ARTES MAGAZINE

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 [...]

Set on a verdant 49 acre landscaped campus with 13 other structures, in an odd 20th Century way, Philip Johnson’s Glass House is a bit like the Sphynx. It is iconic, sublime and rather mysterious. Johnson’s Glass House may be one of the best known residential structures in not only the United States, but the [...]

Largely based on some 200-plus murals in Mexico City and several in the United States, Diego Rivera (1886 – 1957) was among the most renowned artists of his generation. His second wife, Frida Kahlo (1907-1954) was a self taught painter, little know by the art world of that time. Of the 143 works she created [...]

An exhibition titled California Scene Paintings has just opened at the Pasadena Museum of California Art. For those of you that have not visited this downtown museum, the structure was designed and built specifically to show art. It has a modern architectural design with clean lines, high ceilings and an excellent lighting system which shows [...]

“Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.” ~John Singer Sargent       Left: Lucian Freud, The Hon. Colin Tennant (1968). Private collection   Convergences When the arts and sciences intersect, the product of those partnerships is often greater than the sum of their parts. In a recent trend that is, after all, [...]

To launch Rediscovered Masters, art historian Peter Hastings Falk assembled Lost and Found: The Pinajian Discovery, the first in a series of exhibitions dedicated to deserving late-career artists and/or those have passed on and whose achievements have been forgotten or overlooked. An important example of one such notable but neglected artist, according to Falk, is [...]

“Only in a democracy where the full development of the individual is not only permitted but fostered could such an exhibition be assembled.” – William Benton, Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs (1946) The year was 1946. Amid an ideological “Cold War” with the Soviet Union, the United States Department of State began an [...]

Keith Haring’s large-scale symbolic scrawled diptychs, on view at Mana Contemporary, spur memories of an era when gangs of boys performed spontaneous break-dances in SoHo subway stations. They recall a time when free spirits ruled, with street art that continues to spark the cosmic desire in the human soul to soar unfettered, taking those feelings [...]

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 [...]

During the Holiday season, it was inevitable to compare and contrast the titans of the 20th Century, French modernism, Pablo Picasso (25 October 1881 – 8 April 1973), far left, and Henri Matisse (31 December 1869 – 3 November 1954) left. The Guggenheim Museum presents Picasso Black and White through January 23 while the Metropolitan [...]