Colour

Walking through Hare Hill Park today, I reflected on the strange time. We had a delivery the other day.  The driver said he couldn't take a signature but needed to photograph me holding the box. I held it in front of me and smiled over the top. He said "oh no, we are not allowed to photograph your face but need to see your hands holding the box." I readjusted my pose.

It seemed appropriate today to listen, for the first time, to one of Kraftwerk's albums in the light of the announcement of the death of their founder Florian Schneider.  The album is The Man-Machine and the title track was my favourite.

Gustave Courbet's The Painter's Studio (1855) can be seen as a key painting in the transition from traditional Academie des Beaux-Arts French painting to the imminent arrival of Impressionism. Courbet was a "realist" painter whose work departed from the traditional, idealistic style and adopted more recognisably current themes.

This painting is something of an allegory of social and political change. It shows a painter and two models - in the shade, a mechanical man, inert but capable of being manipulated into poses for painterly study and in full light a clearly alive naked woman. The presence of a naked woman, being gazed upon by men and, most shockingly at the time, other women and children, was scandalous.

On either side of the picture is a cast of characters, including "types" emblematic of the classes of Parisian society and some recognisable individuals, including the radical poet Baudelaire and the writer Pierre Joseph Proudhon who coined the provocative phrase "all property is theft."

Courbert was a supporter of the 1848 revolution which overthrew the monarchy and introduced the second republic. He did not take up arms but did design a signet for the revolutionaries.