Chithravathi Magazine

Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, one of the most discussed portraits in the history of art, displayed at the Louvre Museum in Paris, is once again in the news, after a 36-year-old man hurled a handful of cake and tried to smash the glass protecting the world’s most famous painting on Sunday. According to the videos that went viral in the social media, the man in a wheelchair, wearing a wig and apparently posing as an elderly woman, attacked the most famous painting while hundreds of visitors were there, and it is suspected that the vandalism was an act of apparent environment-related publicity stunt. A video posted online shows the perpetrator speaking to visitors in French as he is escorted away by security. “Think of the Earth, people are destroying the Earth... Think about it. Artists tell you: think of the Earth. That’s why I did this.” Since the masterpiece is in a safe enclosure, it was not damaged and the attacker was taken into custody and sent to a police psychiatric unit. Mona ...

The International Council of Museums to observe International Museum Day on May 18 What is a museum? It is not just a collection of art, sculptures or heritage. It is a storehouse of the history of the world, lives, and cultures. As world-renowned Italian architect Renzo Piano has observed, “A museum is a place where one should lose one’s head”. If you stroll through a museum and see more and more works of art, science and history, it would definitely change the way we approach these subjects. It is with this aim that The International Council of Museums (ICOM) has been organizing International Museum Day (IMD) since 1977, on May 18. The objective of IMD is to raise awareness about the fact that, “Museums are an important means of cultural exchange, enrichment of cultures and development of mutual understanding, cooperation and peace among peoples” according to ICOM. Last year, more than 37,000 museums participated in the event and this year they expect more participation. Museums have...

An abstract painting by Wassily Kandinsky  The history of art is also the history of art movements. There are hundreds of such movements that shaped the visual art over the years. While some survived the ravages of time, some other movements faded into oblivion. Abstract Art is a 20th century modernist movement against representation, which was often misunderstood by many, but it is still a major genre in contemporary art. While art was mainly about visual references in reality, many artists felt they should create works that are not related to reality and free from the bondage of subject matter. In abstraction, non-representational lines, colours, shapes, and forms replace accurate visual depiction of objects, landscape, and figures. Representation was the unwritten belief that art was meant to reflect or represent what there was in the everyday world. Some artists rebelled against this restriction and especially against the idea of art only as imitation, which heralded the birth ...

Farhad Hussain designing the car for CCC A car that is a great work of art at the same time retaining all its functionalities.  When Delhi-based artist Farhad Hussain specially painted a Maruti Eeco car in his signature style in the campus of The Velammal International School (TVIS), as part of the Velammal Art Tour, it was a new experience that brought the students closer to the colourful and wider world of art. That was the ultimate aim behind this unique cultural extravaganza organised by Chitravathi Centre for Creativity (CCC) for Velammal Knowledge Park, Ponneri. This car, which is full of the playful images of the vibrant life and its spirit, naturally evinced the interest of the students and other visitors alike about similar creative experiments done earlier. There are a few such works of art done in the past in different parts of the world, including India that transformed cars into great works of art. While some were widely discussed, some faded into oblivion. Let’s have ...