Ben Miller examines a piece of trinitite—glass formed in the 1945 Trinity nuclear test—and a stained-glass window formerly installed in Yale’s Hopper College, both featured in John Stuart Gordon’s new book “American Glass.”
Victor Hugo’s storm-swept drawings at the Hammer
Stones to Stains: The Drawings of Victor Hugo at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles shines a light on sixty-four drawings selected from the more than three thousand sheets of illustrations that Hugo left to the world.
Contemporary art confronts the Gilded Age at the Driehaus
Work by Yinka Shonibare launches a new exhibition series in March
Strange visions: surrealist photography in Mexico
Mexico’s surrealist painters and writers are well-known; perhaps less familiar are its surrealist photographers.
New Life for a Renaissance Woman from Brooklyn
Back in January, a painting at Skinner Auctions’ sale of American and European Works of Art caught the eye of journalist and historian Eve M. Kahn. It was striking: a seated, semi-nude woman wearing a long, flowing train, tightly cropped and rendered with deft, impressionistic brush strokes. Kahn was eager to learn more about the artist, Edith Varian Cockcroft (1881–1962), but the facts of the Brooklyn native’s life proved elusive.
Farther afield
In Antwerp, an arts festival toasts the legacy of Peter Paul Rubens
How Thomas Cole learned the ABCs of landscape art
Even in such early work as The Clove, Catskills (1827) and View of Monte Video, the Seat of Daniel Wadsworth, Esq. (1828), the facture and compositional strategies employed by Thomas Cole—a working-class boy from northern England, self-taught as an artist—demonstrated surprising conversance with European landscape painting of the time.
A hungry eye’s selections at the Annenberg Space
Not an Ostrich: And Other Images from America’s Library, on view this summer at the Annenberg Space for Photography in Los Angeles
A Johnson Collection initiative debuts in Georgia
Central to Their Lives: Southern Women Artists in the Johnson Collection
Battling the damp at a Scottish landmark
Protecting a Mackintosh masterpiece in Helensburgh, Scotland