For many artists in pre-AbEx America, the boundaries between the real and the unreal could be quite porous.
Continue reading...
Modern & Postwar
A Whole Man’s Life
MoMA mounts a de Kooning show as vast and varied as the artist’s career.
Continue reading...Surround Sound
One of the rarest and most collectible Braun items, the portable “Combi” radio-phono designed by Wilhelm Wagenfeld, sold at the Quittenbaum auction house in Munich for €4,500.
Continue reading...Track Work
Papering the subways, London Transport posters brought modernism to the masses.
Continue reading...Ornithology, Infantry and Abstraction
Modern camouflage was invented by artists who studied nature, and camouflage in turn influenced some of modernism’s biggest breakthroughs.
Continue reading...Escape to Freedom
When Beatrice Mandelman and her husband, fellow painter Louis Ribak, left New York for New Mexico in 1944, she knew she was leaving behind one of the world’s most dynamic hubs of cultural and intellectual activity—and the possibility of making a lasting mark there. Mandelman could not have predicted that World War II would end the following year, but she certainly knew that New York had become modern art’s axis mundi by the time she decided to move away.
Continue reading...The Real Grant Wood
The story of Grant Wood is surely one of the strangest episodes in the entire history of American art. As of 1930 he was a little-known local painter in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, whose greatest honor was that he had once won a blue ribbon at the Iowa State Fair. Then he made a painting of his sister and his dentist dressed up as farm folk, standing in front of a little wooden cottage with a gothic window, and sent it to the annual exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago.
Continue reading...Interview with Author Tripp Evans by Henry Adams
He became an instant celebrity with American Gothic, but understanding of Grant Wood’s art has been slow in coming. A new biography reveals the hidden depth—and strangeness— of both the man and his work. ADAMS: When did you first get interested in Grant Wood? When I was in seventh or eighth grade, I remember seeing [...]
Continue reading...A Woman of Valor
This month, Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective, which originated at the Philadelphia Museum of Art last fall, comes to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. With a broad selection of works, some of them never before shown, and a series of installations that demonstrate Gorky’s work process, the exhibition illuminates the development of the artist’s unique style.
Continue reading...A Haunting Humanism
Nearly a century ago, much of Europe waited with trepidation for war to break out. In August 1914, the conflagration that would become World War I finally erupted, and the German artist Otto Dix was one young volunteer who eagerly headed to the front. An avid reader of the works of Friedrich Nietzsche, the 19th-century philosopher who had championed an ideal “superman” or “overman” who would overcome the limitations of mere humanity as it had evolved thus far, Dix would soon find his illusions shattered.
Continue reading...Join Over 6,000 People Who
Get Our Exclusive eNewsletter
