Nobody expects an artist’s studio to be tidy. In popular imagination, the artist works in a Paris garret or a New York City loft, surrounded by scattered paintbrushes and stacked canvases. Twentieth-century sculptor Alberto Giacometti, however, took the disorganized-artist stereotype to new extremes. After visiting his studio, Simone de Beauvoir
Every image that Japanese conceptual artist On Kawara paints would make sense outside of the context of art. On the surface, they are simply numbers, letters, dates, maps and routes, first names and surnames, and newspaper clippings. They could have come from day planners, calendars, scrapbooks, or rosters. In On Kawara: 10 Tableaux and 16,952 Pages, from the Dallas Museum of Art, they represent a formidable boy of work that challenges “the very idea of what it means to be alive and sentient in the world.”
As noted in Art and Activism: Projects of John and Dominique de Menil, edited by Josef Helfenstein and Laureen Schipsi, the de Menils’ collection was a conscious effort to increase others’ welfare. They considered art “a basic human necessity,” not something to be monopolized by the rich, and intended their art to educate generations that came long after them.
There is a not-so-well-kept secret regarding European fashion designers: they care about American consumers’ opinions. With the United States comprising such a large portion of the fashion market, they have to care. With haute couture seemingly forever confined to European cities, the need to attract American buyers is rather empowering
Although Garry Trudeau has been creating the Doonesbury comic strip for over four decades, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize twice and won it once, he has stated that his “scrawlings made the cartoon industry safe for bad art.” Brian Walker notes that he “had always felt that [Trudeau] had not received adequate recognition for his talents as an artist and graphic designer.” His Doonesbury and the Art of G.B. Trudeau restores the cartoonist’s reputation as a master of all aspects of his craft.
Photographs from this month’s Perseid meteor shower from the International Space Station follow a long tradition of science and art blurring boundaries between each other. As curator Susan Dackerman argues in Prints and the Pursuit of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe, the catalog for Harvard Art Museums’ exhibition opening September 6, art and science often have a close relationship with only vaguely definable boundaries.
The new film The Help, based on Kathryn Stockett’s novel of the same name, has been a box office success but has also been met with some thought-provoking criticism. A review in RD Magazine claims that the plot suggests black women need white women to give them a voice, while
Most people are unlikely to associate science and religion with a man who is best known for painting melting clocks, who threw buckets of paint on nude models, and who kept detailed records of his dreams. Yet for the bulk of his career, those two subjects influenced much of Salvador
When James Frazer Stirling won the Good Housing Competition prize in 1963 for his architectural design, the Daily Mail ran the outraged headline, “Frankly, do you think this is WORTH A PRIZE?” The reader’s answer was obviously supposed to be “no,” especially when confronted with the article’s comment that the