This week, a history of emoticons, Barocci in London, LA’s architecture mess, the birth of the Garbage Pail Kids, William Eggleston and baseball, how China censors social media, and more.
May 5, 2013
Posted inOpinion
Weekend Words: Plunder
This week we learned that the family of legendary gallery owner Paul Rosenberg, who was the exclusive representative of Matisse, Picasso and Braque, has claimed ownership of a Matisse that has been in the collection of Norway’s Henie Onstad Arts Center for decades.
Posted inArt
Shock of the Old: The Pre-Raphaelites Go Back to the Future
In its first iteration in London, Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Art and Design, the survey now on view at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, bore the edgier title Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant-Garde. We may not customarily think of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB) — founded in secret in September 1848 by William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and soon attracting other artists — as an avant-garde, but the label does seem apt. The PRB painters and their affiliated artists were an embattled band of refuseniks, rejecting the standard practices of modern painting, and with it modernity itself, as corrupt and unsustainable.
Posted inArt
Who’s Afraid of Hot Pink, Canary Yellow, and Midnight Blue?
Color is frightening. From the color of one’s skin to the color of a painting, it can stir up unlikely obsessions: all kinds of irrational responses tend to explode without provocation. Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko have two things in common: wide expanses of color and the proclivity for people to deface their paintings more than any other Abstract Expressionist work.
