This essay explores Käthe Kollwitz’s antiwar graphic work in the context of the German, and later, international No More War movement from 1920 to 1925, where it played an important role in antimilitarist campaigns, exhibitions, and publications, both in Germany and internationally. Looking at Kollwitz’s production closely, we discover a deeply pragmatic artistic strategy, where the emotionality of Kollwitz’s famed prints was the result of tireless technical, formal, and compositional investigation, contrived to maximize emotional impact. By choosing the easily disseminated medium of printmaking as her main vehicle and using a deliberately spare but powerful graphic language in carefully chosen motifs, Kollwitz intended her art to reach as broad an audience as possible in engaging antiwar sentiment. In connection with the leading antiwar voices of the time, including French Nobel Prize-winning writer Romain Rolland and the founder of War Resisters’ International, Helene Stöcker, she deployed her work to reach beyond the confines of the art gallery, into internationally distributed posters, periodicals, and books.
This essay explores meaning and materiality in the monumental memorial quilt After the Last Sky by Australian art-quiltmaker Jenny Bowker, which memorialises the suffering of protesters during the Rabaa Square Massacre in Cairo on 14 August 2013. The essay shows how Bowker’s migration of the photographic image to quilt form, as well as the quilt’s meaningful, strategic use of medium and relevance to current artistic developments challenge the limits placed on textiles as art.
The monumental state-commissioned Execution of Torrijos and his Companions on the Beach at Málaga by Antonio Gisbert Pérez has only recently begun to receive earnest scholarly attention in Spanish-language literature after decades of relative obscurity, with no known lengthy discussion in English. Yet, it is a major Spanish history painting, commissioned as a monument to Spanish nation building in the wake of despotic monarchism. It is remarkable for its innovative composition and sensitive portrayal of liberal General José María Torrijos and his men, executed without trial on a Málaga beach in December 1831 for rallying against the absolutist monarch Ferdinand VII. In addition to Torrijos, among the dead were liberal politician Manuel Flores Calderón and the Byronic, Northern Irish-born Robert Boyd, active in the final years (1830–1831) of the Greek War of Independence and who was inspired by Torrijos’ cause. Introducing new material that builds on existing research, this essay offers a detailed analysis of the painting’s content and composition within its historical context. It carefully explores its production as a pivotal example of the Spanish visual culture of war and as a sensitively crafted memorial both to the men portrayed and the struggles of Spanish liberalism during the nineteenth century, a context that links it closely to Goya’s Third of May 1808, against which it is often compared, but which is at odds with the remarkably original composition of Gisbert’s work.
Pausanias (X. 17, 6) seeks to convey a definite notion of the rams in Sardinia by saying that they had the form which an Aeginetan sculptor would give a wild ram, except for a shagginess on the breast which was too thick for Aeginetan art. The spareness of form implied here, and still more distinctly in the extraordinary swiftness which he ascribes to these rams, seems to agree very well with what remains of the sculpture of Aegina; and in calling attention to this circumstance (Greek Sculpture, p. 187) I supposed that Pausanias had in his mind only the general characteristic of the Aegina school, to which he refers on other occasions. But it occurs to me now that he may have been thinking specially of Onatas and the statue of Hermes Kriophoros, which he had seen at Olympia and described (v. 27,8). Onatas receives great praise from Pausanias (v. 25, 7), and no doubt was to him a representative of the school of Aegina.
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