Often an artist finds their voice through decades of work. A unique signature is created. Even though the focus may shift and bend, the inimitable remains. There is no one like her anywhere. The painter Jess Allen is one of these artists. Even though her subject changes, she is recognizable.
Art News
This year’s Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny finds Harrison Ford in his final adventure as the legendary archaeologist, Indiana Jones. In the film, Jones and his goddaughter race to find the missing half of Archimedes’ Dial, a device that enables time travel, before a Nazi scientist can use the dial to change the outcome of WW2.
On Thursday, June 29th, Madrid’s cultural landscape is set to be forever changed with the opening of the Royal Collections Museum. Destined to become a haven for art enthusiasts and boost tourism to the already popular Spanish capital city, the new museum will house an extensive collection of priceless artworks and historic artifacts that were hand-picked from around Spain to showcase the rich cultural heritage of the Spanish monarchy.
In 2010, the U.S. Post Office released a sheet of commemorative 44-cent stamps honoring 10 Abstract Expressionists. Clyfford Still (1904-1980) was included among the prominent painters. Despite receiving this stamp of approval, Clyfford Still’s name recognition is not that of other included artists: Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, or Mark Rothko.
During the postwar era, movements were still a thing, and midcentury New York was the place where they were being minted. It mattered which program you were getting with, and in the late 1950s that still meant Abstract Expressionism, though Pop Art and Minimalism were waiting in the wings.
Many modern audiences, upon learning about the intricacies of Paul Gauguin’s life, adopt a distaste for him as a person. Even so, between bouts of deplorable behavior, Gauguin created art that many experts consider important to the art-historical timeline.
Do archaeological exhibitions always require a theme? Of course, there needs to be an overarching subject justifying and advertising why a selection of material has been brought together. Themes help to tell stories, create an argument, and give meaning to seemingly disparate collections of objects. The narratives constructed by curators allow items, especially mundane ones, to take on increased relevance by placing them in a broader context.
Over four hundred years ago, Peter Paul Rubens painted a bloody, yet tender biblical scene of Saint Sebastian being tended to by two angels. But the painting’s ownership history and its frequent change of hands in the eighteenth century led to its eventual loss of all provenance and therefore loss of the artist of this work’s identity for three hundred years.
When thinking of great art, we can’t discount the importance that collectors, philanthropists, and banking families played in the art market from the Renaissance onwards.
The world’s most prestigious art fair, the 2023 edition of Art Basel kicked off with the opening of Unlimited, a section of the fair that presented monumental projects in a space that was big enough to display 76 large-scale installations by a mix of celebrated and emerging artists working in a variety of media.
