Landscape Paintings

The “Death and the Maid” show invites reflection through timeless memento mori, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art By Lilly Wei When London-born artist Cecily Brown landed in New York City, where she has lived ever since, it was 1994, about a year after graduating from the Slade School of Art. She came to the…

“In the Shadow of Dictatorship: Creating the Museum of Spanish Abstract Art,” at SMU’s Meadows Museum By Dian Parker In 1937, Picasso painted the famous Guernica as a way of protesting the leveling of a small Basque village by German aerial bombers under General Francisco Franco’s command. Most of the civilians killed in Guernica, Spain,…

“Life & Death in the Ancient World” at the Tampa Museum of Art harkens to antiquity for reminders of the power of shared human experiences By James D. Balestrieri In the age of the highly focused, thematic museum show, “Life & Death in the Ancient World,” an exhibition with a narrow-beam thesis that aims to…

  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…