Word: artistics
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...very sad story about an essentially minor figure. Thompson's was not a life to celebrate (and Gibney, to his credit, does not do so). But there is an implicit approval in this film that makes me uneasy. But then, irrationality always make me uneasy. All artists - and nominally, Thompson was an artist - need a touch of the lunatic about them. But only a touch. In the end they are obliged to produce. And they are obliged not to succumb to, or to excessively encourage, their own myths. Thanks in part to Thompson's example, journalists are now free...
...salon for the Russian intellectual gentry. As a dear friend of the Aksakovs, Gogol was a frequent and honored guest in Abramtsevo, now a museum and a major Russian landmark of Russian cultural history - early in the 20th century, its new owners, the Mamontovs, turned the estate into an artist colony whose output contributed greatly to the Moscow Tretyakov Gallery, Russia's national art collection. It was in the Aksakovs' Abramtsevo that Gogol first read aloud to a narrow circle of cognoscenti chapters chapters from his never-to-be-completed novel, Dead Souls, much of it devoted to both roads...
...Questions about the painting's attribution have been around for more than a decade, but voicing them has proven difficult. "At a certain point, an artist becomes a mythic national hero, and a painting takes on a life of it's own - it becomes sacred," says Manuela Mena, the Prado's chief curator of 18th-century painting and of Goya's work. "When you challenge that, you might as well be challenging religion - you're seen as a heretic, and you fall into the hands of the inquisition...
...says University of Essex Goya scholar Sarah Symmons. "Who might have painted a bit of the picture, or all of it, or just doodled on the painting one day when bored - who knows?" Nor does Symmons necessarily embrace the argument that the painting's compositional style points to an artist other than Goya. "His prints, which are beyond doubt, often make similar unorthodox visual statements, and, of course one of his most famous prints is a colossus figure," she says...
...which a soldier is falling from his galloping horse. Symmons still isn't convinced. "Goya did create a number of highly unorthodox works in maturity," she says, "and these works do not always correspond to the way some scholars like to regard him - as a more decorous and orthodox artist...