#ChthonicThursday: Maximilian Pirner

April 25, 2024

Maximilian Pirner (1854–1924) was a Czech painter and one of the leading figures in the Vienna Secession, a significant movement in art and design that emerged in 1897.
At its core, the Vienna Secession was a rebellion against the academic art establishment, which was dominated by historicism and rigid standards: the artists involved sought to create a new, modern aesthetic that reflected the changing times and the spirit of the age, which might explain why Pirner is… well… a bit gloomy.

Pirner wasn’t as active in the local artistic community as artists such as Gustav Klimt, Josef Hoffmann, and Koloman Moser, and maybe that’s why his focus remained on classical mythology, but the incursions of macabre themes undeniably tie him to his contemporaries.

The end of all things

Medusa

Hecate (1901)

books and literature

The Wandering Earth

The collection is extraordinary and spans from grand feats of sci-fi imagination (the titular story) to humorous tales such as the one in which a writer called Cixin Liu becomes homeless after spending all his money and energy on a grand saga called The Three-Thousand-Body

March 8, 2026 9:00 am

books and literature

Weird Sisters

Well, this was a fairly unusual read for me in this period, I’m more in my sci-fi era, but good things come from good friends who gift you books you wouldn’t have bought: they usually help you discover something cool you didn’t know. What I

March 6, 2026 9:00 am

books and literature

SciFi Friday — In the Year 2889 by Jules Verne (1889)

[Redactor’s note: In the Year 2889 was first published in the Forum, February, 1889; p. 662. It was published in France the next year. Although published under the name of Jules Verne, it is now believed to be chiefly if not entirely the work of

March 6, 2026 1:00 am