#art-history

#art-history

Curt Goldschmidt's fate is shared with many Jewish collectors and patrons. With this restitution, we honour Jewish collectors and remember victims of Nazi persecution.

The 2026 Whitney Biennial opened at the beginning of the month, providing a snapshot of current trends and curatorial interests in the art world.

I wanted to be a great artist, not in the slang use of 'great,' but fantastic—reaching the soul of other people. This ambition drove Pat Steir throughout her life.

"We look at Europe in a global context and we like to highlight the ways that European artists and collectors traveled and traded with the world. Part of that is representing the people who lived in Europe but came from abroad," Adam Harris Levine, associate curator of European art at the AGO, said over email.

Mark Rothko and his first wife, Edith Sachar, put down roots in a small apartment within a Greek Revival townhouse in Manhattan's East Village neighborhood in the 1930s. There, the late abstract expressionist famously known for his color field technique created the painting titled 'Thru the Window.'

The oil on canvas presents an unusual and dynamic composition of a serene Madonna alongside her energetic child with a reverent Saint John pressed up close in the painting's foreground.

In Braque's paintings, collages, and prints, the polymath set out to distill bucolic landscapes and rural village scenes as broken up and then re-assembled geometric compositions; decidedly abstract yet still slightly recognizable representations. Through this revolutionary approach, he examined how objects could be depicted from multiple perspectives-multiple sources of light-as if superimposed portrayals of the same setting rendered at different times of day.

Today I rented the right-hand wing of this building... it's painted yellow outside, whitewashed inside. Set in Place Lamartine, near the railway station, the building had two wings. The left side was occupied by a grocery shop (it has a pink awning in Van Gogh's painting). The right side (with the green windows) was Van Gogh's, with two small bedrooms upstairs, his studio was behind the front door and the kitchen was at the rear.

Born in Paris in 1936 to German-Jewish parents who fled the Nazis, his family survived the war in hiding in south-western France. Rosenberg first arrived at the Louvre in 1962, at the invitation of Charles de Gaulle's minister of culture, later heading up the department of paintings during the museum's dramatic relaunch in the 1980s and early 90s, symbolised by the 1989 completion of I.M. Pei's sculptural entrance, the Louvre Pyramid.

The history of art is the history of a continuum regularly shattered by revolutionary innovation, which in turn soon becomes absorbed into the continuum, and so it goes throughout the centuries. This process is evident in the new exhibition of works by the London-based Italian painter Patrizio di Massimo, all created between 2021 and 2026.

In 2024, art collector Christian Levett opened Europe's first museum dedicated to women artists in a little town in the south of France. But for those of us who can't make the trip to the Femmes Artistes du Musée de Mougins (Female Artists of the Mougins Museum, or FAMM), the American Federation of the Arts (AFA) has arranged the next best thing: a blockbuster touring exhibition about women artists of the Abstract Expressionist movement, featuring some of the highlights of the FAMM collection.

Modernism is pleased to present its second exhibition of collages by Eva Lake. In Relics of Beauty, striking images are constructed from an array of art history and archaeology photography paired with pop-culture imagery of 20th-century women. The result is a body of work that rewrites the historical record with softness and femininity, and challenges the pervasive societal notions surrounding beauty.

Renais­sance artist Albrecht Dür­er (1471-1528) nev­er saw a rhi­no him­self, but by rely­ing on eye­wit­ness descrip­tions of the one King Manuel I of Por­tu­gal intend­ed as a gift to the Pope, he man­aged to ren­der a fair­ly real­is­tic one, all things con­sid­ered.

Consider Hans Holbein the Younger's portrait of Henry VIII's fourth wife, Anne of Cleves: an enigmatic look, cast from beneath heavy-lidded eyes; a long nose, the soft breath from which is almost felt; a red velvet gown richly adorned with gold and pearls, set against a blue background made more vivid by its recent restoration. Serving as the cover image for Elizabeth Goldring's biography, it is a painting that conveys much of her subject's continuing

The discourse surrounding generative AI in the creative arts is frequently characterised by a sense of historical rupture, a seismic shift unlike any that has come before. Critics often frame the emergence of Large Language Models and diffusion-based image generators as an unprecedented existential threat to the 'soul' of human expression, a black swan event that may signal the end of human creative sovereignty.

It is the place where Salvador Dali painted The Enigma of Hitler, a haunting landscape featuring a giant telephone receiver that seems to be crying a tear over a cutout picture of the Fuhrer. Conceived in 1939, the work seems to anticipate war. It is also the place where Winston Churchill penned parts of his multi-volume A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, and painted its dappled-light view.

There is something quite addictive about Thomas Schlesser's Mona's Eyes ( Les yeux de Mona in French). Once you start reading it, you cannot stop, even though nothing much happens over the course of its 300 pages, and the 52 chapters all follow the same pattern. Written in the vein of Jostein Gaarder's Sophie's World (1991), a fictional survey of Western philosophy as seen through the eyes of a 14-year-old girl, Schlesser's novel, a bestseller in Europe, offers a similarly compact, often exhilarating cruise through the last few centuries of Western art.

Faith Ringgold did not simply paint historyshe broke it open. She reached into the marrow of America's most violent foundations, pulled forth the bones, and demanded that we look. Her Slave Rape Seriesraw, spiritual, brutal, and incandescentremains one of the most courageous achievements in American art, a portal through which the full seismic force of her career becomes legible. Through these paintings, she forged a new language for Black womanhood, a new architecture for Black truth, and an entirely new horizon for artistic liberation.

The Fall 2025 season of art and architecture books from Yale University Press includes exceptional exhibition catalogues, including Man Ray: When Objects Dream (The Metropolitan Museum of Art), Dreamworld: Surrealism at 100 (Philadelphia Art Museum), (Tate), Manet & Morisot (Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco), and Photography and the Black Arts Movement, 1955-1985 (National Gallery of Art). New releases this season also include Knife-Woman, a landmark biography of Louise Bourgeois by Marie-Laure Bernadac and translated into English by Lauren Elkin;

Artist Francis Bacon is known for his hell-raising antics in London, but the Dublin-born painter also had a soft spot for Paris. Following his hit exhibition at the Grand Palais in 1971 he took a a small studio apartment in the French capital. During this time Michael Peppiatt, the UK art historian who wrote Francis Bacon in Your Blood (2015), was his guide to the French capital, helping him navigate the City of Lights.

When you think of Renaissance-inspired fashion, images of rich velvets, intricate lace, and elaborate headpieces likely come to mind. But Dutch artist and designer Suzanne Jongmans is challenging these expectations in imaginative ways. Rather than using traditional textiles, Jongmans crafts her historically inspired costumes out of recycled materials such as packaging foam, plastic sheets, and other discarded objects. Her work bridges the gap between the past and present, proving that beauty and creativity can emerge from the most unexpected sources.

"History is written by the victors," or so goes the quote often misattributed to Winston Churchill. In other words, those who wield the most power or resources are typically the ones whose stories are represented in textbooks, passed down through generations, and etched into our collective consciousness. Without intentional effort, it can be difficult to hear more than a single narrative.

The Histories, an exhibition conceived by Godfrey in collaboration with Marshall and Adrian Locke, the RA's chief curator, is Marshall's largest show to date in Europe and is timed to celebrate his 70th birthday. After London, it will travel to Kunsthaus Zürich and the Musée d'Art Moderne in Paris. The exhibition's title speaks to the layered histories in Marshall's work, to the history of painting as well as African and transatlantic history.

For more than a decade, Rosen has sought out chattering macaws, cockatoos with fluffy, blush-colored plumage, and ornery owls, which she pairs with patterned papers and textiles. An African penguin, for example, stares curiously at its pink-and-white striped surroundings, while a Lady Amherst's pheasant trots across ornate brocade. The resulting portraits are meditations on notions of beauty and the relationship between nature and culture, particularly as we've reproduced imagery of the former throughout centuries of art and design.

Wally Caruana was the senior curator of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art at the National Gallery of Australia between 1984 and 2001. His book provides a concise survey exploring how the diverse works of Aboriginal and Torres Strait artists has continually developed and responded to change. He considers the impact of urban living, the growth of local art centres that support the artists in these communities, and the recognition of women artists.

"The Bayeux Tapestry is a unique work of art. It has no equivalent, not even the Mona Lisa, of which there are several paintings."