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 …
Habsburg flash and filigree
The splendor of the house of Habsburg was always inversely proportionate to its prowess on the field of battle. Under Maximilian I of Austria and his grandson Charles V of Spain, the dynasty waged continuous battles from Cuzco to Constantinople and from Scandinavia to the shores of Africa. During this time, the external manifestations of its magnificence were fairly restrained, …
Visions and revisions of Paris
Amid the colorless rubble that rises up all around them, amid shattered brick and sheered off walls that once were homes, men gaze, as though shell-shocked, into the camera’s eye. This is hell on earth. It is also Paris, France. The photograph, taken in 1876, depicts the construction of the avenue de l’Opéra (see p. 122, top). It is now …
The unfashionable delights of Raoul Dufy
Raoul Dufy is a conspicuous example of a painter who has fallen almost completely from grace. He has not been the subject of a major American exhibition in over a generation, and his name, it seems, is rarely mentioned any more among the living. Indeed, there is no particular reason to write this article just now, since there is unlikely …