Comet Atomic
Author's posts
Feb 22 2025
Constance Stokes: Color, Line & Australian Modernism
Constance Stokes built a distinctive place in Australian modernism through paintings that combined disciplined drawing, luminous color, classical ideas about the human figure, and an unmistakable sense of intimacy. At a time when Australian art was undergoing profound changes, she developed a style that absorbed lessons from European modernism without abandoning the figure, portraiture, still …
Feb 21 2025
Hans Erni: Art, Science & the Humanist Modernist
Few twentieth-century artists moved as comfortably between ancient mythology and the modern machine as Hans Erni. Human bodies, horses, birds, mathematical diagrams, airplanes, scientific instruments, athletes, planets, and abstract lines could all occupy the same visual world. Rather than treating art and science as opposing forces, Erni spent much of his extraordinarily long career searching …
Feb 19 2025
Shigeru Umebayashi: The Music Behind In the Mood for Love
Some film music announces itself with enormous orchestras, booming percussion, and melodies designed to tell an audience exactly what to feel. Shigeru Umebayashi often takes the opposite approach. A few strings, a slow waltz, a repeated phrase, or a melody that seems to circle endlessly around an unresolved emotion can become more powerful than an …
Feb 17 2025
Hung Liu: Memory, Migration & the Ghosts of History
Old photographs were never merely old photographs to Hung Liu. They were survivors. Faces that might otherwise have vanished into archives became monumental paintings. Laborers, refugees, prostitutes, soldiers, children, migrants, and ordinary families appeared again on enormous canvases, their images partially obscured by washes of oil paint and long streams of color. Liu painted history …
Feb 15 2025
Mary Adshead: Murals, Modern Britain & the Art of Public Life
Mary Adshead made art for places where people actually lived their lives. Her paintings appeared on the walls of restaurants, underground stations, churches, exhibition pavilions, public buildings, and even pedestrian passageways. She designed posters that commuters encountered on their way to work, illustrated books, created postage stamps, painted portraits and landscapes, and spent much of …
Feb 13 2025
Verner Panton: Color, Plastic & the Psychedelic Interior
Imagine entering a room where the distinction between furniture, floor, walls, ceiling, lighting, and sculpture has almost disappeared. The carpet climbs into upholstered platforms. Curving forms rise from the floor like strange geological formations. Lamps glow inside fields of saturated red, orange, purple, and blue. There may be no conventional chair at all, because the …
Feb 11 2025
Roy De Forest: Dogs, Dream Worlds & California Funk Art
Dogs stare directly out of the canvas with enormous eyes. Horses wander through impossible landscapes. Cowboys, travelers, strange plants, floating heads, mysterious roads, and brightly colored creatures crowd together until almost every inch of the picture seems alive. Nothing obeys conventional perspective, and almost nothing behaves exactly as expected. Welcome to the world of Roy …
Feb 10 2025
Dave Van Ronk: The Mayor of MacDougal Street & the Greenwich Village Folk Revival
Before Bob Dylan became Bob Dylan, before folk music collided with rock and roll, and before Greenwich Village became permanently associated with acoustic guitars and politically charged coffeehouse songs, Dave Van Ronk was already there. With a booming, rough-edged voice, a sophisticated guitar style, an encyclopedic knowledge of traditional music, and a personality large enough …
Feb 09 2025
Gerhard Richter: Blur, Memory & the Uncertainty of Painting
A family photograph can look like a memory. A newspaper photograph can look like evidence. An abstract painting can appear to contain no recognizable information at all. Gerhard Richter has spent more than six decades making those categories far less certain than they initially appear. Born in Dresden, Germany, on February 9, 1932, Richter became …
Feb 08 2025
Franz Marc: Blue Horses, Color & the Spiritual World of Animals
A blue horse stands against a landscape of brilliant color. A yellow cow seems almost to dance across the earth. Deer, foxes, cats, weasels, and other animals move through worlds where mountains curve around their bodies and colors bear little resemblance to ordinary nature. In the paintings of Franz Marc, animals are rarely just animals. …
