Artist Birthday: Ernst Wilhelm Nay
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: Marlow Moss
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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Curator's Corner
Artist Birthday: Thomas Gainsborough
Thomas Gainsborough’s art was the epitome of the elegant, sophisticated and generally low-key Rococo style that characterized late 1700s British art. It was a major contrast to the flamboyant, o ...
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Curator's Corner
Artist Birthday: Jules Breton
Jules Breton was a unique artist of the Realism movement in France in the mid-1800s. Having grown up with poor rural farmers in northern France, he understood their lives and labors. His paintings pre ...
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Curator's Corner
Artist Birthday: Liubov Popova
Liubov Popova was one of the many women artists active in the avant garde art during the period of the Russian Revolution (1917). Not only did she experiment in all of the most recent modernist styles ...
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Curator's Corner
Artist Birthday: Jean Hélion
Jean Hélion was a member of a number of artists’ groups between World Wars I and II which advocated for total, non-objective abstraction. Ironically, after World War II he lost his tenaci ...
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Curator's Corner
Artist Birthday: Neo Rauch
Leipzig-based Neo Rauch is part of the generation of German artists who revitalized German painting starting in the late 1900s. His work is a combination of late East German Socialist Realism, opera-l ...
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Curator's Corner
An Image of Royal Power Attributed to Muhammad Hasan
In the history of portrait painting, it is fascinating to interpret what the artist is trying to convey about the sitter. Sometimes when the portrait is of a member of a ruling family, it’s pret ...
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Curator's Corner
The Van Gogh of America: Birger Sandzén
As we celebrate the 4th of July and what it is supposed to represent, I present to you an artist who was an immigrant and had a big impact on American art and art education: Birger Sandzén. He ...
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Curator's Corner
Oil Painting in Italy: Antonello da Messina
I really love the Philadelphia Museum of Art, especially the monastery-like room in which I saw this painting displayed. I also really like getting the side-eye from this guy, because this artist is o ...
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