The California-based artist Danny Heller paints the elements that define mid-century Modernism. Evening Swim (2025) depicts a Los Angeles swimming pool.
It took many years for Danny Heller to realize that the unremarkable place in which he grew up was actually so remarkable that it would become his painterly subject. As a boy growing up in the 1980s and ’90s in Los Angeles’s San Fernando Valley, Heller considered his family’s suburban setting to be “blank and bland and vanilla,” as he says now from his studio and home in Desert Hot Springs, California. “My childhood was a nice one, but for excitement, for cultural outings and sites, we would drive over the mountains into L.A. It wasn’t until I returned to the Valley after going to college up the coast that I really started to realize that there was a lot to look at. I started painting what I knew and what I grew up with. I wanted a subject matter to paint and I had found it.”
Given the post-War era in which the vast San Fernando Valley came into being as a suburban adjunct to the city of Los Angeles, some of its areas came to be defined—and still are—by exemplary mid-century Modern houses. These dwellings, most of them built in the 1950s and ‘60s, were made for their sunny California climes—with strong rectilinear lines, large expanses of glass, overhanging and butterfly roofs, swimming pools, terraces and interior courtyards, carports, and novel architectural forms akin to landed alien craft.
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The Message of the Medium
An exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, shows why some consider Winslow Homer the greatest American watercolorist of the genre By Fred Voon The art of Winslow Homer (1836–1910) is well known, but his mind is a bit of a mystery. Famously reclusive, he left no diaries, avoided mingling with other artists, and…
Kenny Harris’s Interiorscapes
By David MaMasello Kenny Harris is not an interior decorator, but some of what he does to create his subject matter has similarities to that profession. While the Venice, California–based Harris is best known for his evocative, poetic depictions of the interiors of rooms and unassuming cityscapes, what he reveals on panel or canvas is…
Rooted in the Now
San Francisco’s de Young Museum refreshes its Indigenous America galleries to center Native voices and connect the ancestral with the contemporary. By Fred Voon When Meyo Maruffo, a Pomo artist and curator, was invited years ago to the de Young Museum and asked for her thoughts on the Native American exhibits, she said, “It’s a…
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Portraitist of Moods
Drive-In Dusk (2020) All images courtesy of John Dowd Although John Dowd has been coursing the streets and beaches of Provincetown for decades, he always finds something new to paint. And even if it’s the same subject, he sees it differently every time. By David Masello Should you be walking the streets of Provincetown late…
The City of Light in the Dark
An opium smoker, along with her pet cat, circa 1931 Courtesy of Moderna Museet, Stockholm © Estate Brassaï Succession – Philippe Ribeyrolles 2026 The legacy of photographer Brassaï and his nocturnal wanderings through Paris in the 1940s goes on view at Stockholm’s Moderna Museet By David Masello For some, it’s among the most pleasurable and…
Always In Fashion
Mr. and Mrs. Andrews (c. 1750) All photos by Joseph Coscia Jr., courtesy of the Frick Collection Thomas Gainsborough wasn’t a clothing designer,but he knew how to paint those garbed in the fashionable wear of his time, as an exhibition at the Frick Collection reveals By David Masello While Thomas Gainsborough understood the need to…
New Nation, New Art
With Nigeria’s independence came new art. London’s Tate Modern tells the story of 20th-century art in the nation, highlighting unique, Pan-African aesthetics. Written by Ashley Busby On October 1, 1960, Nigeria established independence from British colonial rule, and just after that declaration members of the Zaria Art Society published a manifesto that charged the nation’s…
Fit for a Queen
The Hispanic Society Museum & Library in New York spotlights the opulence and over-the-top silhouettes of the Spanish Golden Age, including hoop skirts so large that women were accused of concealing illicit pregnancies. Written by Fred Voon In the 16th century, the world’s fashion capital wasn’t Paris or Milan. It was Madrid. After all, this…
Hail Trajan!
A fresco of Selene and Endymion, dating from the 1st century, once decorated a home in Pompeii The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston A touring exhibition, now at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, brings the ancient Roman emperor to life, as well as the lives of the subjects who lived under his rule Written…
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