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1 week ago | 
theneweuropean.co.uk | Richard Holledge
Max Ernst was a “magician of infinite possibilities”. His paintings combine menace with mischief, grotesque apparitions that creep and crawl from swirls of discordant colours, peopled by humans with beaks for heads, and flamboyant females. He created abstract works using a technique he called frottage – dropping sheets of paper on floor boards and rubbing them with charcoal to transfer the pattern of the grain to the paper.
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1 month ago | 
theneweuropean.co.uk | Richard Holledge
It might seem overly whimsical to pick out a scrapbook as a highlight of an exhibition, but there it is unobtrusively positioned among wood engravings, marbled paper patterns, quirky 3-D creations and mysterious oils. It is jammed full of cuttings from magazines and newspapers compiled between 1947 and 1949, including cigarette cards of bi-planes over Eastbourne, adverts for haute couture in Paris, drawings of birds and beetles, any number of Father Christmases and clowns.
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1 month ago | 
thecritic.co.uk | Richard Holledge
This article is taken from the March 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10. On 16 December, 1947, Knut Hamsun, Norway’s most famous living novelist, stood in court to answer charges of treason. Once revered but now reviled, for years Hamsun had been an ardent proselytiser for Adolf Hitler.
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2 months ago | 
theneweuropean.co.uk | Richard Holledge
As a girl, Jawa El Khash visited the ancient Syrian city of Palmyra, the glorious desert trading post enriched over the centuries with Greek and Roman temples, theatres and grand colonnades which stalk across the dusty plain. “It’s something you don’t forget,” she recalls.
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Jan 14, 2025 | 
theneweuropean.co.uk | Richard Holledge
The Book of Genesis 7; 4.
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Dec 10, 2024 | 
theneweuropean.co.uk | Richard Holledge
An explosion high in the sky, an object at first just a silver dot comes into view, floating to earth on a parachute, landing with a thud and a cloud of dust. It’s a capsule from a spacecraft. There is a rush to open the hatch, and out step three cosmonauts. “My heart gave a skip when I saw that in a TV documentary,” says photographer Andrew McConnell.
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Dec 10, 2024 | 
theneweuropean.co.uk | Richard Holledge
Dead men hang from tree stumps watched impassively by a lounging soldier. A child weeps as her stricken mother is carried away from the tumult of war. A grieving wife holds the dying husband she cannot bear to let go; a soldier seizes a woman unaware that he is about to be stabbed in the back by a vengeful mother. Scenes of violence and despair, abject sorrow and pain. These are the images by the Spanish genius Francisco de Goya which the Portuguese artist Paula Rego hung above her bed.
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Nov 25, 2024 | 
theneweuropean.co.uk | Richard Holledge
Formost of his life, Antonio Calderara sought inspiration from the misty shores of Lake Orta, the smallest of Italy’s northern lakes, where houses rise like terracotta ziggurats from the water’s edge, streets are cobbled and narrow, church towers rise above town squares.
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Sep 24, 2024 | 
theneweuropean.co.uk | Richard Holledge
One fine Sunday morning in 1872, Claude Monet set himself down on the banks of the Seine and painted the sun setting on the river, its dwindling rays still strong enough to catch a boat’s sail with a dash of pink. He had moved to Argenteuil, a small town just outside Paris, in 1871 and painted its surroundings many times. On this occasion, he depicted the grassy, muddy bank to the right of the river, overhung by trees. In the distance, a grand chateau alongside factory chimneys.
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Sep 17, 2024 | 
theneweuropean.co.uk | Richard Holledge
During the pandemic, when galleries were out of bounds, some took to displaying their treasures online. The National Gallery was particularly effective at this, presenting a selection of the world’s finest paintings with such clarity it was as if you were there, zooming in with close-ups that revealed every splash and swirl of paint. All that with a commentary by NG director Gabriele Finaldi.
