Explore 1400 Paintings & Drawings by Vincent van Gogh–and Much More–at the Van Gogh Museum’s Online Collection

in Art, Museums | October 28th, 2019

Readers will receive no prizes for guessing what they’ll find, broadly speaking, at the Van Gogh Museum. But they may well be surprised by the full scope of the Van Gogh and Van Gogh-related work and information on offer for their free perusal at the Van Gogh Museum’s online collection. Naturally, you can view and learn about all of the paintings and drawings by Vincent van Gogh in the collection, including some of his best-known pieces like The Potato Eaters, a scene of “the harsh reality of country life” the artist deliberately chose for its difficulty; The Bedroom (or Bedroom in Arles), with its bright colors “meant to express absolute ‘repose’ or ‘sleep’”; and, painted between 1886 and 1889, no fewer than 21 self-portraits, including Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear, the face we think of when we think of van Gogh himself.

For van Gogh’s most famous series of floral still-life paintings the Van Gogh Museum’s online collection goes much deeper, offering an entire section of its site dedicated to “everything about Sunflowers.”

Among its subsections you’ll find the story of how van Gogh “painted sunflowers as no one before him had ever done,” a look into the conservation of one of the most fragile of the artist’s masterpieces, and even a for-the-young-and-young-at-heart Sunflowers coloring-book page. If you get through all that and still feel your appetite for post-impressionist renderings of Helianthus not fully satiated, the collection’s curators also offer a link to van Gogh’s other depictions of sunflowers, from Shed with Sunflowers to Sunflowers Gone to Seed.

Online or off, collections dedicated to the work of a single artist sometimes suffer tunnel vision, providing a wealth of detail about the life and the masterpieces, but little in the way of context. The Van Gogh Museum doesn’t, having put on view not just van Gogh’s work, but also that of the Japanese woodblock makers from whom he drew inspiration (previously featured here on Open Culture) as well as that of more recent artists who have drawn their own inspiration from van Gogh: Britain’s Jason Brooks, China’s Zeng Fanzhi, and the Netherlands’ own Pieter Laurens Mol, to say nothing of the likes of Edvard Munch and Francis Bacon. Elsewhere you can even explore “the Parisian print world of the 19th century,” a “period of artistic innovation and decadence” that did more than its part to shape van Gogh’s sensibility. As the Van Gogh Museum clearly understands, to know an artist requires immersing yourself not just in their work, but in their world as well. Enter the van Gogh online collection here.

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Van Gogh’s Ugliest Masterpiece: A Break Down of His Late, Great Painting, The Night Café (1888)

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Faceboo k.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Salvador Dalí’s Tarot Cards Get Re-Issued: The Occult Meets Surrealism in a Classic Tarot Card Deck

in Art, Books | October 26th, 2019

Tarot began as a card game and became a tool of occult divination. In that form, with its usually elaborate illustrations, the tarot deck found a major cultural role as an art object: here on Open Culture we’ve featured decks either designed or inspired by the likes of Aleister Crowley, H.R. Giger, Philip K. Dick, and Salvador Dalí. That last, whose limited edition was published in 1984, has proven to be enough of an object of desire to gain the attention of Taschen, the publisher of visually (and often, in terms of dimensions and weight, physically) intensive photo and art books. Next month they’re bringing out a new edition of Dalí’s tarot deck, boxed with a companion book by tarot scholar Johannes Fiebig.

“Legend has it that when preparing props for the James Bond film Live and Let Die, producer Albert Broccoli commissioned Surrealist maestro Salvador Dalí to create a custom deck of tarot cards,” says Taschen’s description of the product. (Bond fans will remember Jane Seymour as Solitaire, the tarot reader whom Roger Moore fatefully encounters early in the picture.)

Even though Dalí and Broccoli ultimately couldn’t come to an agreement — not least over the amount of money upon which the artist insisted — Dalí decided to see the work through to completion on his own.

As Josh Jones noted when we previously featured Dalí’s tarot, the early 1970s was an auspicious time for such a project: “The occult interests of the 60s counterculture were mainstreamed in the 70s thanks to books like Stuart Kaplan’s Tarot Cards for Fun and Fortune Telling,” and Dalí had successfully tapped the mystical zeitgeist not long before with his illustrations for a 1969 edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Drawing from all the Western art that came before his own, Dalí created a tarot deck that Taschen can now pitch as a “surreal kaleidoscope of European art history,” a kind of psychedelic course in Western civilization presented across 78 cards. Dalí also worked himself in, making an appearance as the Magician and the King of Pentacles, and including his wife Gala — whose interest in mysticism surely encouraged her husband’s own enthusiasm for the project — as the Empress.

Anyone who has had an interest in Dalí’s work (and a lack of willingness to pay premium prices for those first editions) will find themselves intrigued by Taschen’s Dalí Tarot. Those unfamiliar with the rules of the tarot can rest assured that the companion book, in addition to providing stories about the deck’s conception, also includes Fiebig’s explanations of the meanings of the cards as well as how to perform readings with them. Perceived correctly, so enthusiasts say, the cards of the tarot open a window onto an alternate perception of reality — a similarity with Dalí’s art hardly lost on the artist himself. Order a copy (set to be released on November 15) here.

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Andy Warhol’s Seven Hand-Illustrated Books: Charming, Little-Known, and Now Available to the World (1952–1959)

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Faceboo k.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

Joni Mitchell Publishes a Book of Her Rarely Seen Paintings & Poetry

in Art, Books, Music, Poetry | October 26th, 2019

Self Portrait.”Art work by Joni Mitchell, from “Morning Glory on the Vine” / Courtesy Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Joni Mitchell is a woman of many talents—too many for the label “singer-songwriter” to encompass. It does not capture the literary depth of her lyricism, the unique strength of her distinctive voice, or the deftness and versatility of her guitar playing. Nor the fact that she’s one of the most interesting personalities in rock (or folk-rock/folk/folk-jazz, whatever). Mitchell’s biography is riveting; her chatty and cantankerous interviews a treat.

And, if you somehow didn’t know from her many album covers, Mitchell is also an accomplished visual artist. “I have always thought of myself as a painter derailed by circumstance,” she said in 2000. “I sing my sorrow and I paint my joy.” It’s a great quote, though she also sings her joy and paints sorrow—as in the portrait of her hero, Miles Davis, made just after his death. (Davis was a painter too, and they bonded over art.)

Mitchell began selling her work “when I was in high school to dentists, doctors—small time,” she told Rolling Stone in 1990. She has written poetry since her teenage years. Her imagistic songwriting came from a love of literary language. “I wrote poetry,” she says, “and I always wanted to make music. But I never put the two things together,” until she heard Dylan’s “Positively Fourth Street” and realized “you could make your songs literature.”

Painter, poet, singer, songwriter, guitarist—all of the artistic sides of Mitchell have mingled throughout her career in the visual splendor of her covers, compositions, and lyrics. They also came together in a rare 1971 book. After the release of Blue, Mitchell “gathered more than thirty drawings and watercolors in a ring binder and paired them with handwritten lyrics and bits of poetry,” writes Amanda Petrusich at The New Yorker.

She had the book handbound in an edition of 100 copies and gave it to friends for the holidays, calling it “The Christmas Book.” Now it has a different title, Morning Glory on the Vine, for a new edition to be released October 22nd. Part of the extensive celebrations for Mitchell’s 75th birthday, this edition fulfills a decade-long desire for the artist. “I always wanted to redo it and simplify the presentation,” she tells Petrusich. “Work is meant to be seen.”

The collection “feels consonant with Mitchell’s songwriting” in that it captures “tantalizing details about home,” in this case the home in Laurel Canyon that she shared with Graham Nash, the inspiration for the Crosby, Stills & Nash song “Our House.” Still life compositions and self-portraits, both “vivid” and “intimate,” complement her vulnerable, playful, “funny and weird,” lyrics and verses. You can see more of the paintings from Morning Glory on the Vine at The New Yorker and order a copy of the book here.

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Songs by Joni Mitchell Re-Imagined as Pulp Fiction Book Covers & Vintage Movie Posters

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 5 ) |

The Provocative Art of Modern Sketch, the Magazine That Captured the Cultural Explosion of 1930s Shanghai

in Art, History, Magazines | October 24th, 2019

“With its newspapers in every language and scores of radio stations, Shanghai was a media city before its time, celebrated as the Paris of the Orient and ‘the wickedest city in the world.’ ” So British writer J.G. Ballard remembers the Chinese metropolis in which he grew up in his autobiography Miracles of Life. “Shanghai struck me as a magical place, a self-generating fantasy that left my own little mind far behind.” Born in 1930, Ballard caught Shanghai at a particularly stimulating time: “Developed on the basis of ‘unequal treaties’ successively instituted after the First Opium War in 1842,” writes MIT’s John A. Crespi, Chinese port cities like Shanghai “experienced a welter of technological and demographic changes,” including automobiles, skyscrapers, rolled cigarettes, movie theaters coffeehouses, and much else besides.

Such heady days also gave rise to media that reflected and critiqued them, and 1930s Shanghai produced no more compelling an example of such a publication than Modern Sketch (时代漫画, Shídài Mànhuà).

Among its points of interest, writes Crespi, “one can point to Modern Sketch’s longevity, the quality of its printing, the remarkable eclecticism of its content, and its inclusion of work by young artists who went on to become leaders in China’s 20th-century cultural establishment. But from today’s perspective, most intriguing is the sheer imagistic force with which this magazine captures the crises and contradictions that have defined China’s 20th century as a quintessentially modern era.”

Published monthly from January 1934 through June 1937, the magazine first appeared on newsstands just over two decades after the collapse of China’s dynastic system. The modernization-minded May Fourth Movement, nationalist Northern Expedition, and purge of communists by “Generalissimo” Chiang Kai-shek were even more recent memories.

But the relative stability of the “Nanjing Decade” had begun in 1927, and its zeitgeist turned out to be rich soil for a wild cultural flowering in China’s coastal cities, none wilder than in Shanghai. To the reading public of this time Modern Sketch offered treatments of material like “eroticized women, foreign aggression — particularly the rise of fascism in Europe and militarized Japan — domestic politics and exploitation, and modernity-at-large,” writes Crespi.

The magazine’s attitude “could be incisive, bitter, shocking, and cynical. At the very same time it could be elegant, salacious, and preposterous. Its messages might be as simple as child’s play, or cryptically encoded for cultural sophisticates.”

Sometimes it didn’t encode its messages cryptically enough: as a result of one unflattering depiction of Xu Shiying, China’s ambassador to Japan, the authorities suspended publication and detained editor Lu Shaofei. Not that Lu didn’t know what he was getting into with Modern Sketch: “On all sides a tense era surrounds us,” he wrote in the magazine’s inaugural issue. “As it is for the individual, so it is for our country and the world.”

As for an answer to the question of whether the strange and tense but enormously fruitful cultural and political moment in which Lu and his collaborators found themselves wold last, “the more one fails to find it, the more that desire grows. Our stance, our single responsibility, then, is to strive!”

You can read more about what project entailed, and see in greater detail its textual and visual results, in Crespi’s history of this magazine that strove to capture the everyday reality of life on display in 1930s Shanghai — “though I sometimes wonder,” Ballard writes, “if everyday reality was the one element missing from the city.”

via 50 Watts

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Faceboo k.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Banksy Launches a New Online Store: Make Purchases Through October 28

in Art | October 18th, 2019

Has Banksy sold out? Fans and critics alike of the street-art provocateur-turned-globally recognizable brand can argue that question endlessly. But we do know, at least, that Banksy sells: earlier this month he broke his own record when his 2009 painting Devolved Parliament went for £9.88 million (about $12.20 million USD) at Sotheby’s. Not all the followers attracted by Banksy’s anti-capitalistic, anti-corporate, anti-wealth image can afford to pay quite so much for a Banksy of their own, but if they can come up with anything from £10 to £850.00, they stand as much of a chance as anyone else of making a purchase from the artist’s newly opened online store, Gross Domestic Product, the second phase of a project that began, as many of Banksy’s ventures have, on a London street.

In this case it wasn’t a mural but a shop, or rather, an installation designed to look like a shop, “opened” right in time for Frieze Week, when the art world passes through the city. “Taking up large windows facing the street, the shop, ‘where art irritates life,’ is a classic display of the artist’s ingenuity and razor-sharp sense of reason and humor,” writes Juxtapoz’s Sasha Bogojev.

Its stock included a “baby crib surveillance mobile toy, along with ‘early learning counting set’ consisting of wooden figures of refugees, welcome mats made from life vests salvaged from the shores of the Mediterranean, disco ball made from old police helmets, plates/clocks with running rats, works on canvas, cushions, and even badly done ‘Banksky’ T‑shirts, mugs and plates.” Much to the dismay of many a Frieze-goer, nothing in Banksy’s brick-and-mortar store was available for sale.

But everything in Banksy’s online store is: “GrossDomesticProduct.com offers a wide range of household products, artworks and basically a whole range of Banksy™ knick-knacks,” writes Bogojev. “From mugs for which ‘the artist got the kids to do it, then signed the result,’ sculptural edition made in collaboration with Escif, learning sets, t‑shirts” — one modeled after Girl with Balloon, shredded bottom half and all — “soft toys, clocks, all the way to two new print editions.” Such is Banksy’s popularity that you might well assume everything has already run out, but no: each hopeful buyer can register to purchase one item — but just one — until October 28th, at which point a lottery process will determine which of them will actually have the privilege of making their desired purchases. In the highly likely event of “demand outstripping supply,” Gross Domestic Product will use as a determining factor applicants’ responses, consisting of fifty words or fewer, to the question, “Why does art matter?”

One hopes that when this latest Banksy stunt has finished, the winning responses to that question will be made public; the art-world commentariat would certainly make much of an answer from Banksy himself. But Banksy-watchers know that the artist, whatever his real identity, is always on the move: no sooner have we learned of his latest piece of work, whatever form it takes, than he’s primed the next one to drop. Banksy has described Gross Domestic Product as legally motivated, prompted by a greeting card company’s attempts “to seize legal custody of the name Banksy from the artist, who has been advised the best way to prevent this is to sell his own range of branded merchandise.” If anyone makes Banksy greeting cards, it’s going to be Banksy. And if he were to announce his own Hallmark Store, lines would surely start forming right away.

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The Always Bankable Banksy

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Faceboo k.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

How to Paint Like Willem De Kooning: Watch Visual Primers from the Museum of Modern Art

in Art | October 17th, 2019

Before you learn how to paint like Dutch American Abstract Expressionist Willem de Kooning, you might ask, why should you paint like Willem De Kooning? Shouldn’t every artist have his or her own inimitable personal style? We might ask, why learn to play piano like Nina Simone or write prose like William Faulkner? If you stop at mere imitation, there may be no good reason to mimic the masters.

But if you take their techniques and make them yours—steal, if you will, their best parts for your work—then, with enough talent and persistence, you might be on your way toward an inimitable personal style of your own. Or, you could simply watch these videos on how to paint like De Kooning to get a vivid, live-action demonstration of how the artist himself did it.

You need never have held a paintbrush to appreciate the Museum of Modern Art’s “How to Paint Like” series, featuring videos of MoMA educator and conservator Cory D’Augustine, who shows us how to imitate the methods of not only of De Kooning, but also Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Agnes Martin. All of these tutorials come from D’Augustine’s Coursera class “In the Studio: Postwar Abstract Painting.”

And as his other videos, here D’Augustine offers a comprehensive overview of the artist’s tools and techniques: low-viscosity oil paint held in large quantities in bowls, rather than small blobs of paint on a palette; the big powerful full-body gestures to achieve “action painting.” If you are trying this at home, be advised, D’Augustine moves fast, assuming a lot of prior experience and a serious artist’s collection of supplies. Think more Bob Vila than Bob Ross—you will need a good set of tools. But if you’re aspiring to paint like De Kooning, odds are you’ve got it covered.

D’Augustine has also been responsive to critics in the comments, releasing the follow up Part 2 video, above, to address the absurdity of actually “doing a De Kooning-esque painting in a day.” Additionally, as he notes above, De Kooning “reinvented himself again and again and again,” meaning “there certainly isn’t one way, there certainly aren’t a hundred ways, to make a De Kooning since he was relentlessly inventive.”

That is to say, we’re seeing a curated selection of De Kooning’s materials and application techniques, which still may be quite enough to influence a budding painter on the way to a unique technique of her own—or to inform De Kooning fans who do not paint, but who have stood before his fearfully, brutally energetic canvases and wondered how they came to be.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

The Politics & Philosophy of the Bauhaus Design Movement: A Short Introduction

in Art, Design, History, Politics | October 17th, 2019

This year marks the centennial of the Bauhaus, the German art-and-design school and movement whose influence now makes itself felt all over the world. The clean lines and clarity of function exhibited by Bauhaus buildings, imagery, and objects — the very definition of what we still describe as “modern” — appeal in a way that transcends not just time and space but culture and tradition, and that’s just as the school’s founder Walter Gropius intended. A forward-looking utopian internationalist, Gropius seized the moment in the Germany left ruined by the First World War to make his ideals clear in the Bauhaus Manifesto: “Together let us call for, devise, and create the construction of the future, comprising everything in one form,” he writes: “architecture, sculpture and painting.”

In about a dozen years, however, a group with very little time for the Bauhaus project would suddenly rise to prominence in Germany: the Nazi party. “Their right-wing ideology called for a return to traditional German values,” says reporter Michael Tapp in the Quartz video above, “and their messaging carried a typeface: Fraktur.” Put forth by the nazis as the “true” German font, Fraktur was “based on Gothic script that had been synonymous with the German national identity for 800 years.” On the other end of the ideological spectrum, the Bauhaus created “a radical new kind of typography,” which Museum of Modern Art curator Barry Bergdoll describes as “politically charged”: “The Germans are probably the only users of the Roman alphabet who had given typescript a nationalist sense. To refuse it and redesign the alphabet completely in the opposite direction is to free it of these national associations.”

The culture of the Bauhaus also provoked public discomfort: “Locals railed against the strange, androgynous students, their foreign masters, their surreal parties, and the house band that played jazz and Slavic folk music,” writes Darran Anderson at Citylab. “Newspapers and right-wing political parties cynically tapped into the opposition and fueled it, intensifying its anti-Semitism and emphasizing that the school was a cosmopolitan threat to supposed national purity.” Gropius, for his part, “worked tirelessly to keep the school alive,” preventing students from attending protests and gathering up leaflets printed by fellow Bauhaus instructor Oskar Schlemmer calling the school a “rallying point for all those who, with faith in the future and willingness to storm the heavens, wish to build the cathedral of socialism.” In their zeal to purge “degenerate art,” the Nazis closed the Bauhaus’ Dessau school in 1932 and its Berlin branch the following year.

Though some of his followers may have been firebrands, Gropius himself “was typically a moderating influence,” writes Anderson, “preferring to achieve his socially conscious progressivism through design rather than politics; creating housing for workers and safe, clean workplaces filled with light and air (like the Fagus Factory) rather than agitating for them.” He also openly declared the apolitical nature of the Bauhaus early on, but historians of the movement can still debate how apolitical it remained, during its lifetime as well as in its lasting effects. A 2009 MoMA exhibition even drew attention to the Bauhaus figures who worked with the Nazis, most notably the painter and architect Franz Ehrlich. But as Anderson puts it, “there are many Bauhaus tales,” and together “they show not a simple Bauhaus-versus-the-Nazis dichotomy but rather how, to varying degrees of bravery and caprice, individuals try to survive in the face of tyranny.”

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The Nazi’s Philistine Grudge Against Abstract Art and The “Degenerate Art Exhibition” of 1937

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Faceboo k.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

William Burroughs Meets Francis Bacon: See Never-Broadcast Footage (1982)

in Art, Literature, Television | October 14th, 2019

The writing of William S. Burroughs and the paintings of Francis Bacon take us into often troubling but nevertheless compelling realities we couldn’t possibly glimpse any other way. Some of that effect has to do with the inimitable (if often unsuccessfully imitated) styles they developed for themselves, and some with what was going on in their unusual lives as well as the even wilder realms of their minds. And though no scholars have yet turned up a Burroughs monograph on Bacon’s art, or Bacon-painted illustrations for a Burroughs novel — just imagine Naked Lunch given that treatment — those minds did meet now and again in life, starting in Morocco six decades ago.

“The two men first met in Tangiers in the 1950s when Burroughs was technically on the run for murdering his wife after a ‘shooting accident’ during a drunken game of William Tell,” writes Dangerous Minds’ Paul Gallagher. “Bacon was then in a brutal and near fatal relationship with a violent sadist called Peter Lacey who used to beat him with a leather studded belt.” None other than Allen Ginsberg made the introduction between the two men, “as he thought Bacon painted the way Burroughs wrote.” But Burroughs saw more differences than similarities: “Bacon and I are at opposite ends of the spectrum,” he once said. “He likes middle-aged truck drivers and I like young boys. He sneers at immortality and I think it’s the one thing of importance. Of course we’re associated because of our morbid subject matter.”

Bacon and Burroughs reminisce about their first meeting — what they can remember of it, anyway — in an encounter filmed by the BBC for a 1982 documentary on the writer. “Arena followed him to the home and studio of old friend Francis Bacon, where he drops in for a cup of tea and a catch up,” says the BBC’s site. “This meeting has never been broadcast.” But you can see their conversation presented in a ten-minute edit in the video above. Gallagher notes that the camera-shy Burroughs gets into the spirit of things only when the talk turns to his favorite subjects at the time: “Jajouka” — a Moroccan village with a distinct musical tradition — “Mayans, and immortality.” Bacon, “waspish, bitchy, gleeful like a naughty schoolboy,” throws out barbs left and right about his fellow artists and Burroughs’ fellow writers.

Bacon also recalls his and Burroughs’ “mutual friendship with Jane and Paul Bowles,” the famously bohemian married couple known for their writing as well as their expat life in Morocco, “going on to discuss Jane Bowles’ mental decline and the tragedy of her last years being tended to by nuns, a situation which Bacon thought ghastly. Ironically, Bacon died just over a decade later being tended to by nuns after becoming ill in Spain (an asthma attack).” Even the most knowledgable fans of Burroughs, Bacon, and all the illustrious figures in their worldwide circles surely don’t know the half of what happened when they got together. And though this ten-minute chat adds little concrete information to the record, it still gets us imagining what all these artistic associations might have been like — firing up our imaginations being the strong suit of creators like Bacon and Burroughs, even decades after they’ve left us to our own reality.

via Dangerous Minds

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Faceboo k.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Explore 1400 Paintings & Drawings by Vincent van Gogh–and Much More–at the Van Gogh Museum’s Online Collection

Salvador Dalí’s Tarot Cards Get Re-Issued: The Occult Meets Surrealism in a Classic Tarot Card Deck

Joni Mitchell Publishes a Book of Her Rarely Seen Paintings & Poetry

The Provocative Art of Modern Sketch, the Magazine That Captured the Cultural Explosion of 1930s Shanghai

Banksy Launches a New Online Store: Make Purchases Through October 28

How to Paint Like Willem De Kooning: Watch Visual Primers from the Museum of Modern Art

The Politics & Philosophy of the Bauhaus Design Movement: A Short Introduction

William Burroughs Meets Francis Bacon: See Never-Broadcast Footage (1982)

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