Open Windows 13
March 2024
Helena de Kay: Apropos of Artistic Careers, Letters and Flowers
Clara Marcellán
In 2023, a series of events shed new light on the universe of Helena de Kay (1846–1916), the model for a small oil painting by Winslow Homer (1836–1910) whose sources of inspiration and significance we are still exploring.
Emil Nolde and Nazism
Paloma Alarcó
‘Happy the man who can talk himself into believing that culture can safeguard society against violence. Even before the start of the twentieth century, the artists, the poets and the theoreticians of the Modernist movement showed that the opposite was true’, wrote Hans Magnus Enzensberger a few decades ago. He went on to state that ‘their predilection for crime, for the satanic outsider, for the destruction of civilization is notorious’.
Magritte, Wittgenstein and the Philosophy of Language: Between the Poetry of Mystery and the Philosophy of Visual Language
José Luis Calderón Aguirrezabala
Magritte’s paintings evoke certain human mysteries in a sort of visual poetry, often leaving the viewer in suspense, engrossed in thought or subsequent questioning. Philosophy aspires, with varying success, to provide rational answers to the mysteries of humankind.