Mar 17 2025
Ken Anderson was difficult to fit into a single job description. He was trained as an architect, became an art director on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, helped shape the worlds of Pinocchio and Fantasia, experimented with new approaches to animated design, contributed to Disneyland, designed characters ranging from Shere Khan to Elliott the …
Mar 14 2025
A glowing red circle floats above a violent black mass. Nothing in the painting tells us precisely what either shape represents, yet the relationship feels immediately charged. The circle might be a sun, a planet, an eye, a warning light, or simply a field of color. The black form beneath it could resemble earth, wreckage, …
Mar 12 2025
Rita Angus painted New Zealand as though every hill, railway station, face, tree, road, and stretch of sky deserved to be looked at with complete attention. Her landscapes are often quiet, but they are never casual. Mountains rise in sharply defined layers. Small buildings sit beneath enormous skies. Roads and railway lines cut through dry …
Mar 11 2025
Millions of cats fill a hillside. Trees bend as though they are alive. A staircase seems to twist upward under its own power. Furniture leans into a room with almost human personality, while plants, houses, fireplaces, roads, and fields appear to breathe, stretch, and move. This was Wanda Gág’s world. Born in New Ulm, Minnesota, …
Mar 08 2025
Anselm Kiefer makes paintings that seem to have survived something. Their surfaces crack, burn, crumble, rust, and accumulate. Straw projects from paint. Lead hangs heavily from walls. Flowers dry and darken. Books become too heavy to open. Fields stretch toward uncertain horizons beneath scorched skies, while ruined buildings and abandoned interiors seem caught between archaeology …
Mar 06 2025
Pauline Boty painted the 1960s from inside them. Marilyn Monroe smiles from a strip of canvas. Jean-Paul Belmondo becomes an object of openly expressed female desire. Newspaper photographs collide with flowers, movie stars, political scandals, abstract shapes, revolutionary slogans, and saturated areas of red, yellow, blue, and green. In other paintings, anonymous women appear beside …
Mar 03 2025
Ronald Searle could make a line look exhausted, furious, elegant, nervous, pompous, half-starved, or completely unhinged. His drawings rarely sit quietly on the page. Buildings lean, noses stretch, limbs bend at improbable angles, schoolgirls advance like small armed revolutionaries, cats appear to have survived several nights of bad decisions, and respectable institutions begin to collapse …
Feb 26 2025
Tarō Okamoto wanted art to hit people before they had time to become comfortable with it. His paintings burst with primary colors, eyes, faces, spikes, organic shapes, black lines, and forms that look simultaneously ancient and futuristic. His sculptures frequently resemble beings rather than objects, while his public monuments seem less interested in blending politely …
Feb 25 2025
Mark Rothko became famous for paintings that appear, at first, almost impossibly simple. Two or three rectangles float against a field of color. Their edges blur. Reds glow beside black, orange seems to breathe against yellow, purple settles into brown, and vast surfaces appear simultaneously solid and strangely immaterial. There are no recognizable people, landscapes, …
Feb 24 2025
Richard Hamilton looked at the postwar world and saw something traditional art could no longer afford to ignore. Television sets were entering living rooms. Automobiles were being sold through carefully engineered fantasies of speed and status. Advertising filled magazines with perfectly photographed refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, bodies, food, furniture, and cosmetics. Hollywood transformed people into reproducible …
