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Lourdes Bernard on Pieter Bruegel
The Wine of Saint Martin’s Day by Pieter Bruegel has preoccupied me since 2009, after coming across it in the fifth Bruegel book I ever purchased.
Sophia Narrett on Edgar Degas
When I first saw Degas’s Portrait of Mlle Fiocre in the Ballet "La Source" I felt like I was experiencing the actual ballet as an audience member might have, accessing the elusive suspension of disbelief that allows viewers to get swept up in the narrative experience.
Audrey Flack on de Kooning's Women
I was a young artist in the early 1950’s feeling the weight of a male-dominated art world in places I frequented...
Clarity Haynes on Domenico Ghirlandaio
Ask me what my favorite painting is — a very hard question since there are so many — and I’ll eventually come up with An Old Man and his Grandson by Domenico Ghirlandaio...
Tony Robbin on Bonnard's Bathers
It is often said that Pierre Bonnard’s paintings featuring bathers are intimate works, as the women are caught unawares, glimpsed in unguarded and private moments...
Gabrielle Vitollo on Hacking the Biological: Post-gender and the Catharsis of Anish Kapoor’s 'Internal Object' Paintings
I found myself immersed in what I considered a psychological space, loaded with ideas of carnage, political violence, and the body...
James Esber on George Grosz
The artist inhabits a post-apocalyptic world where people and objects are empty and degraded. Every volume is a void.
Philip Koch: Sailing Lessons from Edward Hopper
I've always found the painting remarkable for the way Hopper's boat surges with such energy. Any moment it will have sailed out of our view altogether.
Melissa Meyer Remembers Jean Dubuffet at the Jeu de Paume, 1991
Although the marks may appear casual and the painting spontaneous, Dubuffet rigorously planned the composition of each “Theater of Memory.”
Marcela Florido on Stanley Spencer
The unexpected apparition of arms, fences, doors and bodies in that humid landscape led me to perceive mystery and mysticism in what seemed to be a mundane, daily event.
Max Kozloff on Pieter Bruegel and his P.O.V.
Yet this is the prospect given in Bruegel’s “St. John the Baptist Preaching.” Jesus is there, but as a presence he hardly counts and John is too far away to be heard distinctly.
Barry Nemett on Gwen John
The building weighs less than a flower. The parasol stem dreams about being a wicker chair...
David Molesky on Titian’s The Flaying of Marsyas
Through the double doors that open into the Met Breuer’s inaugural exhibition, I fell into the familiar vortex of a painting I have loved for decades...
Rosalyn Schwartz on Caspar David Friedrich
I first discovered the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich in the mid-1980’s when I was an Assistant Professor of Painting at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis...
Raoul Middleman on Rembrandt
The most puzzling aspect of the The Night Watch is the figure of the small girl, the so-called mascot of the civic guard...
Zaria Forman on William Bradford
In July 1869, American painter William Bradford, alongside photographers John L. Dunmore and George Critcherson, embarked on the first expedition to the Arctic devoted principally to art.
Ken Buhler on Andrew Pfriender
One wintry Sunday afternoon in the mid-1980’s, some friends and I piled into a car and headed up Rte. 17 into the Catskill Mountains. In a couple of hours, we exited at Loch Sheldrake, NY, and found our way to a rural mobile home belonging to Andrew Pfriender, aka Grandpa Pfriender.
Ellen Altfest on Francois Boucher
I’ve always disliked the Rococo, and pretty much any artist who paints pink cheeks (Rubens, Renoir, Hals, etc.). For me, it’s not the pleasure, desire, or playfulness of the Rococo and other similar confections, but it is the one-note, overly-sweet eagerness to please that irritates.
Margaret Grimes on Ruth Miller
The still life paintings of Ruth Miller are at first glance deceptively modest. On closer viewing however, they have a compelling power comparable to a gravitational pull.