Scattered Thoughts About Art, Culture and my Adventures in them

In Santa Fe this past spring I spent a good day wandering through the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum and actually spending time in front of each of her paintings, trying to understand what made it so beautiful, so interesting, so penetratingly different, and so moving  to the viewer. It seems Georgia had put such intense observation, but also so much love and emotion, into each one of her subjects, that she was able to find, and paint, “the soul” of the object, be it a part of a flower or the red mountains of her beloved New Mexico desert.   A great new exhibition at the Denver Art Museum provides wonderful new insights into our  understanding of O’Keefe’s art. The exhibition was originally organized by the Houston  Museum of Fine Arts with the collaboration of the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in  Santa Fe. In  Georgia O’Keeffe, Photographer , this exhibition presents and offers for analysis ways in which O’Keeffe saw the shaping of objects and landscapes under di...

A few kilometers west of Candia, the Arab, Byzantine, Venetian, Turkish and Greek city we today call Irakleio, there is a small village called Fodele. Famous for its orange groves, hidden in a beautiful valley crossed by a little river, shaded with gigantic sycamores, this village is a little paradise in a small corner of this big, arid island. Just outside the village, next to an ancient Byzantine church, there is a little cluster of buildings that still today is called “Ta Theotokiana” (the place of the Theotokopouloses). The local lore, and the local store owners will tell you why: this is the place where Dominikos Theotokopoulos, the great Greek-Spanish painter El Greco who revolutionized renaissance art, was born.   Now, not everyone agrees with that lore. While Spain has recognized it as the birthplace of one of the giants of Spanish art and have confirmed it with a glorious plaque and a bust of the artist, others argue that no, he could not have come from such a small...

 A bout Greek music I recently promised a couple of friends to put together some information about what I consider to be a good representation of Greek musical expressions of the 20th century. This is no expert  treatise , just some incomplete reflections on my personal musical preferences. So here it goes: Greek music has been so strongly tied to the social and political movements of the 20th century, that I couldn't explain it without making reference to them and their dynamics and impacts.  In the beginning of the 20th century, Greek music was copying the songs and trends of popular music in France and Germany. It included silly tunes talking about silly love, wealth and prosperity, and in general the good bourgeois life that was the dream of the Europeans already expecting wars. It had no character of its own, to the point that many of the songs of that time were outright translations of European - and even Mexica...