Paradox Lust

By Japanese artist Hirō Isono

Yuko Nakamura’s “Black Cat”, 2021

- Dion Fortune

Tuesday Riddell — Beneath The Bee’s and The Black Pond  (gold and silver leaf, gold powder, lustre powder and paint on japanned board, 2021)

Steve Astromag

Edit after Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Karl Friedrich Thiele and Ludwig Wilhelm Wittich (Metropolitan Museum of Art) (Ed. Lic.: CC BY-NC 3.0)

— George Orwell

Art Nouveau as a style always provokes a reaction and it is impossible to remain indifferent. The style is considered by many to be stunningly beautiful, with shimmering colours and imaginative forms, while others find it the height of bad taste.Emerging more than 100 years ago, the Art Nouveau movement was an attempt to create a modern, international style based on decoration. The “father” of modern Hungarian architecture, Ödön Lechner, wanted to “Shape a new age in art, to give birth to a new style.” Art Nouveau became a force for liberation from the Viennese allegiances and pressures and Lechner gave buildings such as the Post Office Savings Bank and the Applied Arts Museum a singular Magyar identity. The yellow and green roof of the Postal Savings Bank and its exterior tulip design show off the best of Lechner’s creations. The Zsolnay factory chemists had perfected a lustrous eosin glaze that could withstand the effects of rain, snow and extreme cold. Lechner and others eagerly adopted the ceramics, using them extensively for decorative emphasis. Ornamentation, colours and forms are combined with brick, mosaics and ceramics to create an exceedingly original composition. The Royal Postal Bank is a dream of the ‘Hungarian Gaudi’, Ödön Lechner built between 1899 and 1901.

Tamsin Abbott

Bhairava eye, Nepal

MOVEMENT

Moon rise by Phyllis Shafer (born 1958).

Shinya Tamai — Good Night   (mineral pigment on japanese paper, 2017)

margaret macdonald mackintosh

Architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh, about his wife and collaborator, artist Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh (via dredsina)

The Blackthorns - Margaret MacDonald Mackintosh