The New Criterion
America’s leading review of the arts and intellectual life
- Harry Mount, the London Telegraph
FeaturesFebruary 1992 Abstraction then and now, or, thoughts on drawing from the Morgan Beatus This is a tale of two apocalypses. Waiting for the millennium, having already passed the first deadline for the end of days somewhere around A.D. 800, awaiting his own death and final judgment, a monk in Spain paints in a scriptorium; he is illustrating passages from Revelations that were quoted, some centuries before, in a commentary on that book by Beatus of Liebana. We painters here now, having already passed the proclamation of the death of painting, “postmodern,” await our own fates—while we paint. This Beatus manuscript lies almost exactly as distant in time from the twentieth century as the art of the antique was from the Florentines of the 1420s. Just as the world of classical antiquity was opened to the artists of the Renaissance, this other Lost World, of which the Morgan Beatus is part, may be reopened to artists now. Like the antique sculptures that were ... This article is available to subscribers and for individual purchaseSubscribe to TNC (Print and Online editions) Subscribe to TNC (Online only) This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 10 February 1992, on page 24 Copyright © 2012 The New Criterion | www.newcriterion.com http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/Abstraction-then-and-now--or--thoughts-on-drawing-from-the-Morgan-Beatus-4503
rate this article for your user profile
E-mail to friend
|
On Odilon Redon: Prince of Dreams, 1840–1916 at the Art Institute of Chicago. Christopher, for better & for worse On the critic, polemicist & raconteur Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011).
Webcasts
Anthony Daniels on the Euro Crisis
Andrew C. McCarthy: The Muslim Threat
Roger Kimball: The Grim Future of Statism Weblog 
|
add a comment
you must have an account to post a comment. {register now}