Coming Up · Art · Museums · Saint Petersburg

Five Saint Petersburg exhibitions, including Olga Rozanova at the Marble Palace

If you are weary of Moscow's sultry weather, you need the cool Baltic air. But you surely do not know that in Saint Petersburg, too, nobody is having an easier time of it, and one may well have to languish from the heat still more. I hope that

NB! · Archive · The East · Art · Society

Poster Celebrating Egyptian-Soviet Friendship, Commemorating the Construction of the Aswan Dam

Archive · Art · Observations · Paris

Haymaking on the Île aux Juifs in Paris in a Très Riches Heures miniature of the Duke of Berry

Happy start of summer, everyone! May June be as fruitful and bountiful as it is in the miniature from the Très Riches Heures of the Duke of Berry, dating from the middle of the fifteenth century. The miniature already shows the haymaking, for Europe is, after all, a little warmer.

Oil painting of a young man holding a violin, seated on a wooden chair at a garden table against green foliage, in a museum frame.

Art · Museums

Portrait of the painter Friedrich Ahlers-Hestermann by Arthur Siebelist, 1900

Portrait of Pavel Durov at the Hamburger Kunsthalle. A work by the German Impressionist painter Arthur Siebelist, 1900

The East · Art · Books · Society

Nizami describes Alexander the Great's visit to a land without rulers or gold

If any of us is in want, great or small, and we know of it, we share all we have with him. We hold it a law that no one should ever be acquainted with loss. In our possessions we are equal to one another. Riches have been dealt out

NB! · Art · Observations · Science · Humour

Should you ever grow vain, compare yourselves, lying awake until two in the morning with a telephone in your embrace, scrolling through reels, with the seventeenth-century astronomer of the Dutch painter Gerrit Dou, who, with hourglass and globe, passes h

Should you ever grow vain, compare yourselves, lying awake until two in the morning with a telephone in your embrace, scrolling through reels, with the seventeenth-century astronomer of the Dutch painter Gerrit Dou, who, with hourglass and globe, passes his nights over a scientific treatise. Do you feel the

Detail of a painting: a bearded man in a pink turban holds round-rimmed spectacles on his nose with one hand.

Art · Observations · Humour

Imaginary Portrait of the Poet Virgil by Ludger tom Ring the Elder

The poet Virgil, an imaginary portrait by the German artist Ludger tom Ring the Elder (1496–1547). The artist's first name is Ludger, his surname is tom Ring. When I say "attentively", this is precisely the expression and the degree of concentration I have in mind

NB! · Archive · Art · Museums · Pop Culture

Charlotte Rampling in 1973, photographed by Helmut Newton in front of Lucas Cranach the Elder's diptych "Adam and Eve" of 1528 in the Uffizi Gallery

Art

A Rather Unexpected Treatment, for the Early Seventeenth Century, of a Decidedly Tedious Subject

A rather unexpected treatment, for the early seventeenth century, of a decidedly tedious subject. The Four Elements, Louis Finson, 1611. The elements of fire, air, water and earth are locked in eternal opposition, yet in truth they form one indivisible figure

Art · Science

Magritte used the Schuster trident effect in his painting “The Obstacle of the Void”

Magritte's "The Obstacle of the Void", 1965, and Schuster's Impossible Trident, 1964. Magritte, who preferred to call his art magic realism rather than surrealism, used the recently discovered effect of Schuster's trident in his painting "The Obstacle of the Void"

Art · Museums · Heritage · Education

Gustav Klimt's painting "Medicine", 1901

The painting was destroyed by the Germans in 1945; this reconstruction was made in 2021 by the Leopold Museum in Vienna.

Art · Books · Observations

Andrey Bely’s 1915 poem “Dedication”, which recalls Dante

Bartolomeo di Fruosino, Illustration to Dante's "Inferno" There is a poem by Andrei Bely called "Dedication", written in 1915. And it reminds me of Dante. I asked you for bread, and was given molten stone, And at once, scorched through, my palm smokes foully.