Archives: PoP Academy
Ali Miller on Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Alexa Wilding fluctuates between a confident and seductive nymph, a stiff and unamused model, and a vulnerable damsel awaiting a rescue.
Jessica Stoller on the Sévres Breast Bowl
The dairy she created allowed her to demonstrate her political agency while intertwining ideas related to femininity, nature and health.
Constance Mallinson on Manet’s and von Werefkin’s Ragpickers
Few previous painters were capable of challenging and disturbing the consumerist mentality and self-satisfaction of the middle class and the economic and social systems that sustained them.
Zorawar Sidhu on František Kupka
Within a year of exhibiting it, he would never paint like this again
Dear Weather: Buzz Spector on Hobbema, Gainsbourough, & Vermeer
Little popcorn puffs or higher, more distant, cirrus… a shorthand for how the duration of a painting allows for some time.
Suzanne Stryk on Maria Sibylla Merian
Most alluring to me is her enviable touch—the delicately notched antennae, chomped and curled leaves, or gooey-pale larvae casting shadows as they inch along.
What’s in a Name: Raoul Middleman on John Singleton Copley
How else to paint but to concentrate mercilessly on the singularity of high end realistic focus and finish… rendered to an almighty faultless Metaphysical T.
Marc Handelman on Martin Johnson Heade
The jungle is gathered as a flat organization of space, folded, and pierced so as to connect multiple locations.
Sarah Slappey on James Ensor
James Ensor, The Tribulations of Saint Anthony, 1887, Oil on canvas, 46 ⅜ x 66 inches James Ensor, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, and Hieronymous Bosch have all painted depictions of the torment of Saint Anthony by demons and monsters. In Ensor’s Tribulations of Saint...
Sophia Narrett on Edgar Degas
Edgar Degas, Scene of War in the Middle Ages, 1865, Oil and petrol on paper glued on canvas, 33.5 x 58 cm When I first saw Degas’s Portrait of Mlle Fiocre in the Ballet "La Source" I felt like I was experiencing the actual ballet as an audience member might have,...
Tony Robbin on Bonnard’s Bathers
It is often said that Pierre Bonnard’s paintings featuring bathers are intimate works, as the women are caught unawares, glimpsed in unguarded and private moments…
Barry Nemett on Gwen John
The building weighs less than a flower. The parasol stem dreams about being a wicker chair…