Culture Facts

Lithography is a form of printing based on the principle that oil and water do no mix, but reject each other.

A drawing is made on an absorbent stone using an oil based ink.  Then the stone is washed with water, then it’s inked  and the watered parts repel the ink while the drawing part attracts it.   Afterwards it is printed on paper.

This process was invented by an Austrian, Aloys Senefelder, in the 1790’s  and has proved to have been very popular.

One of the leading lithographic artists of our time includes Barnett Freedman.

A totem pole is the American Indian word for guardian spirit.   It is an intricately carved pole which shows imaginary figures and animals, which the Indians honoured.

Many primitive people believed they had descended from weird animals and so they carved these poles with their ideas.   This is no different to when other civilizations would sculpt statues of their gods in marble and stone.

 

Rodin was a French Impressionist sculptor.  He had new ideas to the usual sculptors around at that time as he believed in an artists idea about light and shade.

His first piece that he entered was a figure L’Age d’airain at the Paris Salon in 1879, but he was greeted with a storm of criticism.   He was accused of making a cast of the man from a living person.

This happened for the next few pieces he produced, until the French finally accepted what a talented sculptor he really was, and in the end they opened a museum to house his works.

Although, one of his commissioned pieces of work was rejected.  One his now most famous sculptures was of the statue of the novelist Balzac unveiled in 1898.   It was commissioned by the Societe des Gens de Lettres, as a memorial of a giant to literature.

So Rodin made a giant of a statue, huge in pronouncement of its features.   The Societe rejected it and it earned a great deal of insult.   It has since come to be accepted as one of the most astonishing portraits in Europe.

A Dutch artist named Hans van Meegeren believed he could paint as well as some of the masters of the 17th century Dutch School of Painting.

So he set out to work on painting some fake pictures by the artist Jan Vermeer.   He produced a number which deceived many art experts all over the world.

One particular painting named the Christ at Emmaus, was sold to a famous Rotterdam museum as a genuine Vermeer.

Van Meergeren was only found out when he was arrested and tried for another matter, he had collaborated with the Nazis during the occupation of Holland in the Second World War.

El Greco was a Greek born painter called Domenikos Theotocopoulos, who was born in 1548.

He left his native country which was then ruled by the oppressive Turkish Empire and travelled to Italy to study under Titian.   He then moved to Toledo in Spain.

He produced a splendid variety of paintings,  most famously  ‘The Buriel of the Count of Orgaz’, which was a hauntingly sombre picture because of his use of contrasting colours.

El Greco means ‘The Greek’ in Spanish.