Everyone talks about the weather. Charles Burchfield turned it into art. He rendered its shifts, subtle or severe, in watercolors and sketches, giving visual expression to the humidity on a summer evening, or the faint warmth of the sun on a spring afternoon.
A second-generation star of the Hudson River School
Sanford R. Gifford in the Catskills is the name of an intimate, beautifully curated exhibition on view at the Thomas Cole National Historic Site in Catskill, New York. But the show could also have been subtitled Local Boy Makes Good.
A painter of big skies at the Michener
Pennsylvania impressionist George Sotter (1879–1953) excelled as a stained-glass artist before he turned his talents to landscape painting, and his facility with that first medium perhaps gave him a special understanding of the effects of light and color.
The sybaritic 1700s at the Kimbell
Courtier, boudoir aficionado, jailbird, and escape artist, Giacomo Casanova (1725–1798) was the perpetual motion libertine of Enlightenment Europe. He wrote what is probably history’s most salacious tell-all, Histoire de ma vie (Story of My Life), recounting all he did, and, to the delight of art lovers, some of what he saw.
On the hunt at the Amon Carter
On October 7, the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, Texas, welcomes a traveling exhibition that the organizers deem to be the first of its kind: a major survey of hunting and fishing in American art from the early nineteenth century to the start of World War II.
India and the arts and crafts movement at the Bard Graduate Center
The name Kipling is synonymous with British India in the nineteenth century, but a new exhibition at the Bard Graduate Center Gallery in New York hopes to foster associations beyond Gunga Din, Kim, and Peachey Carnehan.
The ICA in Los Angeles opens with a bang
Martín Ramírez (1895–1963) was an itinerant Mexican laborer who, homeless in California in the 1930s and arrested for vagrancy, was diagnosed with schizophrenia and spent the rest of his life confined to state psychiatric institutions. Ramírez was also, by many lights, one of the more brilliant artists of the twentieth century.
A stitch in wartime
The American Folk Art Museum presents a fascinating collection of quilts made by men at arms.
Arts and letters
A new exhibition explores the affinities between the work of Henry James and the American painting of his time.
Review: Sanford R. Gifford In the Catskills at the Thomas Cole House
Among members of the Hudson River School of painting, Sanford Robinson Gifford has long been considered one of the most brilliant painters of light and air.