Detail from Katsushika Hokusai, The great wave off Kanagawa (Kanagawa oki namiura), (1830–34), from the Thirty-six views of Mt Fuji (Fugaku-sanjū-rokkei)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Felton Bequest, 1909 (426-2)
Hokusai's Great Wave is the enduring image of Japanese art. Less well known is the story of its primary pigment - Prussian blue - which was created in a lab accident in Berlin and sparked 'blue fever' in Europe.
His rise was just as swift as his fall. To mark the painter's 100th birthday, an art historian explores the forces – cultural, political and personal – that created a polarizing legacy.
A view of Tehran, with its mix of traditional and modern design.
Jørn Eriksson/Flick
The tale of a married woman who joins her lover in Paris, The Beauties and Furies is a modernist classic. Like Joyce's Ulysses, the action is concentrated in one city, but dreams are nightmarish in this city of night, not light.
German developer Jörg Duske has built student accommodation out of recycled shipping containers.
Holzer Kobler Architekturen
There is a growing trend of designing modernised replicas of traditional buildings for entertainment and tourism. That’s no way to salvage positive lessons from building traditions.
In order to support his young family, William Faulkner took a job shoveling coal at a power plant on Ole Miss’s campus.
Mussklprozz/Wikimedia Commons
Slated to be demolished this year, a crumbling brick building on Ole Miss' campus once operated as a power plant where novelist William Faulkner shoveled coal – and feverishly wrote.
In 1919, Ivy MacKusick, an art student at UCL’s Slade School of Fine Art, completed a Portrait of a Man in His Shirtsleeves. We know nothing about the man of African descent depicted in this portrait…
In the early 20th century, cubism seemed difficult and wild, and it was a favourite target of conservatives.
Juan Gris, Fantômas, 1915, National Gallery of Art. Wikimedia Commons
There’s a problem with the history of western art: we face it from the wrong side of decades of discursive dismantling. The conventional “story” of early 20th-century modernism, in which an advanced guard…
Frieze London 2014.
Photograph by Linda Nylind. Courtesy of Linda Nylind/Frieze.
One of the biggest international art fairs is back. And London’s Frieze isn’t just about selling contemporary art, it’s an annual exhibition that defines and showcases the international art scene of today…
Centenary Pool, Spring Hill, architect: James Birrell.
James Birrell private collection
When most people think of Brisbane architecture, they usually picture a Queenslander: high-set, timber-and-corrugated iron houses that are ideally suited to subtropical conditions. Modernism fits into…
The gorgeous, ethereal photographic portrait shot of Virginia Woolf taken in 1902 by George Beresford has become the iconic image of her, ubiquitous on mugs, mouse-mats and tea-towels. This image certainly…
McBride’s narrative of trauma negotiates the burdens of Irish literary, religious and cultural history.
Mysi
For you. You’ll soon. You’ll give her name. In the stitches of her skin she’ll wear your say. The foundational challenge of Eimear McBride’s novel is plainly visible in its opening lines, above: the incomplete…
Modernism is typified by a commitment to exploratory experimentation.
Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe by Edouard Manet (1862-63), Wikimedia Commons
I first came across modernism through the lens of postmodernism in the early 1980s. At that time postmodernism – explained here – was washing through the academy, promising to transform everything by placing…
