art & culture

“I don't paint dreams or nightmares, I paint my own reality.”

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A Souvenir from Scotland by Gustave Doré

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Andromeda by Gustave Doré

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The fall of the rebel angels by Gustave Doré

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The Enigma by Gustave Doré

For Gustave Doré, born in Strasbourg, France's defeat by Prussia in 1870, and the consequential loss of Alsace-Lorraine, was a great source of distress. Just after the end of the war he produced three monumental works: The Enigma, The Black Eagle of Prussia and The Defence of Paris, all in shades of grey and presented under the general title of Souvenirs of 1870, when the contents of the artist's studio were sold posthumously in 1884. Of these three paintings, The Enigma is undeniably the most tragic. At the top of a hill, strewn with bodies, there stands a sphinx, a mythical monster with the body of a lion and the head of a human. In the distance, plumes of smoke rise up from a Paris set ablaze by enemy cannon. Under the dark sky, a winged woman, perhaps the embodiment of France seems to be asking the sphinx for answers. The sphinx appears to be compassionate, closer to the sphinx of Egyptian religion, guardian of the underworld, rather than the monster Oedipus came across in Greek mythology.

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Unrevealed feelings by Denis Sarazhin

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Masha by Denis Sarazhin

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Will you tell her by Denis Sarazhin

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Birds of Prey - Alexander Struys

Alexander Theodore Honoré Struys was a Belgian genre and portrait painter in the Realistic style.

His anti-clerical painting, "Birds of Prey" created a scandal in 1876.

He painted in the homes of the poor people he depicted. His work attracted much attention and praise in the more socially conscious publications of that time, and he became a close friend of Jakob Smits, who was also involved in social issues. Some less sympathetic commentators referred to him as the "painter of misery and pain".

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La Primavera (details) - Sandro Botticelli

Along with The Birth of Venus, Boticelli painted Primavera after returning to Florence from Rome, where he was hired to create frescoes in the Sistine Chapel. During this time, he began to turn his attention away Roman Catholic iconography and towards scenes from Greek and Roman mythology.

This humanist interest in ancient allegories culminated in The Birth of Venus and Primavera—two tempera paintings starring Venus, the Roman goddess associated with love and beauty.

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The Mask of Sorrow is a monument perched on a hill above Magadan, Russia, commemorating the many prisoners who suffered and died in the Gulag prison camps in the Kolyma region of the Soviet Union during the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. It consists of a large concrete statue of a face, with tears coming from the left eye in the form of small masks. The right eye is in the form of a barred window. The back side portrays a weeping young woman and a headless man on a cross. Inside is a replication of a typical Stalin-era prison cell. Below the Mask of Sorrow are stone markers bearing the names of many of the forced-labor camps of the Kolyma, as well as others designating the various religions and political systems of those who suffered there.