On This Day

Vaishnavi Srivastava 19th  April, ON THIS DAY “If I had life to live over again, I would give my life to poetry, to music, to literature, and to art to make life richer and happier. In my youth I steeled myself against them and thought them so much waste” – Charles Darwin Today, we’ll explore […]

18th  April, ON THIS DAY “Art has a higher purpose than mere imitation of nature. It transcends the earthly and measurable. It has its own scale and destiny. It is concerned with informing spirit that emanates only from spiritual and mystical realms, from the nether and the astral.” – Max Weber April 18th marks the

Vaishnavi Srivastava 17TH April, ON THIS DAY “Amid all the nonsense, impostors, rhetorical bullshit and sheer trash that pass for art in the 21st century, Doig is a jewel of genuine imagination, sincere work and humble creativity.” –Jonathan Jones (Art critic) What makes an artist great? Over the centuries we have seen a plethora of

Vaishnavi Srivastava 13th April, ON THIS DAY “His (Emil Ganso) career was a symbol for the hope and excuse of democracy” —A Critic on Emil Ganso The life of Emil Ganso is the living embodiment of the infamous trope of a suffering artist getting his success story. On this day back in 1895, Ganso was

Vaishnavi Srivastava 12th April, ON THIS DAY “But why should women and queer people learn to forget? Generational logic underpins our investments in the dialectic of memory and forgetting;” — J. Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure What comes to your mind when you first imagine the colour pink? Soft pastels? Hyper femininity? Or the

Vaishnavi Srivastava 11th April, ON THIS DAY “Peace is not good for an artist. How can that happen? The mind strives and burns all the time in the creative activity of art.” — Jamini Roy The legend of Jamini Roy can plainly be described best by the following excerpt from a poem by Nissim Ezekiel-who was a

Vaishnavi Srivastava 10th April, ON THIS DAY “The kind of painting which I find exciting is not necessarily representational or non-representational, but it is musical and architectural” — Ben Nicholson Ben Nicholson, the prominent figure of the abstract and Cubist movement, was far from an artistic elitist who created for the bourgeoisie. Nicholson individually deemed

Iftikar Ahmed 8th April, ON THIS DAY “Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.” — Pablo Picasso On April 8, 1973, the world mourned the loss of one of the greatest artists of the 20th century, Pablo Picasso.  He had been unwell for a few

Iftikar Ahmed 7th April, ON THIS DAY “Painting is the grandchild of nature. It is related to God..” — Gerrit Dou Gerrit Dou was a renowned Dutch painter of the Baroque era, known for his meticulously detailed and realistic still lifes and genre scenes. Born in Leiden, Netherlands on 7 April, 1613, Dou was a