a lifetime. In fact, an exhibition devoted to Antonello will almost certainly never happen again. Like Vermeer, whom in some respects he resembles through his quietism, he is known through very few paintings - less than 50 in all. About two-thirds of these have been gathered together for the exhibition.

The magnificent Veronese show that opened at the National Gallery in London in 2014 met with a curiously subdued response from local reviewers. They recognized that it was a magnificent event of its kind, and one that was especially appropriate because the gallery has an important group of works by this 16th-century Venetian painter in its own collection, among them the famous Family of Darius Before Alexander.