My first impression of Franz Wilhelm Junghuhn’s lithographs of the Javanese volcanoes – selected from his Java-Album and recently exhibited in Lava-Being. Stories from the Center of the Earth at the Graphische Sammlung ETHZ – is their resemblance to something like picturesque postcards of serene landscapes. However, the context in which they were created reveals a more complex and ambivalent story. Published in 1854 alongside written records of his expeditions in the Dutch East Indies, present-day Indonesia, Junghuhn’s images intertwine colonial ambitions of science and romantic European aesthetics.
Art History
Dürer’s Unequal Lovers: A Moralizing Image of a Gold Digger and her Sugar Daddy
Among the earliest engravings made by the young Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528) is commonly counted an image known as Unequal Lovers. It shows an old man and a much younger woman who have settled down together in a far reaching landscape.
Rome, Fontana di Trevi, 1961
The late Baroque Trevi Fountain in Rome by Nicola Salvi (1697-1751), completed in 1762 by Giuseppe Panini, became famous for the nocturnal bath that Marcello Mastroianni and Anita Ekberg took in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1960). One year after La Dolce Vita, the photograph by Comet photographer Hans Krebs was taken. It shows nuns throwing coins.
Manneken-Pis, a strange, hybrid object
In our little series on the occasion of the Year of Cultural Heritage, another bronze sculpture in the urban space follows today. The “peeing boy”, created by Jérôme Duquesnoy in 1619, is a well-known fountain figure in Brussels. Catherine Emerson describes the figure as a strange, hybrid object:
225 years Louvre
The dream of a public art museum had already been cherished by several ministers of the ancien régime a few decades before the French Revolution as the Musée du Louvre in Paris was inaugurated on 10 August 1793 at the height of the revolution. Andrew McClellan writes:
Joan Miró, on the occasion of his 125th birthday
Today, April 20, Joan Miró would have turned 125. His often humorous paintings and sculptures made the Catalan one of the most popular artists of the 20th century.
Of page-turning and wonder: Andy Warhol and the American magazine LIFE
There probably is nothing more mundane than idly flicking through a magazine on a Sunday afternoon. More often than not, fresh, grinning faces beam back at the reader as colourful page upon colourful page invites you to keep reading. That’s how it is today – and how it has been for ages.
Ermordung eines Privatdozenten – Zum 25. Todestag von Hermann Burger (1942-1989)
Wolfram Schöllkopf, Privatdozent für Glaziologie und deutsche Literatur an der Eidgenössischen Technischen Universität, flieht aus der Sitzung der Freifächerfakultät, der Abteilung 13 für Geistes- und Militärwissenschaften.
How much Switzerland is there in San Francisco? – structural engineer O. H. Ammann and the Golden Gate Bridge
It is a well known story that Swiss-born Johann August Sutter founded a colony by the name of New Helvetia in California in the mid-19th century. It is less well known that another Swiss citizen was essential to the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco’s famous landmark that celebrated its 75th birthday in 2012.