Alfred H. Barr
Alfred Hamilton Barr, Jr. (January 28, 1902 – August 15, 1981), known as Alfred H. Barr, Jr., was an art historian and the first director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. American art historian and administrator who played an enormously important and controversial role in establishing an intellectual and institutional framework [...]
Franz Kline
An abstract expressionist, he made his mark with large black-and-white paintings featuring architectonic forms constructed from broad, slashing lines. Swaths of black paint, sometimes applied with a housepainter’s brush, are held in tension with intervening white areas, also vigorously brushed, so that his compositions avoid figure-ground relationships in favor of a flat surface. Decentralized compositions [...]
Villa Farnese
In 1556 Cardinal Alessandro Farnese (1520–89), patron of Bembo and Vasari, commissioned Giacomo Vignola to build a villa at Caprarola, 55 kilometres (35 miles) north of Rome; the building was erected on the foundations of an earlier villa begun by Antonio Sangallo the Younger. The villa was finished in 1583, and is widely considered to [...]
Robert Rauschenberg
Painter, sculptor, printmaker, photographer, and theater artist. His declared intention to “act” in the “gap” between art and life, as he put it in 1959, succinctly characterized his contribution to art history. In the 1950s he broadened abstract expressionism to include non-art elements. His recognition of the aesthetic potential of ordinary objects stimulated the development [...]
Barnett Newman
Painter, sculptor, and printmaker. An abstract expressionist who set precedents for color field painting, he is known for enormous solid-color canvases broken only by one or more stripes or “zips,” as he preferred to call them. Like other abstract expressionists, he accepted art as a calling of high seriousness, inherently concerned with existential truths and [...]
Cranach Lucas the Elder
One of the pivotal figures in early sixteenth-century German art, Cranach the Elder was the Reformation artist par excellence. A close friend and follower of Martin Luther (they were godfathers to one another’s children), Cranach collaborated with Luther in producing numerous single-sheet woodcuts and book illustrations that were crucial for the spread of the new [...]
CONTEMPORARY PERSPECTIVES ON METHOD
The historiography of art history has been a potent theme in the discourses of the discipline of the last thirty years. And the approaches and methods in the study of the visual are probably more varied, and more vigorously debated, than in any other area of historical enquiry. This is so much so that the [...]
Recent Comments