Dear Kitty. Some blog

By Megan Trudell:

Rebels and Martyrs: how Romanticism and revolution changed art

As a new exhibition opens at the National Gallery Megan Trudell looks at the Romantics’ legacy.

It is a powerful and romantic idea about past artists that they were visionaries starving in garrets, in some ways outside society.

This image – deliberately created in part by artists themselves – can, if unpicked, tell us a great deal about how individuals responded to a rapidly changing world during the 19th century, and something about that world itself.

A new exhibition at the National Gallery in London follows the changing role and self-description of the artist, from pillars of the establishment to rebels and martyrs.

It includes around 70 paintings and aims to view the evolution in the artist from Sir Joshua Reynolds’ pride in acceptance by the establishment in the late 18th century to the tortured outsider status of the likes of Egon Schiele in the years immediately before the First World War.

Covering 130 years, many of the paintings – often portraits and depictions of artists at work – tell part of the story of the dramatic social changes between the French Revolution and the First World War.

Artists struggled to make sense of them and expressed their contradictions in different ways.

Emerging in the late 18th century in Europe, Romanticism was a response to the tremendous hopes of the French Revolution turning to disillusion with the rise of Napoleon and the return of tyranny.

For many who had welcomed the revolution’s promise of freedom, its outcome was a bitter blow.

Many rejected the Enlightenment ideas of reason associated with the revolution and replaced them with a frequently mystical glorification of an illusory ancient past.

Romantic painting is characterised by an emphasis on nature and the individual expression of emotion and imagination.

The ethos of Romanticism stressed that artists should not paint for money or glory, but to release an inner creativity at whatever cost.

It is this movement which gave birth to the notion of the tortured individual artist.

But Romanticism was contradictory, not simply a reactionary rejection of reason.

It was also a formal challenge to the attitudes and forms of classicism in art, to pre French Revolution conservatism and to establishment painting.

Review of that exhibition akso here.

Capitalism, realism, and modernism in 19th-20th century art: here.

Romantic poets dying young: here.

From Socialist Worker weekly in Britain:

Slaughter at the Somme

The Battle of the Somme, which took place 90 years ago, reveals the horror of the First World War of 1914-18 and the system that created it, writes historian Neil Faulkner

On 1 July 1916, 150,000 British soldiers went “over the top” on the Western Front to attack the German trenches in the Somme region.

The front, along which British and French armies confronted the German army, stretched from Switzerland to the Channel.

For 18 months there had been a stalemate.

The German defences on the Somme were made up of consecutive lines of trenches and dug-outs, thousands of yards deep.

They were defended by riflemen, machine guns, artillery and belts of impenetrable barbed wire.

By the end of the first day, 19,000 British soldiers were dead and a further 38,000 wounded.

This was the bloodiest single day in British history.

There had been no gains at all along most of the front.

The assault waves had been so effectively scythed by machine guns and blasted by artillery that some battalions had lost three quarters of their men within minutes of leaving the trenches.

Sheltering in a shell-hole near the German wire, Corporal Ashurst looked back across no man’s land.

He said, “Hundreds of dead lay about, and wounded men were trying to crawl back to safety.

“As I lay there watching their painful efforts to get back to our line, I watched these poor fellows suddenly try to rise on their feet and then fall in a heap and lie very still. …

For 90 years, in Britain at least, the Somme has symbolised the waste of war.

Recently, however, a new generation of revisionist military historians has challenged this view. Revisionism is very much in vogue.

Revolutions are trivialised, empires are rehabilitated, wars are retrospectively justified and tarnished reputations are polished up.

Revisionist history is an academic wing of neo-liberalism – the past is being recast to conform to a Blairite vision of the world.

The revisionists argue that the standard description of British soldiers in the First World War as “lions led by donkeys” – the donkeys being the generals – is false. …

They [British World War I generals] promised great “breakthroughs”.

They predicted the enemy’s imminent “morale collapse”.

Each year was to be the last year of the war.

They dared not admit that half a million men and 1,500 guns were not enough.

Like US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld in Iraq, who predicted victory on the cheap with a small specialised army, they probably deluded themselves.

They certainly had to delude others.

The awful truth about the war could not be told – lest support for it collapse.

On the battlefield itself, class snobbery crippled tactical innovation.

The generals were long service professional officers recruited, with few exceptions, from the upper classes, and trained in small scale colonial wars.

They doubted the discipline and fighting skills of the new mass army of working class volunteers.

“Neither our new formations nor the old divisions have the same discipline that obtained in our army of a year ago,” complained General Rawlinson, Haig’s commander on the Somme.

So on the battlefield they were to be kept under tight rein, denied the initiative and flexibility essential to modern infantry tactics.

“The assaulting troops must push forward at a steady pace in successive lines,” intoned Rawlinson.

Men walking in lines can be monitored and controlled – and easily shot down.

The real criticism of Haig and Rawlinson is not, however, that they were bad generals.

Had they been good generals, the casualties might have been fewer, but there would still have been slaughter, destruction and waste on a mindnumbing scale.

The real criticism is that they were leading members of a rapacious ruling class prepared to sacrifice millions in a war for empire and profit.

The battle of the Somme, by any rational assessment, was barbaric and insane.

The politicians, generals and profiteers had produced a world in which millions of soldiers were grappling with death in a blasted landscape of mud, blood and wire.

And millions of workers and peasants were having their lives torn apart by hunger, poverty and disease.

See also here.

South African soldiers at the Somme: here.

Executions of British soldiers in World War I: here.

Horses in World War I, here.

Prostitution in World War I, here.

This video is called Rare Female Quillfin Blenny in Florida Waters.

From Alaska Fishernman’s Journal:

Dry Tortugas Sea Quest Turns Up Surprises: DIVERS ARE CONDUCTING AN EXPANDED CENSUS OF MARINE LIFE

Source: The Miami Herald

Jun. 27–DRY TORTUGAS — At 112 feet below the Gulf of Mexico’s surface, Rick Gomez spied a four-inch, beige-colored fish with a long dorsal spine and a bright blue spot as it moved atop an algae turf.

The University of Miami’s diving safety officer couldn’t believe his luck: If he was right, he was looking at a quillfin blenny — a fish that had never been documented to live in Florida waters.

Old warship to be sunk to create new reef off Florida: here.

Pacific reef fish: here.

From 24dash.com:

Publisher: Clare Fischer

Published: 27/06/2006

A giant beetle unseen in the UK for 300 years and rare anywhere in the world has been discovered living in Llanelli.

Startled workers at a furniture restorer almost smashed the bug to bits with a hammer in their fear before cooler heads prevailed.

Others believed the 2.6 inches long bug, with two antennae up to 4 inches long, was a child’s plastic toy brought in as a joke.

In fact it turned out to be an extremely rare Capricorn beetle looking like a frightening throwback to the age of dinosaurs.

Staff at Foothold Group, in Llanelli, south Wales, use recycled wood to make new furniture, and saw the big bug crawl out of a pile of English oak. …

Local entomologist Ian Morgan was called and he immediately recognised the importance of the find.

He told the Western Mail in Cardiff: “This type of long-horn beetle was supposed to be have been extinct in the UK since 1700.

“This is the first time in centuries that it has been seen here in Wales.

“It is a male and he was found in timber labelled English oakwood, so it makes you question whether this massive beast is alive in England too.

“I realised he was something special as soon as I saw it. It is very rare and is the largest long-horned beetle in Europe.

“There is also a possibility that he might have been imported from central Europe.

“The beetle depends on very large oaks for its grubs to feed on over a long period.

“It is illegal to kill it anywhere.”

The beetle, which has a short life-span, is expected to survive for only another two weeks.

After its demise its body will be donated to the National Museum of Wales, where it will be exhibited.

Giant ‘extinct’ British Beetle found in Gloucestershire: here.

Fossil Tertiary long-horn beetle: here.

From Dutch news agency ANP:

BARCELONA/LONDON - Spanish television viewers on Monday night have been able for the first time ever to see the documentary film The Spanish Earth by the Dutch film maker Joris Ivens.

The film, with English narration by Ernest Hemingway [see also here; and here], contains images, never seen in Spain itself before, of the bloody civil war (1936-1939), British paper The Times wrote on Turesday.

The film is about the fight between the rebels, led by General Francisco Franco and the republican government troops near Madrid in 1937.

The showing of the film now is because of the coming seventieth anniversary of the beginning of the war.

More on Hemingway and the Spanish Civil War: here.

Italian film on Ivens: here.

David Walsh on films and politics: here.

By David Walsh:

This past weekend investor Warren Buffett, to a vast fanfare from the media, announced his decision to donate some $37 billion worth of shares in his firm, Berkshire Hathaway, to five charitable foundations.

The largest recipient (receiving some $31 billion) will be The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which specializes in global health and education projects.

That one solitary human being has nearly forty billion dollars to dispose of, with a good deal left over, is appalling in itself, at a time when 1.1 billion people, one-fifth of the world’s population, live on less than $1 a day and some 3 billion on less than $2.

The planet’s three wealthiest individuals in 2005 (including Messrs. Buffett and Gates) had greater wealth than the combined gross domestic product of the world’s 48 poorest nations.

There is, in any event, something intrinsically degrading and demeaning about philanthropy.

A society in need of philanthropists is one rooted in inequality, in which the deprivation of the many is supposedly addressed by the largesse of the few.

No one can seriously suggest that social problems will be solved in this manner.

Especially in America, where an aristocracy has taken shape before our eyes over the past decade and the Bush administration is taking blind, reckless measures to eliminate all restrictions on the accumulation of personal wealth.

As for Mr. Buffett himself, there are no doubt immense personal contradictions in his life.

If one takes the media accounts at face value, he seems an honest and civilized man.

Among many unsavory, rotten types, he appears to stand out as something of an exception.

He has liberal views on social issues and has put his money to use in a number of worthy causes. He lives modestly in a home bought decades ago.

It is worth noting that Buffett’s lifestyle puts the lie to the claims by the media and the assorted apologists for corporate thievery that the fabulous sums paid to American executives are necessary to retain “the best and the brightest.”

For Buffett, at least, the accumulation of personal wealth seems not to have been the principal motivation.

See also here.

And here.

And here.