Most people just call it Heaven but actually the name of the painting is The Garden of Earthly Delights. In these three panels Bosch depicted the earth, as we know it. The first panel has a wise figure (possibly religious) introducing Earth to a calm, reasonable...
Along with everyone else, I was always thrilled to see another painting of Wayne Thiebaud’s cars screeching up and down the insane hills of San Francisco in one traffic jam after another, melting into another modern painting of man’s insanity. However, when I finally...
Andy Warhol was not a weak, whiney, limp-wristed gay man. Quite the opposite, in fact: he had different personalities for different people. To his nieces and nephews, he was your normal uncle Andy; they loved him and wrote a storybook about how they would wake up...
In my second year at Cornell my family were happy because they thought they could finally stop worrying about me. I don’t know why they worried so much; I thought I was doing fine. Of course, I was still a virgin, but so what? I had some pretty deep crushes: one on...
We all know The Blue Boy (c. 1770) by Thomas Gainsborough, and for some of us there is a special attachment, while others only know it because it is famous. What most people don’t know is who the blue boy in the painting is, and that’s because it isn’t important....
Diego Rivera’s murals are a tale—no, a single impression—of the epic journey of a country. It is chopped up into events, into battles, and years of endless marching and daily struggles. But the viewer still looks at a mural in a single moment and feels overpowered by...
Jean-Michel Basquiat’s 1982 Untitled painting of a skull looks like a prison that can barely contain all the rage, anger and fierce memories that drive a person. Painted in graffiti style, it is young and barely controlled. You wonder how it is ever going to get...
Yes sir, every Saturday, the Post magazine would come to our door and I would squeal silently with delight because on the cover was yet another Norman Rockwell painting and I got what the painting was saying. It was funny, but not like a Dick Tracy cartoon: It was...
When I first saw a reproduction of The Bedroom I thought, Oh my God, this guy has so few clothes. Later I altered my assessment of the painting and thought how cool to cut out all the crap in your life and just have a few necessities so you could concentrate on what’s...
We talk about this art and that art, and then we either start seeing influences or start making them up. A popular one is the Asian influence on the Impressionists, who we like to consider our greatest artists but we really mean most popular. However, comparing these...
Macbeth is the story of a villain who people understand and have pity for—when the story is told correctly. Both Macbeth and his wife have the difficult task of being evil and asking for our sympathy. They are tortured souls not because they are losing the battle but...
Does anyone remember the Paragons and the Jesters? In high falsetto voices they whined about the ache of first love way before I ever felt it. They prepared me for heartbreak in such a visceral way that I couldn’t wait for it to happen. Love? Was it going to come to...
Have you ever been in someone’s home and seen a painting in the living room or hallway that you have never forgotten? It is not a famous painting, not even an impressive painting, but somehow it sticks with you. You don’t understand why you can’t forget it, but you...
Unlike Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s fascination with his models—whom he painted obsessively, much to the detriment of his painting—Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs of Lisa Lyon show no signs of such frustration. Rossetti was like a man locked outside of a house to which...
Kenny Price’s objects are modest in size and endless in meaning, which is another way of saying they make you think and feel instead of just impressing you. At a recent career survey at Parrasch Heijnen Gallery’s inaugural LA show, the first piece you are confronted...
The most famous Hollywood movie I appeared in was Roger Corman's Death Race 2000, which was bizarre because coming from New York, I didn’t know how to drive yet. Over the years the movie became one of the most popular American films in Europe, including France....
These statues, never really alive, were visiting the Getty like ghosts from the past, and they have traveled an odd underwater route to get here. Afraid that these magnificent bronzes would be melted down into weaponry and coins, their owners dragged them out to sea...
School—the word alone makes me shiver. I was forced to go when I was five. “Forced” is an ugly, ugly word but sometimes it turns out for the better. In the ’50s I attended an all-girls school that focused on posture, a good translation of Cicero, and the perfect...
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