Among the highlights of Henry VIII’s library was a book called “Ruralia Commonia,” which is generally considered the world’s first…
Art & Architecture
Before last week, I knew the work of Californian artist Richard Diebenkorn (1922-1993) only secondhand and had never actually stood…
In Britain Sir Joshua Reynolds is regarded as something of a national treasure. The first president of the Royal Academy…
Before Alexander McQueen became the iconic, illustrious fashion designer of the twenty-first century he worked for a costume design company…
It’s a curious fact that the decisive moment in the history of Impressionism took place not in Paris but in…
Two new excellent exhibitions about 17th- to 19th-century Japanese art and culture grace San Francisco’s well-respected Asian Art Museum, the…
Renowned for his portraits of the great and the good of late-Victorian society and dismissed by critics as a painter…
Dead babies, zombie brides, sex workers, Osama bin Laden, Phil Spector without his wig; welcome to the world of Marlene…
The Flemish artist Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) used to be known as “the Prince of Painters and the Painter of…
When the first Sherlock Holmes story, "A Study in Scarlet," begins, the narrator, Dr. John H. Watson, is kicking his…
Does art belong in a museum or on a T-shirt? When it’s the art of Keith Haring (1958–1990), the answer…
It’s important to remind people that the West is the new kid on the block because our narcissistic Euro centric…
Fin de siècle Vienna. A city fizzing with avant-garde intellectualism and “new” music. The city of Freud, Mahler and Schoenberg….
Who Are You?, the question that forms the title of this new exhibition at London’s National Portrait Gallery, is one,…