© 2012 Sally Whitman Coleman, PhD. All rights reserved.
Did you ever wonder why male figures in ancient Greek art are almost always nude? You probably didn’t. It’s something that we all take for granted, but it really is a curious thing. This is a famous sculpture because it … Continue reading
Albert Bierstadt, The Rocky Mountains, Lander's Peak, 1863, oil on canvas, 73.5" x 120.7", The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.
Albert Bierstadt, perhaps the most successful of the Hudson River School artists, painted very large canvases with majestic scenes of the American West that were hugely popular in New York and London. James McHenry, an American railway entrepreneur living in … Continue reading
Edvard Munch, The Scream, 1893, crayon and tempera on cardboard, 35⅞” x 29”, Nasjonalgalleriet, Oslo, Public Domain via Wikipedia.
Tomorrow, one of four versions of Edvard Munch’s iconic The Scream will be for sale at the Impressionist and Modern Art auction at Sotheby’s in New York. If you’re interested, it will run you about $80 million. No image of … Continue reading
Damien Hirst, For the Love of God, 2007, platinum, diamonds and human teeth, White Cube Gallery, London, Photo by Secretly Ironic, Flickr, Creative Commons Attribution License.
On March 19th, Blake Gopnik, a reporter for Newsweek Magazine, wrote an article about Damien Hirst, claiming that the artist is the most natural heir to Andy Warhol and “business art.” Indeed, the significance of Hirst’s work is lost if … Continue reading
Édouard Manet, Olympia, 1863, oil on canvas, 51.4” x 74.8”, Musée d’Orsay, Paris, Photo by Gautier Poupeau, Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.
In 1865, at the Salon in Paris, the official exhibition space for the art academy, there were many, many paintings of nude women, so why did this one by Édouard Manet cause such an uproar? The public hated this painting! … Continue reading
Gerrit Rietveld, Schröder House, Utrecht, Holland, 1924, Photo by HB, Flickr, Creative Commons Attribution License.
In 1917, Gerrit Rietveld joined Piet Mondrian and Theo van Doesburg to form De Stijl, a utopian art movement. For these artists, the goal of art was perfect balance and harmony and the means was abstraction. They wanted to create … Continue reading
Ansel Adams, Monolith, The Face of Half Dome, Yosemite National Park, California c. 1927, gelatin silver photograph, 8” x 6”, Photo by Cea, Flickr, Creative Commons Attribution License.
Ansel Adams’ remarkably clear and detailed photographs of the majestic American landscape are immediately recognizable to most people. Part of their power derives from their precision, which contributes to the awe-inspiring character and beauty of his work. The precision also … Continue reading
Mark Rothko, No. 46 (Black, Ochre, Red Over Red), 1957, oil on canvas, 8’ 3¼” x 6’ 9¾”, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Photo by rocor Flickr.
Very few works of art grab viewers on a gut level the way Mark Rothko’s paintings do. There isn’t anything quite like the experience of standing in front of a Rothko painting and feeling just what the artist intended you … Continue reading
The Dome of the Rock, 688 and later, Jerusalem, Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.
The focus of the Haram al-Sharif, or the Temple Mount, a religious sanctuary in Old Jerusalem that is sacred to Jews, Muslims, and Christians, is the Dome of the Rock. Built from 688-691 BCE by Caliph Abd al-Malik, it is … Continue reading
Frans Hals, Officers of the St. George Civic Guard of Haarlem, 1627, oil on canvas, 70½” x 101½”, Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem, Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.
It’s spring break in Texas and thousands of university students will flock to places like South Padre Island and Ft. Lauderdale with a keg in the back of the car and a keen appetite for a good time, but these … Continue reading
Venus of Willendorf, c. 28,000 - 25,000 BCE, limestone, 4⅓” high, Naturhistorisches Museum, Vienna, Photo by Matthias Kabel via Wikimedia Commons, GNU Free Documentation License.
The Venus of Willendorf is seriously old; someone carved her from limestone around 28,000 BCE. That’s 30,000 years ago! Needless to say, it’s very difficult to know why this Paleolithic artifact exists. Because we know so little about the circumstances … Continue reading
Constantin Brancusi, Bird in Space, 1928, bronze, 54” x 8½” x 6½”, Museum of Modern Art, New York, Photo by rocor -Flickr
Artists sometimes repeat motifs in their work over the course of their career. Constantin Brancusi, the Romanian sculptor working in the early twentieth century, reworked a bird motif many times from the 1920s through the 1940s in an effort to arrive … Continue reading