Mary M. Lane

This author has been to a number of museums in the world and never has she found a gem as hidden as the Walters Art Museum. Tucked away in a corner of Baltimore, the Walters is the kind of museum…
Skeptics of the American Dream likely will consider Emanuel Leutze’s masterpiece depicting George Washington crossing the Delaware River to be a propagandistic romanticizing of America, a work…
Western art history is filled with colorful characters, whose statuses as heroes or villains can change based on the mores of our current society. The "Reframed" column is not a politically leaning…
Easily the most famous depiction of famine in art history is Vincent van Gogh’s 1885 oil painting, The Potato Eaters. At the time of its creation, the phrase "potato eater" was considered pejorative…
Museum-goers, this author included, are often guilty of walking past still life paintings of food, dismissing them as dull and anodyne. Yet, taking in the context of when they were created, these…
It is an understandable human instinct to treat any crisis as if it were the first of its kind. A century ago, those fears revolved around a widening gap between rich and poor, a global pandemic, and…
Upon its creation, Quidor’s painting was widely panned by art critics for being too dark and focusing more on the woodland nature than on the chase. In many ways, this was a clever choice by Quidor,…
The October 2021 Focus for Reframed is Ghoulish

Horror and death in entertainment shows have captivated millions of Americans in the last decade, from Netflix’s most-binged…