Jun 27 2025
Born on June 27, 1913, in Montreal, Philip Guston spent his career doing something artists are often warned not to do: changing direction when everyone expected him to keep going. He began as a socially engaged mural painter, became one of the celebrated figures of Abstract Expressionism in 1950s New York, and then abandoned the …
Jun 17 2025
Born on June 17, 1931, in National City, California, John Baldessari spent more than half a century questioning almost every assumption people make about art. Did an artist have to personally paint a painting? Could a sentence be an artwork? Could an ordinary photograph become art simply because someone selected it? What happened if you …
Jun 16 2025
Born on June 16, 1935, in Cincinnati, Ohio, Jim Dine has spent more than six decades transforming ordinary objects into intensely personal art. Hearts, bathrobes, hammers, saws, paintbrushes, flowers, skulls, classical sculptures, and the wooden puppet Pinocchio have appeared repeatedly in his paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, and sculptures. Rather than constantly searching for new subjects, …
May 30 2025
Born on May 30, 1892, in Paco, Manila, Fernando Amorsolo became one of the most recognizable painters in Philippine history. Golden rice fields, workers harvesting beneath tropical sunlight, women carrying baskets of fruit, village celebrations, quiet landscapes, and portraits illuminated by a warm glow became synonymous with his name. His extraordinary ability to capture light …
Apr 29 2025
A flower appears on an empty road. A woman climbs a staircase and enters a quiet house. A key changes into a knife. A mysterious hooded figure walks away with a mirror where its face should be. The same moments begin happening again, only slightly differently each time. In just fourteen minutes, Meshes of the …
Mar 31 2025
Jules Pascin seemed almost designed for the mythology of bohemian Paris. He traveled constantly, drew obsessively, surrounded himself with artists, writers, models, and outsiders, threw famously lively parties, and became so closely identified with the cafés and studios of Montparnasse that he earned the nickname “Prince of Montparnasse.” Yet the legend can easily overshadow the …
Mar 28 2025
Everett Ruess was only 20 years old when he disappeared into the canyon country of southern Utah in 1934. He left behind two burros, a campsite, an enigmatic inscription reading “NEMO 1934,” hundreds of letters and journal pages, and a remarkable collection of woodcuts, drawings, and watercolors inspired by the landscapes he loved. What happened …
Mar 27 2025
Jules Olitski spent more than half a century asking what paint could do when almost everything traditionally expected of a painting was stripped away. Figures disappeared. Landscapes dissolved. Drawing retreated toward the edges. Brushstrokes sometimes vanished almost completely. In their place came enormous expanses of color that appeared to hover, drift, glow, or dissolve across …
Mar 26 2025
Norman Ackroyd spent much of his life traveling toward the edges of maps. He sought islands battered by Atlantic weather, distant cliffs, estuaries, remote headlands, rocky stacks, and stretches of sea where land seems almost temporary. He traveled by fishing boat to places many people would never see, made watercolors and drawings while the weather …
Mar 19 2025
Poul Gernes believed that art could improve the places where people actually lived their lives. That conviction carried him far beyond the conventional boundaries of painting. He covered canvases and hardboard panels with circles, stripes, targets, grids, flowers, letters, and brilliantly contrasting colors, but he also transformed hospitals, schools, factories, cinemas, and other public buildings …
