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 …
Mar 02 2025
Lou Reed wanted rock and roll to carry the weight of literature without losing the excitement of three chords played loudly in a small room. Across more than five decades, he wrote about people rarely given much space in mainstream popular music, pushed electric guitars toward abstraction and noise, celebrated the possibilities of a perfectly …
Feb 27 2025
Rolly Crump belonged to a generation of Disney artists who were asked to do something almost unprecedented: take the visual imagination developed inside animation studios and turn it into physical places people could walk through. In Crump’s hands, that challenge produced spinning kinetic sculptures, strange clocks, talking tikis, haunted contraptions, psychedelic patterns, theatrical shops, enchanted …
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 …
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 19 2025
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 …
