I don’t know who votes these things up, but I am glad they do. Can we have a new x_HN, with all the things with potential to open your mind in unspecified ways?
If you enjoy this, you might also like he work of Stanisław Szukalski, a historically problematic but talented/eccentric painter and sculptor who pursued neo-pagan slavic (slav-adjacent?) themes.
Speaking of Slavic paintings, I've had the chance to see Alphonse Mucha's Slav Epic [0] (which, for complicated reasons, is being displayed in some random village somewhere in Czechia) and it was maybe the most impressive art display I've ever had the pleasure of seeing.
The sheer scale (the paintings are like 8 x 6m each!) and detail is unlike anything I've seen before, it really has to be experienced in person. I'd highly recommend making the trip to Moravský Krumlov if you're ever in that part of the world!
You might know Mucha from his Art Nouveau posters, but this Epic was what he considered his magnum opus and spent eighteen years of his life on.
Mucha, IMHO, is a very underrated artist. Were he born in Italy, his level of fame would be somewhere else entirely.
An interesting detail about the epic cycle - it was funded by an American millionaire who got randomly interested in Slavic history even though having no Slavic roots himself.
When I realize that still 30 years ago Slavs in Balkans were genociding each other, and at this moment two Slavic groups are viciously fighting each other while non-Slavs don't even notice a difference between them, I doubt this heritage and culture are worthy of cultivating or praising.
You are an ignoramus. It’s hard to believe you have any realizations. If I took your comment and replaced Slav with any number of groups it applies to and only slightly changed the years I would be shouted off the internet.
Think better of mankind: the conflicts that seem insurmountable today will be overcome. Sweden and Denmark hold the record for most wars, the land that is now Italy was a failed state for many decades at a time, the Japanese spent the better part of the Muromachi period fighting each other grimly.
https://www.szukalski.com/
The sheer scale (the paintings are like 8 x 6m each!) and detail is unlike anything I've seen before, it really has to be experienced in person. I'd highly recommend making the trip to Moravský Krumlov if you're ever in that part of the world!
You might know Mucha from his Art Nouveau posters, but this Epic was what he considered his magnum opus and spent eighteen years of his life on.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Slav_Epic
I think more people should see this part of his work (that is, perhaps even more than the classic Sarah Bernhardt posters, which are also wonderful).
An interesting detail about the epic cycle - it was funded by an American millionaire who got randomly interested in Slavic history even though having no Slavic roots himself.