Last month saw the opening of Mythologies: Eugene Von Bruenchenhein at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, part of The Road Less Traveled exhibition series marking the fiftieth anniversary of the center’s founding.
Purple mountains’ majesty in Tacoma
Rain, snow, high winds, and vertiginous mountain peaks—these were not a problem for the prolific landscape artist Abby Williams Hill (1861–1943), one of the most intrepid plein-air painters America has ever produced.
At Vanderbilt: an influential artist and teacher remembered
When modernism dominated art in the United States, from the interwar period onward, Morris Davidson was a prominent and widely exhibited painter—as well as a teacher, a critic, and a leader of arts organizations. And yet, since his death in 1979, his work has fallen into obscurity.
On the road with Martin Johnson Heade
The itinerant artist is a staple figure in the cultural history of nineteenth-century America, but no one roamed more widely—in terms of both miles and artistic development—than the landscape and nature painter Martin Johnson Heade (1819–1904), who went from a farmland boyhood to become a favorite of princes and tycoons.
An avant-garde patron and peer at the Jewish Museum
A feminist with a penchant for wit, whimsy, and social satire, the artist and Jazz Age saloniste Florine Stettheimer (1871–1944) has often, and unfairly, been misconstrued by critics: her playfulness misread as frivolity, her style and subject matter cast as lacking gravitas.
Tiffany Girl Power at the New-York Historical Society
Ten years ago, a show at the New-York Historical Society revealed a remarkable discovery made by a team of decorative arts scholars: the story of Clara Driscoll (1861–1944), the turn-of-the-century artist who, with her team of “Tiffany Girls,” designed some of the studio’s most iconic leaded glass lamps.
Salaam to the Keir Collection in Dallas
Built by a Hungarian, named for an eighteenth-century house he owned in London, lent after his death to a museum in Berlin, and now residing at the Dallas Museum of Art—the Keir Collection of Islamic Art is the epitome of global cultural exchange even before you consider its contents.
The Middle Ages meets the Digital Age in Chicago
A glimpse of the possible future of museum displays of historical artifacts can be seen in the recent opening of the Art Institute of Chicago’s Deering Family Galleries of Medieval and Renaissance Art, Arms, and Armor.
Neglected viewpoints at the National Gallery of Art
A body of work that has received scant attention from collectors is on view this spring at the National Gallery of Art.
All along the watchtowers at Yale
“From being the homes of great lords in the Middle Ages to being either homes of modern aristocrats or ruins (many castles were destroyed during the English Civil War), castles became both symbols of democracy and warnings to aristocrats that you had to always respect the power of the people.”