Americana

  Oswaldo Vigas at the Boca Raton Museum of Art By Isaac Aden The gift of a painter is to slow time and make it remain forever in an instant, yet infinitely relevant.  Oswaldo Vigas (1926–2014) was a masterful painter of modernist abstraction gifted with astonishing vigor. Vigas’s artistic valor and dedication earned him a…

Called “the largest Johannes Vermeer exhibition ever,” the Rijksmuseum’s revelatory window on the Dutch master’s world allows rare glimpse into mystery and meaning. Sarah Bochicchio Johannes Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring is easily one of the most iconic, most reproduced, most beloved paintings of all time. The artwork vacillates between great intimacy, curiosity, and…

Charlotte’s Mint Museum Showcases Cubist Pioneer’s Painted Treasures By William Corwin The project of Cubism instigated by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque was a ménage à trois with a third, ghostly partner: Paul Cézanne.  Cézanne’s presence in the relationship, as well as his own obsession with landscape, meant that genre of painting defined the movement’s…

As her relationship with painting evolved, Springford’s style became ever more original By Cayla Blachman  Vivian Springford (1913–2003) has earned an almost mythic reputation in the art world today. Often recalled as a 1932 New York City debutante, she has long evaded consideration as a serious artist. Born in Milwaukee, Springford was transplanted as a…

“Art for the People: WPA-Era Paintings from the Djikstra Collection” Invites Reassessment of Terms Used to Define Movements in 20th-century American Art By James D. Balestrieri Henry Adams begins his fascinating essay in the catalogue that accompanies “Art for the People: WPA-Era Paintings from the Djikstra Collection,” on view at the Crocker Art Museum through…

The Life and Art of Jacqueline Lamba Shed Extraordinary Light on a Female Surrealist’s Place in the World of Her Time By Salomon Grimberg About her painting In Spite of Everything, Spring, Jacqueline Lamba wrote: “The object is only a part of space created by light. Color is its non-arbitrary choice in transfiguration. Texture is…

The development of Gustav Klimt’s artistic style is studied in a new exhibition. By Gabriel Almeida Gustav Klimt is one of the foremost painters of fin-de-siecle Vienna, and his pictures are widely recognized today for their radical combination of physical realism, technical virtuosity and exploration of a world of instincts and emotions. A prodigious student…

The Albuquerque Museum of Art gives visitors an inside look of the life an artist with its exhibition Thomas Cole’s Studio: Memory and Inspiration. By James D. Balestrieri If an artist’s studio is an extension of the artist’s creative mind—the space where the artist’s art is conceived, worked out and brought to fruition—then preserving and…