Art Blog
The 1912 Trial Where a Judge Burned Egon Schiele's Art
The 1912 Trial Where a Judge Burned Egon Schiele's Art
In August 1911, twenty-one-year-old Egon Schiele and his seventeen-year-old companion Walburga "Wally" Neuzil arrived in Neulengbach, a market town in Lower Austria roughly thirty kilometres west of Vienna. A pioneer... Read more...
The Anish Kapoor Black Paint War and the Long History of Artist Material Rivalries
The Anish Kapoor Black Paint War and the Long History of Artist Material Rivalries
In December 2016, anyone trying to purchase a fifty-gram pot of powdered paint called The World's Pinkest Pink had to pass through a legal gauntlet before entering their credit card... Read more...
How Gustave Courbet's Pavilion of Realism Invented the Solo Exhibition
How Gustave Courbet's Pavilion of Realism Invented the Solo Exhibition
The Painter's Studio (L'Atelier du peintre), 1855, by Gustave Courbet. Public domain (Wikimedia Commons). On the morning of June 28, 1855, pedestrians walking down the Avenue Montaigne in Paris encountered... Read more...
De Stijl to Bauhaus to Minimalism: How the Straight Line Conquered Modern Art
De Stijl to Bauhaus to Minimalism: How the Straight Line Conquered Modern Art
Modern reduction did not begin as an interior design trend or a tidy Marie Kondo manual. The clean surfaces, unadorned boxes, and stark geometry in our living spaces are the... Read more...
The Flanders Mare Myth: Did the Holbein Anne of Cleves Portrait Really Lie?
The Flanders Mare Myth: Did the Holbein Anne of Cleves Portrait Really Lie?
It was painted on a thin sheet of parchment so light a courier could roll it inside a leather travel cylinder and gallop across Europe without cracking the paint. The... Read more...
Land Art, Arte Povera, and Postminimalism: Three Ways Artists Tried to Escape the Gallery
Land Art, Arte Povera, and Postminimalism: Three Ways Artists Tried to Escape the Gallery
Every decade or so, artists decide that the commercial gallery system is an intolerable parasite and vow to make work that no wealthy collector could ever hang above a sofa.... Read more...
The 1877 Salon Scandal That Accused Auguste Rodin of Sculpting from a Corpse
The 1877 Salon Scandal That Accused Auguste Rodin of Sculpting from a Corpse
The Age of Bronze (L'Âge d'airain), modeled 1875 to 1877 by Auguste Rodin. Public domain (Wikimedia Commons). In April 1877, thirty-six-year-old Auguste Rodin entered the Paris Salon with a life-size... Read more...
Art Deco: The Movement With 4 Parents and Zero Apologies
Art Deco: The Movement With 4 Parents and Zero Apologies
The term "Art Deco" did not exist when Chrysler Building spire went up in Manhattan or when jazz records filled Parisian salons. Art historian Bevis Hillier coined the name in... Read more...
How Impressionism Rebellied Against Academic Art (And Won)
How Impressionism Rebellied Against Academic Art (And Won)
On April 15, 1874, thirty outcasts opened a private art show on the top floor of a vacant photography studio at 35 Boulevard des Capucines in Paris. Visitors paid one... Read more...
The Ruined Marble Block Behind Michelangelo's David
The Ruined Marble Block Behind Michelangelo's David
Michelangelo's David - right view 2 by Commonists. CC BY-SA 4.0 (Wikimedia Commons). In 1464, overseers at the Opera del Duomo in Florence commissioned forty-six-year-old sculptor Agostino di Duccio to... Read more...
Sixteen Years Erasing a Mother's Hands: Arshile Gorky and The Artist and His Mother
Sixteen Years Erasing a Mother's Hands: Arshile Gorky and The Artist and His Mother
In 1912, an eight-year-old boy named Vostanik Adoian stood in a photography studio in Van, an ancient city in Ottoman Armenia, wearing a heavy overcoat and holding a small nosegay... Read more...
5 Art Movements Born as Reactions to Destroy Their Predecessors
5 Art Movements Born as Reactions to Destroy Their Predecessors
Most art history textbooks present the progression of styles as a polite relay race. One generation supposedly discovers an insight, packages it neatly, and hands the baton to the next... Read more...
The Hotel Room Suicide Behind Francis Bacon’s Triptych, May-June 1973
The Hotel Room Suicide Behind Francis Bacon’s Triptych, May-June 1973
An artistic gallery depiction of Francis Bacon's monumental three-panel triptych artwork space under museum exhibition lighting. On October 24, 1971, exactly thirty-six hours before two thousand guests gathered beneath the... Read more...
The $500M Gardner Museum Heist: Why the Empty Frames Still Hang
The $500M Gardner Museum Heist: Why the Empty Frames Still Hang
If you walk into the Dutch Room on the second floor of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, the first thing that strikes you is not the art. It... Read more...
Fluxus: The Movement That Connected Everything to Everything
Fluxus: The Movement That Connected Everything to Everything
In September 1962, at the Städtisches Museum in Wiesbaden, Germany, a group of artists performed Philip Corner's Piano Activities. The score's instructions were open-ended. What the performers chose to do... Read more...
Cézanne and Zola: The 1887 Letter That Rewrote Art History's Most Famous Breakup
Cézanne and Zola: The 1887 Letter That Rewrote Art History's Most Famous Breakup
On November 26, 2013, a single folded sheet of stationery crossed the auction block at Sotheby's in Paris. For 127 years, art historians treated the story of Cézanne and Zola... Read more...
Conceptual Art Movements: How One Radical Idea Birthed 14 Modern Styles
Conceptual Art Movements: How One Radical Idea Birthed 14 Modern Styles
In the summer of 1967, an American sculptor named Sol LeWitt published a manifesto in the pages of Artforum that set off a slow-motion explosion across modern culture. He wrote... Read more...
Benefits Supervisor Sleeping: How Lucian Freud Turned a £20-a-Day Sitting into a $33M Record
Benefits Supervisor Sleeping: How Lucian Freud Turned a £20-a-Day Sitting into a $33M Record
The brown corduroy sofa in Lucian Freud's top-floor Kensington studio was notorious among his models. It was second-hand, stained, and sagged under its own weight, with metal coil springs that... Read more...
From Pre-Raphaelites to Psychedelic Art: The 120-Year Secret Chain
From Pre-Raphaelites to Psychedelic Art: The 120-Year Secret Chain
If you look closely at a 1966 concert poster for the Avalon Ballroom or the Fillmore Auditorium, half the visual DNA belongs to artists who died long before electric guitars... Read more...
The $450 Million Yard Sale: How Leonardo's Salvator Mundi Was Found in a Stairwell
The $450 Million Yard Sale: How Leonardo's Salvator Mundi Was Found in a Stairwell
How does a 500-year-old Renaissance painting spend 17 years hanging next to a stairwell in Baton Rouge, sell for $1,175 at a regional clearance auction, and end up twelve years... Read more...
The Bishop and the Petticoat: How Fragonard’s The Swing Began as an Aristocratic Prank
The Bishop and the Petticoat: How Fragonard’s The Swing Began as an Aristocratic Prank
The Swing (Les Hasards heureux de l'escarpolette, c. 1767–1768) by Jean-Honoré Fragonard. Wallace Collection, London. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons. On 2 October 1767, the French playwright and songwriter Charles... Read more...
The Great Daruma: How Hokusai Painted an 18-Meter Spectacle with Brooms
The Great Daruma: How Hokusai Painted an 18-Meter Spectacle with Brooms
The numbers from that morning sound like a prank. Eighteen meters long by 11 meters wide. One hundred and twenty tatami mats of joined paper laid across a temple yard.... Read more...
The Russian Avant-Garde Family Tree: From Rayonism to Suprematism to Constructivism
The Russian Avant-Garde Family Tree: From Rayonism to Suprematism to Constructivism
In December 1912, four young Russian writers and artists published a thin manifesto printed on coarse wrapping paper titled A Slap in the Face of Public Taste. Signed by David... Read more...
How World War 2 Reshaped the Art World Map: The Transatlantic Shift
How World War 2 Reshaped the Art World Map: The Transatlantic Shift
In late August 1940, an American journalist named Varian Fry stepped off an express train at the Gare Saint-Charles in Marseilles with three thousand dollars in cash taped to his... Read more...