“To represent terrible and questionable things is, in and of itself, an expression of the artist’s instinctive desire for power and glory; he does not fear them.” Nietzsche, The Will to Power The post-war period, with its constant global conflicts, was a rich one for history painting, and the genre dominated American art of the 60s and 70s from the onset of the Vietnam war. Leon Golub (1922-2004) was the foremost history painter of the late twentieth century. After depicting

“For those dreamers who considered that force, thanks to progress, could soon be a thing of the past, The Iliad  could appear as an historical document; for others, whose powers of recognition are more acute and who perceive force, today as yesterday, as at the very centre of human history, The Iliad is the purest and loveliest of mirrors”. Simone Weil, The Iliad or the Poem of Force Vengeance of Achilles , 1978, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia Western literature beg

Jean Genet became familiar with the paintings of Rembrandt on visits to London in 1952, Amsterdam in 1953, then Munich, Berlin and Vienna in 1957, and this is one of two essays that he wrote about the painter. First published in L'Express in 1958, its style, like the rest of his art criticism, flits between the notational and the poetic. A meditation on the effects of profound loss on artmaking, seeing and vocation, it gives an inisght, too, into Genet's writing, particular

Swimming Stags, Lascaux cave, France " ... there are Still songs to sing beyond Mankind" Paul Celan, Threadsuns Art as violence The Boy’s Own story of the discovery in 1940 of the linked caves at Lascaux in the Vezere valley in France, and the 600 or so 17, 000-year-old paintings inside them by schoolboy Marcel Ravidat and his mischievous scamp of a dog Robot can be found in all histories of Prehistoric art. Since Lascaux, older sites and cave art have