Category: Gallery and Museum Art

In addition to receiving a degree in physics from Haverford College in 1944, and an appointment to work on the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, Clark Hulings studied art with George Bridgeman (whose books on anatomy are among my favorites) and influential teacher Frank Reilly (see my post on Frank Reilly) at the Art Student’s…

Odilon Redon (Bertrand-Jean Redon) was a French Expressionist/Symbolist painter and pastel artist whose career in the latter half of the 19th Century was marked by restless experimentation with spare compositions, intense colors and blurred images that suggest more than they reveal. His dreamlike excursions into shifting mists of color and soft suggestions of form and…

Vasily Surikov (Wassilij Iwanowitsch Surikow) was probably the foremost history painter in Russia. He was active in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Born into a Cossack family in Krasnoyarsk, Siberia, he studied at the Imperial Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg. Garnering awards and acclaim for his paintings, Surikov moved to Moscow, where…

Two things strike me about painter Ben Aronson’s work, geometry and edges. The geometry is often prominent, as in his cityscapes and interiors, arrayed not only in the patterns of their own geometric intersections, but in the slashing diagonals of shafts of light and dark, punctuated with floating solids of sun and shadow. Aronson’s edges,…

For reasons that are beyond me, the image most popularly associated with Whistler is not, as it is with most artists, one of his artistic pinnacles; but, at least in my opinion, one of his least successful and least interesting works, Arrangement in Grey and Black: The Artist’s Mother, known commonly at “Whistler’s Mother”. How…

I occasionally make the assertion, in my posts about artists like Jan van Eyck, Antonello da Messina, Albrecht Altdorfer and Matthias Grünewald, that prior to the modern era of motion pictures, artists at various times were the special effects wizards of their day — dazzling those who viewed their works with displays of technical virtuosity,…