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Looking at art leads to thinking about life
Like the first life forms on Earth, the career of John Singer Sargent rose up from the sea. Between 1874 and 1879, when Sargent first emerged from his teens and began his career as an artist, he painted scenes of the sea and shore he witnessed during trips to Brittany, Normandy, Capri, and other ...
Quoth the voters, Nevermore! A recent Art Fund poll asking “Which of these people has captured your idea of romance in art?” came up with the answer of Paul Gauguin’s Nevermore (pictured, from 1897). Voters could choose from among five thought-provoking selections picked by a diverse team of ...
“For me, a picture, since it is easel paintings that we have to paint, should be something lovable, joyful, and pretty: yes, pretty!,” Pierre-August Renoir once said in self-defense. “I know how difficult it is to get people to admit that a picture can be joyful and still be a very great painting ...
President Obama has suggested in not so many words the need for a “New Deal” for America today to, we hope, match the success of FDR’s “New Deal” of the post-Depression age. A good way of looking back at that first “New Deal” and deciding on whether a new “New Deal” is the right prescription for an ...
One of my first subversive art experiences was watching Terry Gilliam’s animated collage title sequences for Monty Python . The Pythons loved to poke fun at the vestiges of stuffy Victorian culture in British contemporary life with the subtlety of that giant foot stomping down at the end of each ...
OK, gents, The Art Love Doctor is IN ! You’re pressed for time and short on ideas for buying that perfect Valentine’s Day gift for your lady. Somewhere in the recesses of your mind, a slide from that art appreciation class you took as an elective in college rises before you—Gustav Klimt’s 1907-1908 ...
Music and art have long been a magical pairing. Finding the right soundtrack for a painting requires as much finesse as finding the right wine for that special meal. Russian-born, Canadian artist San Base takes that dynamic duo one step further by adding cutting-edge computer technology to make the ...
I can’t think of any artist who suffered as much in his life as Arshile Gorky. Fleeing the ethnic cleansing of Armenians by Turkish troops, he watched his mother starve to death in 1919 surrounded by fellow refugees. Upon coming to America, he shed his birth name of Vosdanig Adoian and remade ...
Wouldn’t it be ironic if the origin of big, bad, brawny Jackson Pollock’s drip and splatter paintings were a wifely homemaker, mother, and grandmother from Brooklyn? And wouldn’t it be true? Gary Snyder Fine Art in New York City presents the work of Janet Sobel, whose early 1940s drip paintings ...
“My pictures are like a family, each one has a special niche in my heart,” renowned art collector Chester Dale once said. “Does anyone ever place a dollars-and-cents value on a son or daughter? If they do, they don’t deserve them.” With his first wife Maud, Dale amassed perhaps the greatest ...
When J.D. Salinger passed away recently, many casual fans who only remember him from tattered copies of The Catcher in the Rye lost long ago seemed shocked that he was still alive. Reclusiveness will do that. Influential comic artist Steve Ditko, the creator of the original look for seminal ...
The Indianapolis Colts and New Orleans Saints may be set to meet in Super Bowl XLIV in Miami next Sunday, but a side bet between the Indianapolis Museum of Art and the New Orleans Museum of Art really caught my art-loving eye. What began as a friendly little wager involving nice but minor figures ...
One of the biggest criticisms of contemporary art is that it has no connection to the community. These works seemingly exist in a vacuum with no ties to the people who may not necessarily consider themselves art lovers. With its NEW FRONTIERS: Series for Contemporary Art, the Oklahoma City Museum ...
The art world remains abuzz and aghast at the latest art oopsie incident featuring Pablo Picasso’s 1905 painting The Actor (pictured) and an oncoming art student. When that irresistible force met fragile canvas, the masterpiece lost. Even more stunningly, according to experts, the painting ...
Whenever I hear the name of Turner Prize-winning artist, Chris Ofili, I unfortunately think of the old Monty Python joke: “What’s brown and sounds like a bell? Dung!” For Americans who still remember Rudy Giuliani’s dung-inspired demagoguery in the mid-1990s, Ofili remains defined by that single ...