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Looking at art leads to thinking about life
Like Jerry Lewis, comic books seem to be an American institution best appreciated and understood by the French. Jean-Paul Gabilliet’s Of Comics and Men: A Cultural History of American Comic Books provides the first scholarly overview of the development of the American comic book industry. First ...
Death challenges the strength of any family. A suicide can tear a family apart. Art dealer Carl David, fourth in a line of a four-generation family owned art gallery, recounts the death of his father Sam and the suicide of his brother Bruce in Bader Field, a touching memoir of life and art. Art ...
In the classic Western film The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, James Stewart’s character confesses that he wasn’t a hero, only to hear the newspaper man he’s confessed to respond, "This is the west, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend." When Lady Jane Grey met her end on the ...
Michelangelo spent most of his life on a massive guilt trip. When he painted The Crucifixion of St. Peter in 1550 (pictured), he inserted not one, but two self-portraits. To the left of the martyr, a young Michelangelo stands beside a soldier gesturing to the cross, as if Michelangelo were ...
Sadly, the memorials to the art of Andrew Wyeth since his death early last year have been few. I personally find it difficult to understand the lack of response to the passing of such an important figure in American art. Wyeth’s own wish to be left alone has been respected, perhaps overrespected ...
Who are the artists that people who know nothing about art know? Van Gogh? Michelangelo? Picasso? For museums trying to bring traffic through their doors, drawing in the non-art lover is more important than ever. Shows such as the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s Picasso and the Avant-Garde in Paris ...
We tend to think of work done on assignment as being somehow cheaper than work springing entirely from the mind of the artist. Art on demand never strikes us as anything but commercial. If we allow that prejudice to prevent us from enjoying shows such as the Delaware Art Museum’s On Assignment ...
FutureEverything last week awarded their first FutureEverything Award to The EyeWriter, a new eye-tracking technology (pictured) that allows artists to “draw” with their eyes when unable to do so with their hands. “Art is a tool of empowerment and social change, and I consider myself blessed to be ...
“I have always staged my fears as a way to transcend them,” remarked performance artist extraordinaire Marina Abramović in a recent profile in The New Yorker. With a new retrospective exhibition at the MoMA in New York—the first they’ve ever given to a performance artist—and a new biography and ...
For art world junkies, access to the secret corners of museums can be an addictive substance. On the few behind the scenes tours I’ve been on, the restoration areas have always been a highlight. Part art gallery, part ER—these rooms are where greatness goes to get a second, and sometimes third or ...
In 1882, American novelist Henry James concluded that there was “nothing more to be said” about Venice, Italy. Artists of all stripes had trod and sloshed through the streets and canals so long that opportunities for saying something new had, he felt, dried up entirely. Yet, in 1900, Maurice ...
When competing for the ever-shrinking entertainment dollar in this ever-struggling economy, art museums and galleries compete to find bigger and better gimmicks to catch the public eye. In the new exhibition Size Does Matter at The FLAG Art Foundation, they may have come up with the biggest gimmick ...
Just when you think you’ve seen them all, a new Vincent Van Gogh painting rises from seemingly nowhere. An 1886 painting titled Le Blute-Fin Mill (pictured) recently became the first “new” Van Gogh to be authenticated since 1995. What new things does this painting tell us about the Van Gogh we ...
"I had to create an equivalent for what I felt about what I was looking at,” Georgia O’Keeffe once said of her abstract works, “not copy it." Famous for her images of flowers, shells, animal bones, and other recognizable objects, O’Keeffe also ventured into the world of abstraction, often pushing ...
The eroticism of Gustav Klimt’s painting is obvious to anyone who has enjoyed his art. A new exhibition at the Secession in Vienna, Austria will make that eroticism obvious to the rest of the world. Outside of the area in which Gustav Klimt’s Beethovenfrieze appears, a sexually explicit “swingers ...