ARTES MAGAZINE

  Once a year, preferably in the heart of winter, I leave Connecticut for Florida, where 360-degree vistas of water and warm weather renew the eternal sunshine of my mind. Such was the case last week, when I headed out of New York’s Westchester County Airport for a direct flight to Palm Beach. This wonderfully [...]

China transformed dramatically in the 20th century. The political system alone saw great changes in the span of 37 years—shifting in 1912 from a monarchy to the Republic of China, and in 1949 to a Communist state. When China opened its ports and took on new trading partners, Chinese society was infused with Western ideas [...]

How would God, if he was an artist and a scientist, see our universe from beginning to end in fast-forward? We may discover the artistic/scientific answer to that question in Matthew Ritchie’s multimedia works. The objects he creates are monumental and extremely exciting. Ritchie started to think about the universe and its possible artistic representation [...]

The Inverted Mirror: Art from “La Caixa and MACBA Collection, opened at the Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao thanks to a collaboration agreement between the ”la Caixa” MACBA Foundations, later extended to include MACBA Consortium, for the purpose of combining their respective contemporary art collections. There is a total of 5,500 works in this common fund and [...]

Divided Voices at the Maryland Historical Society in Baltimore is a notable effort to provide a narrative of the American Civil War as it was experienced in Maryland. This exhibition is well worth a visit by anyone interested in American history and culture—or, for that matter, interested in contemporary American life. The exhibition is instructive [...]

The idea of contemporary India, and a quintessential one at that—a conglomerate of many Indias, with its fluid social fabric and multitudes of people—is the paradox that confronts the photo-artist, JJ Valaya, an accomplished designer and pioneering fashion guru. Through his viewfinder, Valaya captures the fascinating multiplicity of a burgeoning city where he has lived [...]

Each year, OPEN generously peppers the beautiful island of Lido with unexpected, imaginative artistic surprises and is one of the most entertaining sculpture and installation exhibitions in the art world. Essentially an outdoor walking tour with a few in-hotel installations, OPEN begins the moment you disembark from the vaporetto onto the Piazzale St. Maria Elisabetta. [...]

   “Pictures must not be too picturesque.”  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson       Illustration (left): Pablo Picasso, Grande Tete de Femme au Chapeau Orne (1962), block print. Private collection Eye on the Future: The Pottery Wheel-of-Fortune All of us at ARTES, fine arts magazine, wish you a happy and healthy New Year. There has been [...]

She was born in Belgium, he in the Netherlands; they both live in the United States. Between them they’ve assembled the finest private collection of Dutch and Flemish Old Master paintings in the world.  Unlikely though it might seem, Golden: Dutch and Flemish Masterworks from the Rose-Marie and Eijk van Otterloo Collection, currently on display at the Museum [...]

Before even seeing it, I made a judgment on this show. And I was right. The landscapes that Barkley Hendricks has made are revelatory in ways so precise and disarming that they trained me instantly. An enlarged capacity to respond to them was guaranteed simply by looking. Eleven of these scenes share a single tight [...]