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Looking at art leads to thinking about life
“Workers of the world, unite!” Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels bellowed in The Communist Manifesto in 1848, largely in response to the Industrial Revolution (and Second Industrial Revolution) threatening not just the livelihoods but the very lives of many workers as profit reigned mercilessly over ...
Among the many things about America that the American Civil War changed was its art. Painting and sculpture simply couldn’t be the same. In these sesquicentennial years, every aspect of that conflict finds itself under the critical microscope. The Civil War and American Art , which runs through ...
Because two thirds of all countries in the world have abolished the death penalty, the majority of executions happen in just five countries—China, Iran, North Korea, Yemen, and the United States of America. The idea that the state holds the power to exact the ultimate price in the name of law and ...
Despite knowing the full-colored truth, I’ve always pictured the 1930s and 1940s in black and white. Laura , The Big Sleep, The Killers , Shadow of a Doubt , and countless other examples of classic American film noir define that era visually for me with their stark contrasts of dark and light ...
On May 24, 1813, just months after publishing Pride and Prejudice , Jane Austen went to a show in search of her female hero. ''I dare say Mrs. D[arcy] will be in yellow,'' Austen wrote to her sister, fully expecting to find her heroine at the event—a retrospective of the painting of Sir Joshua ...
How desperate can a city facing financial armageddon get? What’s the last resort for cities such as Detroit, wounded first by the failing American auto industry and then set bleeding like every other American city after the 2008 financial crash? Detroit emergency manager Kevyn Orr raised the ...
What really matters in an art education? Do we teach every child to paint or sculpt? Do we school them in names and dates and places? Or do we somehow teach them the elusive and dangerous “truth” of what art is or should be? Jean-Francois Laguionie’s animated film The Painting (Le Tableau) ...
Modernism first moved on May 29, 1913. That’s century-old hyperbole, of course, but if any date achieves day of infamy status for modern art in the 20th century, it’s the day that Russian composer Igor Stravinsky teamed up with Russian ballet impresario Sergei Diaghilev and his Ballets Russes ...
When the Tate Britain recently revealed the latest rehanging of their astounding collection of British art, many long unseen works found a new place in the galleries, but one long-standing feature was not to be found—explanatory wall text. The Guardian ’s Jonathan Jones hails this rehanging as “a ...
The gun debate in America may have “jumped the shark” with yesterday’s Mother’s Day Parade shooting in New Orleans that left 19 wounded, including two children. When something as universally accepted as the idea of motherhood becomes a shooting gallery, any idea of a debate seems as absurd as ...
With all apologies to Neil Young, this is the story of Johnny Rotten, or at least the story of his clothes. PUNK: Chaos to Couture , which opens today at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and runs through August 14, argues that Punk rock and its accompanying look didn’t fade away, but rather lingers on ...
By some accounts, last year’s move of the Barnes Foundation from its original home to the new location on Philadelphia’s Benjamin Franklin Parkway marked the last stroke in the fall of Western civilization. Hyperbole reigned, arguments raged, protesters protested, and lawyers filed, but the move to ...
Women have come a long way in the arts, but there’s still a long way to go. It’s not so unusual to find the work of contemporary women artists in galleries and art historians continue to comb through the past in search of overlooked women visionaries. In the world of architecture, however, the ...
No myth about art and artists abides as pervasively as that of Vincent Van Gogh, the mad genius. To mark the grand reopening of the renovated Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, curators and conservators hope to renovate Van Gogh’s madman mythology with the exhibition Van Gogh at Work ...
Few things are as painful to watch in movies as an activity you know and love being portrayed poorly. From the awkward baseball swings of athletically challenged actors to the magical creativity of thespian painters and sculptors, the typical bio-pic rankles with under-researched insensitivity to ...