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Hokusai’s Complete Views of Mount Fuji Land in the UK: Inside Dulwich Picture Gallery’s Historic 46-Print Gathering
Hokusai’s Complete Views of Mount Fuji Land in the UK: Inside Dulwich Picture Gallery’s Historic 46-Print Gathering
Most people encounter Katsushika Hokusai as a single detached motif on cotton tote bags, ceramic coffee mugs, and laptop stickers. Stripped of its sequence, Under the Wave off Kanagawa floats... Read more...
The Broad Takes Paris: 164 American Postwar Masterpieces Land at Fondation Louis Vuitton
The Broad Takes Paris: 164 American Postwar Masterpieces Land at Fondation Louis Vuitton
What happens when Los Angeles's defining postwar art vault packs up its walls and decamps to Europe? You get The Broad Collection: Los Angeles in Paris, the largest overseas loan... Read more...
Post-Impressionism's 9 Children: From Pont-Aven to Bombay
Post-Impressionism's 9 Children: From Pont-Aven to Bombay
In October 1910, the British artist and critic Roger Fry found himself facing an embarrassing publicity deadline. He had leased London's Grafton Galleries for a winter exhibition of radical French... Read more...
Inside 'The Real Thing': Why Robert Ryman's White Canvases Still Provoke at the Barbican
Inside 'The Real Thing': Why Robert Ryman's White Canvases Still Provoke at the Barbican
Step across the concrete threshold of the Barbican Art Gallery, and your first thought is that the installers forgot to hang the show. Pale squares hover against rough bush-hammered concrete,... Read more...
Expressionism's 11 Children: From Dada to Sumatraism
Expressionism's 11 Children: From Dada to Sumatraism
On June 7, 1905, four architecture students in Dresden (Fritz Bleyl, Erich Heckel, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff) rented an empty butcher shop on Berliner Straße and declared themselves... Read more...
Inside Large: Paris Opens a Sprawling Contemporary Art Centre on Renault's 'Cursed' Island
Inside Large: Paris Opens a Sprawling Contemporary Art Centre on Renault's 'Cursed' Island
Paris loves a cultural grand project almost as much as it loves watching them stall in municipal purgatory. For twenty-one years, Île Seguin stood as the capital's most notorious architectural... Read more...
Inside 'Light and Magic': How Tate Modern Reclaims the Global Pictorialist Photography Revolution
Inside 'Light and Magic': How Tate Modern Reclaims the Global Pictorialist Photography Revolution
Under the directional spotlights at Tate Modern, a framed monochrome print looks at first glance like a Song Dynasty ink-wash landscape or a charcoal study from Edgar Degas's Parisian studio.... Read more...
Inside 'The Renegade Housewives of Pop Art': How Joan Kron Put Roy Lichtenstein on a Highway Billboard
Inside 'The Renegade Housewives of Pop Art': How Joan Kron Put Roy Lichtenstein on a Highway Billboard
When New York art dealers and uptown critics talked about Joan Kron and Audrey Sabol in the early 1960s, they reached for a dismissive shorthand: "bored suburban housewives with station... Read more...
Surrealism's 14 Children: Tracing Surrealism's Influence on Modern Art
Surrealism's 14 Children: Tracing Surrealism's Influence on Modern Art
In October 1924, André Breton published the first Manifeste du surréalisme in Paris and offered a clinical definition: "pure psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to... Read more...
Inside 'Arcana Borealis': How Hilma af Klint and the Secret Spiritual Sisterhood Invented Nordic Abstraction
Inside 'Arcana Borealis': How Hilma af Klint and the Secret Spiritual Sisterhood Invented Nordic Abstraction
On Friday evenings in late-1890s Stockholm, five women would bolt the studio door, light candles, and gather closely around a small wooden table. They sang hymns, read verses from the... Read more...
Queering Modernism at Frieze Masters: Radical Code or Market Commodity?
Queering Modernism at Frieze Masters: Radical Code or Market Commodity?
Conventional art histories long treated 20th-century Modernism as an orderly march of formalist shapes inside white cubes. That was an intellectual convenience. The actual development of modern figurative art was... Read more...
Monet Meets Picasso: The European Avant-Garde at the Blanton Museum
Monet Meets Picasso: The European Avant-Garde at the Blanton Museum
On a sunlit morning in downtown Austin, Claude Monet's tranquil 1877 waters of Argenteuil hang mere steps away from Pablo Picasso's fractured, jagged wartime portrait. The visual clash is immediate,... Read more...
From Symbolism to Surrealism: How Giorgio de Chirico Built the Bridge
From Symbolism to Surrealism: How Giorgio de Chirico Built the Bridge
In the autumn of 1910, a twenty-two-year-old painter sat on a wooden bench in Florence's Piazza Santa Croce, slowly recovering from a painful intestinal illness. The late afternoon autumn sun... Read more...
Gustave Fayet at Fondation Louis Vuitton: Inside the Van Gogh Blockbuster
Gustave Fayet at Fondation Louis Vuitton: Inside the Van Gogh Blockbuster
In the spring of 1901, while Parisian critics were still sneering at Vincent van Gogh as an unhinged amateur whose thick paint looked like crude mortar, a wealthy vineyard owner... Read more...
Inside the Lucas Museum Murals Gallery: Banksy, Rivera, and the Power of Public Art
Inside the Lucas Museum Murals Gallery: Banksy, Rivera, and the Power of Public Art
What happens when Banksy, the world's most elusive vandal, collaborates directly with George Lucas's billion-dollar Los Angeles museum to plaster his stencils across 30-foot gallery walls? When the Lucas Museum... Read more...
Roy Lichtenstein Whitney Retrospective: Why the Pop Pioneer Still Shocks
Roy Lichtenstein Whitney Retrospective: Why the Pop Pioneer Still Shocks
Stepping off the elevator onto the fifth floor of the Whitney Museum, you run directly into a 96-foot comic mural and a white-box room that nearly caused a riot in... Read more...
How Seurat's Dots Became Matisse's Wild Color: From Pointillism to Fauvism and Art Deco
How Seurat's Dots Became Matisse's Wild Color: From Pointillism to Fauvism and Art Deco
Standard art histories treat Pointillism as a dead-end optical experiment and Fauvism as an unruly temper tantrum. That tidy division misses the real drama: both movements were the exact same... Read more...
From Pre-Raphaelites to Symbolism: How "Art for Art's Sake" Crossed the Channel
From Pre-Raphaelites to Symbolism: How "Art for Art's Sake" Crossed the Channel
In May 1889, during the opening week of the Paris Exposition Universelle, French critics gathered inside the British fine arts section around a massive canvas measuring nearly ten feet tall:... Read more...
From Harlem to the Cosmos: How Three Black Art Movements Built a Century-Long Relay
From Harlem to the Cosmos: How Three Black Art Movements Built a Century-Long Relay
In March 1965, three weeks after Malcolm X was assassinated in upper Manhattan, the poet and playwright LeRoi Jones walked out of the downtown bohemian scene for good. He left... Read more...
From Romanesque to Realism: The 850-Year Art History Relay in 9 Handoffs
From Romanesque to Realism: The 850-Year Art History Relay in 9 Handoffs
On the second Sunday of June in 1144, King Louis VII and dozens of French prelates gathered inside the freshly consecrated choir of the Abbey of Saint-Denis. Abbot Suger had... Read more...
Rinpa vs Ukiyo-e: Kyoto's Golden Court Revival vs Edo's Floating World
Rinpa vs Ukiyo-e: Kyoto's Golden Court Revival vs Edo's Floating World
Museum visitors often lump historical Japanese painting into one serene, monolithic tradition of misty mountain pines and wave prints. During the Edo period (1603–1867), Japanese visual culture actually split down... Read more...
Zhe School vs Southern School: Chinese Art's Great Classification Dispute
Zhe School vs Southern School: Chinese Art's Great Classification Dispute
If you look up the Zhe school on Wikipedia, you will encounter a claim that would have made late-Ming dynasty art critics choke on their tea: the entry announces that... Read more...
Early Netherlandish Painting vs the Italian Renaissance: Two Renaissances, One Century
Early Netherlandish Painting vs the Italian Renaissance: Two Renaissances, One Century
In 1550, Italian biographer Giorgio Vasari published a tidy little fable that art history spent the next four centuries trying to unlearn. In his Lives of the Artists, Vasari claimed... Read more...
Inside the Brooklyn Museum's Art of Manga Exhibition
Inside the Brooklyn Museum's Art of Manga Exhibition
A volume of manga is engineered to be rolled up in a jacket pocket, leafed through with thumb-smudged fingers on a screeching Tokyo commuter train, and tossed into a recycling... Read more...