Feb 23 2025
A refrigerator door, a bottle of soda, a pair of bright red lips, a cigarette, a telephone, a bowl of fruit, an American flag, and the curve of a reclining body might seem like unlikely ingredients for fine art. For Tom Wesselmann, however, they belonged to the visual vocabulary of modern America. Born on February …
Feb 22 2025
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
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 17 2025
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 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 11 2025
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 09 2025
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
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. …
Feb 05 2025
“There it is, Wendy! Second star to the right and straight on ’til morning.” Peter Pan On February 5, 1953, audiences were invited to leave London behind, think happy thoughts, and fly toward the second star to the right. Walt Disney’s Peter Pan transformed J. M. Barrie’s enduring story of the boy who refused to …
Feb 04 2025
A patterned handkerchief, a piece of Japanese wrapping paper, a blurred photograph, a newspaper image, or the outline of a flower might seem like very modest material from which to build an artistic career. For Daan van Golden, that modesty was precisely the point. He developed an art based not on constantly inventing new images, …
