Friday, December 3, 2010

Portrait of Maurice Utrillo
  by his mother, Suzanne Valadon
1921

Monday, November 29, 2010

Sunday, November 28, 2010

Saturday, October 30, 2010

Monday, September 27, 2010

Monday, September 6, 2010

Sunday, September 5, 2010

 De Chirico with his second wife Isabella Far in Mr. Castelfranco's car
  Florence 1932-1933 

Tuesday, August 31, 2010


Magritte, top left
Mesens, next to Magritte
Georgette, below Magritte

Sunday, August 15, 2010

Friday, July 30, 2010

Sunday, July 25, 2010

Friday, July 16, 2010

Monday, May 17, 2010

Thursday, May 13, 2010

Monday, May 10, 2010

Three men, possibly court officials, and two girls with a two-wheeled ox-cart  

Sunday, April 25, 2010

Sunday, April 18, 2010

Wednesday, March 24, 2010

Hamlet and the gravedigger
by Delacroix


Clown:    Here's a skull now; this skull hath lain in the earth three-and-twenty years.

Hamlet:  Whose was it?

Clown: A whoreson, mad fellow's it was: whose do you think it was?

Hamlet:  Nay, I know not.

Clown:  A pestilence on him for a mad rogue! 'a pour'd a flagon of Rhenish on my head once.
This same skull, sir, was Yorick's skull, the king's jester.



Hamlet:  This?

Clown:   E'en that.

Hamlet:   Let me see. [Takes the skull.]
Alas, poor Yorick!—I knew him, Horatio; a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy: he hath borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is! my gorge rises at it. Here hung those lips that I have kiss'd I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now? your gambols? your songs? your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the table on a roar? Not one now, to mock your own grinning? quite chap-fallen?

Now, get you to my lady's chamber, and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favour she must come; make her laugh at that.

—Pr'ythee, Horatio, tell me one thing.

Horatio:  What's that, my lord?

Hamlet:  Dost thou think Alexander looked o' this fashion i' the earth?

Horatio:  E'en so.

Hamlet:  And smelt so? Pah!

[Throws down the skull.]

Friday, March 19, 2010

Thursday, February 18, 2010

Furniture in the Valley
by
de Chirico
"My series of paintings called Funiture in the Valley was engendered by an idea that came to me one afternoon in Paris, as I was walking down Saint-Germain between Rue du Dragon and Rue du Vieux-Colombier.
On the sidewalk, in front of a used furniture shop, I saw sofas, chairs, wardrobes, tables, and a coat rack displayed right there on the street.  By finding themselves so removed from the sacred place in which man has always sought repose, the place that each of us call home, these objects - the mere sight of which arouses feelings and sentiments that delve back to our earliest childhood -- suddenly appeared solemn, tragic, even mysterious.  In the midst of the street noise, the comings-and-goings of a major capital's passions and fevers, these solitary items of furniture formed a kind of guarded enclave, a loculus, an impregnable zone aginst which the ambient hubbub and commotion broke like waves dying on a strand." 
~de Chirico

(definition of loculus -- 1.  Ecclesiastical. a compartment in an altar, in which relics are kept.
2.  a recess in an ancient catacomb or tomb, where a body or cinerary urn was placed)

Thursday, February 4, 2010