Bruised, But Not Beaten

Nan Goldin (b. 1953) - Nan one month after being battered, 1984


"Purity is the power to contemplate defilement."

Simone Weil

The Ghouls Of Gothabilly

Poison Ivy (Kristy Wallace) of The Cramps


'You know, I always say that a day without an autopsy is like a day without sunshine.'

Buffy (the Vampire Slayer)

The Downside Of Knowing Thyself

Théodore Géricault (1791-1824) - Study of Truncated Limbs, c. 1818


"Biography lends to death a new terror."

Oscar Wilde

Nightfall In The Forest Of Philosophy

Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840) - Evening, 1820-1


'An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.'

Albert Camus

The Court Jester Of Kitsch

Jeff Koons (b. 1955) - Michael Jackson and Bubbles, 1988


"I'm a messenger."

Jeff Koons

The Memories That Last The Longest Are Also Our First

Mary Cassat (1845-1926) - The Boating Party, 1893-4


'Genius is the recovery of childhood at will.'

Arthur Rimbaud

The Art Of Seeing With Someone Else's Eyes

Robert Doisneau (1912-1994) - Sidelong Glance, 1948


"Irony gives us, at little expense, the impression that we are experienced psychologists."

Gaston Bachelard

Intoxicated By Images

Edgar Degas (1834-1917) - Absinthe, 1876


'Art isn't what you see, but what you make others see.'

Edgar Degas

Day Dream Believer

Gillian Wearing (b. 1963) - Dream Mask, 2004


'The necessity of dreaming should already be beyond question by the very fact that we dream.'

André Breton

The Clown Of Colour

Joan Miró (1983-1983) - The Harlequin's Carnival, 1924-5


'I try to apply colours like words that shape poems, like notes that shape music.'

Joan Miró

To Awaken, Perchance To Dream

Henri Julien Félix Rousseau (1844-1910) - The Dream, 1910


'The eye which dreams does not see, or at least it sees with another vision.'

Gaston Bachelard

The Girl With Looking-Glass Eyes

Édouard Manet (1832-1883) - A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, 1882


'Detail contradicts sentiment.'

Robert Hughes

Brought To You By The Number 5 (May Special)

Charles Demuth (1883-1935) - I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold, 1928

Among the rain
and lights
I saw the figure 5
in gold
on a red
fire truck
moving
tense
unheeded
to gong clangs
siren howls
and wheels rumbling
through the dark city.

William Carlos Williams

Savouring The Arrows Of Outrageous Misfortune

Frida Kahlo (1907-1954) - The Little Deer, 1946


'Autobiography begins with a sense of being alone. It is an orphan form.'

John Berger

Criminal Injustice

Francisco de Goya (1746-1828) - The Third of May, 1808


'War does not determine who is right - only who is left.'

Bertrand Russell

Icarus On A Leash

Louis Michel Eilshemius (1864-1941) - Afternoon Wind, 1899


'Happiness is not an ideal of reason, but of imagination.'

Immanuel Kant

Time In A Bottle

Giorgio Morandi (1890-1964) - Bottles, 1916

'Humility is attentive patience.'

Simone Weil

See Paris And Sigh

Brassaï (1899-1984) - Foggy Paris, 1934


'A dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.'

Oscar Wilde

The Ripples Of Being Have No Alpha Or Omega

Jasper Johns (b. 1930) - Target, 1958


'Nature is an infinite sphere whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.'

Blaise Pascal

The Lazarus Machine

Anselm Kiefer (b. 1945) - Falling Stars, 1995


'I'm interested in reconstituting symbols. It's about connecting with an older knowledge and trying to discover continuities in why we search for heaven.'

Anselm Kiefer

He Sang The Body Electric

Jaques-Louis David (1748-1825) - Patroclus, 1780


'Man is an intelligence in servitude to his organs.'

Aldous Huxley

Life After Gravity

Edgar Degas (1834-1917) - Mlle La La at the Circus Fernando, 1879


'The greatest danger for most of us lies not in setting our aim too high and falling short, but in setting our aim too low, and achieving our mark.'

Michelangelo

The Mother Of All Virgins

Damien Hirst (b. 1965) - Virgin Mother (10.7 metres), 2006


'What I really like is minimum effort for maximum effect.'

Damien Hirst

Déjà Lu

Gregory Crewdson (b. 1962) - Untitled (from the series 'Twilight'), 2001


'Literature is the question minus the answer.'

Roland Barthes

The Doyens Of Damnation

Hieronymous Bosch (c. 1450-1516) - The Temptation of St. Anthony (central panel), 1500


'Saintliness is also a temptation.'

Jean Anouilh

Sex Is Not The Enemy

Tom Wesselmann (1931-2004) - Great American Nude, #92, 1967


'I don't know the question, but sex is definitely the answer.'

Woody Allen

The Heart Is A Lonely Punter

Caspar David Friedrich (1770-1840) - Man and Woman Contemplate the Moon, c. 1824


'We're born alone, we live alone, we die alone. Only through our love and friendship can we create the illusion for the moment that we're not alone.'

Orson Welles

Twinkle, Twinkle

Tony Oursler (b. 1957) - Star, 2005


'I wish that I was where I am.'

Gertrude Stein

Darkness Visible

Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) - Olive Trees in the Sun, 1889


'I became insane. With long intervals of horrible sanity.'

Edgar Allan Poe

The Genius Of Infirmity

Max Klinger (1857-1920) - Plague, 1898


'I enjoy convalescence. It is the part that makes the illness worthwhile.'

George Bernard Shaw

Lux Aeterna

Robert Longo (b. 1953) - Untitled (Hot Sun), 2006


'When you possess light within, you see it externally.'

Anaïs Nin

The Contours Of Cognition

Henri Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901) - The Singer Yvette Guilbert, 1894


'Drawing is putting a line around an idea.'

Henri Matisse

Love's Antidote Is You

Cindy Sherman (b. 1954) - Untitled #305, 1994


'Whoever loves becomes humble. Those who love have, so to speak, pawned a part of their narcissism.'

Sigmund Freud

At The Crossroads Of Art And Philosophy

Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840) - A Walk at Dusk, c. 1830-35


'We have art in order not to die of truth.'

Friedrich Nietzsche

'The philosopher creates, he doesn't reflect.'

Gilles Deleuze

'Happiness belongs to those who are sufficient unto themselves. For all external sources of happiness and pleasure are, by their very nature, highly uncertain, precarious, ephemeral and subject to chance. '

Arthur Schopenhauer

Madness Became Him

Salvador Dalí (1904-1989)


'Originality is nothing but judicious imitation.'

Voltaire

'It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.'

Herman Melville

'Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing.'

Salvador Dalí

The Bitterness Of Sweet Memories

Édouard Manet (1832-1883) - The Lemon, 1880


'There is no greater sorrow than to recall in misery the time when we were happy.'

Dante Alighieri

Everybody Knows The Square Of Zero

Jenny Holzer (b. 1950) - The Survival Series: The Conversation Always Turns To Living Long Enough To Have Fun, 1983-5


'I am a Bear of Very Little Brain, and long words bother me.'

Winnie the Pooh

The Gift Of Banishment

Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarotti Simoni (1475-1564) - The Fall and The Expulsion from the Garden of Eden, 1509-10


'The only paradise is paradise lost.'

Marcel Proust

Industrial Light Sans Magic

Dan Flavin (1933-1996) - greens crossing greens (to Piet Mondrian who lacked green), 1966


'I like my use of light to be openly situational in the sense that there is no invitation to meditate, to contemplate.'

'My icons do not raise up the blessed saviour in elaborate cathedrals. They are constructed concentrations celebrating barren rooms. They bring a limited light.'

'One might not think of light as matter of fact, but I do. And it is, as I said, as plain and open and direct an art as you will ever find.'

Dan Flavin

A Freudian Photo Finish

Man Ray (1890-1976) - La Marquise Casati, 1922


'The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.'

Walter Benjamin

I See Red

Henri Matisse (1869-1954) - The Red Studio, 1911


'Mere colour, unspoiled by meaning, and unallied with definite form, can speak to the soul in a thousand different ways.'

Oscar Wilde

The Icy Maze

Piet Mondrian (1872-1944) - Composition with Red, Yellow and Blue, 1921


'Once the last trace of emotion has been eradicated, nothing remains of thought but absolute tautology.'

Theodor Adorno

The Enigma Of Everyday Objects

Jean Baptiste Simeon Chardin (1699-1779) - Pipes and Drinking Pitcher, 1737


'The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity.'

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Four Fanciful Seasons (April Special)

Giuseppe Arcimboldo - Summer, Autumn, Winter and Spring, 1573

The seasons alter: hoary-headed frosts
Fall in the fresh lap of the crimson rose,
And on old Hiems' thin and icy crown
An odorous chaplet of sweet summer buds
Is, as in mockery, set. The spring, the summer,
The childing autumn, angry winter, change
Their wonted liveries, and the mazed world,
By their increase, now knows not which is which.

Shakespeare - A Midsummer Night's Dream

I Come To Bury History, Not To Paint It

André Bauchant (1873-1958) - Cleopatra's Barge, 1939


'History is the science of what never happens twice.'

Paul Valéry

Two Deaths And Only One Life

Piero do Cosimo (1462-1521) - The Death of Procris, c. 1500


'If I was strange, and strange were my figures,
Such strangeness is a source both of grace and art;
And whoever adds strangeness here and there to his style,
Gives life, force and spirit to his paintings.'

(Piero di Cosimo's epitaph.)