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Who created the first work of abstract art has long been a fraught question indeed. Better, perhaps, to ask who first said of a work of art that a kid could have made it. A strong contender in that division is the Russian artist Véra Pestel, whom history remembers as having reacted to
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Why Henry VIII’s Codpiece Is So Monumental in Holbein’s Famous, Lost Portrait
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During the 15th and 16th centuries, fashionable men sported a codpiece. Originally a garment designed to protect and support the proverbial “Willy” (especially when men wore tights), the codpiece morphed into something else–a sign of virility, “a bulging and absurd representation of masculinity itself.” The codpiece featured prominently in paintings by masters such as…
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How Japanese Kintsugi Masters Restore Pottery by Beautifying the Cracks
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A few years ago, we featured here on Open Culture the Japanese art of kintsugi, whose practitioners repair broken pottery with gold in a manner that emphasizes rather than hides the cracks. Since then, the idea seems to have captured the Western imagination, inspiring no few online investigations but also books with titles like…
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When a Young Sofia Coppola & Zoe Cassavetes Made Their Own TV Show: Revisit Hi-Octane (1994)
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It makes sense that Sofia Coppola and Zoe Cassavetes would be friends. Not only are they both respected filmmakers of Generation X, they’re both daughters of maverick American auteurs, a condition with its advantages as well as its disadvantages. The advantages, in Coppola’s case, have included the ability to get Zoetrope, her father Francis Ford…
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A Determined Art Conservator Restores a Painting of the Doomed Party Girl Isabella de’ Medici: See the Before and After
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Some people talk to plants.
The Carnegie Museum of Art‘s chief conservator Ellen Baxter talks to the paintings she’s restoring.
“You have to …tell her she’s going to look lovely,” she says, above, spreading varnish over a 16th-century portrait of Isabella de’ Medici prior to starting the laborious process of…
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