Hamlet, Mary Cassatt, and the Robot Monster (22 May 2013 11:04pm)

The great French landscape painter Hubert Robert was born on this day 1733. Inventor of the electromagnet and electric motor William Sturgeon was born 1783. Composer Richard Wagner were born in 1813. Sherlock Holmes creator Arthur Conan Doyle was born in 1859. The great Laurence Olivier was born in...

Blue for Thomas Gainsborough (14 May 2013 02:57pm)

Photorealist Robert Bechtle is 81 today. Bass player and lead singer of Cream Jack Bruce is 70. Ridiculously overrated director George Lucas is 69. Another blockbuster director, Robert Zemeckis is 62. Pain in the ass and narcissistic Talking Heads front man, David Byrne is 61. Actor Tim Roth is 52. ...

Jerry Saltz Is an Asshole (23 Apr 2013 09:21pm)

I have a great fondness for serious art criticism. But I don't think you get it by reading newspapers or magazines. What's more, I tend to think that criticism takes time. You need to live with a piece of art for a long time. Otherwise, it is too easy to let your emotions distract you with flashy to...

Painting to Lose Your Head Over (16 Apr 2013 10:01am)

Wilbur Wright was born this day in 1867. Actor Peter Ustinov was born in 1921. The great arranger and composer Henry Mancini was born in 1924. Jazz flutist Herbie Mann was born in 1930. And Dusty Springfield was born in 1939. Joseph Aloisius Ratzinger (the Pope emeritus) is 86 today. Kareem Abdul-J...

Leonardo and the Fetus (15 Apr 2013 10:37am)

On this day in 1707, one of the greatest mathematicians ever, Leonhard Euler was born. The great novelist Henry James was born 1843. Muralist Thomas Hart Benton was born in 1889. Nikita Khrushchev and Bessie Smith were born in 1894. The iconoclastic psychologist Thomas Szasz was born in 1920. And El...

Life and Death of Raphael (06 Apr 2013 12:41pm)

Dudley Nichols, screenwriter of Bringing Up Baby, was born on this day back in 1895. The great saxophonist Gerry Mulligan was born in 1927. And Kinch from Hogan's Heroes, Ivan Dixon was born in 1931. The great geneticist James D. Watson is 85 today. Merle Haggard is 76. I like him for songs like "M...

Mona Lisa Now (03 Apr 2013 11:23am)

Giovanni Carmine, an art curator in Switzerland, had an interesting idea. It also turned out to be horrifying. He took a number depictions of women in great pieces of art throughout history and altered them into our modern standards of beauty. That is: he made them painfully skinny. We aren't talkin...

Oy Vey, Goya Day (30 Mar 2013 10:24am)

The Italian composer Tommaso Traetta was born on this day way back in 1727. Vincent van Gogh was born in 1853. I'm fond enough of him, but I really don't understand his stature among art collectors. Could it be as simple as, "Pretty colors!"? There are remarkable aspects of his painting. I especiall...

Way Back to Bartolomeo (28 Mar 2013 10:24am)

Remember two days ago when I wrote, Just Good Enough: Richard Dawkins? Those were the glory days! March 28 sucks, but let's get it over with. Marlin Perkins was people you could count on when the Sunday TV's rough (when I was a kid). And if you don't get that reference: Perkins was the host of Anim...

Celebrity Painters (10 Feb 2013 11:21am)

In general, I'm against artists in one field going into another. Part of it is just that we already live in a winner-take-all society. There are damned few ways for artists to make a living. Does Jeff Bridges really need the extra income from doing voice-overs for commercials? Couldn't he leave som...

Bush Self-Portrait (09 Feb 2013 03:00pm)

Guccifer hacked the Bush family emails and all I got was this stupid painting! Okay, not stupid. Let me backtrack, because this hasn't exactly been well covered. Earlier this week, The Smoking Gun reported a hacker by the name of Guccifer got into six email accounts of Bush family members and friend...

Friday Night Fright (19 Oct 2012 08:45pm)

BuzzFeed offers up 8 Mind-Boggling Pieces of Illusionary Makeup Body Art. They are all amazing, but the one below is the best. This is just my little attempt to spice up your Friday Night: Of course, I could have just offered up Dali at the Age of Six When He Thought He Was a Girl Lifting the Skin...

Getty Center (07 Sep 2012 11:17am)

I spent the whole of yesterday at the Getty Center. Truly, I was none too keen on it, given my general opinion of J. Paul Getty—one of the great third basers who we are all supposed to bow down to. The fact that he was a miser doesn't help matters. He loaned his son money to pay for the kidnap...

Anne Adams and Frontotemporal Dementia (06 Sep 2012 10:31am)

Radio Lab produced an exceptional short program called Unraveling Bolero. It tells the story of the Anne Adams, a PhD cell biologist turned artist. Her change from science to art was the result of the early stages of a brain disease called frontotemporal dementia. The disease causes the language por...

The Art of an Iraqi War Criminal (03 Aug 2012 12:45am)

I caught a bit of The Rachel Maddow Show tonight as I made dinner. During one bit, she mentioned that since leading Iraq into ever more chaos for the Bush administration, L. Paul Bremer is now painting. She showed the painting on the left and I thought, "That looks really interesting." So I went to...

Second Person Singular Cover (09 Jun 2012 08:01pm)

I grabbed a copy of Sayed Kashua's Second Person Singular yesterday because of its cover: ...

A Late Valentine (07 Mar 2012 12:11am)

When I was a kid, I thought comics sucked. The only mainstream comic I ever read was Kamandi: The Last Boy on Earth. It was written and drawn by Jack Kirby. But it definitely wasn't the art I liked. Kirby is a really important comic book artist. He more or less created Marvel Comics as we now know i...

Who is Mista Moose-Puppet-Head? (18 Jan 2012 07:30pm)

This is a cry for help. For a couple of weeks now, I've been signing off my email with, "As Mista Moose-Puppet-Head would say, 'Ha-cha-cha-cha!'" It speaks volumes about who I am and how long I have been, that not a single person has thought to ask, "Who is Mista Moose-Puppet-Head?" Maybe they all...

This is Not Your Father's Rene Magritte (17 Sep 2010 09:55pm)

As my 2.72 readers know, the header to this site is based upon an couple of paintings by Rene Magritte. One of them is not the following: This is one of my very favorite Magritte paintings, however; it is called "La condition humaine" ("The Human Condition") and was painted in 1935 (to distinguis...

George Henry (11 Aug 2010 01:46pm)

Yesterday, I had a curious, but ultimately delightful meeting with a young artist named George Henry. He is working on a collection of photographs of the poor, dispossessed, and wounded. And he thought I might be of some help in this endeavor—how much remains to be seen. Until I met with him, ...

Making Money from Art (04 Jan 2010 01:03am)

The top Classical Realist painters seem to sell large canvas oils for upwards of a couple hundred thousand dollars. So the money isn't bad, if you are very good—which you must be to create even workman-like paintings in this sub-field. ...

The Twilight of Painting (04 Jan 2010 12:41am)

The Twilight of Painting is a reactionary book about how everything is going to hell these days. It was first published in 1945. And it was written by the great artist R. H. Ives Gammell. In fact, the book is not about how everything is going to hell—just painting. You see, Gammell started pai...

Total Articles: 22