His first and last trip to the city in 1940 was not for military purposes — he left that to his generals — but for his one true love: art.
Excerpts
Posted inBooks
Van Gogh and the Siren Song of Paris
The artist’s internal revolution erupted in the radical innovations of his years in the city, which seemed to offer refuge from the storms of his life.
Posted inBooks
The History of Blackness Is Entwined With Blue
Manet’s portrait of Jeanne Duval reveals how racism trains us to see colors in particular and sometimes contradictory ways.
Posted inBooks
Five Poems for Vincent
What started as a catalog essay about van Gogh’s little-known passion for poetry became a suite of poems for the Dutch painter.
Posted inBooks
Thomas Cole’s Landscape Painting Through an Indigenous Lens
Unlike European Christian notions regarding human dominion over all of creation, the Haudenosaunee belief is that our relationship with the earth is one of responsibilities.
Posted inBooks
The Contrived Rivalry Between Two Pioneering French Women Artists
Whenever French 18th-century artist Adélaïde Labille-Guiard is mentioned, it’s almost always as a counterpoint to her better-known “rival,” Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun.
Posted inBooks
In Art Conservation, There Is No Perfect Solution
Conservator Rosa Lowinger reflects on her time working at LACMA in the 1980s in an excerpt from her new memoir, Dwell Time.
Posted inBooks
Read an Excerpt of Lucy Lippard’s Newest Book, Stuff: Instead of a Memoir
Lippard muses on her early years in New York City, from discovering a love of art writing to encountering Marcel Duchamp when she worked at MoMA’s library.
Posted inBooks
Carrie Mae Weems’s Visual Response to Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come”
Weems’s essay is excerpted from Ways of Hearing: Reflections on Music in 26 Pieces.
Posted inBooks
How Black Artists Are Shaping a Distinctly Black Gaze
Cultural and artistic icons are reshaping the circulation of Blackness on a global scale.
Posted inBooks
The Strange Tradition of “Practice Babies” at 20th-century Women’s Colleges
An excerpt from Megan Culhane Galbraith’s “The Guild of the Infant Survivor,” a memoir of an adoptee’s quest for her past.
Posted inBooks
New Hokusai Graphic Biography Shares Stories from His Extraordinary Life
At the age of 44, Hokusai took on an amazing challenge: a giant portrait of the founder of Zen Buddhism.