I saw Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper during a visit to Milan in 2008. I had to buy a ticket—the last one available during our stay in the city—for the chance to spend 15 minutes with it. Located in the refectory of Santa Maria della Grazie, the painting has been kept under controlled conditions…
Revolution in art is never boring. In fifteenth-century Italy, art innovated and flourished as it had never done before. Its aim? The rebirth of classical learning and culture of ancient Rome and Greece. In other words a renaissance (naissance is French for birth). The Renaissance art style continued to evolve, eventually leading to Mannerism. Catholic…
How do you imagine Paris? For the artist in many of us, it is a Bohemian Paris we conjure up and even yearn for. But is Bohemian Paris merely an illusion? What is a Bohemian, anyway? In the popular view, she is someone unconventional, carefree, and usually involved in the arts. A free spirit who…
Undulating forms are beautiful, sensuous, and seductive. You often find them in nature—in the curve of a woman’s body, the outline of a camel’s neck and hump, the motif on a sidewalk mosaic, etc. They appeal to an aesthetic sense in all of us. Artists have been aware of this appeal for a long time.…
Today is the anniversary of the massacre of civilians in the small town of Guernica. On this day, April 26, 1937, Spanish cubist Pablo Picasso, who was living in Paris, worked on a painting with a familiar theme, the autobiographic subject of a painter and his model. The painting was commissioned by Spain’s Republican government…
October 2012. I stood in the Bibliothèque Polonaise on the Ile Saint Louis in Paris, looking at the works of Andrzej Kreütz-Majewski. Captivated. Unsettled. His images haunted me and I had to find out more about him. An operatic and theatrical scenery designer, and professor of the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow, Kreütz-Majewski was…
Bugs in your mug? In your Starbucks Strawberry Frappuccino maybe? Or your pink tequila? Picture these squashed creatures in your drink: Humongous yuk factor, right? But it’s not really these bugs you’ll see. It’s the color they impart. One thing you can reassure yourself about—it’s natural, not one of those chemical dyes with toxic components…
Milan. We like it. Quite a lot. Some guide books tell you Milan isn’t really Italy and many tours exclude it from their itineraries. Maybe, they mean it’s not the Italy they have romanticized. Nor Italy of the renaissance or baroque periods. But Milan is Italy as: • Grand gestures; • Innovation and design; •…
It’s a long journey from San Francisco to Florence. On our last summer trip, it took a fairly uneventful seventeen hours of flying and waiting at airports. For a month our pied-à-terre was on the Oltrarno, south of the river. About 900 sq. ft. of voluminous dark space with a loft bedroom and two bathrooms,…
Art is: A Tube of Paint. On first blush, this makes sense, at least when it comes to painting: Most paintings start with a canvas and a tube (or tubes) of paint. But, before Marcel Duchamp and, perhaps, Russian avant-garde painter Wassily Kandinsky—credited with producing the first abstract paintings—a painting also needed an idea and/or…
A curious intrigue surrounded Marcel Duchamp’s urinal aka Fountain by R. Mutt. The original urinal not only never graced the show it sought to get into. It had mysteriously disappeared. Where to and taken by whom? No one knew or would say. It is, in fact, this disappearance that bestowed on Fountain its notoriety and…
Custard tarts and patterned stone pavements. These are the attractions that stood out for me in Macau when I visited it with my husband before China reclaimed it. Both are Portugal’s legacy to China. You may know that Hongkong once belonged to the British. But it’s neither the first nor the only Chinese region occupied…
Artsy Rambler 