More on Art and Red 349

This is not a book

I'm not sure if I've come to the end on finding a way into understanding of Art (or a beginning anyway), I have (of course) the thoroughly excellent E.H. Gombrich book The Story of Art so beloved by art teachers and The Shock of The New by Robert Hughes ( a great TV series as well as a book) .

..and this isn't too

Yesterday attendance at OPEN Ealing's session on Abstract art was particularly well timed to help me further put together in my mind some of what I'd been told about Futurism, The Great War and the move away from representational art during the City Lit focus on Duchamp.

During the lecture I was somewhat surprised to hear a different interpretation of 'States of Mind I: The Farewells' by Boccioni the futurist intellectual who had was involved in formulating the movement's  manifesto sadly Boccioni died at the age of  just 33 in the Great War.



On Sunday Rachel had described the painting  as being about a train journey but with it's move towards abstraction the work has other possible interpretations it's part of three works and was one of the most significant of Boccioni's works.

I suppose looking again at how 'Art' has become so knowing and self referential that Magritte is worth considering once again in the representational critique in such works as   'Attempting the impossible' and  the brilliant Not to be Reproduced - these paintings are of course not only crafted but have a central idea about painting as epitomised in 'This in not a pipe' (also known as the treachery of images).

It seems apposite to that I'm listening to Proust's Swann's Way on Radio 4 Extra as I consider the tumult in the arts at the end of the 19th century.

Red 349

Here's a red jacketed man eating his chips in Bermondsey - I wonder what the choice of a red jacket tells us?

Lunch on the run