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 13 2025
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
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
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
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 07 2025
A burst of brass, a stalking bass line, crisp percussion, and strings that seem to move with the confidence of someone stepping out of a sports car in the middle of swinging London. Laurie Johnson understood that a television theme did not merely have to introduce a program. In less than a minute, it could …
Feb 06 2025
Before François Truffaut became one of the directors who changed cinema, he was the young man sitting in the dark watching everyone else’s films. Movies offered him something childhood often had not: escape, companionship, excitement, and a world that seemed larger than the difficult streets and apartments of postwar Paris. Eventually, watching movies was not …
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 …
