ARTES MAGAZINE

“We find ourselves faced with the only reality—despite ourselves we encourage our painters to reproduce us on their canvases just as we are, with our costumes and customs.” ~Émile Zola (1868) Does life imitate art, or art imitate life? Addressing that very quandary, a stunningly-curated show at the Met demonstrates how to pull out all [...]

John James Audubon (1785-1851) was not the first person to attempt to paint and describe all the birds of America, but for half-a-century he was the young country’s dominant wildlife artist. His seminal Birds of America (1827-39), a collection of 435 life-size prints, quickly eclipsed others’ work and remains a standard against which ornithological renditions [...]

Loss of a Halo By Charles Baudelaire, from, le spleen le Paris: petits poèms en prose (1863)     “Eh!  What!  You here, my dear?  You in a place of ill-repute!  You, the drinker of quintessences!  You the eater of ambrosia!  Indeed, this really surprises me.” “– My dear, you know my terror of horses and [...]

A recent tour of the newly expanded and renovated Yale University Art Gallery, in New Haven Connecticut, has visitors treading on a little-noticed engraved marker inlayed in the stone floor of the Ancient Arts gallery. Cool winter light slants into the space from nearby Chapel Street, illuminating the inscription: ‘Col. JOHN TRUMBULL, Patriot and Artist, Friend [...]

  Winslow Homer, Weatherbeaten (1894). Portland Museum of Art. Bequest of Charles Shipman Payson. Ubiquitous Winslow Homer images of the surf-battered, rocky Maine coastline and pastoral scenes of American life in a simpler time, are so deeply embedded in our sense of national identity that we hardly ‘see’ them any longer. Too many posters of [...]

  Part I of this story appeared on June 18th and can be found at: http://www.artesmagazine.com/2012/06/20th-c-documentarian-seeks-film-truth-in-early-revolutionary-soviet-union/ In all his films, the presence of sound, either implied or field-recorded played a role. In his first, and most faouus, The Man withthe Movie Camera (1929), the film bears the sub-title, ‘A Visual Symphony.’ Later, his visual eulogy to Lenin [...]

Spiders! You may love them, like Wilbur the pig does, in E. B. White’s classic Charlotte’s Web; or they may frighten you away, like the tiny creature that startled Little Miss Muffet, as she sat eating her curds and whey. As for me, well, I wouldn’t want to find one climbing up my arm or [...]

Jasper Johns’s arrival on the New York scene, from South Carolina in 1952, was propitious. The post-war city, newly thrust onto the world stage as a powerful economic and influential cultural force, had attracted numerous artists, poets and writers determined to redefine art in a new, more muscular light than their pre-war European predecessors. This new [...]

At some point in all our lives we have grappled with the assumption that there is a place for nature and a place for culture. One is located in the rolling hills of ladybird books and biscuit tin lids, the other in the smoggy sprawl of the city. But there is somewhere in-between. It is [...]

  One of the most gratifying developments in the art world this last year was the special attention given to the sculptor John Chamberlain. The Solomon R. Guggenheim’s recent critically acclaimed Retrospective, John Chamberlain: Choices, was the first full survey in the USA since 1986 and the appropriate culmination for an artist over whom critical [...]