what you get here

This is not a blog which opines on current events. It rather uses incidents, books (old and new), links and papers to muse about our social endeavours.
So old posts are as good as new! And lots of useful links!

The Bucegi mountains - the range I see from the front balcony of my mountain house - are almost 120 kms from Bucharest and cannot normally be seen from the capital but some extraordinary weather conditions allowed this pic to be taken from the top of the Intercontinental Hotel in late Feb 2020

Saturday, December 7, 2013

Salute to Varna City Gallery

It’s not often that one can upload an entire book of paintings free of charge but that is what Varna City Art Gallery now offers as part of its city bid to be European City of Culture in 2019.

It’s not a large book (136 pages) and contains very little text – other than the names and dates of the painters - which is sad. But the quality of the reproductions is excellent and the book is a good short introduction to about 50 of the key names in Bulgarian art of the first part of the 20th Century. 

By comparison the little book I published last year gives some detail of the lives of about 150 of the key Bulgarian painters – as well as some 50 reproductions. 
One of the artists in the Varna book is Alexander Moutafov, the seascape specialist, who was schooled in the area in 1880s and 1890s and trained in Turin and Munich in the first decade of the 20th century. The aquarelle above is a new one I acquired today. This is the third of his paintings I now have. You can read more on the Dec 5 post.

I now have my beady eye on this painting from the 1940s or so - by Dimo Nikolov about whom I know nothing except that he had some art training in Prague.......The photo does not do the painting justice - the style and strong colours in particular remind me of the Baia Mare school of paintingthen in Hungary - now Romania) of the turn of the century

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