Arts & Culture | Art & Artists | Smithsonian.com

Hong Kong Fell in Love With This Larger-Than-Life Rubber Duck

Fri, 24 May 2013 06:01:54 GMT

A massive inflatable rubber duck floats in Hong Kong’s Victoria Harbor, adding a flash of bright yellow to the cityscape. Courtesy of Flickr user Zanthia Earlier this month, a new type of waterfowl paddled into Victoria Harbor in Hong Kong. The bird was of the plastic variety: specifically, the world’s largest inflatable rubber duck, measuring 46 feet tall and 55 feet long. The floating sculpture migrated to the harbor by tugboat on May 4 after stops in Sydney, Osaka and Sao Paolo. The art installation, created by Dutch artist Florentijn Hofman, drew thousands of camera-toting locals and tourists to the Tsim Sha Tsui waterfront. But last week, the six-story-tall duck was temporari

Look, But Don’t Eat: Delicious Crocheted Dishes

Wed, 22 May 2013 06:10:00 GMT

Designer Kate Jenkins goes for a mix of realism and humor in her crocheted works of art. Here, the poppy seed bagel looks quite delectable until you notice the lips on that lox. 2012 © Kate Jenkins Throughout history, food has been sketched in pencil, painted in watercolors and oils and cast in stone. In the 1960s, Wayne Thiebaud replicated cakes and pastries in great pastel detail. Centuries before that, the Italian painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo painted fruits and vegetables in the shape of human faces. Designer Kate Jenkins immortalizes food in a different medium: lambswool. Jenkins crochets meals that look almost realistic enough to eat, from birthday cakes and chocolates to r

How Harlem Put Itself Back on the Map

Wed, 22 May 2013 03:42:46 GMT

Despite a recent slump from the economic crisis, Harlem brownstones prices are on the rise again. Photo by Ilan Costica, courtesy of Wikimedia Just a block from Harlem’s great thoroughfare, 125th Street, is a brownstone listed for a cool $2.3 million, courtesy of the Corcoran Group Real Estate. Advertising its proximity to the subway and trendy restaurants like Red Rooster, the listing provides a snapshot of the dramatic changes underway in the Manhattan neighborhood. Projects like the expansion of the Harlem Hospital Center and the plans for Columbia University and rezoning efforts have brought a wave of development interest to Harlem, which suffered along with the rest of New Y

The Design Future of New York as Seen by Urbanist Michael Sorkin

Mon, 20 May 2013 06:59:13 GMT

Detail from the cover of All Over the Map: Writings on Buildings and Cities, 2011. Published by Verso. Copyright Michael Sorkin Studio. Only Michael Sorkin, urban theorist and architect, could write an entire book about his 20-minute walk to work and turn it into an engaging meditation on city life and citizenship. Principal of Michael Sorkin Studio in New York as well as a professor at City College, Sorkin’s unique examination of what makes cities work has earned him the Cooper-Hewitt’s 2013 “Design Mind” Award. Sorkin says he’s honored to have won and has big plans for the celebratory lunch in October. “I have so much to discuss with the president

Ali, Marilyn, Jackie and Mr. TIME: The cover artist who helped define a magazine

Fri, 17 May 2013 03:45:37 GMT

“If TIME had a beguiling woman that was going to make the cover, it often went to Boris Chaliapan,” says curator Jim Barber. Marilyn Monroe by Boris Chaliapan. 1956. Courtesy of the Estate of Marilyn Monroe, National Portrait Gallery Fifty years ago on May 17, 1963, TIME magazine put James Baldwin on the cover with the story “Birmingham and Beyond: The Negro’s Push for Equality.” And to create his portrait, the weekly called on artist Boris Chaliapan. Baldwin’s intense eyes and pensive expression stared out from newsstands across the country. “Chaliapan,” explains National Portrait Gallery curator Jim Barber, “tried to capture the

Sheila E. On Her Glamorous Life, Upcoming Album and Future Collaborations

Thu, 16 May 2013 09:37:23 GMT

Sheila E. jokes that she slowed down for a few hours before stopping by the African Art Museum en route to a show Thursday evening at the Howard Theater. Photograph by Jessica Suworoff, National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution In high heels and flawless fashions, Sheila E. has been rocking the drums since she was a teenager growing up in Oakland, California. At 55, she’s still not slowing down. She’s collaborated with artists like Michael Jackson and Prince, toured the country and is currently working on a new album and autobiography, From Pain to Purpose, due out next year. In town for a show at the Howard Theater Thursday, May 16, she stopped by the African

When F. Scott Fitzgerald Judged Gatsby By Its Cover

Tue, 14 May 2013 08:08:00 GMT

left: Francis Cugat’s original gouache painting for The Great Gatsby. right: a first edition of the book (image: USC) It’s one of the most recognizable book covers in the history of American literature: two sad female eyes and bright red lips adrift in the deep blue of a night sky, hovering ominously above a skyline that glows like a carnival. Evocative of sorrow and excess, this haunting image has become so inextricably linked to The Great Gatsby that it still adorns the cover of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s masterpiece 88 years after its debut. This iconic work of art was created by Spanish artist Francis Cugat. Little is known about Cugat –also known as Francisco

Amazing Sea Butterflies Are the Ocean’s Canary in the Coal Mine

Tue, 14 May 2013 07:27:00 GMT

The shelled sea butterfly Hyalocylis striata can be found in the warm surface waters of the ocean around the world. Photo: © Karen Osborn The chemistry of the ocean is changing. Most climate change discussion focuses on the warmth of the air, but around one-quarter of the carbon dioxide we release into the atmosphere dissolves into the ocean. Dissolved carbon dioxide makes seawater more acidic—a process called ocean acidification—and its effects have already been observed: the shells of sea butterflies, also known as pteropods, have begun dissolving in the Antarctic. Tiny sea butterflies are related to snails, but use their muscular foot to swim in the water instead

The Great(est) Gatsby Playlist

Fri, 10 May 2013 01:50:59 GMT

Carey Mulligan as Daisy. Photo by Courtesy of Warner Bros. Picture – © 2013 Bazmark Film III Pty Limited The drinks were freer, the music brassier and the times, well, Gatsby-er. At least, that’s the picture F. Scott Fitzgerald creates with his tales of high society run wild in his 1925 novel, The Great Gatsby. Now set for yet another screen adaptation, this time thanks to the energetic hands of Baz Luhrmann, the novel continues to resonate today. Its appeal is a dark but undeniable one, enough to let you weep alongside Daisy as she marvels inside Gatsby’s closet at his exquisite shirts. The clothes, the alcohol, the music–we get it, it’s a heady and seductive mix. S

The Best of Design, Cooper-Hewitt Announces 2013 Award Winners

Thu, 09 May 2013 01:43:57 GMT

Part of the portfolio for this year’s Lifetime Achievement award winner: Ross’s Landing Park and Plaza entrance bridge, Chattanooga, TN, 1992. Architecture: SITE (James Wines, Alison Sky, Michelle Stone, Joshua Weinstein). Engineers: Hensley-Schmidt. Construction: Soloff Construction Company. Photo: SITE Recognizing everything from landscape architecture to fashion, the 2013 Cooper-Hewitt Design Awards recognize the best in design. Some names, like this year’s winner for Corporate and Institutional Achievement, TED, are familiar, while others may be new to most. Within academic circles, for example, Michael Sorkin is a well-known architecture and planning critic and

Creepy or Cool? Portraits Derived From the DNA in Hair and Gum Found in Public Places

Fri, 03 May 2013 03:02:27 GMT

Artist Heather Dewey-Hagborg and her DNA-derived self-portrait. Photo by Dan Phiffer. It started with hair. Donning a pair of rubber gloves, Heather Dewey-Hagborg collected hairs from a public bathroom at Penn Station and placed them in plastic baggies for safe keeping. Then, her search expanded to include other types of forensic evidence. As the artist traverses her usual routes through New York City from her home in Brooklyn, down sidewalks onto city buses and subway cars—even into art museums—she gathers fingernails, cigarette butts and wads of discarded chewing gum. At 12:15 pm on January 6, 2013, Dewey-Hagborg collected a cigarette butt (above, right) on Myrtle Avenue (above, le

Want to See How an Artist Creates a Painting? There’s an App for That

Thu, 02 May 2013 02:30:00 GMT

The Repentir app reveals an artist’s creative process by allowing users to peel back layers of paint with the touch of their fingertips. Photo courtesy of Jonathan Hook. Artwork © Nathan Walsh An artist’s studio is usually a private space, and the hours spent with a paint-dipped brush in hand mostly solitary. So, the final products we gaze at on gallery walls are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the makers’ creative processes. For Nathan Walsh, each of his realist paintings is a culmination of four months of eight to 10-hour days in the studio. Now, thanks to a new app, we can go back in time and see how his work came to be, stroke by stroke. Repentir, a free

How Do You Build a 12-Ton Sculpture Installation? Very Slowly

Wed, 01 May 2013 03:45:11 GMT

View of Xu Bing’s Phoneix models in transit. Photo by John Tsantes When you go to the museum for a show, what you see is the final product: a painting, a photograph, an installation. But now at the Sackler, you can see the process behind the product in the new exhibit “Nine Deaths, Two Births: Xu Bing’s Phoenix Project.” The exhibit explores the two-year effort to complete Chinese contemporary artist Xu Bing’s “Phoenix Project” and offers a look into the ways both creation and destruction can be part of the artistic process. Now on view at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, the final product, two giant phoenix sculptures, were originally

At the Smithsonian Craftshow: Textile Topographies

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 02:24:35 GMT

Leah Evans titled this work “Soil Survey.” All images courtesy of the artist Though she doesn’t consciously start with a place in mind, Leah Evans says her textile wall hangings often end up becoming their own kind of geography. Taking the aesthetic of soil surveys, agricultural plots and maritime maps, Evans creates colorful abstractions of familiar forms, some of which are up for sale at the annual Smithsonian Craft Show through April 28. These zoomed out views offer serene meditations. Evans also takes the close-view in her work, echoing microscopic imaging. The two perspectives, from landscapes to cells, share a certain symmetry. At its core, our world is built up

The Strange Beauty of David Maisel’s Aerial Photographs

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 02:07:53 GMT

Terminal Mirage 2, 2003. Credit: David Maisel/INSTITUTE For almost 30 years, David Maisel has been photographing areas of environmental degradation. He hires a local pilot to take him up in a four-seater Cessna, a type of plane he likens to an old Volkswagen beetle with wings, and then, anywhere from 500 to 11,000 feet in altitude, he cues the pilot to bank the plane. With a window propped open, Maisel snaps photographs of the clear-cut forests, strip mines or evaporation ponds below. American Mine (Carlin NV 2), 2007. Credit: David Maisel/INSTITUTE The resulting images are beautiful and, at the same, absolutely unnerving. What exactly are those blood-red stains? As a nod to the con

24 Craft Creations That’ll Inspire You To Think Outside the Box

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 02:26:53 GMT

When you go to an exhibition, do you ever wish you could take some of the art home with you? Well, once a year, you can with the Smithsonian’s Craft Show organized by the Women’s Committee. The juried show is part exhibit, part sale, with proceeds benefiting the Institution. The show runs April 25 to 28 at the National Building Museum and includes a presentation by Martha Stewart on Thursday at 11 a.m. Of the 121 artists in the show, 46 are first-timers. In case you can’t make it to see the glass, ceramic and fiber creations, we present some of the standouts for your viewing pleasure. Basketry Debora Muhl designs her works in the process of making them. Using sweet g

Before and After: America’s Environmental History

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 08:21:37 GMT

A difference of nearly four decades: at top, a ski area in Aspen, Colorado last year, captured by Ron Hoffman; at bottom, the same location in 1974, shot by Dustin Wesley. Credit: US EPA In 1971, about 70 photographers, commissioned by the newly formed Environmental Protection Agency, set out to document the American landscape on just 40 rolls of film each. They trudged through coal mines and landfills, traversed deserts and farms and discovered big cities’ small corridors. The end result was DOCUMERICA, a collection of more than 15,000 shots capturing the country’s environmental problems—from water and air pollution to industrial health hazards—over six years. Decades lat

How Do You Make a Painting Out of Sounds?

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 06:00:00 GMT

Entering Jennie C. Jones’ studio in Brooklyn, a visitor is drawn to a series of artworks on a whitewashed wall. At first, they look like simple abstract canvases with warm tones of gray and black subdivided by precisely painted yellow lines and rectangles. But there’s more to them than that. For one thing, they’re made from acoustic panels. “Come closer,” Jones said. “Listen to them.” She passed her ear across two panels, pausing between them. “If you listen closely, you’ll hear what I mean.” It was true. The ambient noise in the studio, mostly muffled traffic rumblings from the nearby Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, resonated gentl

The Real Deal With the Hirshhorn Bubble

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 06:00:00 GMT

UPDATE, May 23, 2013: The Hirshhorn board of trustees was unable to reach a decisive vote on the fate of the museum's bubble project. As a result, director Richard Koshalek resigned from his position, effective later this calendar year. For more details, read our post on Around the Mall. The Smithsonian Institution will make a final decision on the project in June. A little over three years ago, what looked like a droll New Yorker cartoon landed in the pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post. An architect’s rendering depicted a glowing, baby-blue balloon bulging up through the doughnut hole of the Hirshhorn Museum, with another smaller balloon squished out to the side,

Before There Was Photoshop, These Photographers Knew How to Manipulate an Image

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 06:00:00 GMT

Jerry Uelsmann and other artists manually blended negatives to produce dreamlike sequences

Never Underestimate the Power of a Paint Tube

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 06:00:00 GMT

The French Impressionists disdained laborious academic sketches and tastefully muted paintings in favor of stunning colors and textures that conveyed the immediacy of life pulsating around them. Yet the breakthroughs of Monet, Pissarro, Renoir and others would not have been possible if it hadn’t been for an ingenious but little-known American portrait painter, John G. Rand. Like many artists, Rand, a Charleston native living in London in 1841, struggled to keep his oil paints from drying out before he could use them. At the time, the best paint storage was a pig’s bladder sealed with string; an artist would prick the bladder with a tack to get at the paint. But there was no

VIDEO: Earth Art on the Mall

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 04:04:13 GMT

As part of the African Art Museum’s new exhibition opening on Earth Day, “Earth Matters: Land as Material and Metaphor in the Arts of Africa,” the museum invited for the first time ever four artists to take over the Enid A. Haupt Garden. We talked with curator Karen Milbourne about the results, as well as the art on view indoors at the museum. Discussions of land art usually begins with the renowned American artist Robert Smithson of the 1960s and then skip across the pond to his European counterparts. Milbourne points out that “Africa is remarkably absent from the telling of these histories.” It is a mistake that stands corrected in the new exhibition wi

Egypt’s Murals Are More Than Just Art, They Are a Form of Revolution

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 06:00:00 GMT

Forgetfulness is the national disease of Egypt. But a new generation, born from the revolution that erupted during the Arab Spring, refuses to forget and insists on recording everything and anything. When I co-founded the April 6 Youth Movement to promote peaceful political activism, I believed that the most effective tools for documenting our struggle were social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter. (See Ron Rosenbaum’s profile of Mona Eltahawy for an inside story of Egypt’s revolution.) Yet, I’ve come to learn that there will always be new tools—graffiti is one of them. Graffiti was a rare sight until two years ago, when artists began documenting the crimes of

Intriguing Science Art From the University of Wisconsin

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 06:41:12 GMT

ZnO Fall Flowers. Image by Audrey Forticaux, a graduate student in the Chemistry Department. “The scientist does not study nature because it is useful; he studies it because he delights in it, and he delights in it because it is beautiful. If nature were not beautiful, it would not be worth knowing, and if nature were not worth knowing, life would not be worth living.” —Jules Henri Poincare, a French mathematician (1854-1912) Earlier this month, the University of Wisconsin-Madison announced the winners of its 2013 Cool Science Image contest. From an MRI of a monkey’s brain to the larva of a tropical caterpillar, a micrograph of the nerves in a zebrafish’s tail

What Modern Art Looks Like As Yummy Dessert

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 03:00:47 GMT

From start to finish, pastry chef Caitlin Freeman’s Mondrian cake, inspired by modernist painting, takes two days to complete. Photo by Clay MacLachlan/Modern Art Desserts: Recipes for Cakes, Cookies, Confections, and Frozen Treats Based on Iconic Works of Art © 2013 Mondrian/Holttzman Trust Artist Piet Mondrian used oil on canvas to create his famous geometric composition of neat red, yellow and blue squares and straight black lines. Caitlin Freeman’s interpretation of this work of art is slightly different, and sweeter. Her medium? Flour, sugar, eggs and vanilla extract in a baking pan. The pastry chef pulls inspiration from art and whips it into cakes, cookies, gelées and p

Collage Turns 100 and Continues to Inspire

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 07:28:21 GMT

Nick Cave’s exuberant sculpture, “Soundsuit,” from 2009 marks a recent application of assemblage. From the Hirshhorn’s collection. How is a sculpture of neon-colored Easter baskets similar to a Picasso collage? That question is at the heart of the Hirshhorn’s new exhibit, “Over, Under, Next: Experiments in Mixed Media, 1913-Present,” which brings together roughly 100 works of mixed media from the 20th century. Starting with the early experiments of George Braques in 1913, the exhibit shows the wide range of applications, from playful to nostalgic, political to personal. Drawing on mass-produced media and objects allows artists to comment on common c

An Artist Creates Artificial Fog in San Francisco

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 01:32:37 GMT

An artist’s rendering of Fog Bridge at the Exploratorium in San Francisco. Image courtesy of the Exploratorium. Artist Fujiko Nakaya believes in the transformative power of fog. The first time she realized that her fog sculptures could change a person’s memory was in 1976 during the run of Earth Talk, a fog sculpture made for the Biennale of Sydney, Australia. After seeing her sculpture, an electrician told her how he had taken his family to see the Blue Mountains in New South Wales. The mountain was fogged in at first and he couldn’t see it, but the fog cleared and the view of the mountain was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. “The instant he saw the

Q+A with Chadwick Boseman, Star of New Jackie Robinson Biopic, ’42′

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 04:53:30 GMT

Chadwick Boseman as Jackie Robinson. Courtesy of Warner Bros. Entertainment In 1947, when Jackie Robinson signed with the Brooklyn Dodgers and broke major league baseball’s color barrier, the world was still 16 years away from the March on Washington and the Civil Rights Movement as just getting organized. The Montgomery bus boycott was eight years away and housing discrimination based on race would remain legal until 1968. In his first season with the MLB, Robinson would win the league’s Rookie of the Year award. He was a perpetual All-Star. And in 1955, he helped his team secure the championship. Robinson’s success was, by no means, inevitable and in fact he earned

The Incredible True Story of Master Craftsman, Freedman Thomas Day

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 03:50:38 GMT

A later piece shows Thomas Day’s uniquely “Exuberant Style” in full bloom. Whatnot, 1853-1860. Collection of Margaret Walker Brunson Hill, courtesy of the Renwick Gallery North Carolina’s most in-demand, pre-Civil War, master cabinetmaker Thomas Day had everything it took to be Southern royalty–land, money, education. Yet, Day was a black man. Born in a community of free African-Americans in southern Virginia, Day was able to achieve such fame that his customers created a double meaning for the term “daybed,” a convenient play on his name. His story is as striking as his unique creations, marked by his very own “Exuberant Style,” of which

When Modern Art Met the Classic Chess Set

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 01:46:13 GMT

Josef Hartwig’s 1924 chess set (original image: MoMA) Last week we published a history of the Staunton chess set, which was developed, in part, out of a need to standardize pieces for international competition. In a response on his blog, Jason Kottke published some terrific images of beautiful pre-Staunton sets –the St. George, the Selenus, and the Regence– and explained some of the confusion that prompted the creation of the Staunton. While following up on some of these early chess sets, I learned that there is a trove of artist-designed chess sets in the archives of the Museum of Modern Art. The largely minimalist chess pieces, created by artists including Man Ray, Marcel Ducha

The History of the Flapper, Part 5: Who Was Behind the Fashions?

Fri, 05 Apr 2013 01:14:51 GMT

Ballerina Desiree Lubovska in a dress by Jean Patou. Photography by Adolf de Meyer, c. 1921. Have a look at the paintings of Georges Braque, Pablo Picasso, Fernand Léger and other Cubist painters whose work included hard, geometric forms and visible lines. As these artists were working in their studios, fashion designers, particularly those in France, were taking cues from their paintings. With la garçonne (the flapper, in French) in mind, the designers created fashions with the clean lines and angular forms we now associate with the 1920s-and with Cubism. The styles we’ve come to connect with Louise Brooks, Norma Talmadge, Colleen Moore and other American actresses on the silve

When The Gap Was Everywhere

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 04:28:39 GMT

Art Club 2000, Untitled (Conrans I), 1992-93. Chromogenic color print, 8 x 10 inches (20.32 x 25.4 cm). Courtesy the artist and the Estate of Colin de Land “We knew that nostalgia goes hand in hand with style as the driving force behind all these decisions. What art succeeds or gets remembered and functions again? What has shelf life? What makes it? It’s all nostalgia. We knew we were engaging in that. History is always as close as the person you’re talking to and what they’re talking about.” —Art Club 2000, Art Forum, February 2013 In 1993, seven students from Cooper Union formed an artists’ collective called Art Club 2000 with the help of Colin

Would You Like to Browse an Edo-Period Japanese Bookstore?

Fri, 05 Apr 2013 02:23:24 GMT

Performers, seen from behind, delight an audience in Katsushika Hokusai’s “Tōto shokei ichiran,” 1800. All images from the Gerhard Pulverer Collection, courtesy of the Sackler Gallery. Celebrities, the hottest tech-gadgets and a dance craze that swept the globe: these were the top Google searches of 2012. According to Google Zeitgeist, we couldn’t get enough of Kate Middleton, the iPad3 or Gangnam Style. So are we just incredibly shallow or what? The internet gets blamed for a lot these days, a perceived lack of sophistication included. Serious-minded articles query whether the internet is even responsible for making us “dumb.” But a survey of more

Every Day a Different Dish: Klari Reis’ Petri Paintings

Fri, 05 Apr 2013 01:21:38 GMT

April 4, 2013: Taylor Swift, by Klari Reis. For all 94 days of 2013 thus far, Klari Reis has kept to her resolution. The San Francisco-based artist has posted a new petri dish painting—eye candy for any sci-art lover—to her blog, The Daily Dish. Reis’ circular art pieces are explosions of color. The yellows, pinks, purples, greens, oranges, reds and blues in the paintings take on a smattering of different shapes, including amorphous blobs, radiating fireworks and wavy veins that resemble, quite intentionally on Reis’ part, what a scientist might see when gazing through a microscope. The artist gives her creations playful names, little quips, really, that spring to mind whe

Michael Benson’s Awe-Inspiring Views of the Solar System

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 01:35:38 GMT

Jupiter’s innermost large moon, Io, is extremely volcanic. “If you look closely on the upper left and upper right horizon, you can see eruptions in the process of happening,” says Benson. “We know that at least 400 volcanos are continuously blasting magma into space from Io.” Mosaic composite photograph. Galileo, July 3, 1999. Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona/Michael Benson, Kinetikon Pictures. At the outset of both his new book, Planetfall, and his exhibition of the same title now at the Washington, D.C. headquarters of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, photographer Michael Benson defines the word “planetfall.” Pla

What Major World Cities Look Like at Night, Minus the Light Pollution

Fri, 29 Mar 2013 06:00:58 GMT

San Francisco 37° 48′ 30″ N 2010-10-9 Lst 20:58. © Thierry Cohen. Last week in Collage, I interviewed Caleb Cain Marcus, a New York City-based photographer who spent the last two years documenting glaciers around the world. When he composed his photographs of glaciers in Iceland, New Zealand, Norway and Alaska, Marcus obscured the actual horizon. It was an experiment, he explained, to see how it affected his viewers’ sense of scale. The idea was born out of the Colorado native’s own experience with city living. “Living in New York City, unless you live very high up, you never see the horizon, which is really kind of odd,” said Marcus. “I’

Butterflies, Baseball and Blossoms: Tours for Your Spring Vacation

Wed, 27 Mar 2013 03:30:36 GMT

These flowers are always in bloom at the American Art Museum. Courtesy of the museum Though you might not know it judging from the forecast most places, spring has indeed arrived. And despite the unpredictable D.C. weather, the snow, sleet, cold rain and wind hasn’t kept the tourists away. Crowds are gathering in the nation’s capital for the first glimpses of the cherry blossoms. For those of you interested in making the most of your visit, the editors over here have released two new spring-themed tours to help showcase the seasonal delights both inside and outside along the Mall. The Gardens tour will take you to our many well-maintained plots around the Mall to see more

The Otherworldly Calm of Wolfgang Laib’s Glowing Beeswax Room

Tue, 26 Mar 2013 03:04:08 GMT

Wolfgang Laib, Wax Room. (Wohin bist Du gegangen-wohin gehst Du?/Where have you gone-where are you going?), 2013. The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. Photo by Lee Stalsworth. When I step into the newly installed Laib Wax Room at the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., the floral smell of beeswax wafts through my senses. Psychologists say that scents can quickly trigger memories, and this one transports me back to my childhood: The fragrance of the amber beeswax coating the walls instantly reminds me of the crenellated sheets of beeswax, dyed pink and purple, that came in a candle making kit I had as a kid. I remember rolling the sheets into long tapers for Advent. The warm

PHOTOS: Portrait Gallery Announces Winners of its Outwin Boochever Competition

Sat, 23 Mar 2013 12:00:46 GMT

Jill Wissmiller’s 2011 video portrait, “The Gilding of Lily,” is one of 48 works selected for 2013′s Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition. All images courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery Every three years, a set of fresh faces enters the halls of the National Portrait Gallery. This year, 48 faces made it. One was covered in glitter, another composed of rice, but all offered a “fresh and provocative way of looking and thinking about portraiture,” according to the museum’s interim director Wendy Wick Reaves. The national Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition brought more than 3,000 submissions, of which Reaves and a panel of six other juror

Caleb Cain Marcus’ Photos of Glaciers on a Disappearing Horizon

Thu, 21 Mar 2013 05:35:24 GMT

Perito Moreno, Plate I, 2010. Patagonia. © Caleb Cain Marcus. What happens when you lose your grip on the horizon? How much does it warp your sense of scale? One trek on the 97-square-mile Perito Moreno glacier in Patagonia and Caleb Cain Marcus was hooked by these questions of perspective. With that experience, in January 2010, the New York City-based photographer launched a two-year odyssey, documenting, in his own minimalist style, glaciers all around the world—in Iceland, Alaska, New Zealand and Norway. Marcus shares 3o photographs taken in his travels in his latest book, A Portrait of Ice. The images—three of which were recently acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art—are R

Fresh Off the 3D Printer: Henry Segerman’s Mathematical Sculptures

Fri, 15 Mar 2013 03:00:46 GMT

“Bunny” Bunny, by Henry Segerman and Craig Kaplan. The pattern on the bunny consists of copies of the word “bunny.” Listen as the artist describes the sculpture in this YouTube video. To say that Henry Segerman is schooled in mathematics is an understatement. The 33-year-old research fellow at the University of Melbourne, in Australia, earned a master’s degree in math at Oxford and then a doctorate in the subject at Stanford. But the mathematician moonlights as an artist. A mathematical artist. Segerman has found a way to illustrate the complexities of three-dimensional geometry and topology—his areas of expertise—in sculptural form. First things first

The Northern Lights—From Scientific Phenomenon to Artists’ Muse

Tue, 12 Mar 2013 01:52:18 GMT

Jesper Kongshaug’s Northern Lights display at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. Photo by Margot Schulman. The aurora borealis, also known as the Northern Lights, is a spectacle to behold—so much so, that it is hard to put into words. I think Smithsonian‘s former senior science editor, Laura Helmuth, did it justice a few years back. “Try to imagine the most colorful, textured sunset you’ve ever seen, then send it swirling and pulsing across an otherwise clear and starry sky,” she wrote. Helmuth also handily described the physics behind the natural phenomenon: “Your planet is being buffeted by solar wind—particles of protons and electrons that

The Cyrus Cylinder Goes on View at the Sackler Gallery

Fri, 08 Mar 2013 10:28:06 GMT

When Cyrus the Great conquered Babylon in 539 B.C., he encountered the same problem many political leaders face today: How do rulers keep the peace? Cyrus, the King of Persia, was in the midst of building the largest empire that the world had ever seen. By his death in 530 B.C., his reign would extend from present-day Turkey to India. For Cyrus, establishing control over vast miles of land with peoples of different cultures, languages and faiths created numerous obstacles in unifying his kingdom. The king sought order, not more war. “It is the first time anyone has had to address that challenge,” says Neil MacGregor, director of London’s British Museum. “As well as a transport system,

The (Natural) World, According to Our Photo Contest Finalists

Thu, 07 Mar 2013 04:12:12 GMT

The Milky Way Galaxy Exploding from Mount Rainier. Photo by David Morrow (Everett, Washington). Photographed at Sunrise Point in Mount Rainier National Park, Washington, October 6, 2012. David Morrow, a 27-year-old aerospace engineer by day and budding photographer by night, was perched at Sunrise Point on the evening of October 6, 2012. From the popular viewing spot in Mount Rainier National Park, he had a clear view of Rainier, the 14,411-foot beastly stratovolcano to his west. As he recalls, at about 9 p.m. the sun had set and the stars began to appear. Filling the viewfinder of his Nikon D800, quite brilliantly, was the Milky Way. “It is not often that you see the Milky Way

Winged Migration: The 77-Carat Butterfly Brooch That “Glows” in the Dark

Tue, 05 Mar 2013 09:04:00 GMT

Under the black light, the Butterfly Brooch shows off a whole separate array of fluorescent colors. Photo by Donald Hurlbert, Smithsonian Cindy Chao knew, with more than 2,300 gems of diamonds, rubies and tsavorite garnets, her butterfly brooch was masterpiece of craftsmanship. Made in 2009, the brooch found its way to the cover of Women’s Wear Daily–the first piece of jewelry ever to do so in 150 years. Known for her wearable works of art, Chao had made a name for herself as the first Taiwanese jeweler included at a Christie’s auction in 2007, and her work even debuted on the Hollywood red carpet. Now her butterfly brooch comes to the Natural History Museum’s

Women’s History Month at the Smithsonian

Tue, 05 Mar 2013 04:30:08 GMT

These two ladies are on their way to the Smithsonian to celebrate woman’s history month. Photo by Percival Bryan, courtesy of the Anacostia Community Museum Women in jazz, women in science, women in the arts, women were everywhere. Even in the days when women were supposed to just be in the kitchen, they were busy making history. And this month at the Smithsonian, a month-long celebration of those women kicks off with the American History’s exhibit on the 100th anniversary of the Woman Suffrage Parade. Get the full schedule of films, lectures and events here, but check out these highlights: LECTURE The Scientist is In Museum specialist at the National Oceanic Atmospheric

The Greatest R&B Singer Who Never Existed

Tue, 05 Mar 2013 02:02:00 GMT

From 1968 to 1977, Mingering Mike and his crew made more than 80 records and performed in sold-out venues around the world. Not bad for a made-up superstar. All photos courtesy of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Now in the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s collections: the tape recorded songs and a curious cache of hand-made imitation record albums of a make-believe R&B artist, known as Mingering Mike. The collection was discovered nine years ago when Dori Hadar, a record digger who owned more than 10,000 records at the time, found a stack of the faux albums early one morning in a Washington, DC flea market. Hadar is a criminal investigator for a Maryland law firm, and he som

Digital Files and 3D Printing—in the Renaissance?

Fri, 01 Mar 2013 08:12:21 GMT

The titular draughtsman looks through his perspective machine in this still from Peter Greenaway’s 1982 film The Draughtsman’s Contract 3D printers and digital mapping services are making it drastically easier to produce infinite identical copies of anything, for better or worse, for humanitarian or for destructive purposes. A digital map can be accessed by anyone with a smartphone or computer and a replica of Michelangelo’s David can be made at home just as easily as an assault rifle. While the relatively new technology of 3D printing is proving popular with designers, fabricators and the general public, it hasn’t yet reached the ubiquity of the home printer. B

Transforming Raw Scientific Data Into Sculpture and Song

Fri, 01 Mar 2013 08:15:00 GMT

For Nathalie Miebach, the stars aligned with this sculpture, inspired by a Hertzsprung-Russell diagram. © Nathalie Miebach In 2000, Nathalie Miebach was studying both astronomy and basket weaving at the Harvard Extension School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She was constantly lugging her shears and clamps with her into the room where she’d study projections of stars and nebulas on the wall. Understanding the science of space could be tricky, she found. “What was so frustrating to me, as a very kinesthetic learner, is that astronomy is so incredibly fascinating, but there’s nothing really tactile about it,” says Miebach. “You can’t go out and to

Snakes in a Frame: Mark Laita’s Stunning Photographs of Slithering Beasts

Tue, 26 Feb 2013 06:07:08 GMT

Rowley’s Palm Pit Viper (Bothriechis rowleyi). This venomous snake, which ranges from two and a half to five feet in length, lives in the forests of Mexico. © Mark Laita. Mark Laita captured plenty of photographs of snakes striking, their mouths agape, in the making of his new book, Serpentine. But, it wasn’t these aggressive, fear-inducing—and in his words, “sensational”—images that he was interested in. Instead, the Los Angeles-based photographer focused on the graceful contortions of the reptiles. “It is not a snake book,” says Laita. As he explained to me in a phone interview, he had no scientific criteria for selecting the species he did, thoug

10 Vintage Menus That Are a Feast for the Eyes, If Not the Stomach

Tue, 26 Feb 2013 02:17:48 GMT

The company’s top-seller, a 1940s menu from a Chicago seafood restaurant, is also one of the most visually striking. The Chicago seafood restaurant J. H. Ireland Grill opened in 1906 and had a colorful client list. It attracted everyone from gangster John Dillinger (who preferred the grill’s frog legs) to lawyer Clarence Darrow, who went there to celebrate big wins. But the co-founders of Cool Culinaria, which finds and sells prints of vintage menus, remember it for a different reason: its menu design. As colorful as its past, the best-selling menu uses bright colors to convey the fresh and vibrant ingredients to be found inside. Menus from across the country featured fant

The Story of How An Artist Created a Genetic Hybrid of Himself and a Petunia

Fri, 22 Feb 2013 02:36:00 GMT

DNA splicing joins one of the artist’s genes (red) and an antibioticresistance gene (yellow) in a bacterium, which inserts the genes into petunia cells. Photo by Eduardo Kac. The most radical figure in the biodesign movement is Eduardo Kac, who doesn’t merely incorporate existing living things in his artworks—he tries to create new life-forms. “Transgenic art,” he calls it. There was Alba, an albino bunny that glowed green under a black light. Kac had commissioned scientists in France to insert a fluorescent protein from Aequoria victoria, a bioluminescent jellyfish, into a rabbit egg. The startling creature, born in 2000, was not publicly exhibited, but

With Biodesign, Life is Not Only the Subject of Art, But the Medium Too

Thu, 21 Feb 2013 07:34:00 GMT

“This project was inspired by the universe of unseen organisms that inhabit our bodies,” author William Myers says of Julia Lohmann’s mural Co-Existence exhibited in 2009 in London. Photo courtesy of The Wellcome Trust. When Julia Lohmann set out to create an artwork for the street-level windows of the London headquarters of the Wellcome Trust, the health research foundation, she chose a classic subject: the female body. But where Lohmann broke from tradition was her medium. The German designer created her large-scale portrait of two reclining nudes using 9,000 petri dishes, each containing an image of live bacteria. Suzanne Lee, a British fashion designer, is attem

Locking Eyes With Spiders and Insects

Wed, 20 Feb 2013 06:03:40 GMT

Male Paraphidippus aurantius (a species of jumping spider), by Thomas Shahan Thomas Shahan came eye to eye with a jumping spider in his backyard about seven years ago when he was living and attending high school in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Since that first encounter, he has been “smitten,” according to a December 2011 spread of his macrophotography in National Geographic. “I began learning about their names and their ways, then looking for them in local parks and reserves like the Oxley Nature Center,” he wrote in the magazine. Holcocephala fusca (robber fly), by Thomas Shahan For the past seven years, Shahan has developed a hobby of photographing arthropods—insects,

Birds and Bards: Beautiful Japanese Images from the Edo Period

Wed, 20 Feb 2013 03:48:35 GMT

Birds were a popular part of Japanese art during the Edo period. Eagle hanging scroll by Kishi Ganku, ca. 1802. Courtesy of the Freer Gallery Two new exhibits at the Freer Gallery explore the riches of the Japanese art collections and reveal how pieces of everyday life make appearances in works of art. Together, “Arts of Japan: Edo Aviary and Poetic License: Making Old Worlds New” show how artists of the Edo period (1603 to 1868) were influenced by a growing field of natural history, as well as evolving literary traditions and practices. Selections from the exhibits, depicting some of these elegant representations of birds and bards, are featured here. Poetic License The

“Freakish Absurdities:” A Century Ago, An Art Show Shocked the Country

Fri, 15 Feb 2013 01:30:49 GMT

Few interior views of the revolutionary 1913 Armory Show remain, but the Archives of American Art holds one of the most comprehensive collections of related documents, from organizers’ letters to critical response. Courtesy of Wikimedia Posters advertised a heady guest list for the 1913 Armory Show held in New York City, including, Matisse, Brancusi, van Gogh and Cézanne. It would have been a once-in-a-lifetime gathering had it been true and not just a little bit of ornery fun on the part of organizers (unfortunately, van Gogh died in 1890 and Cézanne in 1906). Even without them, the show, which celebrates its 100th anniversary February 17th through March 15th, managed to make h

Flower Power, Redefined

Wed, 12 Dec 2012 03:09:50 GMT

Beehive ginger. © Andrew Zuckerman. With a stark white background and a splash of color, minimalist master Andrew Zuckerman has reinvented the way we look at the world around us. Known for his crisp photographs of celebrities and wildlife, Zuckerman turned his lens on the plant kingdom and captured 150 species in full bloom for his latest book Flower. © Andrew Zuckerman. The filmmaker/photographer culled through over 300 species—even visiting the Smithsonian Institution— to select plants both familiar and exotic. Armed with a 65 mega-pixel camera, Zuckerman’s images capture the color, texture and form of each flower and showcase them in a way never seen before. Smithsonian.com

This Artist Uses Meat As His Medium

Mon, 11 Feb 2013 07:01:42 GMT

“United Steaks”, image courtesy of the artist. Let’s just say Dominic Episcopo has sunk his teeth into the “meat” of Americana. In his Kickstarter project, “Meat America,” the photographer has paired iconic images from Lincoln to Elvis (“Love Me Tender”) with hunks of red-meat art. He spent six years gathering what he describes as uniquely American images for the coffee table book-to-be “manifesto” that hits shelves later this month. “I was absorbed in this world of meat. When I was at the supermarket or at a restaurant, I thought, ‘What else could that be besides a hot dog?’,” he says. “I go in with drawings into the supermarket—they know me

The Unsettling Beauty of Lethal Pathogens

Thu, 07 Feb 2013 09:34:38 GMT

E. coli, by Luke Jerram. Few non-scientists would be able to distinguish the E. coli virus bacteria from the HIV virus under a microscope. Artist Luke Jerram, however, can describe in intricate detail the shapes of a slew of deadly viruses pathogens. He is intrigued by them, as a subject matter, because of their inherent irony. That is, something as virulent as SARS can actually, in its physical form, be quite delicate. Clearly adept at scientific work—as an undergraduate, the Brit was offered a spot on a university engineering program—Jerram chose to pursue art instead. “Scientists and artists start by asking similar questions about the natural world,” he told SEED magazine in a 2009

The Year’s Most Outstanding Science Visualizations

Tue, 05 Feb 2013 10:09:00 GMT

First Place and People’s Choice, Photography: Biomineral Single Crystals. Credit: Pupa U. P. A. Gilbert and Christopher E. Killian; University of Wisconsin, Madison. When Pupa U. P. A. Gilbert, a biophysicist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and her colleague Christopher E. Killian saw the scanning electron micrograph that they took of a sea urchin’s tooth, they were dumbstruck, says the journal Science. “I had never seen anything that beautiful,” Gilbert told the publication. The individual crystals of calcite that form an urchin’s tooth are pointy, interlocking pieces; as the outermost crystals decay, others come to the surface, keeping the too

Honey, I Blew Up the Bugs

Mon, 04 Feb 2013 04:15:08 GMT

A leaf grasshopper (Phyllophorina kotoshoensis). Courtesy of the museum exhibition “Bugs…Outside the Box.” As a kid, I was an avid bug collector. I had one of those screen-covered bug boxes, and I carried it with me on backyard adventures and forays into the woods behind my house. I have fond memories of the first nights of summer when the fireflies came out–I’d cup the air and catch one, put it in my box and lie belly in the grass, with the box at my nose, watching the little thing light up. My brother and I had ant farms, sea-monkeys and kits to grow monarch butterflies from caterpillars and frogs from tadpoles. Seeing little critters up-close was fasci

Seven Must-See Art-Meets-Science Exhibitions in 2013

Fri, 28 Dec 2012 05:05:14 GMT

Courtesy of the Water Tank Project. This New Year’s Eve, in addition to the typical resolutions to exercise more or spend more time with family, consider resolving to take better advantage of the cultural offerings of America’s cities and towns. Whether you seek to attend concerts, listen to lectures by authors and visiting scholars or become regulars at area museums, a few exhibitions slated for 2013 on the intersection of art and science will be must-sees in the New Year. The Water Tank Project Courtesy of the Water Tank Project. The skyline of New York City will be transformed next summer when 300 water tanks in the five boroughs become public works of art, calling at

Slice of Life: Artistic Cross Sections of the Human Body

Thu, 20 Dec 2012 06:30:35 GMT

Female Torso, by Lisa Nilsson. Photo by John Polak. Lisa Nilsson was on an antiquing trip three or four years ago when a gilt crucifix caught her eye. The cross was crafted using a Renaissance-era technique called quilling, where thin paper is rolled to form different shapes and patterns. “I thought it was really beautiful, so I made a couple of small, abstract gilt pieces,” says Nilsson, an artist based in North Adams, Massachusetts. She incorporated these first forays in quilling into her mixed media assemblages. Almost serendipitously, as Nilsson was teaching herself to mold and shape the strips of Japanese mulberry paper, a friend sent her a century-old, hand-colored

Mona Lisa Travels by Laser, to Space And Back Again

Fri, 25 Jan 2013 06:13:38 GMT

Art buffs are not the only ones intrigued by Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. In a fun experiment in 2005, a group of researchers from the University of Amsterdam analyzed Mona Lisa’s famous smile. They ran a scanned reproduction of the painting through “emotion recognition” software, which concluded that Mona was precisely 83 percent happy, 9 percent disgusted, 6 percent fearful, 2 percent angry, 1 percent neutral—and completely unsurprised. In 2010, scientists in France used X-ray fluorescence spectrometry on the painting and found that da Vinci applied layers upon thin layers of glazes and paints to achieve the subject’s flawless complexion. Then,

The Story Behind Banksy

Thu, 24 Jan 2013 04:04:00 GMT

When Time magazine selected the British artist Banksy—graffiti master, painter, activist, filmmaker and all-purpose provocateur—for its list of the world’s 100 most influential people in 2010, he found himself in the company of Barack Obama, Steve Jobs and Lady Gaga. He supplied a picture of himself with a paper bag (recyclable, naturally) over his head. Most of his fans don’t really want to know who he is (and have loudly protested Fleet Street attempts to unmask him). But they do want to follow his upward trajectory from the outlaw spraying—or, as the argot has it, “bombing”—walls in Bristol, England, during the 1990s to the a

Origami: A Blend of Sculpture and Mathematics

Wed, 23 Jan 2013 03:17:00 GMT

This origami structure, called “Green Cycles,” by Erik Demaine and his father Martin required a week of improvisation to assemble. Credit: Renwick Gallery The shape of a Pringle, mathematically speaking, is called a hyperbolic paraboloid. Artists have been folding paper into this shape for years. The twist? Hyperbolic paraboloids shouldn’t exist in origami—it’s impossible to make such a 3D shape using only the creases pressed into paper by hand. By that logic, some of Erik Demaine’s artwork shouldn’t exist either. Demaine, the world’s top computational origami theorist, has created a series of sculptures by folding concentric squares into

Polaroid Portraits: Capturing President Obama's Second Inauguration

Wed, 23 Jan 2013 02:33:06 GMT

We sent photojournalist Tamir Kalifa to the inauguration to ask attendees why they came to the National Mall

The Gory Details of Artist Katrina van Grouw’s Unfeathered Birds

Fri, 18 Jan 2013 03:30:06 GMT

Great Hornbill (Buceros bicornis). © Katrina van Grouw. Katrina van Grouw’s new book The Unfeathered Bird is a work of passion. A former curator in the ornithological division of London’s Natural History Museum, the fine artist, based in Buckinghamshire, England, has used her experience in ornithology and taxidermy to draw, over the course of her career, 385 beautiful illustrations of birds—all, as the book’s title suggests, without their feathers. Her work shows the skeletal and muscular systems of 200 different species, from ostriches to hummingbirds, parrots to penguins, in life-like poses. Collage of Arts and Sciences interviewed van Grouw by email. When did you

The First Major Museum Show to Focus on Smell

Wed, 16 Jan 2013 01:09:00 GMT

Installation view of The Art of the Scent exhibition at the Museum of Art and Design in New York. (image: Brad Farwell) While walking through the Museum of Art and Design’s exhibition “The Art of the Scent (1889-2012)” my mind was flooded with memories of a nearly forgotten childhood friend, an ex-girlfriend and my deceased grandmother. It was a surprisingly powerful and complex experience, particularly because it was evoked in a nearly empty gallery by an invisible art form—scent. It’s often cited that smell is the sense most associated with memory (both are processed by the brain’s limbic system), and the iconic fragrances exh

Covered in Ink, Cross-sections of Trees Make Gorgeous Prints

Tue, 15 Jan 2013 05:16:00 GMT

Ash, 80 years old. © Bryan Nash Gill. When I phoned Bryan Nash Gill last Thursday morning, he was on his way back from a boneyard. The New Hartford, Connecticut-based artist uses the term not in its traditional sense, but instead to describe a good spot for finding downed trees. “I have a lot of boneyards in Connecticut,” says Gill. “Especially with these big storms that we have had recently. Right now, in the state, the power companies are cutting trees back eight feet from any power line. There is wood everywhere.” Eastern Red Cedar, 77 years old. © Bryan Nash Gill. Gill collects dead and damaged limbs from a variety of indigenous trees—a

A 24-Hour Movie That May Be the Biggest (and Best) Supercut Ever

Fri, 28 Dec 2012 04:41:56 GMT

In most cases, movies are a two-hour escape from the minutiae of daily life. Watching Christian Marclay’s The Clock—a massive and impressive video supercut now at the Museum of Modern Art in New York—is a full-scale immersion in it. Marclay, a Swiss video and sound artist, has masterfully knit together more than 10,000 film clips in service of one animating idea: the mundane minute-by-minute passage of time. The monumental work is 24 hours in total, with each clip featuring a clock or watch showing the actual time of the world outside. The segments range in length from just a few seconds to a minute or more, and come from a broad range of films—everything from the

Karen Cusolito Lights Her Artwork on Fire

Tue, 20 Nov 2012 07:00:00 GMT

Meet the artist who burns her creations to amazing effect

Bringing the Color Back to Ancient Greece

Mon, 22 Oct 2012 06:00:00 GMT

The Greeks took their beauty seriously. It was a beauty contest, after all, that touched off the Trojan War. Athena, Hera and Aphrodite vied for Paris to decide who was the fairest among them. After Aphrodite promised him the love of the most beautiful mortal woman, Paris carried off Helen to Troy. Thus began the true mother of all wars. As the goddess of love, beauty and sexual pleasure, Aphrodite inspired cult worship and challenged artists to render her in suitably magnificent form. We have inherited an image of her as an idealized nude chiseled in white marble, immortalized by works such as Praxiteles’ Aphrodite of Knidos or the Venus de Milo. That image is dead wrong, accordi

Why Camille Paglia is Alarmed About the Future of Art

Mon, 22 Oct 2012 06:00:00 GMT

My first moments of enchantment by beauty occurred in a church and a movie theater. The interior of St. Anthony of Padua church in Endicott, New York, the upstate factory town where I was born, was lined with richly colored stained-glass windows and niches holding life-size plaster statues of saints in sumptuous robes or silver armor. Paying no attention to the action on the altar, I would stare transfixed at those glorious figures, which seemed alive. At the theater downtown, I was mesmerized by the colossal Technicolor images of Hollywood stars, who seemed as numinous as living gods. Because of those vivid early impressions, my sense of beauty remains skewed toward the lavish and theatr

George Washington and Abigail Adams Get an Extreme Makeover

Fri, 05 Oct 2012 06:24:02 GMT

Inside the conservation lab at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. , Joanna Dunn painstakingly wipes a solvent-soaked cotton swab across the bridge of Joseph Anthony’s nose. Her subject, a prominent merchant at the outset of the American republic, stares out from a 1787 depiction by master portraitist Gilbert Stuart. The force of White’s gaze has been muted, its intensity obscured by a layer of hazy, yellowed varnish. As Dunn cleans the canvas, however, a transformation takes hold. “The varnish makes everything dull, and flat,” Dunn says. “When you get it off, you see all the subtle details—the ruddiness in his cheek, the twinkle in his eye&m

Why Polaroid Inspired Both Steve Jobs and Andy Warhol

Thu, 04 Oct 2012 05:18:15 GMT

Few companies can claim they altered the path of an entire medium but that’s exactly what Polaroid did in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s to photography. Founded by Edwin H. Land in 1937, Polaroid was the Apple of its day and Land, the original Steve Jobs. The idea factory churned out iconic products such as the SX-70, the one-step instant camera that now resides in the Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum in New York City. In his new book, “Instant: The Story of Polaroid,” Christopher Bonanos of New York chronicles the rise and fall of the company and details how it changed the way we save memories. What made you want to write a book about Polaroid?

Ai Weiwei on His Favorite Artists, Living in New York and Why the Government is Afraid of Him

Wed, 22 Aug 2012 06:00:00 GMT

Do you feel a connection to any artists that came before the Communist period in China? Landscape paintings or ways of working with ceramics, for example. Why is old Chinese art important? China has a long history, and also a vast area of land. About 2,000 or 3,000 years ago, the Zhou Dynasty had a high performance in art: Early jade, bronzes—the skill and concept and how they actually crafted is a miracle—it was the highest form in human art. [At that time] the whole culture had this kind of total condition, with philosophy, aesthetics, morality and craftsmanship—it was just one; it’s never been separated. That’s why art was so powerful. It’s not ju

Is Ai Weiwei China’s Most Dangerous Man?

Wed, 22 Aug 2012 06:00:00 GMT

Last year, the editors of ArtReview magazine named the Chinese dissident Ai Weiwei the most powerful artist in the world. It was an unusual choice. Ai’s varied, scattershot work doesn’t fetch the highest prices at auction, and critics, while they admire his achievement, don’t treat him as a master who has transformed the art of his period. In China, Ai—a brave and unrelenting critic of the authoritarian regime—has spent time in jail, was not allowed by the government to leave Beijing for a year and cannot travel without official permission. As a result, he has become a symbol of the struggle for human rights in China, but not preeminently so. He is too quixoti

Incredible Photos of the Artist Who Makes Himself Invisible

Wed, 22 Aug 2012 06:00:00 GMT

Look closely at these photographs. Shut down by the Chinese government, Liu Bolin has mastered the art of disappearing

When the Olympics Gave Out Medals for Art

Wed, 25 Jul 2012 04:17:20 GMT

At the 1912 Summer Olympics in Stockholm, American Walter Winans took the podium and waved proudly to the crowd. He had already won two Olympic medals—a gold for sharpshooting at the 1908 London Games, as well as a silver for the same event in 1912—but the gold he won at Stockholm wasn’t for shooting, or running, or anything particularly athletic at all. It was instead awarded for a small piece of bronze he had cast earlier that year: a 20-inch-tall horse pulling a small chariot. For his work, An American Trotter, Winans won the first ever Olympic gold medal for sculpture. For the first four decades of competition, the Olympics awarded official medals for painting, sculp

Barbara Kruger's Artwork Speaks Truth to Power

Wed, 27 Jun 2012 05:57:31 GMT

Barbara Kruger is heading to Washington bearing the single word that has the power to shake the seat of government to its roots and cleave its sclerotic, deep-frozen deadlock. What is the word? Well, first let me introduce Barbara Kruger. If you don’t know her name, you’ve probably seen her work in art galleries, on magazine covers or in giant installations that cover walls, billboards, buildings, buses, trains and tram lines all over the world. Her new installation at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., scheduled to open August 20—the one that focuses on that powerful, power-zapping word (yes, I will tell you what it is)—will be visible from two floors of pu

Winners of Nature's Best Photography

Thu, 24 May 2012 09:44:21 GMT

Through January 2013, the Natural History Museum is home to stunning photographs of wildlife around the world

How Posters Helped Shape America and Change the World

Wed, 23 May 2012 10:05:27 GMT

One enthusiast's collection, on exhibit at the Oakland Museum of California, offers a sweeping look at grass-roots movements since the 1960s

Chickens Dressed Like Napoleon, Einstein and Other Historical Figures

Mon, 21 May 2012 12:00:00 GMT

They came, they clucked and they conquered. Get the story behind these absurd portraits and how they came to be

What Do Jackson Pollock, Tennessee Williams and Norman Mailer Have in Common?

Mon, 21 May 2012 06:00:00 GMT

There are no more storied shelters in America than the dune shacks of Cape Cod, an encampment of 19 primitive huts on an isolated stretch of beach near Provincetown, Massachusetts. In 1916, the playwright Eugene O’Neill first arrived in this seaside wilderness, “a grand place,” as he put it, “to be alone and undisturbed.” He produced Anna Christie (1920) and The Hairy Ape (1922) inside a structure later lost to erosion. Jack Kerouac, by his own account, conceived part of On the Road at the enclave in 1950. From the 1920s on, major figures in American arts and letters—Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, Tennessee Williams and E.E. Cummings—gravi

Re-envisioning the Statue of Liberty

Tue, 15 May 2012 06:33:42 GMT

Dislocation has been a recurrent theme for the Switzerland-based artist Danh Vo, who in 1979, at age 4, escaped with his family by boat from Vietnam and was eventually granted asylum in Denmark. Vo—recently declared “one of the most stimulating figures on the international [art] scene” by the New York Times—has reimagined the greatest symbol of the worldwide refugee experience: He is re-creating the Statue of Liberty, piece by massive piece. One hundred components are in a traveling exhibition, currently in a 21,000-square-foot space at the National Gallery of Denmark in Copenhagen. He envisions his monumental Statue of Liberty sculptures as works-in-progress. He

How Futurist Art Inspired the Design of a BMW

Thu, 22 Mar 2012 06:00:00 GMT

The Futurists stormed Italy in the early 20th century, picking a fight with anything pretty, sentimental or passé. They celebrated violence, speed, masculinity and, above all, modernity. The art movement’s 2009 centennial brought a rash of retrospectives to Italy and elsewhere. The biggest-ever American exhibition is scheduled to open at the Guggenheim in 2014. Since the Futurists proposed the destruction of museums (“cemeteries,” in their parlance), they would have hated these tributes. But they would have been pleased to discover that their influence remains potent in the 21st century. In 1909, when Futurism’s father, the poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti,

The Essentials: Video Games

Mon, 05 Mar 2012 09:48:17 GMT

A couple of years ago, video game designer Kellee Santiago and film critic Roger Ebert got into an online debate over whether video games qualify as art. Ebert, a naysayer when it comes to the subject, watched a TED talk that Santiago gave at the University of Southern California in March 2009. In it, Santiago declared that video games are art, and Ebert dug his heels in further, poking what he saw as holes in the designer’s argument. In her defense, Santiago noted Ebert’s inexperience with gaming and wrote, “It’s good for dinner party discussion and entertaining as an intellectual exercise, but it’s just not a serious debate anymore.” Santiago, the co-

The Hidden History of a Rock ’n’ Roll Hitmaker

Tue, 28 Feb 2012 06:02:27 GMT

Like the clarion call of a medieval trumpet, the money to be made in the record business at the dawn of the ’60s in Los Angeles would prove to be an irresistible draw to every kind of hopeful. Essentially music’s version of the California Gold Rush, the varied and rapidly growing number of opportunities to make some cash and a name in rock and roll began to attract talent, ambition, greed and egotism, all in seemingly equal measure. And from this diverse migratory mix—aside from the scores of singers, songwriters and others who made the journey—there evolved a core clique of instrument-playing sidemen who gradually began to stand out from the rest. These musicians n

Errol Morris: The Thinking Man's Detective

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 07:00:00 GMT

My favorite private-eye trick is the one I learned about from Errol Morris. You probably know Morris as an Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker. Roger Ebert called his first film, Gates of Heaven, one of “the ten greatest films ever made.” With The Thin Blue Line, Morris dramatically freed an innocent man imprisoned on a murder rap. In The Fog of War he extracted a confession from Robert McNamara, getting the tightly buttoned-up technocrat to admit “[we] were behaving as war criminals” for planning the 1945 firebombing of Tokyo, which burned to death 100,000 civilians in a single night. You may also know that Morris is the author of the recent massive, fascinating

Seven Famous Photographers Who Used Polaroids

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 07:00:00 GMT

For artists such as Andy Warhol and Ansel Adams, the Polaroid SX-70 was the digital camera of its day

The Other Vitruvian Man

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 07:00:00 GMT

In 1986, during a visit to the Biblioteca Comunale Ariostea, in Ferrara, Italy, an architect named Claudio Sgarbi called up an anonymous copy of the Ten Books on Architecture, written by the Roman architect Vitruvius. The only such treatise to have survived from antiquity, the Ten Books is a classic, studied by historians of architecture and antiquity alike. Early copies are of great interest to scholars, but few had any idea this one existed. Academic inventories made no mention of it, and the Ariostea catalog described it unpromisingly as only a partial manuscript. When Sgarbi took a look at it, he discovered, to his amazement, that in fact it contained almost the full text of the Ten B

Sanjay Patel: A Hipster’s Guide to Hinduism

Wed, 21 Dec 2011 09:52:02 GMT

Sanjay Patel arrives at the entrance of San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum, breathless. His vahana, or vehicle, is a silver mountain bike; his white helmet is festooned with multicolored stickers of bugs and goddesses. Though we’ve barely met, Patel takes my arm. He propels me through dimly lit halls, past austere displays of Korean vases and Japanese armor, until we arrive at a brightly lit gallery. This room is as colorful as a candy store, its walls plastered with vivid, playful graphics of Hindu gods, demons and fantastic beasts. “This is awesome.” Patel spins through the gallery, as giddy as a first-time tourist in Times Square. “It’s a dream come t

Annie Leibovitz's American Pilgrimage

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 07:00:00 GMT

In a new book and exhibition, the esteemed photographer pursues a passion for history and lets us see familiar icons in a fresh light

More Astounding Modern Art Collectors

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 07:00:00 GMT

Peggy Guggenheim 1898-1979 Popular art soirees in Guggenheim’s Manhattan town house inspired the heiress to open the Art of This Century gallery, which became the 1940s cutting-edge venue for modern art and emerging artists, particularly American Abstract Expressionists. Guggenheim exhibited their work, arranged solo shows, exposed them to European modernists and provided stipends. The artists she helped launch include Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still, Robert Motherwell and Jackson Pollock, said by some critics to be the greatest artist of the century. Dorothy Vogel 1935- and Herbert Vogel 1922- Herb was a postal clerk and Dorothy a librarian in 1965 when the New York City couple

An Eye for Genius: The Collections of Gertrude and Leo Stein

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 07:00:00 GMT

With its acid colors and slapdash brush strokes, the painting still jolts the eye. The face, blotched in mauve and yellow, is highlighted with thick lines of lime green; the background is a rough patchwork of pastel tints. And the hat! With its high blue brim and round protuberances of pink, lavender and green, the hat is a phosphorescent landscape by itself, improbably perched on the head of a haughty woman whose downturned mouth and bored eyes seem to be expressing disdain at your astonishment. If the picture startles even after a century has passed, imagine the reaction when Henri Matisse’s Woman with a Hat was first exhibited in 1905. One outraged critic ridiculed the room at th

Clyfford Still's Sublime Art

Thu, 17 Nov 2011 07:00:00 GMT

The American painter Clyfford Still (1904-1980) thought he was un-categorizeable, but many experts consider him to be, along with Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman, one of the few who painted the “abstract sublime.” The art critic and historian Irving Sandler says, “Jackson Pollock may have been the more important artist, but Still was, in my opinion, the greater innovator.” Still’s reputation is about to get a boost from the $29 million Clyfford Still Museum, designed by the star architect Brad Cloepfil and due to open November 18 in Denver. Its collection comprises more than 800 paintings and some 1,600 works on paper. Still, who was born in North Dakota, took

How to Install a 340-ton Work of Art

Wed, 09 Nov 2011 09:55:19 GMT

A pioneer in monumental artworks made of earth and stone, Michael Heizer had waited 40 years for the perfect rock for one of his projects. It was 1968 when he first conceived of a large-scale work that would suspend a giant boulder over a trench cut in the earth. Four decades later at a stone quarry in Riverside, California, Heizer spotted his prize—a pyramid-shaped, 340-ton chunk of granite that had been dynamited from a cliff. He proclaimed it “the most beautiful rock I’ve ever seen.” In a few weeks, the piece he designed so long ago, called Levitated Mass, will be installed at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art with the 21-foot-high monolith as its crowning ce

America’s Forgotten Landscape Painter: Robert S. Duncanson

Thu, 20 Oct 2011 05:16:23 GMT

In the mid-1860s, an African-American artist arrived at the home of England’s poet laureate, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, on the Isle of Wight. He brought with him his most celebrated painting, Land of the Lotus Eaters, based on a poem by the great man of letters. Tennyson was delighted with the image. “Your landscape,” he proclaimed, “is a land in which one loves to wander and linger.” The artist, Robert S. Duncanson, known in America as “the greatest landscape painter in the West,” now stood poised to conquer England. "He invented a unique place for himself that no other African-American had attained at that time,” says art historian Claire Pe

America's 19th Century Highway: The River

Wed, 19 Oct 2011 06:00:00 GMT

At the start of the 19th century, the United States was still a place where many people ate what they grew and many women made the family clothes. But with technological innovations such as the railroad, telegraph and steamboat, the United States grew into one of the world’s leading industrial powers. Meanwhile, the country had become a transcontinental empire, which these innovations in transportation and communications helped facilitate. The Great American Hall of Wonders, an exhibition at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., presents a graphic representation of this transformative era. It emphasizes precisely those forces of science and technology that were dr

Ralph Eugene Meatyard: The Man Behind the Masks

Wed, 19 Oct 2011 06:00:00 GMT

One day in 1958 or ’59, Ralph Eugene Meatyard walked into a Woolworths store in Lexington, Kentucky. An optician by trade, Meatyard was also a photographer—a “dedicated amateur,” he called himself—and he kept an eye out for props. He might drop by an antiques store to buy eerie dolls or emerge from a hobby shop with a jar of snakes or mice cured in formalin. In Woolworths, he came upon a set of masks whose features suggested a marriage of Picasso and a jack-o’-lantern. “He immediately liked their properties,” recalls his son Christopher, who was with him at the time. Meatyard père bought a few dozen. “They were latex and had a v

When Gertrude Stein Toured America

Fri, 14 Oct 2011 09:13:39 GMT

When people envision the life and times of Gertrude Stein, it is often in the context of 1920s Paris. Her home at 27 rue de Fleurus was a fabulously bohemian outpost, where she, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse and writers, including Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, discussed the merits of art. It was the type of salon that makes writers, artists and historians swoon, “If only I were a fly on the wall.” Perhaps that is why Woody Allen transports his time-traveling character there in his latest film, Midnight in Paris. Gil, a modern-day Hollywood screenwriter portrayed by Owen Wilson, asks Stein (with Kathy Bates in the role) to read his fledgling novel. The story of the w

A Tribute to a Great Artist: Steve Jobs

Thu, 06 Oct 2011 08:04:59 GMT

Steve Jobs, who died October 5 after resigning in August as CEO of Apple, the company he co-founded, had many talents. But what set him apart from other computer wizards was his artistic sense. He continually used the word “taste” in explaining what was ready to be manufactured at Apple, and what wasn’t ready yet—what he had to reject. The Apple computer, the iPhone, the iPad and the iPod are all strikingly beautiful objects; the clarity of their visual design matches the way they function. It’s clear that Steve Jobs was an artist and that his artistry worked at many levels: it was a visual sensitivity that extended outward to a way of thinking about how thing

Bringing Andy Warhol’s Shadows to the Hirshhorn

Fri, 23 Sep 2011 08:34:39 GMT

It was five o’clock and lightly snowing when a limo picked up Andy Warhol and took him to the Heiner Friedrich Gallery at 393 West Broadway in SoHo. Earlier in the week, Warhol’s assistants, Ronnie Cutrone and Stephen Mueller, had hung his latest work there, a series of boldly colored paintings titled Shadows. And, on this late-January night in 1979, the gallery was hosting a preview. In his diary, Warhol described how “all the usual fantasy kids that go to openings” circled the gallery with cameras, looking to snap photographs of celebrities, who hummed around the artist. Truman Capote was there. But the only thought Warhol cared to scrawl down about the 83 painti

Ask an Expert: What is the Difference Between Modern and Postmodern Art?

Fri, 23 Sep 2011 06:44:27 GMT

All trends become clearer with time. Looking at art even 15 years out, “you can see the patterns a little better,” says Melissa Ho, assistant curator at the Hirshhorn Museum. “There are larger, deeper trends that have to do with how we are living in the world and how we are experiencing it.” So what exactly is modern art? The question, she says, is less answerable than endlessly discussable. Technically, says Ho, modern art is “the cultural expression of the historical moment of modernity.” But how to unpack that statement is contested. One way of defining modern art, or anything really, is describing what it is not. Traditional academic painting and s

Willem de Kooning Still Dazzles

Mon, 19 Sep 2011 06:00:00 GMT

In 1926, Willem de Kooning, a penniless, 22-year-old commercial artist from the Netherlands, stowed away on a freighter bound for America. He had no papers and spoke no English. After his ship docked in Newport News, Virginia, he made his way north with some Dutch friends toward New York City. At first he found his new world disappointing. “What I saw was a sort of Holland,” he recalled in the 1960s. “Lowlands. What the hell did I want to go to America for?” A few days later, however, as de Kooning passed through a ferry and train terminal in Hoboken, New Jersey, he noticed a man at a counter pouring coffee for commuters by sloshing it into a line of cups. “He

You're Invited to Smithsonian magazine's Museum Day!

Thu, 15 Sep 2011 07:04:20 GMT

Free Admission at Participating Venues with Ticket on Saturday, September 24th, 2011.

The Museum Day Ticket provides FREE ADMISSION to one person, plus a guest.

In the spirit of Smithsonian Museums, who offer free admission everyday, Museum Day is an annual event hosted by Smithsonian magazine in which participating museums across the country open their doors to anyone presenting a Museum Day Ticket...for free.

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Handcrafted "Tiles for America" Project Remembers 9/ll

Mon, 12 Sep 2011 03:05:33 GMT

Among the scores of events that New York City prepared to mark the 10th anniversary of 9/11—the opening of the 9/11 Memorial at the World Trade Center site, a Sunday-long series of services at historic Trinity Church on Wall Street, an NYPD Fife and Drum parade and concert at Town Hall, to mention just a few—one unusual monument returns to the place where it has been since Sept. 14, 2001. Tiles for America, a spontaneous, hand-made memorial in the West Village began when neighborhood potter Lorrie Veasey made hundreds of ceramic tiles painted with angels and American flags. Posted on a chain link fence near now-closed St. Vincent’s Hospital, they attracted admiration and

A New Look at the Men of Baseball’s Past

Thu, 01 Sep 2011 06:58:43 GMT

Charles Conlon’s classic photographs of baseball players from the early 20th century offer a glimpse into a familiar sport at an otherworldly time

Fay Ray: The Supermodel Dog

Wed, 17 Aug 2011 06:00:00 GMT

Fay Ray hadn’t had a lot of modeling experience when William Wegman put her on roller skates. He says that the image he titled Roller Rover was “one of the first” to feature his beloved cinnamon-gray Weimaraner. John Reuter, a Polaroid technician who assisted on the Roller Rover shoot in 1987 and on many other Wegman photo shoots, says it was “the first or second.” It is agreed, however, that the picture is a definitive example of the work that has made Wegman one of the world’s most widely known conceptual artists (as well as a powerful brand name), and that Fay Ray was destined to be a star from the moment she put on wheels. She was 6 months old when

Samuel Morse's Other Masterpiece

Wed, 17 Aug 2011 06:00:00 GMT

On May 24, 1844, Samuel F. B. Morse wowed the American public when he sent the biblical message “What hath God wrought?” by telegraph, from the Supreme Court room in the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. to Baltimore. Seventeen years later, telegraph lines spanned the entire country. Then, by 1866, a cable was laid across the Atlantic Ocean. But lesser known is Morse’s earlier attempt at connecting North America and Europe—through his art, in a painting called Gallery of the Louvre. Before Morse was an inventor, he was an artist. A Massachusetts native, he graduated from Yale in 1810 and went on to study art, first in Boston under the painter Washington Allston and

Ned Kahn: The Limits of the Knowable

Tue, 02 Aug 2011 06:19:03 GMT

Last June, sculptor Ned Kahn’s 17-year-old son approached him with a box. “I got you a traditional Father’s Day gift,” Ben Kahn warned his Dad. “But it’s not a traditional Father’s Day gift.“ Inside was a tie—made of polished, perforated aluminum. The gift was especially significant because Ben had fashioned it in the workshop of San Francisco’s Exploratorium: the legendary hands-on science museum where Ned had served as artist-in-residence for 14 years. Even so, the tie seemed incongruous; a more appropriate gift might have been a silk-lined hard hat. Though Kahn appears pensive and soft-spoken, this large-scale environmental

Making Beautiful Art out of Beach Plastic

Thu, 14 Jul 2011 07:22:22 GMT

Judith Lang waves from a kelp pile on Kehoe Beach, shouting to her husband. “Here’s the Pick of the Day!” The artist holds aloft her newfound treasure: the six-inch long, black plastic leg of an anonymous superhero toy. But did it come from Batman or Darth Vader? Only careful research will tell. “We’ll google ‘black plastic doll leg,’” Richard Lang informs me, “and try to find out what it belonged to.” In 1999, Richard and Judith had their first date on this Northern California beach. Both were already accomplished artists who had taught watercolor classes at the University of California and shown their work in San Francisco ga

William Eggleston's Big Wheels

Wed, 22 Jun 2011 06:00:00 GMT

Although a photograph always shows the same things, that doesn’t mean those things are always seen the same. This William Eggleston picture is variously known as Untitled, Tricycle and Memphis, 1970. It has been variously seen, too. Now considered a classic, it was initially greeted in many quarters with incomprehension, even as an outright affront. Eggleston’s tricycle first attracted attention as part of a 1976 exhibition of his work at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. It appeared, in fact, on the cover of the exhibition catalog, William Eggleston’s Guide. “The most hated show of the year,” one critic wrote. “Guide to what?” detractors

How to Trademark a Fruit

Wed, 22 Jun 2011 06:00:00 GMT

In 1847, Charles M. Hovey, a stalwart of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society and the proprietor of Hovey & Co., a 40-acre nursery in Cambridge, began publishing a series of handsomely illustrated prints of American fruits. Most of the trees—apple, pear, peach, plum and cherry—had come from England and Europe. Over time, many new fruit varieties emerged from natural cross-pollinations effected by wind, birds and insects—for example, the Jonathan apple, after Jonathan Hasbrouck, who found it growing on a farm in Kingston, New York. By the mid-19th century, a few new indigenous fruit varieties had arisen from breeding, notably Hovey’s own widely admired seedlin

Stolen: How the Mona Lisa Became the World’s Most Famous Painting

Thu, 16 Jun 2011 08:58:17 GMT

It was a quiet, humid Monday morning in Paris, 21 August 1911. Three men were hurrying out of the Louvre. It was odd, since the museum was closed to visitors on Mondays, and odder still with what one of them had under his jacket. They were Vincenzo Perugia and the brothers Lancelotti, Vincenzo and Michele, young Italian handymen. They had come to the Louvre on Sunday afternoon and secreted themselves overnight in a narrow storeroom near the Salon Carré, a gallery stuffed with Renaissance paintings. In the morning, wearing white workmen’s smocks, they had gone into the Salon Carré. They seized a small painting off the wall. Quickly, they ripped off its glass shadow box

Agatha Christie on the Big and Small Screen

Tue, 17 May 2011 06:00:00 GMT

Even though Dame Agatha may not have enjoyed adaptations of her mysteries, audiences have been loving them for decades

An Unforgettable Photo of Martha Graham

Tue, 17 May 2011 06:00:00 GMT

Barbara Morgan’s 1940 image of Martha Graham in the ballet Letter to the World may be the most famous photograph ever taken of an American dancer. It ranks, in honor, with Ansel Adams’ photographs of Yosemite and Walker Evans’ of small-town churches, and it bears much the same message: Americans’ belief in the flinty, frank truth of their vision of life, as opposed, say, to European decorativeness and indirection. That faith was especially strong around the mid-20th century, and in the minds of certain artists it was allied especially with the American Southwest: the hogans, the cliff-hemmed mesas, the vaulted skies. D.H. Lawrence and (the best-known example) Georgi

The Story Behind the Peacock Room's Princess

Tue, 17 May 2011 06:00:00 GMT

The great American expatriate painter James McNeill Whistler is best known, of course, for his Arrangement in Grey and Black, a.k.a. Whistler’s Mother, an austere portrait of a severe woman in a straight-backed chair. But judging Whistler only by this dour picture (of a mother said to have been censorious toward her libertine son) is misleading; the artist delighted in color. One painting that exemplifies Whistler’s vivid palette, The Princess from the Land of Porcelain, constitutes the centerpiece of the Peacock Room at the Smithsonian’s Freer Gallery of Art. The work was owned by English shipping magnate Frederick R. Leyland in 1876 and held pride of place in the dinin

George Ault’s World

Tue, 10 May 2011 09:43:56 GMT

The black barn in George Ault’s painting January Full Moon is a simple structure, bound by simple lines. Yet its angular bones give it a commanding presence. The barn stands at attention, its walls planted in moonlit snow and its peak nosing toward a deep blue sky. It is bold and brawny, and as Yale University art history professor Alexander Nemerov puts it, a barn with a capital “B,” the Barn of all barns. A little-known American artist, George Ault had the ability in his painting to take specific locations in Woodstock, New York, where he lived from 1937 until his death in 1948, and make them seem universal. Nemerov says that places like Rick’s Barn, which Ault p

Maria Anna Mozart: The Family’s First Prodigy

Mon, 28 Mar 2011 07:40:26 GMT

“Virtuosic.” “A prodigy.” “Genius.” These words were written in the 1760s about Mozart—Maria Anna Mozart. When she toured Europe as a pianist, young Maria Anna wowed audiences in Munich, Vienna, Paris, London, the Hague, Germany and Switzerland. “My little girl plays the most difficult works which we have … with incredible precision and so excellently,” her father, Leopold, wrote in a letter in 1764. “What it all amounts to is this, that my little girl, although she is only 12 years old, is one of the most skillful players in Europe.” The young virtuoso, nicknamed Nannerl, was quickly overshadowed by her brother, Wol

A Velázquez in the Cellar?

Wed, 23 Mar 2011 06:00:00 GMT

John Marciari first spotted the painting among hundreds of other works carefully filed in pullout racks in a soulless cube of a storage facility in New Haven, Connecticut. He was then, in 2004, a junior curator at Yale University’s renowned Art Gallery, reviewing holdings that had been warehoused during its expansion and renovation. In the midst of that task, he came upon an intriguing but damaged canvas, more than five feet tall and four feet wide, which depicted St. Anne teaching the young Virgin Mary to read. It was set aside, identified only as “Anonymous, Spanish School, seventeenth century.” “I pulled it out, and I thought, ‘This is a good picture. Who

Velázquez: Embodiment of a Golden Age

Wed, 23 Mar 2011 06:00:00 GMT

As a teenage art student at Madrid’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts in 1897 and 1898, Pablo Picasso haunted the galleries of the Prado Museum, where he liked to copy the works of Diego Velázquez. Picasso was especially fascinated by Las Meninas; in 1957, he would produce a suite of 44 paintings reinterpreting that single masterpiece. And he was hardly alone among 19th- and 20th-century painters: James McNeill Whistler, Thomas Eakins, Mary Cassatt, John Singer Sargent, Salvador Dali and Francis Bacon were all profoundly influenced by the 17th-century Spanish master. Édouard Manet, the pioneering French Impressionist, described Velázquez as “the painter of paint

Gauguin's Bid for Glory

Wed, 23 Feb 2011 07:00:00 GMT

Paul Gauguin did not lack for confidence. “I am a great artist, and I know it,” he boasted in a letter in 1892 to his wife. He said much the same thing to friends, his dealers and the public, often describing his work as even better than what had come before. In light of the history of modern art, his confidence was justified. A painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramist and writer, Gauguin stands today as one of the giants of Post-Impressionism and a pioneer of Modernism. He was also a great storyteller, creating narratives in every medium he touched. Some of his tales were true, others near-fabrications. Even the lush Tahitian masterpieces for which he is best known reflect an

Wayne Thiebaud on Pop Art

Thu, 27 Jan 2011 05:52:33 GMT

The artist discusses where his work fits among the many genres of painting

Wayne Thiebaud Is Not a Pop Artist

Wed, 19 Jan 2011 07:00:00 GMT

Among the familiar Wayne Thiebaud paintings on display at the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento—the still lifes of gumball machines and voluptuous bakery cakes, the brightly dressed, sober-faced figures, the San Francisco cityscapes with their daredevil inclines—was one mysterious picture, unlike anything else in the exhibition. It was a darkly comic painting of a man in a business suit hanging on for dear life from the limb of a leafless tree, his briefcase tossed on the grass below. A downtown city street loomed beyond the little park where this puzzling drama was playing out. Was the man trying to climb up or down? And why was he there? Thiebaud tries to explain: “Essen

Martin Luther King Jr. by Mural

Wed, 12 Jan 2011 09:08:24 GMT

Photographer Camilo José Vergara captures varying portrayals of the civil rights leader in urban areas across the United States

Arcimboldo's Feast for the Eyes

Mon, 20 Dec 2010 07:00:00 GMT

The job of a renaissance court portraitist was to produce likenesses of his sovereigns to display at the palace and give to foreign dignitaries or prospective brides. It went without saying the portraits should be flattering. Yet, in 1590, Giuseppe Arcimboldo painted his royal patron, the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II, as a heap of fruits and vegetables (opposite). With pea pod eyelids and a gourd for a forehead, he looks less like a king than a crudité platter. Lucky for Arcimboldo, Rudolf had a sense of humor. And he had probably grown accustomed to the artist’s visual wit. Arcimboldo served the Hapsburg family for more than 25 years, creating oddball “composite heads&

Painter Alexis Rockman Pictures Tomorrow

Wed, 17 Nov 2010 07:00:00 GMT

"I try not to collect things," Alexis Rockman says, standing in front of a glass-front cupboard in his white-walled studio in Lower Manhattan. The cabinet holds dead animals given to him by friends: a mongoose devouring a cobra, stuffed birds, a bat with outstretched wings, an armadillo. There's also a photograph of the artist at age 7, wearing a toothy smile as he holds up an Eastern box turtle. The passions of that little boy, who grew up in New York City haunting the American Museum of Natural History, are deeply embedded in his extravagantly beautiful, disquieting paintings of a post-apocalyptic natural world, for which the artist, now 48, is increasingly well known. If Rockman's earl

The Woman Who Brought Van Gogh to the World

Tue, 02 Nov 2010 08:06:21 GMT

When Vincent van Gogh tragically killed himself in 1890, many of the works that would later gain him posthumous fame and fortune were barely dry. In the last ten weeks of his life, which he spent in Auvers-sur-Oise, France, Van Gogh experienced a period of unprecedented productivity, often painting an entire canvas in a day. Van Gogh in Auvers: His Last Days, a new book written by Wouter van der Veen and Peter Knapp, compiles the paintings Van Gogh produced during that time, interspersed with correspondence and information about the artist later in his life. While other artists in Van Gogh’s social circle admired his work, most of the public had no knowledge of him until years after

Looking at the World's Tattoos

Mon, 20 Sep 2010 06:00:00 GMT

Chris Rainier has seen bare flesh etched by the crudest of implements: old nails, sharpened bamboo sticks, barracuda teeth. The ink might be nothing more than sugar cane juice mixed with campfire soot. The important part is the meaning behind the marks. “Blank skin,” the photographer says, “is merely a canvas for a story.” Rainier has documented these stories in dozens of cultures across the globe. In New Guinea, a swirl of tattoos on a Tofi woman’s face indicates her family lineage. The dark scrawls on a Cambodian monk’s chest reflect his religious beliefs. A Los Angeles gang member’s sprawling tattoos describe his street affiliation, and may ev

The World’s Great Structures Built With Legos

Wed, 04 Aug 2010 06:16:45 GMT

Former Chicago-based professional architect Adam Reed Tucker is one of 11 Lego-certified professionals in the world, designing scale models of famous buildings and structures out of Lego bricks. His models, including the World Trade Center, the Gateway Arch, Fallingwater and others, are on display in the National Building Museum until September 5, 2011, in the exhibit, “LEGO Architecture: Towering Ambition” in Washington, D.C. You got your degree in architecture from Kansas State University in 1996. How did you get from there to Lego Certified Professional? In a nutshell, I worked for a number of architecture firms, and then I had my own practice. One day I had this idea of d

The Grand Women Artists of the Hudson River School

Mon, 26 Jul 2010 04:05:25 GMT

When Americans took to travel and tourism in the mid-19th century, exploring the great landscape around them brought particular challenges, especially to women, who were constrained by the strictures of proper behavior and dress. But that didn’t stop a coterie of female artists like Susie M. Barstow, who not only climbed the principal peaks of the Adirondacks, the Catskills and the White Mountains, but also sketched and painted along the way—sometimes “in the midst of a blinding snow-storm,” according to one account. If you have never heard of Barstow, you are not alone. The curators of “Remember the Ladies: Women of the Hudson River School,” a little e

Norman Rockwell’s Storytelling Lessons

Wed, 07 Jul 2010 06:14:42 GMT

What draws two of the world’s most successful filmmakers to the same famous American illustrator? The answer may lie in a 1920 canvas called Shadow Artist, the picture portrays a gray-haired, goateed man in a vest and shirt sleeves standing in front of a kerosene lamp creating with his hands a wolf silhouette of a wolf—we can easily imagine the bloodcurdling sound effects—for a rapt audience of three young people whose hair seems almost to be standing on end. Reduced to its essence, this is what George Lucas and Steven Spielberg do: create illusions on a vertical reflecting surface to attract, amuse and amaze their audiences. It is also what figurative painters and illus

What Movies Predict for the Next 40 Years

Wed, 30 Jun 2010 03:18:14 GMT

For a filmmaker, creating a futuristic world is a tricky task, especially if your crystal ball looks just a few years over the horizon. The challenges are varied – from dreaming up technological advancements, ages before their time, to predicting an approaching apocalypse (that also, hopefully, is ages before its time). Over the course of the next 40 years, many cinematic visions will be compared to the reality of their time. Will they turn out like 2001, with its unfulfilled expectations of an outer-space-focused future, or like The Truman Show, prescient and a clear warning sign of things to come. From summer blockbusters to dystopian allegories to animated adventures, here is a s

James Cameron on the Future of Cinema

Mon, 28 Jun 2010 06:00:00 GMT

Many believe that Avatar, the largely computer-generated, 3-D film by James Cameron—and the top-grossing movie in history, earning nearly $3 billion worldwide—has changed the moviegoing experience. Like Avatar, Cameron’s 1984 thriller Terminator, about an indestructible human-machine cyborg, and 1997’s Titanic, with its hyper-realistic feel for the “unsinkable” ship’s disastrous end, are morality tales about technology’s risks—created with the most advanced technology. The director spoke with reporter Lorenza Muñoz. How has technology evolved since your first foray into film? Terminator was my first real film, and you can direc

Art's Bold New Direction

Mon, 28 Jun 2010 06:00:00 GMT

What will happen in the art world by 2050? I predict that all the smashed plates on Julian Schnabel’s paintings will fall off on exactly the same day. Seriously, though, by 2050, I believe that artists will be exploring and affecting all aspects of our daily environment in the most original ways possible. We’re already seeing that artists today are moving beyond the four walls of established institutions (such as museums) and are directly engaging and inspiring a range of new audiences. Through new technologies especially, these audiences will grow, as will artists’ presence and influence. At the Hirshhorn, we’re organizing two major initiatives for 2012 that refl

George Lopez on Comedy and Race

Mon, 28 Jun 2010 06:00:00 GMT

On his nightly talk show, “Lopez Tonight,” on his HBO specials and at clubs and auditoriums, the comedian George Lopez takes aim at ethnic stereotypes. In a recent monologue, he noted that babies born to minorities will soon outnumber babies born to whites in the United States. “You’ll have to learn to clean your own house!” he joked (to whites). Some audience members booed. When his ABC sitcom, “George Lopez,” was canceled in 2007 after six years and replaced by “Cavemen,” he blasted network executives. “So a Chicano can’t be on TV,” he said, “but a cave man can?” His angry-young-man reputation has been so

Glimpses of the Lost World of Alchi

Wed, 17 Mar 2010 06:00:00 GMT

The wood-framed door is tiny, as if intended for a Hobbit, and after I duck through it into the gloomy interior—dank and perfumed with the saccharine scent of burnt butter oil and incense—my eyes take a while to adjust. It takes my mind even longer to register the scene before me. Mesmerizing colored patterns scroll across the wood beams overhead; the temple’s walls are covered with hundreds of small seated Buddhas, finely painted in ocher, black, green, azurite and gold. At the far end of the room, towering more than 17 feet high, stands an unblinking figure, naked to the waist, with four arms and a gilded head topped with a spiked crown. It’s a painted statue of

Cathleen McGuigan on "Wayne Thiebaud Is Not a Pop Artist"

Wed, 26 Jan 2011 08:31:59 GMT

Based in New York City, journalist Cathleen McGuigan covers art, architecture, design and culture. She has written for Newsweek, the New York Times Magazine, Harper’s Bazaar, Rolling Stone and ARTnews. She last wrote for Smithsonian about the painter Alexis Rockman. You have written profiles of several artists. What do you like about this type of assignment? I think it’s interesting to figure out how artists work and how they come up with their ideas and what their intentions are. A lot of artists aren’t very good at talking about what they do and why they do it. I think I’ve been fortunate in having some subjects who were very interested in engaging in conversati

Renoir's Controversial Second Act

Tue, 19 Jan 2010 07:00:00 GMT

In October 1881, not long after he finished his joyous Luncheon of the Boating Party, probably his best-known work and certainly one of the most admired paintings of the past 150 years, Pierre-Auguste Renoir left Paris for Italy to fulfill a long-standing ambition. He was 40 and already acclaimed as a pioneer of Impressionism, the movement that had challenged French academic painting with its daring attempts to capture light in outdoor scenes. Represented by a leading gallery and collected by connoisseurs, he filled the enviable role of well-respected, if not yet well-paid, iconoclast. His ambition that fall was to reach Venice, Rome, Florence and Naples and view the paintings of Raphael,

Contemporary Aboriginal Art

Fri, 18 Dec 2009 07:00:00 GMT

An art movement’s origins usually can’t be pinpointed, but boldly patterned Aboriginal acrylic painting first appeared at a specific time and place. In July 1971, an art teacher named Geoffrey Bardon distributed some brushes, paints and other materials to a group of Aboriginal men in the forlorn resettlement community of Papunya, 160 miles from the nearest town, Alice Springs. Bardon had moved near the remote Western Desert from cosmopolitan Sydney hoping to preserve an ancient aboriginal culture imperiled by the uprooting of Aboriginal people from their traditional territories in the 1950s and ‘60s. The men, who saw Bardon distributing the art supplies to schoolchildren,

Norman Rockwell's Neighborhood

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 07:00:00 GMT

If you lived in Arlington, Vermont, in the 1940s, or in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, in the '50s, chances are you or someone you knew appeared on the cover of The Saturday Evening Post. Norman Rockwell's cover illustrations, which adroitly captured the nation's homiest images of itself, were based on the neighbors and surroundings the artist saw every day. He enlisted as models not only his friends and family members but also strangers he met at the bank or at a high-school basketball game. The camera played a vital, if little-known, role in Rockwell's high fidelity, as Ron Schick's new book, Norman Rockwell: Behind the Camera, makes clear. Schick, who was given access to the entire archiv

Man Ray’s Signature Work

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 09:29:55 GMT

In 1935, the avant-garde photographer Man Ray opened his shutter, sat down in front of his camera and used a penlight to create a series of swirls and loops. Because of his movements with the penlight, his face was blurred in the resulting photograph. As a self-portrait—titled Space Writings—it seemed fairly abstract. But now Ellen Carey, a photographer whose working method is similar to Man Ray’s, has discovered something that has been hidden in plain sight in Space Writings for the past 74 years: the artist’s signature, signed with the penlight amid the swirls and loops. “I knew instantly when I saw it—it’s a very famous self-portrait—tha

Ansel Adams in Color

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 06:00:00 GMT

Ansel Adams never made up his mind about color photography. Long before his death in 1984 at age 82, he foresaw that this "beguiling medium" might one day replace his cherished black and white. In notes tentatively dated to 1949, he observed that "color photography is rapidly becoming of major importance." Yet he once likened working in color to playing an out-of-tune piano. America's regnant Western landscape photographer tried to control every step of picture-making, but for much of his lifetime too many stages of the color process were out of his hands. Kodachrome—the first mass-market color film, introduced in 1935—was so complicated that even Adams, a

Anne Truitt’s Artistic Journey

Wed, 30 Sep 2009 02:52:39 GMT

“The light is wonderful in Washington, [D.C.]” said artist Anne Truitt in an interview near the end of her life. “I have a lifetime of friends here. It’s the latitude and longitude I was born on.” Truitt, largely known for her richly hued columnar sculptures and often associated with Minimalism and the Washington Color Field, claimed the city as her home for more than 50 years. “It’s as if the outside world has to match some personal horizontal and vertical axis,” she wrote in Daybook, the first of three autobiographical journals she published during the 1980s and 1990s. “I have to line up with it in order to be comfortable. … I

250 Years of Wedgwood

Tue, 29 Sep 2009 04:13:09 GMT

When Josiah Wedgwood, an apprentice potter in Burslem, England, opened his own pottery business in 1759, nobody expected him to change the world. But 250 years later, his Wedgwood china is still a perennial favorite of both brides and collectors. And the Wedgwood name is an international symbol of luxury and elegance. This fall, two U.S. museum events will mark the 250th anniversary of Wedgwood's company, now known as Waterford Wedgwood Royal Dalton Holdings, Ltd. An exhibition at the Daughters of the American Revolution Museum in Washington, D.C., “Wedgwood: 250 Years of Innovation and Artistry,” will be on display from October 3, 2009, through February 27, 2010. The exhibit

Decoding Jackson Pollock

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 08:03:28 GMT

It was my wife, Marianne Berardi, who first saw the letters. We were looking at a reproduction of Jackson Pollock's breakthrough work, Mural, an 8-by 20-foot canvas bursting with physical energy that, in 1943, was unlike anything seen before. The critic Clement Greenberg, Pollock's principal champion, said he took one look at the painting and realized that "Jackson was the greatest painter this country has produced." A Museum of Modern Art curator, the late Kirk Varnedoe, said Mural established Jackson Pollock as the world's premier modern painter. I was researching a book about Pollock's lifelong relationship with his mentor, Thomas Hart Benton, the famed regionalist and mura

Leonardo’s Horse?

Fri, 18 Sep 2009 06:00:00 GMT

Leonardo da Vinci scholars have been puzzling over the origins of a bronze statuette of a rearing horse for nearly a century. In 1916 the similarities of the Rearing Horse and Mounted Warrior to Leonardo’s drawings led a curator at the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest, which owns the work, to argue that the horse and rider, once thought to be an ancient Greek sculpture, was actually a Renaissance bronze, cast from a clay or wax model fashioned by the hands of the master himself. As in the case of most Leonardo claims, the attribution has never been universally accepted and study and debate are ongoing. Recently, conservators at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. conduc

Looking for Leonardo

Fri, 18 Sep 2009 06:00:00 GMT

There's nothing unusual about discoveries of lost works by Leonardo da Vinci. Every few months, it seems, a story hits the news that yet another "Leonardo" has been unearthed—the lost fresco of the Battle of Anghiari, a terra-cotta bust discovered in the attic of a 14th-century palazzo, or a self-portrait embedded in the spidery script of one of his notebooks. A recent television documentary even made a claim for the artist's authorship of the Shroud of Turin. Leonardo scholar Martin Kemp, emeritus professor of art history at Oxford University, calls the perpetrators of such dubious attributions "Leonardo loonies" and says he gets "bombarded" with them

Teaching Cops to See

Fri, 18 Sep 2009 06:00:00 GMT

Early one morning a bunch of New York City police officers, guns concealed, trooped into the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Inside a conference room, Amy Herman, a tall 43-year-old art historian and lawyer, apologized that she hadn't been able to provide the customary stimulant. "I usually try to give you coffee with plenty of sugar to make you talk more," she said. The officers, all captains or higher in rank, were attending "The Art of Perception," a course designed to fine-tune their attention to visual details, some of which might prove critical in solving or preventing a crime. Herman laid out the ground rules. "First, there are two words that are not allowed&md

Dancing Around Abraham Lincoln

Fri, 11 Sep 2009 06:01:52 GMT

It must be said that, in the beginning, Bill T. Jones did not want to create a dance about Abraham Lincoln. Jones, a monumental figure in his own right—he is widely considered one of the preeminent living American choreographers—had never before developed a pure work of portraiture for his company. And Lincoln definitely didn’t seem like the right subject with which to start. “First of all, I wanted to know if it was a Black History Month idea, because I am not interested in Black History Month ideas,” Jones (who is African-American) drily recalls in his authoritative baritone. “If you’re going to offer me something, make sure it’s because y

Decorating the White House with Smithsonian Art

Tue, 04 Aug 2009 05:37:55 GMT

Continuing a Washington tradition, the Obamas selected artwork from the Smithsonian collections to hang in their historic home

Alex Katz Is Cooler Than Ever

Mon, 20 Jul 2009 06:00:00 GMT

The cavernous lobby of New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art is jammed with people, but it is impossible to miss Alex Katz. The artist famous for his bright figurative paintings is standing by the information desk wearing a parka so blindingly orange it looks radioactive. Orange is one of Katz's favorite colors, and the jacket, adorned with reflective silver strips, is the kind that a guy on a road crew might wear to direct traffic in a rainstorm. But this French-made parka is downright chic, rather like its owner, who looks at least a decade younger than his 82 years, with a smooth head (he shaves it daily) and features as sharp as those of the suave figures who populate his painting

Across Africa, Finding Common Ground in Their Art

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 07:48:04 GMT

António Ole, 57, from Angola, and Aimé Mpane, 40, from the Democratic Republic of Congo, created multimedia installations as part of an artistic dialogue on view at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art. The exhibition, on view through August 2, is the first in a series from the museum in which contemporary artists are asked to create work in response to each other. The pair spoke about their individual work and the collaborative process with Smithsonian’s Joseph Caputo. Why is this dialogue important? Mpane: The human being doesn’t live alone--he lives in contact. You will not progress if you’re just by yourself. You must have a dialogue anyhow

Harlem Transformed: the Photos of Camilo José Vergara

Tue, 02 Jun 2009 09:01:19 GMT

The year is 1990. In the foreground, a man dressed in a blue work shirt and denim overalls poses amid corn and vegetables planted on a patch of junkyard between West 118th and 119th Streets and Frederick Douglass Boulevard in Manhattan. A makeshift scarecrow, also in overalls, stands beside him. The man’s name is Eddie, he’s originally from Selma, Alabama, and he’s now an urban farmer. Welcome to Harlem. But the story doesn’t end there. The photographer, Camilo José Vergara, has returned to the same location year after year to shoot more pictures. In 2008, he aimed his camera here and found, not a vegetable patch, but a crisply modern luxury apartment buildi

Flowers Writ Large

Fri, 22 May 2009 04:11:22 GMT

In the fall of 2006, Jonathan Singer, a podiatrist from Bayonne, New Jersey, requested that John Kress, a botanist at the National Museum of Natural History, take a look at Singer’s photographs of orchids and other flowers. Kress was a bit skeptical, but he arranged to meet Singer outside the museum, at a gallery in Georgetown. “He was looking for a botanical stamp of approval,” says Kress, who responded to Singer’s 20 or so large prints with excitement. Singer’s photographs of single, brightly colored blooms on stark black backgrounds struck Kress enough that he invited Singer to the museum’s research greenhouse in Suitland, Maryland. “When he s

1934: The Art of the New Deal

Tue, 19 May 2009 06:00:00 GMT

In early 1934, the United States was near the depths of what we hope will not go down in history as the First Great Depression. Unemployment was close to 25 percent and even the weather conspired to inflict misery: February was the coldest month on record in the Northeast. As the Federal Emergency Relief Act, a prototype of the New Deal work-relief programs, began to put a few dollars into the pockets of hungry workers, the question arose whether to include artists among the beneficiaries. It wasn't an obvious thing to do; by definition artists had no "jobs" to lose. But Harry Hopkins, whom President Franklin D. Roosevelt put in charge of work relief, settled the matter, saying,

What’s the Deal about New Deal Art?

Tue, 19 May 2009 06:00:00 GMT

Sweeping a long arm in an arc around the walls of a new exhibition at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, deputy chief curator George Gurney fires off a string of locales. “This is Seattle, Washington,” he says. “This is St. Paul, Minnesota. That’s Peterborough, New Hampshire.” He continues through New England to Pennsylvania, California and New Mexico. The show, “1934: A New Deal for Artists,” offers a panorama of the United States through the vision of artists in the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP), the first nationwide foray into public art. “This gave people something to be proud about, for their locale,” adds curatorial assoc

Eunice Kennedy Shriver Portrait Unveiled

Mon, 11 May 2009 04:14:49 GMT

Editor's Note: Eunice Kennedy Shriver, champion for children with special needs, died on August 11 at the age of 88. In May 2009, Smithsonian reported on the unveiling of a portrait of the American icon and sister to President John F. Kennedy, and Sens. Robert and Edward Kennedy. Seventy-five bowling lanes are jammed with spectators and families at the December 2008 Special Olympics state bowling competition in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Eleven-year-old Special Olympics athlete Sam Lenz, who has Down syndrome, picks up his bowling ball, aims carefully and throws a strike. His arms raised in victory, he high-fives his wildly cheering teammates. After the competition, Sam works his way through a

Edward Steichen: In Vogue

Mon, 20 Apr 2009 06:00:00 GMT

For the photographers who followed him, Edward Steichen left a creative wake of Mozartean dimensions. There was not much that he didn't do, and do extraordinarily well. Landscapes, architecture, theater and dance, war photography—all appear in his portfolio. Born in 1879 in Luxembourg, Steichen came with his family to the United States in 1881 and started in photography at age 16, when the medium itself was still young. In 1900, a critic reviewing some of his portraits wrote admiringly that Steichen "is not satisfied showing us how a person looks, but how he thinks a person should look." During his long career, he was a gallery partner with the great photography promoter A

Celebrity Portraitist Gerard Malanga

Tue, 14 Apr 2009 05:08:34 GMT

While researching photographs for “Four for a Quarter” (September 2008) about old photobooths, Smithsonian’s Jeff Campagna came across a captivating 1966 photostrip image of socialite Gerard Malanga, a photographer whom the New York Times called “Warhol’s most important associate.” Malanga discussed his career--chronicling the famous and non-famous, bohemian and non-bohemian--with Campagna via e-mail. What was your first impression of Andy Warhol when you began working with him as a silkscreener in 1963? Andy was pretty much open to any ideas or suggestions I would contribute. I think part of the whole reason he hired me was because of my expertise in

The Measure of Genius: Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel at 500

Fri, 10 Apr 2009 07:26:22 GMT

In the spring of 1509, just two years after a mapmaker coined the word “America” in honor of the explorer Amerigo Vespucci, a fellow Florentine named Buonarotti was beginning to work on one of the defining masterpieces of Western Civilization. His first name—Michelangelo—would also reverberate through the ages. And, like many of the early transatlantic voyages of discovery, his ceiling frescoes in Rome’s Sistine Chapel had gotten off to a terrible start. “He was working on the largest multi-figure compositions of the entire ceiling when the actual fresco plaster itself became infected by a kind of lime mold, which is like a great bloom of fungus,”

Forensic Astronomer Solves Fine Arts Puzzles

Thu, 19 Mar 2009 06:00:00 GMT

In painter Edvard Munch's Girls on the Pier, three women lean against a railing facing a body of water in which houses are reflected. A peach-colored orb appears in the sky, but, curiously, casts no reflection in the water. Is it the Moon? The Sun? Is it imaginary? Does it matter? To Donald Olson, an astrophysicist at Texas State University, the answer to the last question is an emphatic yes. Olson solves puzzles in literature, history and art using the tools of astronomy: charts, almanacs, painstaking calculations and computer programs that map ancient skies. He is perhaps the leading practitioner of what he calls "forensic astronomy." But computers and math can take him only s

Owen Edwards on “In Vogue”

Wed, 22 Apr 2009 04:48:54 GMT

Freelance writer Owen Edwards writes the “Object at Hand” column in Smithsonian magazine and occasionally contributes feature stories. His most recent story, “In Vogue,” about fashion photographer Edward Steichen, in the May issue is timed with a new book by Todd Brandow and William Ewing, Edward Steichen in High Fashion: The Condé Nast Years 1923-1937, and an exhibition through May 3 at the International Center of Photography in New York. What drew you to this story? I used to be the exhibition critic for American Photographer and as such I’ve always been interested in Steichen. He kind of orbited like Haley’s comet. Sooner or later, somebody w

Jennifer Drapkin and Sarah Zielinski on “Celestial Sleuth”

Thu, 19 Mar 2009 06:14:24 GMT

Jennifer Drapkin and Sarah Zielinski teamed up to report and write “Celestial Sleuth,” a feature about “forensic astronomer” Don Olson’s quest to solve artistic mysteries in Smithsonian’s April issue. Drapkin is a former Smithsonian writing intern who has written for The Village Voice, The Week, Psychology Today and Smithsonian. She is currently a senior editor at Mental Floss magazine. Zielinski is an assistant editor at Smithsonian and a blogger for Smithsonian.com’s Surprising Science. What drew you to this story? Drapkin: My grandfather was an amateur astronomer, and he's the one who told me about Olson's work. Solving mysteries with the star

A Jazzed-Up Langston Hughes

Fri, 13 Mar 2009 09:45:59 GMT

“The words need to float above the orchestra,” composer Laura Karpman instructs world-renown soprano Jessye Norman who is singing passages of Langston Hughes’ most ambitious though nearly forgotten work, his 1960s epic poem Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz. Sitting in folding chairs in a Carnegie Hall rehearsal room, Norman and Karpman, along with mezzo-soprano Tracie Luck and jazz vocalist de’Adre Aziza, prepare for the first major performance of Hughes’s jazz poem, which premieres on March 16 at the historic theater. “Of course,” replies Norman, who has sung at the hall dozens of times. She lifts her chin, and in the voice that has thrilled mill

A Painter of Angels Became the Father of Camouflage

Mon, 09 Mar 2009 03:47:15 GMT

Down the full distance of my memory, a dauntingly stout box stood on its end in the barn of our Victorian house in Dublin, New Hampshire. In my morbid youthful imagination, maybe it was a child’s casket, maybe there was a skeleton inside. My father airily dismissed the contents: just the printing plates for the illustrations in a 1909 book, Concealing-Coloration in the Animal Kingdom, the brainchild of Abbott Handerson. Thayer, a major turn-of-the-century painter who died in 1921. He was a mentor to my artist father (whose name I bear) and a family icon. He was the reason my father stayed in Dublin: to be near the man he revered. I was recently visited in Dublin by Susan Hobbs, an

Costume’s Cultural Reveal

Sun, 08 Mar 2009 04:06:33 GMT

One day an art conservator was studying a 19th-century French portrait at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art when Sharon Takeda happened to walk by. He was puzzling over a section of the painting, the man’s lush emerald cloak. Takeda, the museum’s costume and textile department head, knew immediately what the restoration expert was staring at: the artist’s rendering of “changeable silk,” an iridescent fabric that changes color depending on the light. Thanks to Takeda¬--a curator who surely knows her warp from her weft--the conservator learned what the fabric should look like after cleaning. Such moments are rare in art museums, where "costume and t

Matthew Gurewitsch on "Jan Lievens: Out of Rembrandt's Shadow”

Fri, 27 Feb 2009 05:36:03 GMT

What drew you to this story? Can you describe its genesis? The trigger was the retrospective at the National Gallery in Washington. I was intrigued that the work of a forgotten artist had been partly “assimilated” into the Rembrandt canon. To be mistaken for Rembrandt would be an indication of real merit, no? Yet as an independent artist, Lievens disappeared. There had to be a story here. What surprised you the most while covering Lievens? His versatility—and his continuing curiosity about media that were new to him, even if they were long out of fashion. What was your favorite moment during your reporting? Getting into the gallery and discovering that all these pain

Jan Lievens: Out of Rembrandt's Shadow

Tue, 24 Feb 2009 07:00:00 GMT

Telescopes trained on the night sky, astronomers observe the phenomenon of the binary star, which appears to the naked eye to be a single star but consists in fact of two, orbiting a common center of gravity. Sometimes, one star in the pair can so outshine the other that its companion may be detected only by the way its movement periodically alters the brightness of the greater one. The binary stars we recognize in the firmament of art tend to be of equal brilliance: Raphael and Michelangelo, van Gogh and Gauguin, Picasso and Matisse. But the special case of an "invisible" companion is not unknown. Consider Jan Lievens, born in Leiden in western Holland on October 24, 1607,

Family of Man's Special Delivery

Thu, 22 Jan 2009 07:00:00 GMT

Of the 503 photographs by 273 photographers that were in Edward Steichen's landmark "Family of Man" exhibition in 1955, one may best reflect the show's title. Made on September 19, 1946, by Wayne F. Miller, it depicts the moment of birth—a doctor bringing into the world a baby boy, still attached to his mother by the umbilical cord, glistening with amniotic fluid and as yet unaware that a fundamental change has taken place. The baby is David Baker Miller, the photographer's son, and the person least seen but most essential is Miller's wife, Joan. Many fathers, including me, have photographed their children being born, but Miller had already developed an extraordinary gift

Shepard Fairey: The Artist Behind the Obama Portrait

Wed, 14 Jan 2009 10:02:20 GMT

To show his support for Barack Obama, Los Angeles-based graphic designer Shepard Fairey created a large-scale, red, white and blue collage of the President-elect. From there, Hope, as he calls it, went viral. He printed posters and stickers of the portrait, and ardent Obama supporters tagged them on city buildings and car bumpers. He put a downloadable version of the design on the web, and others snagged it for t-shirts and signs. Literally, Hope has become the most recognizable image of the campaign, so much so that spoofs have cropped up with the faces of John McCain and Sarah Palin and words other than “hope”—like “nope”—on them. Time magazine commiss

The Divine Art of Tapestries

Tue, 23 Dec 2008 10:02:15 GMT

Apart from crowd-pleasers such as the Dame à la Licorne (Lady with the Unicorn) series at the Musée Cluny in Paris and the “Unicorn” group at the Cloisters in New York City, tapestries have been thought of throughout the 20th century as dusty and dowdy -- a passion for out-of-touch antiquarians. But times are changing. “The Divine Art: Four Centuries of European Tapestries in the Art Institute of Chicago,” on view at the Art Institute through January 4 and documented in a sumptuous catalog, is the latest in a flurry of recent exhibitions to open visitors’ eyes to the magnificence of a medium once prized far above painting. In Mechelen, Belgium,

Van Gogh's Night Visions

Thu, 18 Dec 2008 07:00:00 GMT

With his bright sunflowers, searing wheat fields and blazing yellow skies, Vincent van Gogh was fanatic about light. "Oh! that beautiful midsummer sun here," he wrote to the painter Émile Bernard in 1888 from the south of France. "It beats down on one's head, and I haven't the slightest doubt that it makes one crazy. But as I was so to begin with, I only enjoy it." Van Gogh was also enthralled with night, as he wrote to his brother Theo that same year: "It often seems to me that the night is much more alive and richly colored than the day....The problem of painting night scenes and effects on the spot and actually by night interests me enormously." What van Gogh fixed on, by dayli

The Splendor of Greene and Greene

Tue, 09 Dec 2008 09:53:42 GMT

Overdue recognition for the brothers Charles and Henry Greene was a bittersweet triumph because it came partly in response to an irreparable loss. Arguably the greatest building by the architectural firm of Greene & Greene is the 1907 Blacker House in Pasadena, California, a masterpiece in the American Arts and Crafts style which is imbued with a love of Japanese architecture, traditional wood joinery, metal craftsmanship and classical proportion. Purchased by a Texas rancher and antiques collector who calculated that the furnishings were worth more than the $1.2 million purchase price, the Blacker House was stripped in 1985 of its art-glass windows, light fixtures and front door&mdash

A Creche Reborn

Fri, 12 Dec 2008 10:54:36 GMT

Along a stretch of scenic winding road, the turn-off to one of the country’s most exquisite artworks is marked only by a small sign, “Pax Crèche.” But every year thousands of people find their way to a 300-year-old hand-crafted nativity scene displayed in a white clapboard barn on the grounds of a monastery. A treasured work at the Abbey of Regina Laudis, home of cloistered Benedictine nuns, the creche is fittingly located in Bethlehem, a tiny town in western Connecticut. After a three-year restoration by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the baroque Lilliputian figures return to refurbished nativity setting this month. Dubbed a “Rembrandt or Rubens” of

From Castro to Warhol to Mother Teresa, He Photographed Them All

Tue, 25 Nov 2008 07:00:00 GMT

Photography fans know him as the man who shot Winston Churchill—shot him in 1941 in a back room at the Canadian Parliament, having plucked the great man's cigar from his mouth and been rewarded with a glower that made the cover of Life magazine. Said to be one of the most widely reproduced images in history, the portrait Yousuf Karsh made that day has also graced the postage stamps of seven countries. "You can even make a roaring lion stand still to be photographed," the statesman declared, whereupon he magnanimously permitted a second click of the shutter. The alternate take, long known only to the Churchill family, shows a twinkle in the lion's eye and the hint of a smile

Mark Catesby's New World

Tue, 25 Nov 2008 07:00:00 GMT

It is no secret that the 18th-century British natural history artist Mark Catesby occasionally copied the work of his predecessors. His sketch of a land crab bears a striking resemblance to a watercolor rendered by John White (see "Brave New World" in the December SMITHSONIAN), a British artist who joined Sir Walter Raleigh's voyages to present-day North Carolina in the 1580s. The crustacean's spiny legs are bent at all the same angles as they are in White's version. In total, Catesby replicated, possibly even traced, about seven of White's published watercolors. The patchwork of amorphous spots on his puffer fish is virtually identical to White's, and he acknowledges White as t

Matthew Gurewitsch on "Karsh Reality"

Tue, 25 Nov 2008 07:00:00 GMT

What drew you to this story? I was drawn to the challenge of a subject that was virtually unknown to me. Of course, I had seen many Karsh portraits before. But in the past, I had always looked at the sitter without giving much thought to the photographer. It was fun to turn the camera around, so to speak. What surprised you the most while covering this story? I was flabbergasted, honestly, to think how widely Karsh traveled. Getting around wasn't so easy in his day. I was surprised, too, that, with the success he enjoyed, he might have become a prima donna, but he never did. Were there any interesting moments that didn't make it to the final draft? There's a vast body of work—photo

Warhol's Pop Politics

Thu, 30 Oct 2008 09:44:57 GMT

No doubt Andy Warhol, who died in 1987, would have reveled in our current media-saturated election. The artist’s own iconic images of 20th-century leaders inspired spirited debate about the pairing of politics and pop culture. So it is fitting that the first retrospective of his political works has been timed not only to coincide with this pivotal presidential election but also unveiled in New Hampshire, a state well-trod by political hopefuls and pundits. In “Andy Warhol: Pop Politics,” the Currier Museum of Art in Manchester exhibits more than 60 of Warhol’s paintings, prints, drawings and photographs, drawn largely from the collection of the Andy Warhol Museum in

Feeling Blue: Expressionist Art on Display in Munich

Thu, 23 Oct 2008 06:00:00 GMT

If you spot a blue horse on your next trip to Munich, chances are that you've either been enjoying too much of the local brew, or you're admiring the art at the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus (State Gallery in the Lenbach House). The Lenbachhaus, a small museum located northwest of the city center, pays homage to the Blaue Reiter (Blue Rider) group, a loose association of kindred spirits founded in 1911 by Wassily Kandinsky, Franz Marc and other artists. Though the group's collective work was cut short by the First World War, its ideas marked a major turning point in art history – the birth of Abstract Expressionism. "Men are blinded. A black hand covers their eyes,&qu

Bernini's Genius

Thu, 25 Sep 2008 06:00:00 GMT

Gian Lorenzo Bernini was said to have been only 8 when he carved a stone head that "was the marvel of everyone" who saw it, according to a contemporary biographer. He was not much older when he dazzled Pope Paul V, who reportedly declared, "We hope that this youth will become the Michelangelo of his century." Prophetic words: over a long lifetime, Bernini undertook commissions for eight popes, transforming the look of 17th-century Rome as Michelangelo had helped shape Florence and Rome a century before. Much of the Baroque grandeur of the Eternal City—its churches, fountains, piazzas and monuments—can be credited to Bernini and his followers. Yet, despite h

Day of the Iguanas

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 06:00:00 GMT

In the early 1920s, Diego Rivera returned to Mexico City from a trip to Oaxaca and began telling friends about a place where strong, beautiful women ruled. Soon Rivera was painting such women, and within a decade, the list of artists and intellectuals that followed the road south to Oaxaca included Frida Kahlo, Sergei Eisenstein and Langston Hughes. Photographers came too: Henri Cartier-Bresson, Tina Modotti, Edward Weston. To varying degrees, they were all taken with the indigenous Zapotec women on the Isthmus of Tehuantepec and the culture in which they really did enjoy more power and freedom than other women in Mexico. Graciela Iturbide didn't travel to the region until 1979, but the p

Kenneth R. Fletcher on "Four for a Quarter"

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 06:00:00 GMT

Kenneth Fletcher graduated with a master's degree in journalism from University of Maryland, where he covered agriculture and the environment for the Capital News Service, in 2007. From there, he became Smithsonian's writing intern, contributing primarily to the magazine's Around the Mall section. I recently caught up with Fletcher, who has since left the magazine to freelance from Latin America, to chat about his experience reporting and writing "Four for a Quarter," in our September issue. What drew you to this story? Back in April, Nakki Goranin came to the American History museum to give a talk about her new book. I thought it would be a great story. The pictures in the book

Lost & Found

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 06:00:00 GMT

Kabul, 2004 On a hot day in late april some 30 archaeologists, cultural officials and National Museum of Afghanistan staffers crammed into a small office at the city's Central Bank. Before them was a safe, one of six containing a cache of 2,000-year-old gold jewelry, ornaments and coins from the former region of Bactria in northern Afghanistan. Fifteen years before, the treasure, known as the Bactrian Hoard, had been secretly removed from the museum and stashed in the bank's underground vault under the supervision of Omara Khan Masoudi, the museum's director. The handful of museum employees responsible for hiding it had risked their lives to protect the treasure from warring factions and l

Botticelli Comes Ashore

Fri, 15 Aug 2008 02:32:56 GMT

"How much do you want a Botticelli?" The question was sent to Isabella Stewart Gardner in Boston in a letter posted by Bernard Berenson on August 1, 1894, from London. Berenson, thirty-one, had, with the publication of the groundbreaking Venetian Painters of the Renaissance, recently established himself as an expert on Italian art. Four months before, he had sent Gardner a copy of his book, and earlier that summer, when she was in Paris, he urged her not to miss an exhibition of English pictures. Soon after, Isabella Gardner asked Berenson his opinion of several Italian Old Master pictures proposed to her by dealers in France. Berenson replied that the paintings were not what th

Q & A: Cynthia Saltzman

Fri, 15 Aug 2008 04:47:41 GMT

Your book profiles several of the great 19th-century American collectors of European Old Master paintings. What was happening in the 1880s and 1890s that prompted these wealthy Americans to go after these works? I think it was because America was really becoming a world power. It was overtaking England and Germany as the leading economic power. Americans began to focus on culture. They had built the Metropolitan, they had built the Philadelphia Museum and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, then they need great art to put in them. In order to have a major world-class museum you needed Old Master paintings. The Old Masters were a measure of the museum. What, at the same time, was prompting the

Richard Misrach's Ominous Beach Photographs

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 06:54:43 GMT

You might think that Richard Misrach took the photographs on these pages while hovering over different beaches around the world. But he actually shot them all from the same high-rise hotel in Hawaii. Misrach, a 59-year-old fine arts photographer known for his pioneering work with color and unsparing images of the despoiled American West, says he enjoyed the lofty perspective from the hotel's balconies: "I always thought about it as being a god's-eye view, looking down and seeing these amazing human interactions." Though the connection may not be obvious, his pictures of people relaxing and playing were deeply influenced by the events of September 11, 2001. That morning, Misrach,

More With Richard Misrach

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 06:50:11 GMT

American fine arts photographer Richard Misrach has produced beautiful pictures of disturbing events, from pollution to fires to dead animals. Author Kenneth R. Fletcher talked to Misrach about his latest exhibition, "On the Beach." How did the events of September 11, 2001 inspire a series of beach pictures? September 11 changed the way I looked at the world, but these pictures are not about 9/11. They were influenced by it. That's a really big distinction. These photographs are about how people are able in the face of huge tragedy to continue on and do things and have a good time and play and relax on the beach. What were you doing on September 11? I was at the Corcoran [Galle

True Colors

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 06:00:00 GMT

To find out what the Greek gods looked like, it would seem reasonable to start in Room 18 of the British Museum. That's the gallery devoted to the Elgin Marbles, grand trophies removed from the Parthenon in Athens between 1801 and 1805 by Thomas Bruce, seventh earl of Elgin, the British envoy to Constantinople from 1799 to 1803, when Greece was under Turkish domination. Even at the time, Elgin's action struck some as the rape of a great heritage. Lord Byron's largely autobiographical poem "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage" contains this stinging rebuke: Dull is the eye that will not weep to see Thy walls defaced, thy mouldering shrines removed By British hands, which it had best behov

Gregory Crewdson's Epic Effects

Tue, 27 May 2008 06:00:00 GMT

The photograph seems utterly serendipitous: a boy stands under a bridge, framed by lush trees, and directs his (and the viewer's) gaze heavenward through backlit fog toward some unseen attraction. But nothing has been left to chance. The photographer, Gregory Crewdson, scouted the spot under a Massachusetts railroad bridge for a month, and a crew of about 40 people spent days setting up the shot. The illumination comes from lights suspended from cranes, and the fog rises from hidden machines. Crewdson instructed the boy, who had been hanging around the bridge, to imagine "a dream world where everything is perfect." Such preparation for a single photographic image may seem a bit

Small Wonders

Tue, 27 May 2008 06:00:00 GMT

What is it about small, quirky museums that makes them so compelling? Perhaps it's because they can be traced to antiquity, when Greco-Roman temples would display both wondrous artworks and pagan relics—the spear of Achilles, Helen of Troy's sandal, or "giants' bones" (usually petrified mammoth remains). Medieval cathedrals carried on the tradition: tortoise shells or "griffin's eggs" (actually those of ostriches) might be placed alongside the relics of saints. In the Renaissance, Italian princes began assembling cabinets of curiosities, eclectic displays that could include any creation of man or nature: Egyptian mummies, pearls, Classical sculptures, insects, gia

Recalling Robert Rauschenberg

Mon, 19 May 2008 08:33:09 GMT

At Bob Rauschenberg's the television was always on. This was as true in the hulking former orphanage that became his Greenwich Village pied-à-terre as it was in the cottages scattered like coconuts amidst the palm groves of Captiva Island, Fla., his real home in the last decades of his life. He died last week at the age of 82, an American artist whose "hybrid forms of painting and sculpture changed the course of American and European art between 1950 and the early 1970s," according to the Los Angeles Times. It was winter, sometime late in the 1970s, when I went to Captiva Island with Tatyana Grosman, the legendary printmaker who'd introduced Rauschenberg as well as Jasper

Rogues Gallery

Tue, 20 May 2008 09:53:09 GMT

Every day a work of art is stolen somewhere in the world. Thieves rip paintings from walls, sever canvases from their frames with razors or even screwdrivers, raid warehouses with assault rifles, saw sculptures from their bases with chainsaws and haul them away in trucks. In February, three masked men raided the E.G. Burhle Collection, a small museum in Zurich, Switzerland. At gunpoint, they forced patrons and museum staffers to the floor and made off with four 19th-century paintings worth about $165 million. Two of the paintings were later found in an unlocked car parked at a psychiatric facility, less than a mile from the museum. The thieves and the other two paintings remain missing. Ac

Forensic Science for Antiques

Fri, 16 May 2008 01:36:04 GMT

The clients had paid many thousands of dollars for the Chinese silk samples with the bird motifs and now wanted reassurance that they were indeed from the Warring States period (about 480–221 B.C.). But the news was not good. After testing them, the Rafter Radiocarbon Laboratory in New Zealand declared the samples less than 50 years old. "We had some really unhappy submitters," says Dr. Christine Prior, team leader at Rafter, which is part of the National Isotope Centre of the Institute of Geological and Nuclear Sciences. We've all marveled at the forensic wizardry that traps villains on such TV hits as CBS's "CSI" ("Crime Scene Investigation"), but da

Impressionism's American Childe

Wed, 19 Jan 2011 09:59:02 GMT

In the summer of 1889, a 29-year-old American artist with an unusual name, Childe Hassam, rented a studio in Paris’ Montmartre district. Littering the space were unsold canvases abandoned by the previous tenant—“un peintre fou,” the concierge called him. The “mad painter” was Pierre-Auguste Renoir. The young American had never heard of the artist, a leader of the French Impressionists, but he was intrigued by his work. “I looked at these experiments in pure color and saw it was what I was trying to do myself,” he recalled 38 years later. Hassam, who died in 1935 at age 75, was a pioneer of American Impressionism in the 1890s. Though he neve

Showcasing Shams

Thu, 08 May 2008 09:57:42 GMT

Salvatore Casillo should be a happy man. The museum he runs in southern Italy—Museo del Falso—recently acquired a large collection of works attributed to contemporary Italian pop artist Mario Schifano, whose paintings have fetched up to $500,000 at auction. Any day now, the museum will take possession of thousands of oil paintings, drawings, lithographs and prints ascribed to other famous artists, including Andy Warhol. The best part? The museum pays nothing—not a cent, not a euro—for this art trove. Here's the catch: the works are fakes. They come courtesy of the Carabinieri, Italy's military police, and its Department for the Protection of Cultural Heritage&mdash

China’s Artistic Diaspora

Mon, 05 May 2008 06:28:21 GMT

Xu Bing's sunny art studio in Brooklyn, with spacious ceiling-to-floor windows and reassuring domestic touches—including a purple plastic slide in one corner for his seven-year-old daughter—is worlds away from the desolate labor camp where he toiled as a teenager during China's Cultural Revolution. Yet, as the 52-year-old artist told me when I visited his studio earlier this year, the tensions and turmoil of recent Chinese history continue to fuel his artwork. Like many artists and intellectuals of his generation, Xu left China shortly after the 1989 crackdown in Tiananmen Square. After moving to the United States in 1990, he began to explore the theme of "living between

“No More Long Faces”

Thu, 24 Apr 2008 06:00:00 GMT

Gawking at the love lives of public figures–from Brangelina to Eliot Spitzer–is something of a national pastime these days, and things weren't much different during the lifetime of celebrated American artist Winslow Homer (1836-1910). While prolific in depicting the outside world, Homer adamantly refused to reveal his inner landscape to an increasingly curious public throughout his career. Perhaps that is why, nearly a century after his death, we're still interested: Secrecy often suggests something worth concealing. Homer himself hinted at this sentiment in a 1908 note to a would-be biographer: "I think that it would probably kill me to have such a thing appear–an

The Life and Times of a Maine Island

Thu, 24 Apr 2008 06:00:00 GMT

An island is a special place, often invested by both its residents and outside observers with an identity, a life and a personality. People talk and whisper, defend and attack, brag and condemn an island as if the landmass were a friend, family member or nemesis. I don't know why islands inspire such personification or generate such strong opinions. Some people, including friends and relatives of mine, have stepped off the shores of Long Island and never again returned. Others leave for several years before coming back. And still others leave, but no matter how young they were when they sailed, they still consider it "down home." For me, even more than an island or a hometown,

Beneath the Surface

Thu, 24 Apr 2008 06:00:00 GMT

The frugal Winslow Homer was at his most parsimonious with words—especially when asked to reveal his aesthetic ideas or his methods of working. "I think it would probably kill me to have such a thing appear," he told a friendly writer who proposed a biography. The artist doggedly rebuffed all such overtures, left only a thin trail of correspondence and remained resolutely tight-lipped, particularly about his artistic views. But his more than 700 watercolors provide scattered biographical and artistic clues. In the most recent investigation into his methods, mounted by the Art Institute of Chicago, a meticulous study focused on 25 watercolors. Using a microscope, Kristi A.

Hidden Depths

Thu, 24 Apr 2008 06:00:00 GMT

The storm pounded in from the North Sea on October 20, 1881, picked up the Iron Crown like a toy and drove the 1,000-ton bark onto the shoals near Tynemouth, on the Northumbrian coast of England. Hundreds of villagers rushed to the Life Brigade House to launch rescue operations. As night melted into the morning of October 21, members of the life brigade wrestled a boat into the surf and managed to bring 20 people from the Iron Crown to safety. With all but one of the ship's hands accounted for, all eyes turned back to the battered vessel. There the lonely figure of Carl Kopp, a crewman thought to have been washed overboard, appeared on deck, clinging to the ship with one hand and waving w

Model Arrangement

Thu, 24 Apr 2008 06:00:00 GMT

Writers as diverse as Norman Mailer and Gloria Steinem have waxed lyrical about Marilyn Monroe's enduring appeal, but they have rarely doted on her movie performances. Instead, they consider her image in photographs: the playful, precociously sexual Norma Jeane, so carefully cloaking her harrowing childhood; the iconic platinum-blonde glamour girl who wanted only to marry a millionaire; the dreamy and heartbreakingly worldly woman of the fabled "Last Sitting," photographed six weeks before she died. One could say that her greatest role was a nonspeaking one: Marilyn, the Portrait. "She could, arguably, be the most photographed person of the 20th century," says producer

On the Job: Choreographer

Fri, 18 Apr 2008 12:59:34 GMT

Meeting Lori Belilove, founder of the Isadora Duncan Dance Foundation, can be eerie for anyone familiar with the mother of contemporary dance. Both women were born in the San Francisco Bay area. Both Belilove and Duncan were raised as free spirits, encouraged early to love the arts and nature. Both traveled extensively with their families through Europe. Both drew inspiration from classical Greece. And both were passionate believers that dance begins deep within the soul, not strictly at the barre. Which came first, the interest in Isadora or the interest in dance? The interest in Isadora. As a young girl growing up in Berkeley, I was certainly exposed to dance and all the arts. I was tak

On the Job: Broadway Producer

Tue, 25 Mar 2008 06:17:11 GMT

Jeffrey Seller has an eye and ear for what works on Broadway. Dubbed a "power hitter" on the Great White Way, the two-time Tony Award winner has produced Rent, Avenue Q, De La Guarda, La Bohème and High Fidelity. Smithsonian.com goes behind the scenes with Seller as he prepares for the end of Rent's 12-year run and the beginning of In the Heights, an energetic new musical about life in New York City's Washington Heights. How did you get into this line of work? When I graduated from [the University of] Michigan, I moved to New York. I found my first job doing publicity at a four-man pr operation that did a little bit of theater, a little bit of television. Less then a yea

Larger than Life

Tue, 25 Mar 2008 06:15:03 GMT

Painter, provocateur, risk taker and revolutionary, Gustave Courbet might well have said, "I offend, therefore I am." Arguably modern art's original enfant terrible, he had a lust for controversy that makes the careers of more recent shockmeisters like Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst and Robert Mapplethorpe seem almost conventional. As a rebellious teenager from a small town in eastern France, Courbet disregarded his parents' desire for him to study law and vowed, he wrote, "to lead the life of a savage" and free himself from governments. He did not mellow with age, disdaining royal honors, turning out confrontational, even salacious canvases and attacking established social v

Protecting the Priceless

Mon, 28 Jan 2008 09:22:57 GMT

Retired Army Reserve Major Corine Wegener remembers well the April 2003 day when the news broke that the Iraq Museum in Baghdad had been looted. She was then an Assistant Curator in the Department of Architecture, Design, Decorative Arts, Crafts and Sculpture at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, and so far as anybody knew, the only arts curator in the U.S. military. Her ten-month deployment to the Iraq Museum in 2003-2004 convinced Wegener that the US military needed to update and improve training related to cultural property. In 2004 she co-authored the U.S. Army's new cultural property training manual, and in 2006, she founded the U.S. Committee of the Blue Shield, the American branch

Gaga Over a Gargoyle

Mon, 28 Jan 2008 09:17:47 GMT

The 61st-floor terrace of the Chrysler Building in Manhattan had rarely seen such a large crowd. There was photographer Annie Leibovitz and her assistant Robert Bean, standing on one of the eight gargoyles that grace the building's exterior. Dancer David Parsons was on another of the gargoyles, posing for Leibovitz. A video crew was on hand to record the proceedings. So was a writer and photographer from the New York Times. Hovering over them all was the spirit of Margaret Bourke-White (1904-1971), the swashbuckling Life photographer who had herself been photographed atop one of the Chrysler's gargoyles in 1934. "The height wasn't terribly bothersome," says John Loengard, the ph

Looting Iraq

Fri, 25 Jul 2008 07:08:27 GMT

Looting has been a part of war at least since 333 B.C., when Alexander the Great strolled into the tent of King Darius III, helped himself to the vanquished Persian's best tapestries and commandeered the royal bathtub for a soothing victory soak. In the years since, victors have taken the spoils, and in their wake, ordinary citizens and opportunistic thieves have grabbed anything of value in that confused pause between war and peace. All the looting at Baghdad's Iraq Museum had taken place by the time U.S. troops—engaged in toppling Saddam Hussein—arrived to protect it, on April 16, 2003. Between April 8, when the museum was vacated, and April 12, when the first of the staff r

Being Funny

Mon, 28 Jan 2008 09:06:25 GMT

In the late 1960s, comedy was in transition. The older school told jokes and stories, punctuated with the drummer's rimshot. Of the new school, Bill Cosby—one of the first to tell stories you actually believed were true—and Bob Newhart—who startled everyone with innovative, low-key delivery and original material—had achieved icon status. Mort Sahl tweaked both sides of the political fence with his college-prof delivery. George Carlin and Richard Pryor, though very funny, were still a few years away from their final artistic breakthroughs. Lenny Bruce had died several years earlier, fighting both the system and drugs, and his work was already in revival because of hi

Portraits of Resistance

Mon, 28 Jan 2008 09:05:53 GMT

Sarah Vaughan looks enraptured—eyes closed, lips parted, hands held at her chest in an almost prayerful gesture. This photograph of the late "Divine One," nicknamed for her otherworldly voice, introduces visitors to an exhibition of 100 black-and-white photographs of African-American activists, artists, scientists, authors, musicians and athletes at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. (through March 2). A scaled-down version of the exhibition, co-sponsored by the International Center for Photography in New York City, will travel to several cities starting in June. Drawn from the gallery's collections, the photographs span the years from 1856 to 2004 and make

Danger Zones

Thu, 20 Dec 2007 10:06:48 GMT

David Maisel doesn't consider himself an environmental activist. Yet his large-scale aerial photographs of strip mines, a bone-dry lake bed and man-made evaporation ponds can be viewed as indictments of our indifference to the planet that sustains us. Once you figure them out, that is. The photographs call to mind everything from blood vessels to stained-glass windows. "They might be mirrors into who we are as a society and who we are in our psyches," Maisel says. At a recent exhibit (traveling through 2010) of Maisel's "Black Maps"—aptly titled because they leave most viewers in the dark as to where they are—his Terminal Mirage 1 (p. 56) looked to me like

Big News

Thu, 20 Dec 2007 10:04:06 GMT

It was originally called Leviathan, and it was supposed to be a monster of the deep seas. Nearly 700 feet long and 60 feet high, the double-hulled iron steamer renamed Great Eastern was twice the length and triple the tonnage of any other ship when it was launched in 1858. Intended to shrink the vast distances of the British Empire, it could carry 4,000 passengers from England to Australia without stopping to refuel. The Times of London declared that "its immensity is so great in comparison with all the notions previously conceived of monster ships that it seems to elude comprehension and weigh upon the mind." And yet Great Eastern never met the outsize expectations of its desig

Letters from Vincent

Thu, 20 Dec 2007 10:00:10 GMT

The image of Vincent van Gogh daubing paint onto canvas to record the ecstatic visions of his untutored mind is so entrenched that perhaps no amount of contradictory evidence can dislodge it. But in an unusual exhibition at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York City (until January 6), a different van Gogh emerges—a cultivated artist who discoursed knowledgeably about the novels of Zola and Balzac, the paintings in Paris' Louvre and Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum, and the color theories of artists Eugéne Delacroix and Paul Signac. The show is organized around a small group of letters that van Gogh wrote from 1887 to 1889, toward the end of his life, during his most creative peri

Van Gogh in Auvers

Thu, 20 Dec 2007 09:50:56 GMT

On the evening of July 27, 1890, Vincent van Gogh stumbled back to his tiny room at the Auberge Ravoux in Auvers-sur-Oise, just north of Paris. When the innkeeper looked in on the artist, alarmed by his groans, he found van Gogh doubled over in pain from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the chest. The innkeeper, Ravoux, summoned the village doctor and van Gogh requested that his personal doctor, Paul-Ferdinand Gachet, come as well. After examining the patient, the doctors concurred that it was not possible to remove the bullet. So at van Gogh's request, Gachet filled a pipe, lit it and placed it in the artist's mouth. Van Gogh puffed quietly, while the doctor sat attentively at his side.

2008 International Art Fairs

Mon, 26 Nov 2007 03:10:25 GMT

Although Art Basel (Switzerland) and its sister event, Art Basel Miami Beach, each featuring more than 2,000 modern and contemporary artists annually, are top contenders for the title of premier international art fair, a number of other shows, including the ten listed below, earn high ratings from both critics and patrons. ARCO (Madrid, Spain) February 13-18 More than 200,000 visitors in February 2006 and 2007 have helped consolidate ARCO's standing as one of the world's leading contemporary visual arts fairs. National Black Fine Art Show (New York, New York) February 14-17 Dozens of international dealers exhibit works by 19th-, 20th- and 21st-century African, African American and Caribb

Married, With Camera

Mon, 26 Nov 2007 03:03:03 GMT

He wasn't like the other Danville boys, Edith recalls. He looked sharp that night in 1961, clad entirely in black for the dance at the Y; later, she learned that he listened to jazz and classical music. Emmet Gowin wanted to be an artist but was having trouble finding a subject. In Edith Morris, he did. They married three years later, and Gowin went on to make his first photographs of Edith and her extended family. It was a welcoming family, and a large one, clustered in five houses on a Danville, Virginia, cul-de-sac. By 1971, when this picture was taken, Edith and Emmet had the first of their two sons, Elijah (playing with a train set), and five nephews and nieces (one of whom appears i

Miami Splash

Mon, 26 Nov 2007 03:01:17 GMT

Miami has had its moments. In the 1980s it was "Miami Vice"—remember Don Johnson's five o'clock shadow and T-shirt-cum-blazer? In the 1990s it was South Beach, when seedy old Art Deco hotels blossomed into glamour destinations, luxury condos mushroomed all over town and supermodels rollerbladed along the beach. But since 2002, the year of the first Art Basel Miami Beach, it has been the city's art moment. When the Miami Beach Convention Center opens its doors to the public on December 6 for the annual four-day Art Basel expo, a tsunami of artists, dealers, collectors, critics, curators and art-world followers will flood the 262,960-square-foot exhibition space to ogle, and

Back to the Figure

Wed, 26 Sep 2007 08:52:55 GMT

The death of painting was first predicted in the middle of the 19th century, when the advent of photography seemed to snatch reality out of the painter's hand. "If photography is allowed to stand in for art in some of its functions," wrote French poet and art critic Charles Baudelaire in 1859, "it will soon supplant or corrupt it completely." Artists have been trying to come to terms with photography's implications ever since. Impressionists such as Monet and Renoir, rejecting the static, mechanical imagery of photographs as well as the stale academic painting of their time, set out to paint their own impressions of how the eye perceives light and atmosphere in nature.

Trunk Show

Mon, 29 Oct 2007 02:17:01 GMT

The relic from 1959 was hard to miss. Painted taxicab yellow and battered by the years, the old Chevrolet came lumbering around a corner, cruised majestically down the faded brown streets of Kabul, Afghanistan, and swept past Steve McCurry. Something about the vintage Chevy, so far from home, struck a chord with McCurry, an American photographer who, in 1992, had just returned to document the war-weary country's reawakening after almost a decade of Soviet occupation. "It was so out of place. I couldn't believe it," recalls McCurry, whose new book on Afghanistan, In the Shadows of Mountains, includes portraits, landscapes and street photography he has made there over the past 30

FOR HIRE: Fine Art Appraiser

Sun, 01 Jul 2007 04:00:00 GMT

Since Sotheby's founder Samuel Baker sold some 400 books from an estate library in London in 1744, the company has grown into an international auction house—handling some of the most important paintings, manuscripts and books in the world. Nan Chisholm appraised fine art for Sotheby's for more than 20 years, valuing paintings from the old masters to 20th century artists, before leaving to start her own appraisal/broker business four years ago. She can also be seen on the PBS series "Antiques Roadshow" offering her expert opinion on paintings from around the world. Now she tells Smithsonian.com just what her job is worth. How did you get into this line of work? Between col

Sculpting Her Vision

Mon, 12 Nov 2007 07:19:41 GMT

The Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian declared Nora Naranjo-Morse the winner of its outdoor sculpture design competition in May 2006. Her sculpture Always Becoming was selected unanimously by a museum committee from entries submitted by Native artists throughout the Western Hemisphere. The work was dedicated on September 21, 2007, and is the first outdoor sculpture by an American Indian artist to be on display in Washington, D.C. "It really is about the way we look at ourselves and the way we look at our homes and the fact that these are going to melt down and they're going to transform; that is the idea of Always Becoming," Naranjo-Morse says. The five differ

The Gates of Paradise

Mon, 29 Oct 2007 02:22:45 GMT

Michelangelo likened the gilded bronze doors of Florence's Baptistery of San Giovanni to the "Gates of Paradise." The phrase stuck, for reasons that anyone who has seen them will understand. Combining a goldsmith's delicacy with a foundryman's bravura, sculptor Lorenzo Ghiberti condensed the Old Testament into ten panels to produce one of the defining masterpieces of the Italian Renaissance. Since their installation in 1452, the doors have withstood a variety of near-biblical catastrophes: a torrential flood, vandalism, overzealous polishing and caustic air pollution. When the doors were finally removed for restoration from the facade of the 11th-century octagonal Baptistery in 1