All Essays
The Robert Lehman Collection
The organic shapes, in particular, suggest that anatomical study and dissection played a significant part in the development of the characteristic idiom of the Auricular Style.
Femke Speelberg
May 1, 2014
Claude drew inspiration from his close, constant study of nature and changing effects of light.
Katharine Baetjer
February 1, 2014
By the twelfth century, there were medical schools throughout Europe. The most famous was the school of Salerno in southern Italy, reputedly founded by a Christian, an Arab, and a Jew.
Sigrid Goldiner
January 1, 2012
Famed for his sensual nudes and charming scenes of pretty women, Auguste Renoir was a far more complex and thoughtful painter than generally assumed.
Cindy Kang
May 1, 2011
Gauguin cultivated and inhabited a dual image of himself as, on the one hand, a wolfish wild man and on the other, a sensitive martyr for art.
Cindy Kang
March 1, 2011
Bonnard explicitly admitted that he could only paint the familiar. The rituals of daily life—taking tea, feeding the cat, tending to the dinner table—were his subjects.
Dita Amory
November 1, 2010
With Giotto, the flat world of thirteenth-century Italian painting was transformed into an analogue for the real world, for which reason he is considered the father of modern European painting.
Jennifer Meagher
September 1, 2010
An aristocratic, alcoholic dwarf known for his louche lifestyle, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec created art that was inseparable from his legendary life.
Cora Michael
May 1, 2010
Antonello da Messina is, in a sense, the first truly European painter and his remarkably varied achievements raise issues crucial to our understanding of European art.
Keith Christiansen
March 1, 2010
The woodwork demonstrates the reliance on traditional Netherlandish building practices in late colonial New York.
Matthew Thurlow
December 1, 2009