Book Review: The Naked Lady by Vicente Blasco Ibáñez

To be an artist usually implies many struggles, some of them useless not to say quixotic. Part of the problem are people who feel called upon to decide what true art should or should not be and thus influence public opinion including potential buyers. Notably religious leaders along with other rich and powerful personalities have inspired and supported, but also limited artists in their work during most of human history. In Spain, the Holy Inquisition left its mark in art as well as in the minds of people as the painting protagonist of the classical novel The Naked Lady by Vicente Blasco Ibáñez is painfully aware. His convent-educated, bourgeois wife gets into a tantrum over models taking off their clothes before him in his workshop. He abides by her wishes and becomes a celebrated painter of “decent” pictures dreaming all the while of producing a nude like Francisco de Goya.

Book Review: The Dragon Painter by Mary McNeil Fenollosa

In a strictly patriarchal society it can be bad luck bordering on disaster for a man to grow old without a male heir to continue the family tradition, especially when it’s a glorious one. The cultural pressure can be so strong that a man resorts to steps that by modern western standards are rather drastic and strange, if not downright loathsome. Divorce or even murder and following remarriage to father a son with another, younger and presumably more fertile woman like English King Henry VIII is one way, marrying off a daughter and adopting the son-in-law is another. The latter is what the ageing protagonist of The Dragon Painter by Mary McNeil Fenollosa does in Tōkyo of the early twentieth century, when a friend of the family sends a young man from the mountains to him whose exceptional talent and commitment make him worthy to carry on the name of the famous family of painters.

Book Review: The Flanders Panel by Arturo Pérez-Reverte

Many believe that until the break-through of photography painters did little more than depict what they, saw in reality or in imagination. In fact, even naturalistic pictures like portraits are the product of an idea that can include mysteries. Some are obvious and easily revealed knowing the code, i.e. the meaning of symbols, colours, composition, etc. in a given period, while others are hidden or inexplicable because their codes are lost and too subtle or time-bound to be cracked. Occasionally, the restauration of a painting exposes a secret that sheds new light on time, methods and mind of the artist like in the novel The Flanders Panel by Arturo Pérez-Reverte. Nearly five hundred years after its creation the art restorer Julia discovers a hidden inscription in the painting of a chess game that turns it into an encrypted testimonial of a murder... and the reason for more crimes in Julia’s immediate surroundings.