TLS March 28 2008
From Christopher Reid's review of Modern Painters: The Camden Town Group at the Tate Britain: The more likely truth is that Sickert was simply the first painter in a long tradition to point out that the reclining nude, a standard compositional trope, had a lot in common with the inertia of a corpse, and the scrutiny of the artist with the calculating gaze of the malefactor. *** From Fernando Cervantes' review of Marjorie Trusted's The Arts of Spain: Iberia and Latin America 1450-1700 : In the 1920s, Jose Ortega y Gasset attempted to counter these myths with the argument that Europe was not the creation of the sovereign nation state but, rather, the result of a piecemeal and laborious cultural fusion of what he called the "Germanic" and the "Mediterranean" elements. What particularly interested Ortega was that this fusion had been attained Iberia earlier and more permanently than in any other part of Europe, so that the presence of those very elements th...