How 16th-Century Artist Joris Hoefnagel Made Insects Beautiful—and Changed Science Forever

in Art, History, Nature | July 2nd, 2025

In English, most of the words we’d use to refer to insects sound off-putting at best and fearsome at worst, at least to those without an entomological bent. Dutch, close a linguistic relation though it may be, offers a more endearing alternative in beestjes, which refers to all these “little beasts” in which the artists and scientists of Europe started to take a major interest in the late sixteenth century. As was the style of that era, the magisteria of art and science tended to overlap, a phenomenon nowhere more clearly reflected — at least with regard to the insect kingdom — than in the work of Joris Hoefnagel, a Flemish artist whose illustrations of beestjes combined beauty and accuracy in a manner never seen before.

You can now see Hoefnagel’s art up close at the exhibition Little Beasts: Art, Wonder, and the Natural World, which will be up at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC until early November. If you won’t be able to make it out to the museum, have a look at the exhibition’s web site, which shows off the splendor of Hoefnagel’s work as published in The Four Elements, a collection of about 300 watercolors grouped into four volumes in the fifteen-seventies and eighties, each one named for an element: Aqua contains water animals; Terra land animals; Aier birds and plants; and Ignis, or “fire,” insects.

“We don’t really know why Hoefnagel put insects in the fire volume,” says Evan “Nerdwriter” Puschak in the new video above. “Maybe because both fire and insects symbolize transformation.”

“What we do know,” Puschak adds, “is that these insect miniatures are magnificently rendered.” Hoefnagel even made improvements on the nature illustrations of his artistic predecessor Albrecht Dürer, whose own abilities to render our world with fidelity had been regarded as nearly superhuman. One particular work that surpasses Dürer is Hoefnagel’s depiction of a stag beetle, which he accompanied with the Latin inscription “SCARABEI UMBRA,” or “the shadow of the stag beetle”: possibly a reference to the unprecedented realism of the insect’s shadow as Hoefnagel rendered it, but in any case a common saying at the time about hollow threats. For however frightening the stag beetle looked, as Hoefnagel well knew, the actual creature was gentle — just another wee beastie after all.

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Ernst Haeckel’s Sublime Drawings of Flora and Fauna: The Beautiful Scientific Drawings That Influenced Europe’s Art Nouveau Movement (1889)

Two Million Wondrous Nature Illustrations Put Online by The Biodiversity Heritage Library

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Watch The Insects’ Christmas from 1913: A Stop Motion Film Starring a Cast of Dead Bugs

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

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

How Scientists Recreated Ancient Egypt’s Long-Lost Pigment, “Egyptian Blue”

in Art, History, Science | June 24th, 2025

Photo courtesy of Washington State University.

It’s become fashionable, in recent years, to observe that we live in an increasingly beige-and-gray world from which all color is being drained. Whether or not that’s really the case, all of us still enjoy easy access to a range of colors that nobody in the ancient world could have imagined, and not just through our screens. Look around you, and your eye will soon fall upon some object or another whose hue alone would have looked impossibly exotic in the civilization of, say, ancient Egypt. My coffee cup offers a simple but vivid example, with its blue-green, and maybe yours does too.

“Most ancient pigments were derived from natural resources — ochre, charcoal, or lime, for example,” writes Ben Seal at Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh. “In some cases, Egyptians were able to use lapis lazuli, a metamorphic rock that was only found in Afghanistan, to represent the color blue.” But such a “cost-prohibitive and completely impractical” source, as Seal quotes Carnegie Museum of Natural History Egyptologist Lisa Haney describing it, motivated ancient Egyptians to come up with “a process to emulate its intense ultramarine hue. Without a consistent way to represent the beautiful blues of the world around them, they had to get creative.”

Just this past May, Haney and a team of other researchers from CMNH, Washington State University, and the Smithsonian Institution’s Museum Conservation Institute published a paper on their work of re-creating what’s called “Egyptian blue,” the earliest known synthetic pigment. Extant on artifacts and used also, it seems, in ancient Rome, and at least once in the Renaissance (by no less a Renaissance man than Raphael) its original recipe has since been lost to history. Using period materials like “calcium carbonate that could have been drawn from limestone or seashells; quartz sand; and a copper source” heated to around 1,000 degrees Celsius, Seal writes, “the researchers prepared nearly two dozen powdered pigments in a stunning range of blues.”

Photo courtesy of Washington State University.

The key was to replicate cuprorivaite, “the mineral that gave Egyptian blue such resonance,” and one of those experimental powders turned out to be 50 percent cuprorivaite by volume. The resulting pigment, as Artnet’s Brian Boucher writes, is of more than historical interest, with potential modern uses “due to its optical, magnetic, and biological properties. It emits light in the near-infrared part of the electro-magnetic spectrum, which people can’t see. For that reason, it could be used in applications like dusting for fingerprints and formulating counterfeit-proof inks.” Here in the twenty-first century, we may have all the blues we need, but as in the ancient world, the job of staying one step ahead of counterfeiters is never done.

via Hyperallergic

Behold Ancient Egyptian, Greek & Roman Sculptures in Their Original Color

The Met Digitally Restores the Colors of an Ancient Egyptian Temple, Using Projection Mapping Technology

Discover Harvard’s Collection of 2,500 Pigments: Preserving the World’s Rare, Wonderful Colors

Why Most Ancient Civilizations Had No Word for the Color Blue

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

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

How Art Conservators Restore Old Paintings & Revive Their Original Colors

in Art | June 23rd, 2025

We tend to imagine old paintings as having a muted, yellow-brown cast, and not without reason. Many of the examples we’ve seen in life really do look that way, though usually not because the artist intended it. As Julian Baumgartner of Chicago’s Baumgartner Fine Art Restoration explains in the video above, these paintings’ colors have changed over the decades, or in any case appeared to change, because of the layer of resin on top of them. When that kind of coating is first applied, it actually makes the hues underneath look richer. As time passes, alas, chemical changes and the accumulation of dirt and grime can result in a dull, even sickly appearance.

“A lot of people say that the varnish should never be removed, “that that’s a patina that is on the surface of the painting and that it adds to the painting’s quality: it makes the painting look better, it makes it look more serious,” says Baumgartner.

“Those are all interesting opinions, but they’re all inaccurate. If the artist wanted to apply a patina to their painting, they could apply a patina and tone down the colors. But most artists, when they apply a varnish, do not envision that that varnish will ever become yellow or brown, or will crack or become cloudy.” The idea is to get the colors back to how the artist would have seen them when the work first attained its finished state.

Therein lies the difference between a painting and, say, a cast-iron skillet. But on some level, the actual labor of cleaning a work of art — as Baumgartner demonstrates, sped-up, in the video — differs less than one might imagine from that of cleaning a kitchen implement. The result, however, can certainly be more striking, especially with a canvas like this one, whose twin-sister subjects provide an ideal means of showing the contrast between colors long covered by varnish and those same colors newly exhumed. Though there now exist formulas that don’t turn yellow in quite the same way, more than a few artists stick to the classic damar varnish, which does have advantages of its own — not least keeping a few more generations of conservators in business.

A Determined Art Conservator Restores a Painting of the Doomed Party Girl Isabella de’ Medici: See the Before and After

Watch an Art Conservator Bring Classic Paintings Back to Life in Intriguingly Narrated Videos

The Art of Restoring a 400-Year-Old Painting: A Five-Minute Primer

Watch the Tate Modern Restore Mark Rothko’s Vandalized Painting, Black on Maroon: 18 Months of Work Condensed Into 17 Minutes

The Joy of Watching Old, Damaged Things Get Restored: Why the World is Captivated by Restoration Videos

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

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

How Jackson Pollock Redefined Modern Art: An Introduction

in Art | June 16th, 2025

In his lifetime, Jackson Pollock had only one successful art show. It took place at the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York in November 1949, and afterward, his fellow abstract expressionist Willem de Kooning declared that “Jackson has finally broken the ice.” Perhaps, according to Louis Menand’s book The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War, he meant that “Pollock was the first American abstractionist to break into the mainstream art world, or he might have meant that Pollock had broken through a stylistic logjam that American painters felt blocked by.” Whatever its intent, de Kooning’s remark annoyed art critic and major Pollock advocate Clement Greenberg, who “thought that it reduced Pollock to a transitional figure.”

It wasn’t necessarily a reduction: as Menand sees it, “all figures are transitional. Not every figure, however, is a hinge, someone who represents a moment when one mode of practice swings over to another.” Pollock was such a hinge, as, in his way, was Greenberg: “After Pollock, people painted differently. After Greenberg, people thought about painting differently.”

When they made their mark, “there was no going back.” Gallerist-YouTuber James Payne examines the nature of that mark in the new Great Art Explained video above, the first of a multi-part series on Pollock’s art and the figures that made its cultural impact possible. Even more important than Greenberg, in Payne’s telling, is Pollock’s fellow artist — and, in time, wife — Lee Krasner, whose own work he also gives its due.

We also see the paintings of American regionalist Thomas Hart Benton, Pollock’s teacher; Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros, in whose workshop Pollock participated; and even Pablo Picasso, who exerted subtle but detectable influences of his own on Pollock’s work. Other, non-artistic sources of inspiration Payne explores include the psychological theory of Carl Gustav Jung, with whose school of therapy Pollock engaged in the late nineteen-thirties and early forties. It was in those sessions that he produced the “psychoanalytic drawings,” one of several categories of Pollock’s work that will surprise those who know him only through his large-canvas, wholly abstract drip paintings. Each represents one stage of a complex evolutionary process: Pollock may have been the ideal artist for the new, post-war American world, but he hardly came fully formed out of Wyoming.

Watch “Jackson Pollock 51,” a Historic Short Film That Captures Pollock Creating Abstract Expressionist Art on a Sheet of Glass

How the CIA Secretly Used Jackson Pollock & Other Abstract Expressionists to Fight the Cold War

The MoMA Teaches You How to Paint Like Pollock, Rothko, de Kooning & Other Abstract Painters

Was Jackson Pollock Overrated? Behind Every Artist There’s an Art Critic, and Behind Pollock There Was Clement Greenberg

Anatomy of a Fake: Forgery Experts Reveal 5 Ways To Spot a Fake Painting by Jackson Pollock (or Any Other Artist)

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

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

The 100 Greatest Paintings of All Time: From Botticelli and Bosch to Bacon and Basquiat

in Art, History | June 4th, 2025

It would be a worthwhile exercise for any of us to sit down and attempt to draw up a list of our 100 favorite paintings of all time. Naturally, those not professionally involved with art history may have some trouble quite hitting that number. Still, however many titles we can write down, each of us will no doubt come up with a mixture of the near-universally known and the relatively obscure, with paintings we’ve been seeing reproduced in popular culture since birth alongside works that made a strong and unexpected impression on us the one time we came across them in a book or gallery. The 100-favorite-paintings list in video form above by Luiza Liz Bond is no exception.

You may recognize Bond’s name from her work on the YouTube channel The Cinema Cartography, many of whose videos — on David Lynch, on Quentin Tarantino, on animation, on cinematography, on the greatest films ever made — we’ve previously featured here on Open Culture. Recently rebranded as The House of Tabula, that channel now makes its aesthetic and intellectual explorations into not just film but art broadly considered.

And though painting may not be the art form with which we spend most of our time these days, it’s still one of the first art forms that comes to our minds, perhaps thanks to its twenty or so millennia of history. It’s from a relatively narrow but enormously rich slice of that history, spanning the fourteenth century to the twentieth, that Bond makes her 100 selections.

Among them are more than a few paintings that longtime Open Culture readers will remember us having covered before: Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus, Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights, Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling, Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas, Fragonard’s The Swing, Goya’s The Dog, Manet’s Luncheon on the Grass, Sargent’s Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose, van Gogh’s The Starry Night, Klimt’s The Kiss, Matisse’s The Dance, Magritte’s The Lovers, Dalí’s The Persistence of Memory, Picasso’s Guernica, Wyeth’s Christina’s World, and Basquiat’s Untitled. These works and many others constitute a journey through the “world of high symbolism and religiosity to a private space where painters tell their personal stories through images on canvas,” as Bond puts it. Wherever art’s next major destination may be, only human creativity can take us there.

14 Self-Portraits by Pablo Picasso Show the Evolution of His Style: See Self-Portraits Moving from Ages 15 to 90

The Evolution of Kandinsky’s Painting: A Journey from Realism to Vibrant Abstraction Over 46 Years

Take a Journey Through 933 Paintings by Salvador Dalí & Watch His Signature Surrealism Emerge

1540 Monet Paintings in a Two Hour Video

The Metropolitan Museum of Art Puts 490,000 High-Res Images Online & Makes Them Free to Use

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

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

Pablo Picasso’s Childhood Paintings: Precocious Works Painted Between the Ages of 8 and 15

in Art | June 2nd, 2025

It’s hard to imagine from this historical distance how upsetting Pablo Picasso’s 1907 modernist painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon was to Parisian society at its debut. On its 100th anniversary, Guardian critic Jonathan Jones described it as “the rift, the break that divides past and future.” The painting caused an uproar, even among the artist’s peers. It was a moment of culture shock, notes PBS. Its five nude figures, broken into proto-cubist planes and angles with faces painted like African masks, met “with almost unanimous shock, distaste, and outrage.”

Henri Matisse, himself often credited with ushering in modernist painting with his flattened fields of color, “is angered by the work, which he considers a hoax, an attempt to paint the fourth dimension.” Much of the outrage was purported to come from middle-class moral qualms about the painting’s subject, “the sexual freedom depicted in a brothel.”

This is a little hard to believe. Nude women in brothels, “odalisques,” had long been a favorite subject of some of the most revered European painters. But where the women in these paintings always appear passive, if not submissive, Picasso’s nudes pose suggestively and meet the viewer’s gaze, actively unashamed.

What likely most disturbed those first viewers was the perceived violence done to tradition. While we cannot recover the tender sensibilities of early 20th-century Parisian critics, we can, I think, experience a similar kind of shock by looking at work Picasso had done ten years earlier, such as the 1896 First Communion, further up, and 1897 study Science and Charity at the top, conservative genre paintings in an academic style, beautifully rendered with exquisite skill by a then 15-year-old artist. See an earlier drawing, Study for a Torso, above, completed in 1892 when Picasso was only 11.

Given his incredible precocity, it may seem hardly any wonder that Picasso innovated scandalously new means of using line, color, and composition. He was a prodigious master of technique at an age when many artists are still years away from formal study. Where else could his restless talent go? He painted a favorite subject in 1900, in the loose, impressionist Bullfight, above, a return of sorts to his first oil painting, Picador, below, made when he was 8. Further down, see a drawing from the following year in his early development, “Bullfight and Pigeons.”

This piece, with its realistic-looking birds carefully drawn upside-down atop a loose sketch of a bullfight, appeared in a 2006 show at the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC featuring childhood artworks from Picasso and Paul Klee. Contrary, perhaps, to our expectations, curator Jonathan Fineberg remarks of this drawing that “9‑year-old Picasso’s confident, playful scribble” gives us more indication of his talent than the finely-drawn birds.

“It’s not just that Picasso could render well, because you could teach anybody to do that,” Fineberg says. Maybe not anybody, but the point stands—technique can be taught, creative vision cannot. “It’s not about skill. It’s about unique qualities of seeing. That’s what makes Picasso a better artist than Andrew Wyeth. Art is about a novel way of looking at the world.” You may prefer Wyeth, or think the downward comparison unfair, but there’s no denying Picasso had a very “novel way of seeing,” from his earliest sketches to his most revolutionary modernist masterpieces. See several more highly accomplished early works from Picasso here.

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2018.

14 Self-Portraits by Pablo Picasso Show the Evolution of His Style: See Self-Portraits Moving from Ages 15 to 90

Watch Pablo Picasso’s Creative Process Unfold in Real-Time: Rare Footage Shows Him Creating Drawings of Faces, Bulls & Chickens

The Gestapo Points to Guernica and Asks Picasso, “Did You Do This?;” Picasso Replies “No, You Did!”

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

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

A Young Jim Henson Teaches You How to Make Puppets with Socks, Tennis Balls & Other Household Goods (1969)

in Art | May 27th, 2025

By the time he filmed this video archived on Iowa Public Television’s YouTube channel, Jim Henson was just about to strike gold with a new children’s show called Sesame Street. The year was 1969, and he already had 15 years of puppetry experience under his belt, from children’s shows to commercials and experimental films.

On the cusp of success, Henson, along with fellow puppeteer Don Sahlin (the creator and voice of Rowlf), ventures to teach kids how to make a puppet out of pretty much anything you’ll find around the house. Such a vision appears easy, but it really shows the genius of Henson, as he and Sahlin make characters from a tennis ball, a mop, a wooden spoon, a cup, socks, an envelope, even potatoes and pears. (There is a lot to be said for the inherent comedy of googly eyes, and the importance of fake fur.)

An unknown assistant takes some of these puppets and brings them to life while Henson and his partner create more–funny voices, personalities, even a bit of anarchy are in play. Surprisingly, Kermit does not make an appearance, although his sock ancestor does.

The man who saw potential puppets in everything is in his element and relaxed. Check it out, smile, and then raid your kitchen for supplies for your own puppet show. And although Henson promises a further episode, it has yet to be found on YouTube, or elsewhere.

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2016.

Watch Twin Beaks, Sesame Street’s Parody of David Lynch’s Iconic TV Show (1990)

Jim Henson’s Animated Film, Limbo, the Organized Mind, Presented by Johnny Carson (1974)

Watch The Surreal 1960s Films and Commercials of Jim Henson

Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the artist interview-based FunkZone Podcast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

George Orwell Reviews Salvador Dali’s Autobiography: “Dali is a Good Draughtsman and a Disgusting Human Being” (1944)

in Art, Literature | May 26th, 2025

Images or Orwell and Dali via Wikimedia Commons

Should we hold artists to the same standards of human decency that we expect of everyone else? Should talented people be exempt from ordinary morality? Should artists of questionable character have their work consigned to the trash along with their personal reputations? These questions, for all their timeliness in the present, seemed no less thorny and compelling 81 years ago when George Orwell confronted the strange case of Salvador Dali, an undeniably extraordinary talent, and—Orwell writes in his 1944 essay “Benefit of Clergy”—a “disgusting human being.”

The judgment may seem overly harsh except that any honest person would say the same given the episodes Dali describes in his autobiography, which Orwell finds utterly revolting. “If it were possible for a book to give a physical stink off its pages,” he writes, “this one would.” The episodes he refers to include, at six years old, Dali kicking his three-year-old sister in the head, “as though it had been a ball,” the artist writes, then running away “with a ‘delirious joy’ induced by this savage act.” They include throwing a boy from a suspension bridge, and, at 29 years old, trampling a young girl “until they had to tear her, bleeding, out of my reach.” And many more such violent and disturbing descriptions.

Dali’s litany of cruelty to humans and animals constitutes what we expect in the early life of serial killers rather than famous artists. Surely he is putting his readers on, wildly exaggerating for the sake of shock value, like the Marquis de Sade’s autobiographical fantasies. Orwell allows as much. Yet which of the stories are true, he writes, “and which are imaginary hardly matters: the point is that this is the kind of thing that Dali would have liked to do.” Moreover, Orwell is as repulsed by Dali’s work as he is by the artist’s character, informed as it is by misogyny, a confessed necrophilia and an obsession with excrement and rotting corpses.

But against this has to be set the fact that Dali is a draughtsman of very exceptional gifts. He is also, to judge by the minuteness and the sureness of his drawings, a very hard worker. He is an exhibitionist and a careerist, but he is not a fraud. He has fifty times more talent than most of the people who would denounce his morals and jeer at his paintings. And these two sets of facts, taken together, raise a question which for lack of any basis of agreement seldom gets a real discussion.

Orwell is unwilling to dismiss the value of Dali’s art, and distances himself from those who would do so on moralistic grounds. “Such people,” he writes, are “unable to admit that what is morally degraded can be aesthetically right,” a “dangerous” position adopted not only by conservatives and religious zealots but by fascists and authoritarians who burn books and lead campaigns against “degenerate” art. “Their impulse is not only to crush every new talent as it appears, but to castrate the past as well.” (“Witness,” he notes, the outcry in America “against Joyce, Proust and Lawrence.”) “In an age like our own,” writes Orwell, in a particularly jarring sentence, “when the artist is an exceptional person, he must be allowed a certain amount of irresponsibility, just as a pregnant woman is.”

At the very same time, Orwell argues, to ignore or excuse Dali’s amorality is itself grossly irresponsible and totally inexcusable. Orwell’s is an “understandable” response, writes Jonathan Jones at The Guardian, given that he had fought fascism in Spain and had seen the horror of war, and that Dali, in 1944, “was already flirting with pro-Franco views.” But to fully illustrate his point, Orwell imagines a scenario with a much less controversial figure than Dali: “If Shakespeare returned to the earth to-morrow, and if it were found that his favourite recreation was raping little girls in railway carriages, we should not tell him to go ahead with it on the ground that he might write another King Lear.”

Draw your own parallels to more contemporary figures whose criminal, predatory, or violently abusive acts have been ignored for decades for the sake of their art, or whose work has been tossed out with the toxic bathwater of their behavior. Orwell seeks what he calls a “middle position” between moral condemnation and aesthetic license—a “fascinating and laudable” critical threading of the needle, Jones writes, that avoids the extremes of “conservative philistines who condemn the avant garde, and its promoters who indulge everything that someone like Dali does and refuse to see it in a moral or political context.”

This ethical critique, writes Charlie Finch at Artnet, attacks the assumption in the art world that an appreciation of artists with Dali’s peculiar tastes “is automatically enlightened, progressive.” Such an attitude extends from the artists themselves to the society that nurtures them, and that “allows us to welcome diamond-mine owners who fund biennales, Gazprom billionaires who purchase diamond skulls, and real-estate moguls who dominate temples of modernism.” Again, you may draw your own comparisons.

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2018.

George Orwell Reviews Mein Kampf: “He Envisages a Horrible Brainless Empire” (1940)

How the Nazis Waged War on Modern Art: Inside the “Degenerate Art” Exhibition of 1937

Tolstoy Calls Shakespeare an “Insignificant, Inartistic Writer”; 40 Years Later, George Orwell Weighs in on the Debate

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

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

How 16th-Century Artist Joris Hoefnagel Made Insects Beautiful—and Changed Science Forever

How Scientists Recreated Ancient Egypt’s Long-Lost Pigment, “Egyptian Blue”

How Art Conservators Restore Old Paintings & Revive Their Original Colors

How Jackson Pollock Redefined Modern Art: An Introduction

The 100 Greatest Paintings of All Time: From Botticelli and Bosch to Bacon and Basquiat

Pablo Picasso’s Childhood Paintings: Precocious Works Painted Between the Ages of 8 and 15

A Young Jim Henson Teaches You How to Make Puppets with Socks, Tennis Balls & Other Household Goods (1969)

George Orwell Reviews Salvador Dali’s Autobiography: “Dali is a Good Draughtsman and a Disgusting Human Being” (1944)

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