“Heath began painting in 1989 at the age of forty. Rising early to go to work as a taxi driver he would see the homeless bent over trash bins looking for food. In the shallow morning light they looked like oblique shapes and forms. Out of the...
“Here, the artist blends elements of color into shapes and forms to explore salvation and the terms under which his winged and hooded figure, manipulating a marionette whose actions are predicated under the guise of Christianity, delivers it. His...
Paintings; Acrylic paintings; Abstract paintings; Abstract works
“Johnson is a practitioner of a style sometimes labeled ‘abstract illusionism’, making paintings where apparently solid but abstract forms float in illusionary space. Riverfront Break may have been suggested by the industrial forms of the...
"Ad Reinhardt's satirical cartoons, which contrasted sharply with his practice as a painter, dated back to the 1930s and 1940s. His strong Communist sympathies during that period had informed a series of cartoons for left-wing journals. By the...
"Alice Aycock […] bases her forms on the logic of the imagination. […] Aycock revels in conjuring the past. The rich associative content of her sculpture is often nurtured by fanciful titles and accompanying texts that refer to history,...
"As early as 1876, in the ornate, somewhat epicene sensuality of The Apparition, Moreau summarized many of the concepts that linked the melancholy beauty of the Pre-Raphaelites with his own native poetic tradition epitomized by Baudelaire's...
"Because precision in dating is impossible for the Paleolithic era, art historians usually can be no more specific than assigning a range of several thousand years to each artifact. But probably later in date than the Venus of Willendorf is...
"Between 1970 and 1987 Zofia Kulik carried out performances in her native Poland with fellow artist Przenyslaw Kwick. Her more recent photographic works contain a 'time-based' aspect in that, rather than constituting montages made up from...
"Bojewyan is a small village near St. Just in Cornwall, England. At the time of the painting local farmsteads were falling empty because they were uneconomic. Lanyon saw this as a serious threat to the region. His painting contains hints of a...
"Broodthaer's Musée d'Arte Moderne assumed various forms. The 'Department of Eagles', which contained the exhibits pictured here, had further permutations in other venues. In a Düsseldorf showing of 1970 the museum's 'nineteenth-century'...
Sculpture; Metalwork; Maps; Industrialization; Industry; Economic & social conditions; Social aspects; Industrial arbitration; Social classes; Wealth; Poverty; Economic & industrial aspects
"Fabro made his first sculpture in the Italia series in 1968. Dozens of variations followed in subsequent years. Another theme established in 1968 was that of 'Feet'. This involved the artist in producing a series of bizarre sculptural...
"Fate of the Beasts (1913), perhaps also related to the prevailing apprehensions of war, portrays a total, inescapable catastrophe. Hard, arrowlike diagonals intersect to shoot across the canvas. Trees bleed and descend in a cosmic cataclysm....
"Further insight into Sumerian religious beliefs and rituals comes from a cache of sculptures reverently buried beneath the floor of a temple at Eshnunna (modern Tell Asmar) when the structure was remodeled. Carved of soft gypsum and inlaid...
"Having originally been taught by a pupil of Rodin and by the Paris-based sculptor Antoine Bourdelle, Richier produced work in a classical vein before the Second World War. After the war her work changed markedly. Her figures appeared...
"In de Kooning's black canvases the elimination of color was conditioned as much by financial constraints as by the need to simplify pictorial problems in the spirit of Analytic Cubism. The deliberately artless use of shiny enamel housepaints...
Paintings; Oil paintings; Civil wars; War; Politics & government; Political issues; Dictators; Nazis; Fascism; Civilization; Bombings; Military tactics; War destruction & pillage; Death; Dismemberment; Body parts; Mental states; Despair;...
"In this monumental work of 1937, Guernica, Picasso combined Analytic and Synthetic Cubist forms with several traditional motifs, juxtaposing them in a new Surrealist way. The combination serves the political message of the painting - namely,...
Sculpture; Mixed media; Maps; Recycling; Conservation of natural resources; Economics; Economic & political systems; Political issues; Politics & government
"It was not until the end of the 1970s, in the work of a new generation of sculptors including Tony Cragg, Richard Deacon, Anish Kapoor, and Bill Woodrow, that the sculptural object as such, in relation to human or urban themes, reassumed...
Paintings; Oil paintings; Eyes; Body parts; Clouds; Puns (Visual works)
"Magritte's False Mirror of 1928 depicts a large eye (from which the familiar CBS logo is derived). The black circle at the center can refer both to the pupil and to the eclipsed sun. The observer is thrown off balance by the unusual close-up...
"Marc, unlike Kandinsky, was predominantly a painter of imagery derived from the material world. But in a group of small compositions from 1914 and in sketches that he made in the notebook he carried, there was evidence of a move to...
Paintings; Oil paintings; Abstract paintings; Abstract works; Collages; Colors; Men; Musicians; Entertainers; Monks; People associated with religion; People associated with entertainment & sports; Music ensembles; Performances; Music; Guitars;...
"Synthetic Cubism marked a return to bright color. Whereas Analytic Cubism fragmented objects into abstract geometric forms, Synthetic Cubism arranged flat shapes of color to form objects. Picasso's Three Musicians - a clarinetist on the left,...
