Your college art history textbook probably tore Pablo Picasso’s oeuvre into more digestible bits such as “Blue Period” and “Rose Period.” A new exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City adds a new “period” to the list—Picasso’s lifelong “Black and White Period.” In Picasso ...

Depending on your relationship to the powers that be, Wikileaks and its founder Julian Assange rank among either the brightest angels or the darkest demons of contemporary life. Harnessing the power of the internet to blow the virtual whistle on corruption around the world, Wikileaks demonstrated ...

Is there any more famous footage of an artist at work than Hans Namuth’s film of Jackson Pollock? More than half a century after Pollock’s death, the “Jack the Dripper” label still sticks in the public’s imagination. But according to a recent piece by Robin Cembalest in Art News, greater attention ...

A second Mona Lisa ? One made even earlier than the one hanging in the Louvre? It sounds almost too good to be true, and probably is. A Swiss-based organization calling itself The Mona Lisa Foundation launched a full-scale international media assault asserting that the painting formerly known as the ...

In our current “War on Terror,” it’s sometimes hard to imagine or appreciate the terrors of times gone by. For Americans of the 19th century, stories of shipwrecks struck deep into their souls. Many harbored fresh memories of a harrowing crossing to the New World from Europe. Tales of rescue ...

“They always say time changes things,” Andy Warhol once said, “but you actually have to change them yourself.” Warhol simultaneously embodied and changed his time—a combination that continues to work posthumously through artists working today. In a new exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art ...

Can an idea that looks backward also look forward? That question hangs over the the Tate Britain’s new exhibition Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant-Garde at the same moment that it celebrates the now crowd-pleasing artists that made up the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood: Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William ...

“[I]t was here that I found a scene that did not exist elsewhere. I suppose I was like a child in a sweet shop. The California beach was like heaven,” British painter David Hockney says in Christopher Simon Sykes’ David Hockney: A Rake’s Progress: The Biography, 1937-1975 . The first volume of a ...

Perhaps the one unavoidable fact all museums must face is the reality of limited space. Who stays? Who goes? Most importantly, who makes those decisions? In Germany, these questions have taken on a whole new degree of importance. The Gemäldegalerie—home of Berlin’s most prestigious Old Masters ...

There may be no American artist so linked with specific places and the history of those places as Andrew Wyeth. Wyeth spent his summers in Cushing, Maine, but the other three seasons found him in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania. When Andy’s father, the artist N.C. Wyeth, first came to Chadds Ford to ...

The idea of owning one of Andy Warhol’s landmark Pop Art paintings from the Campbell’s Soup Cans series of the early 1960s seems a dream, unless you have some spare millions to dream with. On the 50th anniversary of Warhol’s first solo show, which featured the start of the soup cans, Target is now ...

When painter Andrew Wyeth passed away in 2009, the reclusive painter took many of the secrets behind his art to the grave. When I heard that the Brandywine River Museum had opened up The Andrew Wyeth Studio, where both the art and the legends happened, I wondered just how many secrets would be ...

“It’s the economy, stupid!” James Carville crowed throughout the 1992 presidential election, and has pretty much continued crowing since. What do you do when you know it’s the economy that matters, but you’re feeling stupid about how it all works? Do you plunge headfirst into Adam Smith’s Wealth of ...

When I struggle to wrap my head around a problem, I often turn to art to help me literally picture the big issue and, I hope, guide me to an answer. In the same vein, CNN commissioned artists to create art based on the theme of “power” as part of their coverage of the 2012 election. Just as we’re ...

Every election comes with questions, ranging from the serious (How will we fix the economy?) to the ludicrous (Was he born in this country?). But this election season, artist Barbara Kruger is asking the open-ended questions that this election (and every election) must answer in her exhibition ...