🌻 The Leading Online Digest of Oscar Wilde Studies
Next week the University of Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum1 opens a major exhibition of the German visionary Anselm Kiefer, which it describes as “a landmark survey of the artist’s work produced between 1969-1982.”
So why should this interest Wildeans?
Continue reading “Anselm Kiefer”
PURPLE AND ROSE: THE LANGE LEIZEN OF THE SIX MARKS.
J. M. Whistler, 1864.
I visited the Philadelphia Museum of Art recently to see James McNeill Whistler’s 1864 work “Purple and Rose: The Lange Leizen of the Six Marks”
The painting depicts Whistler’s model (and of course, partner) Joanna Hiffernan in a classic Whistler composition, here given an oriental setting in the sitting-room of his studio. The details in the picture display some of Whistler’s personal collection and reveal his burgeoning interest in East Asian art.
Being no expert on the artistic merits of the painting itself, I thought I would concentrate instead on the terminology of its title, littérateur that I might be.
And as Wildean that I am, I was drawn immediately to the reference to “Six Marks” because the expression The Six-Mark Tea-Pot is the caption to a well-known cartoon satirizing the aesthetic movement, and I was anxious to decipher its coupling with the “Lange Leizen” of the low-country.
Continue reading “Six Marks”