Tag Archives: art history

Pinkie and Bluey

  When my daughters were babies I would occasionally dress them in matching outfits in different colors. That inevitably meant that one wore pink and the other blue. My uncle regaled me with stories about a set of twins whose mother used their clothes to tell them apart. They were named Pinkie and Bluey. Pantone’s […]

Better late than never

I grew up in Buffalo almost literally in the shadow of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery. Its mission throughout the 20th century was “enhancing the understanding and appreciation of contemporary and modern art.” Meanwhile, one of the great 20th century art movements was blooming just across the Niagara River in Ontario. Seymour Knox and his curators […]

Noblesse oblige

Although I’m not much of a joiner, one contemporary tradition I embrace is National Gratitude Month (November). I personally think gratitude is a tremendous boon to mental health. It has the power to lift an incipient bad mood, it helps lower blood pressure, and it makes us engage more in our work and with our […]

A Romantic at heart

Whenever I’m in the Farnsworth, I stop to visit George Bellows’ “Romance of Autumn.” It fascinates me because it is so different from his urban work I know and love. Bellows was always an exuberant painter, but in his New York paintings he was also a careful chromatist whose work was unified by its paint handling. […]

An enduring story of sex and death

The beheading of Holofernes by Judith was one of the most popular Biblical subjects of classical painting. The Book of Judith is minor. Why did it interest artists so much? The story starts off with the Israelites cowering before the overwhelming force of the Assyrians. Her countrymen’s cowardice upsets Judith, a beautiful and resourceful widow. Judith […]

The good ol’ days, at least for me

Robert Clunie was a California realist plein air painter. If he’d never painted anything but the High Sierra, he wouldn’t interest me overmuch. This is even though his work is fresh and colorful, and his draftsmanship on high peaks, boulders and cliffs is perfect. However, I recently saw two paintings by him of the Saginaw River that […]

The Mystical Nativity

This week I got a note from a reader about the image of the Nativity: “The Gospels give us Joseph receiving messages from God in dreams. A sleeping Joseph is therefore a Joseph disposed to prayer. I’m guessing that’s why he is so often depicted as sleeping.” He’s right. If Joseph isn’t sleeping by the […]

The obtuseness of the effective altruism movement

An op-ed piece in the Washington Post earlier this week suggested that the effective altruism movement could kill the arts. Effective altruism purports to apply rational decision-making to funding charities. In theory, anything that demonstrates a good bang for the buck could be effective altruism. In practice, effective altruism means alleviating world poverty, improving animal welfare, avoiding […]