I’m another fan of Edward Hopper. My favorite is New York Movie.
But that isn’t why I came here.
My favorite painting is Le Coquelicot by the Dutch fauvist Kees van Dongen. It’s just the most sensuous work I’ve ever seen.
Okay, here’s something from Chapter 19 of Vladimir Nabokov’s Ada.
Note the overweening artiness–French (untranslated of course) and Russian too.
Note also the “who is the narrator” game. The main narrator is Van (one of V. Nabokov’s many names which are anagrams or cousins of his own) and the interjector is Ada, though what sounds like dialog is sometimes in quotations and sometimes not–it may be entirely recollection–and later in the chapter we step outside the narrative frame when Van talks about editing the memoir “he” is writing as “an old gray wordman while his bath overflows” (but of course the author of the book is Nabokov who is not the narrator in any 1:1 sense) and refers to “a dictionary of pet names that goes through many revised versions until its definitve edition of 1967” (the date of the book itself).
Note finally the “Cockloft” sexual innuendo–the book is explicit and (as in Lolita) we have sexual leads who are not only 13 and 12 (or thereabouts) but are brother and sister (they thought at first they were cousins or half-siblings but documents in the “Cockloft” led them to realize they were full brother and sister). (Going the pedophilia of Lolita one better with incest!) Ada is set in “anti-terra” however so we don’t know all of its moral rules.
Esoteric enough? Elitist enough? Offensive enough? It’s even worse–you should see the annotated version: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/ada/ada119
It reads like a dream (that’s a small pun in context because the chapter later notes that dream and read are the same word in French–so who is dreaming?–Van? Nabokov? His readers?). It is about desire and nostalgia and love. Like all of Nabokov’s stuff, it champions freedom of the imagination (art) without limits. (It does have a plot and characters too so it may not be the ne plus ultra (see? I can throw the French around too!) of attackable modern books (which is probably Ulysses, which Naobov loved) but it’s close.)
I hope it’s not out-of-bounds to dispute in this thread–just giving you a chance to do more defending!
I think Psyche looks like an inert plastic blow-up doll. Cupid is cool as a blusing adolescent, but the overall esthetic of the piece is unbalanced.
I’m with you on the Frost and the woodthrusth, though.
Giles, could you try to further articulate what you like about this one? (and the link may be too small to see properly, but which parts are the poppies?)
Well, the poppies that you see in that picture are the bundles resting on the top of the wings. Presumably the iconography is that poppies are worn in Remembrance Day (November 11th, commemorating the end of World War I), so they are a symbolic contrast to the bomber as a war machine showering death on the people below.
I did a Google search to work out what “Angel of History” might mean, and the second site I found had this quotation from Walter Benjamin:
which sounds really appropriate to the work, so doubtless Kiefer had it in mind when he gave the name.
But, as I said, the picture doesn’t really do justice to a sculpture that’s 5 metres across: you do need to walk around it to appreciate it.
How lovely! The bomber has a faceless look and “wings” and so is a nice response to this image. Still, I think I like this better than the sculpture itself.
Oh, sure. Criticize my taste with one of the funniest lines I’ve read lately. 
Get your butt to Cleveland and see it (the painting, not your butt) in person. It might change your mind.
Definitely (well, not just Iraq -all war). Yet I have it on a t-shirt.
There’s some South African struggle art that is also very good, but I can’t find much online. If I do, I’ll post it here.
Okay, few people need to “understand” Pink Floyd, and my favorites have been mentioned in fiction and visual art (and Ada and Bosch aren’t that popular, especially Ada! [I will mention in passing, though, that the final “Floramor” scene made me break down and cry for literally ten minutes, as a commentary on the general decay everything undergoes].) But I’ll go over my second-favorite work of visual art: The cover of Republic by New Order, including the stuff inside the CD case.
It’s a montage of photographs, sometimes fading into each other. They include joyfully mindless beachgoers, a Marlboro-manesque pair of cowboys at sunset, a firefighter in action whose pose and gear obscures his body, and time-lapse cityscape at night, taken in the manner of viewing from atop a “lover’s lane”.
When you first look at it it seems to be just a somewhat-over-the-top celebration of America, given the album’s title. But then you see that it seems to be instead of a fun mockery, a scathing indictment of the shallowness of American society, since everyone seems to be confident in their job and life but is really alone.
But then you look deeper and, other than the front cover of mindless Ken and Barbie clones, everyone seems to be intensely devoted to their activities and aware of their loneliness. So I come off with a picture of America as being rough, hypocritical, and lonely, yet at the same time strong and full of hope.
In that vein, I like how each sex scene is not quite as good as the prior one–first time is best (at least in memory) and can never come again.
Very happy to meet another Ada fan; you are of course cultured, brainy and inherently fascinating.