For the first half of the 20th century, images of industry were synonymous with progress. As assembly lines increasingly supplied the needs and wants of the world's growing urban population, factory scenes became shorthand for the brave new world of modernity. Industrial art became an international genre, crossing political borders and...
Conquering armies have returned with booty from time immemorial, but in the 20th century, the Nazis organized what was probably the largest campaign of art theft in history. To call it organized, however, overlooks a rivalry among Nazi leaders that resembled gangsters fighting over their share of the loot.
Dudley Browne, head of James D. Julia's glass and lamp department, had a sneaking suspicion the firm's Dec. 1-2 sale would break new ground. He noted a number of pre-auction cues, such as inquiries from new blood collectors and dealers as well as from veterans who perhaps hadn't been as active...
German artist Heinrich Vogeler (1872-1942) believed art should be inseparable from daily life. Fine art expert Mary Manion show us in her Art Markets column why his life of is worthy of a great novel.
Canada might have seemed hundreds if not thousands of miles distant from the centers of modern art in the early decades of the 20th century, but the artists of the dominion transformed their isolation into an asset.
It was a snowy New Year’s Eve day, and the appraisers were making a house call. The client was a woman with a family heirloom, a piece of cut and painted paper silhouette art from a genre known by its German name, scherenschnitte.
An art critic puzzled at the sight of Claude Monet’s Impression, “Sunrise” (Impression, soleil levant), coined the name “Impressionism” as a jeering insult. But the artists in the exhibition who so irked the critic eagerly embraced the term to describe their new approach to painting.
Very few artists have had a color named for them. One of them, Maxfield Parrish (1870-1966), was an American illustrator and painter known for his luminous hues, including the shade called Parrish blue.
It didn’t take long for Leo Castelli to establish himself as one of America’s premiere art dealers. In 1957, he opened the Leo Castelli Gallery on East 77th Street in Manhattan, and less than a year later, in January 1958, he took center stage with an exhibition of Jasper Johns.
When Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908-2004) switched his focus from paintbrush to camera, the essence of photography was still the subject of fierce debate. Should photographers aspire to art or remain as mere documenters of reality?
