Looking at the Statue of Liberty not as a symbol, but as a work of art
Cézanne Reconsidered
A pair of recent exhibitions prompts a new look at the eminent French postimpressionist
The Louvre: The Many Lives of the World’s Most Famous Museum, a new book by James Gardner
James Gardner retells and retraces the evolution of one of the world’s most complex architectural palimpsests with elegance, economy, and wit.
Off the Piazza, Another World
Celebrating a Venetian Institution, Caffè Florian at 300.
Baroque Pearls
A forthcoming exhibition and its catalog examine the art of the Old Masters in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Genoa.
That was another country
Notes on Photographs by Larry Silver, 1949–1955 at the New-York Historical Society. Precisely because photography is thought to be the most objective of all mediums, it acquires over the course of years, and seemingly in spite of itself, a haunted quality that no other product of visual culture can claim to the same degree. Fig. 9. Leaving Penn Station, 1952. …
Walker Evans: early and late
The man who, more than any other, gave visual expression to American life during the Great Depression was not a painter, but a photographer who originally wanted to be a writer. As surely as Aubrey Beardsley’s graphic mastery defined London in the mauve nineties, Walker Evans’s stark photographs remain the most powerful and enduring images of America in its time …
A divine passion
Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun was the most sought-after portraitist of the ancien régime.
A Rich and Beautiful Sadness
Silence, stillness, and darkness in the paintings of the Danish artist Vilhelm Hammershøi In one of his most famous works, the esteemed art historian Sir Nikolaus Pevsner sought to define “The Englishness of English Art.” If anyone were to under take a comparable inquiry into the Danishness of Danish art, the painter Vilhelm Hammershøi could well stand as the palmary …
One Off
“There has never been another artist like George Caleb Bingham” Fig. 1. The Jolly Flatboatmen by Bingham, 1846. Oil on canvas, 38 by 48 ½ inches. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D. C., Patrons’ Permanent Fund. Before the middle of the nineteenth century, most American artists were “outsider” artists, in the sense that these denizens of the New World stood …