ARTES MAGAZINE

From December 24th to March 8th, 2012, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts will host Elvis at 21: Photographs by Alfred Wertheimer, a collaborative exhibition developed by the National Portrait Gallery, the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service, and Govinda Gallery, and made possible through the support of the History channel. The idea of images of a pop culture icon [...]

Republican presidential candidate, Newt Gingrich, recently referred to the Palentinians as an “invented people.”  Don’t tell that to a certain cab drive in New York City, in a nation with an equally legitimate claim to ‘being invented.’ I step from the cool marble lobby of a mid-town office building into the blazing sunlight of a [...]

 “I assure you no art was ever less spontaneous than mine…of inspiration, spontaneity, temperament—temperament is the word—I know nothing.” ~Edgar Degas Edgar Degas, best known in the public imagination for his more sentimental, impressionistic works—ballet scenes, race tracks, opera and music hall scenes—was, first and foremost, a student of the human figure. With the current [...]

 Editor’s Note: Occasionally, an article published in ARTES evokes a profoundly personal and instructive reply by a reader. On very rare occasions, that response is crafted by a fellow writer and regular contributor to the magazine.  Recently (November, 2011), we ran a feature-length article by curator and consultant, Ken Yellis, as an expanded article originally [...]

“Genius is no more than childhood recaptured at will, childhood equipped now with man’s physical means to express itself, and with the analytical mind that enables it to bring order into the sum of experience, involuntarily amassed.” ~Charles Baudelaire “Happy, happy Christmas, that can win us back to the delusions of our childhood days, recall [...]

On view through spring, 2012, the Philadelphia Museum of Art features a unique exhibition, Zaha Hadid: Form in Motion. This show includes furniture and design objects in a space entirely transformed by the prominent female architect. The fluid, site-specific installation is the first of its kind in the United States, assembled by a team of [...]

Picasso and the Guitar: Memory and Metaphor Inspired by, ‘Picasso: Guitars (1912-14)’- At the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, 2011 Though living in France most of his life, Picasso was a Spaniard, through-and-through, remaining proud of his birthright, cultural heritage and sun-drenched memories of childhood, over his lifetime. Any retrospective of his work [...]

Cultures evolve around patterns of shared personal belief in powers that reside outside themselves, in the natural universe. Every society through the ages has venerated the mysteries embedded in symbolic references to these powerful—but unknowable— life-shaping elements. Behind the impulse to embrace these hidden forces is a set of primal fears and suspicions, buried deep [...]

In 1908, there suddenly appeared in the Munich Expressionist literary and art magazine, Die Jungend (The Youth)—unheralded and unexpected—a series of remarkable pen and ink sketches signed “Kley.” Sometimes black and white, sometimes covered with color washes, usually without captions, they were characterized by a highly individual staccato technique and a subject matter that leaped [...]

 What follows is a wonderful historical record of how a particular artist resolved the issues of a particular subject, to yield a masterpiece of art. It was written by Blaise Cendrars in 1924, about his friend, the painter Robert Delaunay, and the creation of his painting, Champs de Mars: The Red Tower (1911).*  The Eiffel [...]