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abstraction

Curator's Corner

Another Beauty Attack: Rogier Bissière

Tuesday, September 2, 2025 | Karl Cole

I have what I like to call episodes of “Beauty Attack” on a weekly, sometimes daily, basis when I’m struck by the awesomeness of an artist’s work that I never stopped to contem ...

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Curator's Corner

Artist Birthday: Sarai Sherman

Tuesday, September 2, 2025 | Karl Cole

Painter, interior designer, and ceramic artist Sarai Sherman was a Jewish American whose paintings were a combination of reality and reminiscences, producing a unique form of abstraction. ...

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Curator's Corner

Artist Birthday: Hananiah Harari

Friday, August 29, 2025 | Karl Cole

Hananiah Harari was both an abstract painter and a commercial artist who designed advertising campaigns and magazine covers. Never a doctrinaire abstractionist, his work went freely between geometric ...

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Curator's Corner

Artist Birthday: Jacques Lipchitz

Friday, August 22, 2025 | Karl Cole

Jacques Lipchitz was an extraordinary early modernist sculptor who worked in the Cubist idiom longer than most other artists associated with the style. Eventually his style incorporated the monume ...

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Curator's Corner

Artist Birthday: Christian Schad

Thursday, August 21, 2025 | Karl Cole

Christian Schad was of the generation of artists whose reaction against World War I engendered the Dada movement in art. Dada introduced the reinterpretation of what constituted fine art based on a re ...

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Curator's Corner

August Is Here: Willem de Kooning

Wednesday, August 6, 2025 | Karl Cole

In New England, it is generally said that summer is coming to an end in August. But I have a particular fondness for August because it’s when I discovered the house in Provincetown, Massachusett ...

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Curator's Corner

Artist Birthday: Marcel Duchamp

Monday, July 28, 2025 | Karl Cole

Marcel Duchamp matured as an artist during one of the most exciting periods in Western art history. Paris was one of the undisputed leaders in avant-garde experiments in art which had repercussions th ...

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Curator's Corner

Artist Birthday: Ludwig Sander

Friday, July 18, 2025 | Karl Cole

Ludwig Sander was a member of the New York School that established the United States as a center for modernist experiment in art. He was an early practitioner of Color Field painting which he stuck wi ...

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Curator's Corner

Artist Birthday: Gustav Klimt

Monday, July 14, 2025 | Karl Cole

Gustav Klimt, along with Oskar Kokoschka (1886–1980) was a leading Austrian modernist at the turn of the 1900s. Although noted as a society portrait painter in an Art Nouveau/Byzantine mosaic li ...

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Curator's Corner

Artist Birthday: Otto Freundlich

Thursday, July 10, 2025 | Karl Cole

The works of Otto Freundlich reflect the prevalence of geometric abstraction among Western European artists in the period between World War I (1914–1918) and World War II (1939–1945). His ...

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Curator's Corner

Artist Birthday: Barbara Chase-Riboud

Thursday, June 26, 2025 | Karl Cole

The tradition of African American women sculptors goes all the way back to the 1800s with Edmonia Lewis (1844–1907), continues through the Harlem Renaissance in the person of Augusta Savage (189 ...

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Curator's Corner

Artist Birthday: Jimmy Ernst

Friday, June 20, 2025 | Karl Cole

Jimmy Ernst was the son of pioneering German Surrealist artist Max Ernst. In the late 1940s he emerged as a major force in American Abstract Expressionism. ...

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Curator's Corner

Artist Birthday: Anni Albers

Thursday, June 12, 2025 | Karl Cole

Anni Albers is notable as one of the class of Bauhaus fiber artists who helped elevate weaving and other fiber disciplines to the status of fine art in Western art. After moving to the United States, ...

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Curator's Corner

Artist Birthday: Ernst Wilhelm Nay

Wednesday, June 11, 2025 | Karl Cole

Nay, who was forbidden by the Nazis to paint or even buy art supplies after 1937, painted abstractions secretly in a French sculptor’s cellar while serving as a cartographer in the German army i ...

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Curator's Corner

Artist Birthday: Conrad Marca-Relli

Thursday, June 5, 2025 | Karl Cole

Conrad Marca-Relli was part of the “first generation” of Abstract Expressionism, along with Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. His artistic vision, however, was uniquely apart from eit ...

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Curator's Corner

Artist Birthday: Marlow Moss

Thursday, May 29, 2025 | Karl Cole

Marlow Moss was a major figure in abstraction between the world wars. She was very active in the Abstraction-Creation group of abstract artists in the between-the-wars School of Paris, and she was act ...

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