The lure of Sicily comes partly from nature—a temperate climate, abundant crops and a bounty of seafood—and partly from its strategic importance. Situated in the Mediterranean at the crossroads of Greece, Italy and North Africa, the island has attracted...
What could be more natural than a landscape? And yet the word landscape—commonly used to describe not just a picture but any view of mountains, fields and woods—originates in seventeenth-century art terminology. (Used as a verb, landscape even more...
Think of it as a riddle. What’s the difference between an artist who lines up identical piles of sand on the floor of a former Philadelphia warehouse and another artist who builds towers out of chicken bones?
Before you try to answer, here’s yet another...
Caravaggio is the greatest of the Counter Reformation artists, combining intense religious experience with a realism of startling immediacy. His short life (he died at 38), disorderly and often violent, has fascinated modern commentators almost as much as...
How effective can a work of art be when it’s smaller than your hand? Tremendously so, if “Single Fare 3”—the third-annual exhibition of works created exclusively on New York City subway MetroCards—is any indication. The show, at RH Gallery, was up for...
The Met's bulletin of recent acqusitions shows us what we all will soon be viewing
The curators at the Metropolitan Museum of Art have gone shopping. Just as most of us are were devising our holiday wish list last December, the directors of the museum’s...
“Beatrix Potter: The Picture Letters,” which was recently on view at the Morgan Library, centered on the many letters that Potter wrote to children of her acquaintance in the years before she became a celebrated author (the famous Tale of Peter Rabbit was...
If you didn’t happen to be in Amsterdam or Helsinki early last year, when the exhibition “Illusions of Reality: Naturalist Painting, Photography, Theater, and Cinema, 1875–1918” was on view at theVan Gogh Museum and the Ateneum Art Museum, then a mournful...
The Comtesse and the Marchesa, the Earl and the haughty Medici-court aristocrat wearing his big codpiece, the Duke and one of Napoleon’s most dashing Conseillers d’Etat have all had to make room for an unlikely new guest in their home at New York’s Frick...
Mary Oliver is not afraid to use certain words. Cover your ears, for you may be offended. Her language includes words like beautiful, love, beloved, prayer, loneliness, God, He, holy, heaven. And this from a woman who has taught at Bennington College, is...
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