Category: Innovation in Art
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When Kandinsky moved mountains
Extraordinary breakthroughs often take surprising paths. Wassily Kandinsky drew inspiration from symphonies to pioneer abstract art, using color to orchestrate spirituality and raw emotion.
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Fra Angelico: The devil is in the details
At the dawn of the Renaissance, when art was awakening to new possibilities, Fra Angelico emerged as the first Italian painter to transmit the innermost feelings of his characters directly to the viewer.
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The baffling paintings of Paul Cézanne
I’m at odds with historians who describe the hugely influential paintings of Post-Impressionist Paul Cézanne as famously silent or emotionally detached. To my eye, nothing could be further from the truth.
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Miriam Schapiro: Feminism in pieces
The Women’s Rights Movement was a defining moment for Schapiro. She invented femmage, a unique form of “feminist collage” that weaves paint with fragments of fabric to depict women’s intimate stories.
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Giotto reads the room
Giotto looked at the people around him and saw a story worth telling. His frescoes in the Arena Chapel break away from the non-naturalistic tradition of Byzantine art to portray what it means to be human.
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Jean Dubuffet’s stranger things
Immediately after World War II, French artist Jean Dubuffet began mixing paint with whatever he could scrounge up: string, tar, gravel, shards of glass. “Art should make us laugh a little and fear a little,” he said.
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How Caillebotte saved Impressionism
The French Impressionists were struggling. Their paintings weren’t selling, and Pissarro was becoming exasperated with Monet and Renoir. He was ready to quit the group when a mysterious letter arrived.
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Matisse and that cursed armchair
French artist Henri Matisse suffered from anxiety, so he painted moments of repose in order to catch his breath before returning to the turmoils of daily life. Does this mean he isn’t a “serious enough” artist?