ARTES MAGAZINE

Sometimes it just all comes together, and when it does there’s magic on the stage. Such is the case with The Dining Room, A. R. Gurney’s nostalgic look back at a way of life—a way of thinking, a way of dining—currently on the boards at the Westport Country Playhouse. The production, under the sure directorial [...]

“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 [...]

Experiencing the creative work of architectural brothers, Greene & Greene, is like sipping a rare, richly-made wine—offering sensory delights from the firm of two authentic American Arts and Crafts masters. As the brothers Greene—Charles and Henry—worked primarily in California, they created the ‘gold standard’ for the Arts and Crafts design style. Their work, both as [...]

  There are those who say that the Yale Repertory Theatre often dabbles in post-modernistic-theater-of-the-absurd-nihilistic-surrealism, that those in charge of the venerable establishment conceive of their audience as a blend of the Marquis de Sade and Krafft-Ebing, that what is sometimes offered fulfills only the needs of those who dwell in dark attics reading Henry [...]

Mary Hrbacek’s solo exhibition, Peopled Forest of My Mind, curated by Elga Wimmer at the Creon Gallery in New York City in April, 2013, featured Hrbacek’s new, very small and very large, personified tree paintings. Inspired by her dense, dramatic charcoal drawing executed on stark white paper, Hrbacek cultivates eerie hybrid plant forms as they [...]

He has a murderer’s face, which is to say that he looks like any one of us. A workman, obedient without pleasure, his hand in a paralyzed clutch of the hair on the decapitated head. left: Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, Salome Receives the Head of Saint John the Baptist, c. 1606–10. Oil on canvas. The National Gallery, [...]

There is always a bit of an edge to any production at the A.R.T. and by extension its satellite Oberon. This is true of Beowulf—A Thousand Years of Baggage now at the Oberon. This version of the English/Danish epic poem uses song and silliness to tell the story of the hero and the blood-thirsty monster. [...]

“The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery.”   ~Francis Bacon   Left: Yoshitora (active circa 1840 – 1880)  Lovely Beauty Design (1870). Private collection   Losing Your Head in New York ARTES, a fine arts magazine, is always on the lookout for cool images that could fit the old adage: art is [...]

In a 1995 set of three paradigmatic, black and white photographs, Ai Weiwei (Born Beijing, 1957), the conceptual Chinese artist, iconoclast, and dissident, is documented Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn (below). The setting is austere and generic. The artist is shown dressed informally standing with weight distributed on spread legs in front of a brick [...]

Kathleen Elliot’s new series of flame worked glass botanical sculptures are both unexpected and intriguing. She achieves rich surface textures and pure luminous colors in imagery that spans natural form from flowers, fruits, pods and nests, to complex entwined linear vines. The artist accentuates details that are often overlooked when one confronts nature, providing a [...]