During the period between the two World Wars, Europe was left staggering. Empires had disappeared. New borders were drawn. And the ensuing deep economic recession seemed a permanent quagmire. Little wonder that within this environment artists and writers would explore themes that expressed...
Finally revealed is this extraordinary double life: Walk into any drugstore and you’ll see his commercial packaging designs that have become iconic in American culture. But for more than 60 years he was also pushing the boundaries of abstract expressionist painting.
Leo is the only American artist who actually grew up in the circus. He became a pioneer in Pop Art in the early 1960s, and was the first to create kinetic Pop sculpture. Here’s a fascinating and truly unique chapter in the history of American Art.
English artist Sophie Aston is a painter who has questioned the role of painitng by making a powerful foray into the world of collage. By so doing she has brought revelations about the creative process and painting itself. Her collages are composed of clippings from copies of vintage Better Homes...
Don ZanFagna might be the most famous visionary artist you never heard of. Buckminster Fuller admired him as “a great visionary, artist, and architect.” He was 60 years ahead of his time in predicting the impact of technology on the environment. This idiosyncratic genius was eerily prescient...
“The easiest thing to say about Raymond Smith is that he follows in the tradition of Walker Evans and Robert Frank. Evans was his photography teacher at Yale in the early 1970s and Frank’s book The Americans (1958) is a source Smith acknowledges for his own book. But neither of these...
Before he disappeared he was on the perfect path: studying under Josef Albers at Yale; a solo exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in 1966; internationally, several museums of modern art showed his paintings. But in his spiritual exploration he became reclusive and shunned galleries. In his...
This survivor of the Armenian genocide wound up in a Cairo orphanage in 1927. He rose to fame as one of Egypt’s great modernists, but after moving to Long Island late in life he withdrew into anonymity. Now his compelling story is being told.
Yes, a street artist can become a master. “The Wizard of Brooklyn” was a completely self-taught artist who was also a holistic healer at one of the world’s largest mental hospitals. Psychoanalysts said he fit the profile of a classic reclusive hoarder. Bartnikowski found it...
Iraqi Phoenix
Qasim Sabti is the founder of a group of Iraqi artists called “The Iraqi Phoenix,” owing not only to their own survival during their country’s war and upheaval but to their creative vision that persisted. Among the most important of Sabti’s artworks are...
