Picasso

This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate 5 Painting was ecstasy for Henri Matisse. Color worked on his eyes and gut like a self-renewing first crush. But between about 1905 and 1917, he was on the rack. His experiments on canvas broke so radically with norms, and triggered so much derision, that he was tormented by anxieties, undone by insomnia, near paralyzed by doubt. Yet he was powerless to stop. His relationship with painting was akin to that of a besotted lover with a domineering partner: The pleasure is deranging, but the cost to one's equanimity steep. Outwardly, Matisse steadied himself by adopting a sober, bespectacled facade. Rejecting the overt Bohemianism of his rival, Pablo Picasso, he set up a private art school, used his professorial eloquence to win over a handful of foreign collectors (they had to be foreign, since all of France thought him a lunatic), and established his family in a sturdy, … [Read more...] about This 1911 Matisse masterpiece has had a very unusual afterlife

This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate 3 WASHINGTON - Throughout the 20th century, more than a few radical artists attacked the canvas. They ripped it from the frame, sliced it with a knife, burned holes into it and shot at it, sometimes with paint, sometimes with more lethal ammunition. Canvas became a metaphor for art and society, for the old ways of doing things, for the oppressive, immutable weight of complacency and cruelty woven into so much of the human-made world. Sam Gilliam didn't attack the canvas, he liberated it. That distinction was critical to his career, and the affection felt by so many for the artist, who died Saturday at age 88. Gilliam lived a long life, a productive one, and his artistic adventure was enormously varied and restlessly inventive. But it was work he began making in the mid- to late 1960s, using unstretched, draped canvas for which he is best known, and which secured both his entree and his … [Read more...] about Sam Gilliam never fought the canvas – he liberated it

This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate 3 Summer Brennan can recognize a Vincent van Gogh painting by its wispy, vibrant brushstrokes. A series of loopy spirals or spindly legs? That's probably Louise Bourgeois. But after a few days of playing "Artle," Brennan, a writer based in Paris, began to notice some holes in her art knowledge. For 30 years, she has indulged her love of visual arts by visiting galleries, reading books and attending shows. So when she couldn't identify a piece by French photographer Eugène Atget, it felt like an embarrassing lapse. "It does give you some self-awareness when you realize that all the artists you know right away are like White 19th-century artists, that maybe it's time to expand some of your art appreciation," Brennan said. One of the latest "Wordle" copycats challenges players not with letters, but with images plucked from the National Gallery of Art. The popular daily word game, … [Read more...] about ‘Wordle’ fan? The National Gallery of Art has launched a copycat