“Perfection is not necessary.”

On two forgotten portraitists and how to actually alter the art historical canon.

Edgar Degas was the ultimate voyeur of the stories behind the curtain and in the audience.

What if plants are smarter than we think — a lot smarter?

The fifteenth-century Italian artist Fra Angelico invented emotional interiority in art.

Toward the end of his life, Manet shifted to painting pretty flowers and pretty women. Critics were perplexed. What was the value of these seemingly meaningless confections?

An exhibition at Paris’s Musée d’Orsay centers on a black model named Laure in Édouard Manet’s ‘Olympia’ and reinterrogates the role of black people in art history.

Where is the line between genius and madness? The Belgian artist, poet, and art thief Stéphane Mandelbaum’s attempt to create a lasting mythology of himself led to a macabre, untimely death.

Pierre Bonnard’s revolutionary and controversial use of color became a means toward unlocking his past and the truths of his own self. But what if, ultimately, there was nothing to find? 

Perhaps all creativity is, in some way, created in the crucible of family tension. Perhaps it comes from the desire to define oneself in opposition to one’s family while also living up to its expectations. Perhaps what we try to escape is invariably what defines us.

The passage of time tends to either confirm the supposed transgressions of historical figures, or absolve them. But Egon Schiele, whose centenary is being celebrated at museums across the world, presents a particular lens through which to think about the line between art and exploitation.

A London exhibition looks at the art that came out of the 20th century’s most tumultuous relationships. But is it only within the context of romantic unrest that the best art can be made?

In Caspar David Friedrich’s most famous painting, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (1818), the German Romantic artist depicts a young, aristocratic-looking man in a green overcoat as he stands atop a jagged rock, taking in a misty, high-altitude scene o…

On the work of Gabriele Münter.    The Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, some twenty-five miles north of Copenhagen on the shore of the Øresund, has a sense of porousness—glass and light everywhere, so many doors between the museum and the scu…

In our new monthly column, The Big Picture, Cody Delistraty will travel across Europe—from Copenhagen to Dublin to Berlin to London—searching out essential artworks and exhibitions that speak to a wider cultural context, such as our desire for wa…

  On July 5, 1945, the French painter Jean Dubuffet set off for Switzerland accompanied by two fellow Frenchmen, the publisher Jean Paulhan and the architect Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, better known as Le Corbusier. The Swiss tourism board had org…

Sixteen years ago, Marina Picasso, one of Pablo Picasso’s granddaughters, became the first family member to go public about how much her family had suffered under the artist’s narcissism. “No one in my family ever managed to escape from the str…

Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and sexual anxiety. History tends to compare Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald—and why not? As contemporaries and rivals, the two make natural foils for each other. Hemingway, we’re told, epitomizes a certain archet…