Alejo Benedetti and Steven Zucker discuss Andy Warhol's Coca-Cola [3] (1962, casein on canvas, © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts) at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.
Art News
In this episode of Anatomy of an Artwork, immerse yourself in the history and details of Rembrandt’s monumental painting 'The Night Watch’. Perhaps the most celebrated painting of the Dutch Golden Age, 'The Night Watch’ is also a triumph of painting on a grand scale and a masterful example of tenebrism, the dramatic use of light and shadow. Over the four centuries since its creation, the work has been reduced in size, slashed by a school teacher and even sprayed with acid and yet it still endures as a testament to the majestic genius of Rembrandt.
Joshua Reynolds and Thomas Gainsborough were Georgian art superstars and friendly rivals. The Royal Academy's annual Summer Exhibition was the perfect setting for them to go head to head, as curator Mark Hallett, Director of Studies at Paul Mellon Centre, explains. See their paintings, and many other spectacular works from 250 years of the Summer Exhibition, until 19 August 2018.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibition, Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination, sprawls across the Fifth Avenue location’s Medieval, Byzantine, and Lehman galleries and its Anna Wintour Costume Center, as well as the Met Cloisters further uptown.
An American who has lived in South Africa for the past thirty years, Ballen began his career as a geologist. He is now one of the most important and influential photographic artists of the 21st century. Renowned for his striking extremely visceral black and white photographs, he has a style he himself describes as ‘documentary fiction’, blending stark reality and set design.
Currently at Seattle’s Frye Art Museum, Juventino Aranda’s Pocket Full of Posies explores how everyday objects become symbols of identity and social strata. Aranda grew up in Walla Walla, Washington, the child of Mexican immigrant workers, and was the first in his family to get a University degree. His work reflects the mixed cultural heritage of immigrants in the US. As an activist and artist, Aranda uses his installations to draw attention to socioeconomic, political and cultural issues.
The Art Institute of Chicago has brought together a stunning collection of works by one of America’s greatest portraitists. The recently opened John Singer Sargent and Chicago’s Gilded Age includes over 100 objects, both borrowed and from the museum’s collection, highlighting the connections the painter had with the city of Chicago. Though Sargent is best known for his portraits, his artistic practice was wide-ranging, and this exhibition covers all of his output, including the en plein air landscapes of his late career, sketches, and watercolors.
Photographer Catherine Opie traces her personal and artistic development in San Francisco. She describes how she captured the invented “personas” of the city’s queer community during the AIDS crisis in the early 1990s.
Explore Tim Marlow's Must-See Museum Shows in July 2018.
Pinpoint a figure staring directly out at you in an early Renaissance painting and chances are it’s a surreptitious self-portrait, slipped into a crowded scene. It took time for artists to feel comfortable devoting entire canvases to their own likenesses, and longer for masters such as Rembrandt van Rijn to return to self-portraiture over and over. But with the invention of photography in 1839, things changed. Artists could quickly and cheaply craft self-images that were divorced from their work, playing with their personas without wielding paintbrushes or chisels.
