Portraiture Archives - Liz Hager Liz Hager

From Mughals to Minis: The Enduring Paisley Motif

Indian textile block, single boteh motif, carved wood (collection of the artist)

Very few design motifs have withstood the vicissitudes of fashion as well as paisley. It’s incredibly versatile—cacophonous and ebullient elements can be channeled into a sophisticated all-over pattern or individual “pine cones” can be released on their own to create a simple appealing repeat. Through the centuries its motifs have been transformed, embellished, and recombined endlessly….

Birthday Observances: Giacomo Balla

Giacomo Balla, Self Portrait, 1900

Best known as a member of the Italian Futurist movement, Giacomo Balla—painter, sculptor, and set designer—was born on this day (July 18) in 1871 in Turin, Italy.

Balla had little formal art training. In 1895, while still in his early 20s, the painter left Turin to live in Rome. His work was included in the 1899 Venice Biennale…

A generation that had gone to school on a horse-drawn streetcar stood under the open sky, after WWI, in a countryside in which nothing remained unchanged but the clouds, and beneath these clouds, in a field of forces of destructive torrents and explosions, was the tiny, fragile human life.
—Walter Benjamin