Art

I'm not an expert on figurative arts. I actually don't wish to become one, because much of the pleasure I get by discovering things that are new to me, every time I visit a museum, would be gone. I think figurative art doesn't require one to explain why a painting is a masterpiece, and why one spends twenty minutes looking at a portrait by a minor painter rather than crowding in front of the neighboring Cezanne. They were created to please and inspire, so let them do that.
...I wish it were so. What actually happens is that we get biased in our judgement and appreciation of a painting or a sculpture by the opinion of the critics. But that also allows for ever new discoveries, as I just pointed out.
Anyways, I am bewildered by the fact that, after having spent my whole childhood being inflicted the torture of full days inside museums and miles walking to see a meaningless (at least to me, at that time) N^th century church by my father each and every time we were visiting a city large enough to contain one, I still love art. I actually do enter churches that look antique and fancy to me, even without being pulled by somebody three times taller than me. And I actually do visit the British Museum every time I go to London. Amazing, ain't it ?
Ok, I am talking too much. What do I like ? Here's a very short gallery of some of the compositions I admire most. I plan to put more pictures here as I find them, but unfortunately locating a good image of a particular work is not exactly trivial...

Henry Moore's Atom Piece, 1964-65 (Tate Gallery, London)

Henry Moore is my favourite sculptor. I love almost every single sculpture I've seen. This one, in particular, is one of my favourites. I know, many of his reclining figures are much more expressive and interesting, but this one has something different.

Le Bar aux Folies Bergere, 1881-82 (Courtauld Institute Gallery, London)

Edouard Manet is another favorite of mine. Don't ask me why. This masterpiece is wonderful, but I am afraid that the jpg file I got does not make any justice to the explosion of colours of the original. You'll have to go to London to see it, at the Courtauld Institute Gallery. Don't stop at the second floor though, go directly to the third if you don't want to be stuck in the seventeenth Century boredom. You'll find many wonderful paintings by Gauguin, Cezanne, etc.

Karma (N.82), Oil on painting paper,1933

Alexej Von Jawlensky's work lived happily without my interest until some years ago a friend of mine pointed it out to me. A russian painter, member of "the blue four" with Feininger, Klee and Kandinsky (1924), Von Jawlensky conveys deep emotions through his paintings. Both his abstract and figurative portraits, as well as his delightful landscapes, are full of bright colors and possess an unexplicable charm. I found the reproduction on the left at this very nice site.

Composition VIII, Oil on canvas, 1923 (S.R.Guggenheim Museum, NY)

Wassily Kandinsky, another russian painter and one of the first creators of pure abstraction in modern painting, is certainly another of my favourites. The masterpiece on the right is especially attractive to me.

Six Types, watercolors on cotton, 1930

Paul Klee also deserves a place in my small gallery. I must say I like only a part of his works, but I do love some, like this one on the left.

Figurative art is not everything, of course. I do love music and, as I've explained in my life and likes page, I play the piano and am not a music illiterate. But for some reason listening to music has never caught me. I prefer to play it myself, even if the results are somewhat sloppy. Chopin was the real wizard of the keyboard, and I really wish I could play it better...

Further down the list of what people commonly understands as "art" we find poetry. Here I have little to say, I am afraid. My only real love is the English Preromanticism and the early Romanticism. I can recite by heart quite a few of Burn's, Coleridge's, Wordsworth's, and Byron's poems. But that's quite it. So let me quote from Thomas Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard:

Full many a gem of purest ray serene
The dark unfathom'd caves of Ocean bear;
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen
And waste its sweetness in the desert air.

So let it be with Poetry.
(A sucked mint to all those who guess where this last citation comes from).

Finally I must quote Chess. I know, most of my twentythree readers (another citation, too tough for you this time: no guessgame here - it's from A.Manzoni's "I promessi sposi") won't understand why I consider chess an art. I fear all I can say is: Too bad for you. But remember, "Fatti non foste a viver come bruti, ma per seguir virtute e canoscenza" (D.Alighieri, La divina commedia, Inferno, canto 33).

Reopen Tommaso Dorigo's home page in this frame

Tommaso_Dorigo

Last modified: Fri Mar 31 15:29:32 CST 2000