The best paintings in the extraordinary Gustave Courbet (1819-1877) retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art exude a commanding discombobulation, Roberta Smith writes. They challenge and seduce with their brusqueness of surface, inconsistencies of space or scale, emotional ambiguities and alternately frank and improbable accounts of the female form. Courbet himself was, and remains, a [...]
An act of artistic philanthropy on a par with Britain’s greatest - including bequests by Samuel Courtauld and Henry Tate - was unveiled today in a move that will see 725 works of postwar and contemporary art donated to the nation.
Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt presents Women Impressionists: Berthe Morisot, Mary Cassatt, Eva Gonzalès, and Marie Bracquemond, on view through June 1, 2008. Everyone knows the names of famous Impressionists – Manet, Monet, Degas, Renoir, Pissarro – but it is less well known that important women painters also belonged to their circle. Berthe Morisot, a successful and [...]
Saint Phalle’s version, “Nana Power”, takes its name from the French word nana, meaning “chick”. It’s the title of a show-stopping image of the artist in which she points a gun at the camera, playing to the public’s perception of her as a woman who muscled her way into a male-dominated art world.
Nana Power (1970) [...]
Sex, politics and religion may not be the form at dinner parties, but they made Lucas Cranach a fortune. He printed Luther’s version of the New Testament, served three times as Mayor of Wittenberg, was at one point the richest man in town and owned a liquor-licensed pharmacy that was a sure-fire winner in an [...]
The biggest art theft in American history occurred at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston on March 18, 1990. The stolen paintings, including the one that hung in this frame, Rembrandt’s “Lady and Gentleman in Black,” remain unrecovered.
This year’s shortlist for the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize shows a welcome shift of emphasis. Whereas 2007’s nominees had rather intimidating, introspective themes, this year each of the artists has flung his net outwards with a keen, almost evangelical fervour, to create social observations which make full use of photography’s talent for conferring beauty on [...]
