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Picturing Christina of Denmark
The year was 1538, and King Henry VIII of England was back in the marriage market. His third wife, Jane Seymour, had died in childbirth a year earlier, leaving an opening for wife number four. Henry...
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Why We Love/Hate Brutalist Architecture
Brutalist architecture. You either love it or hate it, right? However you feel, we can all agree that Brutalism is an architectural style that continues to elicit strong reactions some seventy years...
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Reading “The Book of Nature”
Bear cubs are born as limbless blobs of fur, only taking form after being licked into shape by their mothers. When pursued by hunters, beavers bite off their own testicles. Storks that have grown too...
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The “Refus Global”
The Montreal-based artist group “Les Automatistes” had a mission. Quebec was, culturally speaking, trapped under a thick sheet of ice. They were going to smash through it with one striking blow. That...
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Under Hokusai’s Great Wave
Katushika Hokusai’s woodblock print “Great Wave off Kanagawa” is one of the world’s most recognizable images. A global icon, the thrilling print has been widely reproduced, repurposed, and, inevitably,...
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Paul Revere Williams: An Architect of Firsts
Zsa Zsa Gabor. Frank Sinatra. Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz. All names that harken back to the glamor and glitz of Old Hollywood. They’re also names that harken back to the career of architect Paul...
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Eileen Gray: Architect In Her Own Right
The Irish architect and designer Eileen Gray is possibly best known for an act of vandalism. Not an act she perpetrated, but the deliberate defacing of a home she designed by an architect she had...
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The Art of Renaissance Clothes
The well-dressed Renaissance figure was, argues historian Ulinka Rublack, a work of art, a form of “polychrome sculpting.” Fashion, she continues, is “as important as painting for understanding the...
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The Genius of Georgette Chen
In a work that journalist Ong Sor Fern calls “perhaps the most famous image of Georgette Chen,” the painter “gazes directly at the viewer with a severe, even confrontational air. […] There is a...
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Going “Black to the Future”
With growing pressure to act in the face of the anthropogenic climate crisis, notions of time and urgency have gained renewed importance. Possible solutions have been posed as a race against a ticking...
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Remembering Maud Lewis
“Live-in or keep house.” Fish peddler Everett Lewis slapped this short ad on the walls of shops all over Marshalltown, Nova Scotia, in January 1938. Maud Dowley accepted the job. She also convinced the...
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Saving Art from the Revolution, for the Revolution
Alexandre Lenoir’s Musée des monuments français was one of the first popular museums in Europe. Located in a Gothic convent only recently disestablished by the French Revolution, it must have been a...
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The Long Shadow of the Jolly Bachelors
When, along with a group of largely queer female artists, Charlotte Cushman “retired” to Rome in 1852, she was one of the best-known celebrities in the United States and Europe. In playing both female...
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Alexander Calder, Sculptor
American sculptor Alexander Calder was born on this day in 1898. Celebrated for his abstract kinetic sculptures and his monumental public sculptures, Calder, together with minimalist artists such as...
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What the Shadow Says
The mid-twentieth-century writers Sylvia Plath, Jack Kerouac, and Amiri Baraka may not have much in common in terms of subject matter or writing style. But, as literary scholar Erik Mortenson writes,...
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Lessons in Mannerism at the Palazzo del Te
“Mannerist architecture is architecture that was strange then and is now.” This was just one of the thoughts Robert Venturi shared in a lecture on architectural history and design given to the Royal...
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How Renaissance Art Found Its Way to American Museums
Madame X, The Consummation of Empire, and The Andes of Ecuador are all considered examples of great American art, but there was little appreciation for these works (or the artists who made them) at the...
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Painting Race
The defining of race by skin color becomes visible in European art of the long eighteenth century (c. 1688–1815). It was during that time that “art, natural history, nascent anthropology, aesthetics,...
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Surrealism at 100: A Reading List
On October 15, 1924, French poet André Breton published his Manifeste du surréalisme, arguing for a new form of literary creation that would unlock the subconscious. He defined Surrealism as “pure...
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JSTOR Daily’s Archives of Art History
Over the past decade, our writers and editors have shared dozens of stories, research summaries, and reading lists on the history of art. We’ve covered individual artists, movements and manifestos,...
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