Bob Duggan
Contributing Writer
Bob Duggan has Master’s Degrees in English Literature and Education and is not afraid to use them. Born and raised in Philadelphia, PA, he has always been fascinated by art and brings an informed amateur’s eye to the conversation.
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 […]
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 […]
“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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Bob Duggan: I’m not sure what I think about the idea of scientifically determining the creative process as a brain process. If they succeed, would they arrive at a formula for creativity?
When you think of Pop Art, the art movement that dominated the late 1950s and early 1960s in America, you almost automatically cast up the wigged head of Andy Warhol. […]
Who killed Caravaggio? Or what killed Caravaggio? Four hundred years later, who cares? To “celebrate” the 400th anniversary of the demise of the demented genius of the Renaissance, Italy’s National […]
Enough time and thought has been spent on the philandering of Tiger Woods, so I don’t want to follow the crowd. From my visual perspective, the most interesting part of […]
When the women artists of today look back in history for examples to follow, they usually limit themselves to the artists of the twentieth century. Sure, an Artemisia Gentileschi here […]
For those of us who didn’t live in the time that the moral giant Martin Luther King, Jr., walked the earth, we have only the pictures—the young, fiery preacher, the […]
Tomorrow will mark the first anniversary of the passing of American painter Andrew Wyeth. Love his work or hate it, it’s hard to argue that he didn’t leave a significant […]
When you hear the name Leonardo da Vinci you automatically think “Genius” with a capital “G.” Such Genius that he seemingly came from nowhere to walk among us. Science fiction […]
How do you tell a Rembrandt from a non-Rembrandt? Even the experts have been stumped, and they’ve been stumped for centuries since Rembrandt himself passed away. Drawings by Rembrandt and […]
The fight over who owns art might have just gone nuclear, and Vincent van Gogh’s 1888 painting The Night Cafe is at the center of it. The descendents of the […]
Quick Quiz: Who is the only artist to be named “man of the century”? Picasso? Did Demoiselles d’Avignon and Guernica preach love and peace to define the twentieth century? I […]
The American art scene lost one of the great, yet forgotten artists of the twentieth century last Tuesday with the passing of Kenneth Noland at 85 years of age. One […]
The underwhelming results of the Copenhagen Accord during last month’s United Nations Climate Change Conference in Denmark sent me searching my mental files for examples of how art has documented […]
Has any other American artist been as overanalyzed as Thomas Eakins? Pollock, Hopper, Rothko, and others have all been called to the critics’ psychological couch, but only Eakins has gotten […]
The word “explosive” is use to describe a lot of artists’ work. In the case of Cai Guo-Qiang, he actually earns the adjective. Last month, the Chinese artist inaugurated his […]