Modern Art

During its relatively short life, the Bauhaus school was the site of thousands of conversations and experiments in which artists, designers and architects came together to collectively decide what contemporary art should be. Continue reading →

In September 1931, Alexandre Kojève addressed a letter to his uncle, painter Vasily Kandinsky, one of the pioneers of abstract art, comparing his capacity to continually discover new forms to Picasso’s. “But unlike him, you never allow yourself the role of ham actor,” quipped Kojève, a Russian emigré philosopher living in the Parisian suburb of Boulogne. Continue reading →

The Taos School of painting is known for its part-academic, part-modernistic depictions of a startlingly beautiful landscape and for its celebration of the picturesque qualities of New Mexico’s indigenous people. It often takes the unjaded eye of an outsider to see a place this way, and in fact, none of the Taos painters were actually from Taos (see Art & Antiques, Summer 2009). Continue reading →

Until April 2010 you can see Guernica in London, at the newly expanded Whitechapel Gallery. But if you’ve visited the Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid and seen Picasso’s anguished portrayal of the bombing of a Basque town during the Spanish Civil War, you might notice something a bit odd. At 10 by 22 feet, the Guernica in London is slightly smaller than the one in Spain and considerably heavier (the gallery needed six men to hang it). Continue reading →

“Summer and its blossoms all winter in California.” Around the turn of the 20th century the United States Railroad Administration put slogans like this on thousands of travel posters, hoping to cash in on Americans’ desire to escape the cold, harsh winters of the Northeast and Midwest. But artists didn’t need slogans to entice them. Continue reading →

Jack Whitten is an artist visibly in love with paint. Over a 40-year career he has made luscious abstract works, at first in oil and later in acrylic. And yet he is quick to point out that he does not consider himself a painter but rather someone who makes artworks with paint. Continue reading →

“Suddenly, without any kind of warning, I found myself completely naked, in the heart of the city of Milan, on the morning of Oct. 24, 1907.” With this astonishment began the fantastic life of Bruno Munari, an artist and designer whose every moment was imbued with the wonder of a child emerging from the womb. Continue reading →

In 1967, at the height of Beatlemania, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Bandappeared to wide acclaim. With more than 11 million copies sold in the U.S. alone, it was one of the most successful albums of all time. The cover, designed by the British painter Peter Blake, displayed 70 famous faces, including Edgar Allan Poe, Marilyn Monroe, Marlene Dietrich, Carl Jung, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Bob Dylan, Marlon Brando, Lenny Bruce, Mae West—and one painter, Richard Lindner. Continue reading →

Despite the standard art-history-book summary of Mexican modernism, there actually is much more to this colorful subject than the works, emblematic though they might be, of Los Tres Grandes (The Three Great Ones)—Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros and José Clemente Orozco. Their epoch-defining murals painted in the decades following the 1910–20 revolution that ousted the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz gave enduring expression to a proud people’s still-emerging sense of national identity. Continue reading →

Of all the towns that could have played host to New England’s first modernist building, Lenox, Mass., is among the least likely. When Mrs. Astor’s 400 finished summering at their extravagant, ironically named “cottages” in Newport, R.I., they would shift to Lenox, in the Berkshires, for several more weeks before returning to Manhattan in the fall. Continue reading →