The Execution of Emperor Maximilian

~THE UNCOMMON heroism of a Hector or a Germanicus, the noble tears of an Andromache or an Agrippina—such high moments from...

One of the most famous scandals in the history of art broke out when Edouard Manet’s Olympia (​Plate 5​) was first exhibited in the Salon of 1865...

~I WANT to begin this chapter with the case study of Gustave Caillebotte, both patron of, and participant in, the Impressionist collective. He was the youngest (born 1848) and most well off of the group, and the most conservative in style and content. His major works attest to a thorough assimilation of the rhetoric of...

At the Exposition Universelle of 1878,...

THE LATTER HALF OF 1948 WAS A TUMULTUOUS TIME FOR MOTHERWELL; HE LATER REMEMBERED IT as one of the most miserable and stressful periods he had ever lived through. Although his work was being well received, and he was involved in a number of publishing projects and other professional activities (among them co-founding an art school called The Subjects of the Artist), in his personal life...

~Those writers who believe that Manet’s subject matter was just a pretext for painting are most puzzled by his forays into the realm of ‘history painting’ since these generally involved subjects which Manet could not have seen in everyday life, and since they seemed, in some ways, to be concessions to academic requirements. While it...

Even a casual glance at successive editions of guide books to Paris, from their beginnings in the 1840s to the end of the “Belle Epoque,” reveals the striking truth: leisure and entertainment took an ever-increasing place in the life of Paris...