Tag: Art
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Camera in love
That was the title given to the exhibition of the work of Ed van der Elsken at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 2017. The woman with the cigarette on the photo is Vali Myers, a bohemian artist who was Van de Elsken’s muse during his stay in Paris in the early 1950s. She figures…
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Japan unbound
Between 1959 and 1988, photographer Ed van der Elsken visited Japan many times. He once calculated that, taken together, he must have walked the streets of Tokyo and other places with his camera every day for more than two years. And, to his own surprise, during those 750 days of roaming around the streets of…
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Twins of an era
Ed van der Elsken (1925-1990) was a street photographer. Wherever he was, in Amsterdam, Paris or Tokyo, he roamed the streets with his camera for days on end and took pictures of … people. Looking at his pictures at an exhibition of his work in 2017, the atmosphere of the 50s, 60s, 70s of the…
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Gyantse Kumbum
The biggest and best preserved pyramidal multi-chapel monument of the kind in Tibet. It has more than 70 – dark – chapels inside, almost all decorated with murals and statues. We can look at the kumbum as a three-dimensional mandala: when you project the whole building on its ground-plan, it represents a visual metaphor of…
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Tashilhunpo Thanka
Tashilhunpo in Shigatse is the largest monastery in Tibet and the seat of the Panchen Lamas. The complex contains several golden roofed monuments and a multitude of chapels filled with statues and adorned with murals, thankas and other treasures. For 362 days of the year the view of this monastic city is not exactly like…
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Massive arcades
Such is the abundance of granite rock at Hampi that massive projects could easily be envisaged. Like constructing two lengthy arcades for the entranceway to a temple complex. Hundreds of massive pillars, heavy but simple, for a massive project indeed. In contrast, inside the complex, reliefs of love and tenderness that clearly betray how much…
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Stonecutters’ paradise
Elegant camels, mounted horsemen. and of course, as always, the graceful women … it’s as if we can appreciate these scenes from daily life even more when depicted in stone. Maybe it is because we can feel the pleasure the sculptors of Hampi must have had in cutting these reliefs. The non-sculptured walls are impressive…
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Globed breasts adorned with pearls
Globed breasts adorned with pearls sandal-misted, wide curving hips with girdles strung with bells, precious anklets making music on their lotus feet, lit with happiness deep within women now enhance their beauty. In strophes like this Kālidāsa sings of the feminine ideal in his long poem Ṛtusaṃhāram (The Gathering of the Seasons, translation from the…
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Béla Tarr and the seventh art
His last and maybe final film: The Turin Horse (black and white, 146′, 2011). There is inside and outside. Outside: a deafening storm rages over the barren land. The gale blows clouds of sand and dead leaves in the air. A desolate bare tree stands on the hill in front of the farm. Inside: the…
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Art with a wink
The one girl looks intently at the other, and vice versa. Each one utterly intrigued by the sight of the other. I remember I had a funnily-meant little book long ago, called ‘Kunst met een knipoog’ (‘Art with a wink’), with a winking Mona Lisa on the cover. Here it is not the girls that…
καιρός remembered 