Artist Mark Bradford recently visited one of Kristine Hatanaka’s art classes at Culver City High School to talk to students about works they’d created based on his art-making activity RE-RE-Process, available through Open Studio. Initiated by Mark as part...
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An American has slipped his way into exclusive British company—the exhibition Luminous Paper: British Watercolors and Drawings, opening July 19. Owned for years by Thomas Jefferson, admirer of all things classical, this pen-and-ink by Pennsylvania-born artist Benjamin West depicts...
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Do you have memories that feel more real than your life today? British painter J. M. W. Turner did, and they are the subject of this painting. The year is 1839. Turner, now in his 60s, has not set...
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After several months of writing and archival processing, I’ve just finished my work on the archive of Galerie Schmela. The archive’s 172 boxes and 25 flat file folders are listed and described here. The records of Galerie Schmela in Düsseldorf document the business...
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This weekend, we’re screening a four-part film series, Soy Cuba!, that offers a brutal and beautiful look at Cuba through different perspectives in the 1960s (and one from 1959 with Our Man in Havana), a time of great transition...
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Update—We’ve posted video excerpts from Patrick McGovern’s talk. See below for his discussion of Midas Touch, here for Chateau Jiahu, and here for Theobroma. What ancient brews were served at the funeral feast of King Midas, or his father...
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As a kid I was sure if I could be alone with works or art, in or out of museums—ditch the parents, teachers, and guards—that the works of art would talk to me. I assessed hiding places, considered alarm...
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There are digital photographers. And then there’s Luther Gerlach. In the time it took you to read that last paragraph, you could have snapped six digital photos. It would take Luther half a day to make that many images—on...
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It was an unusual day at the Villa. People wandered about with numbers clipped to their lapels. Intense conversations took place about Homer’s poetry, fueled by coffee and snacks. Visitors moved in and out of the auditorium, as if...
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In the emerald-green galleries of the exhibition Spirit of an Age: Drawings from the Germanic World, I was drawn to a cluster of quiet drawings that convey beautiful stories: miraculous healings, heroic quests of medieval knights, momentous coronations. These...
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Paris in the mid-18th century was a time of invention in the culinary arts. Food was an integral part of the fashion and culture of this bustling city. Haute cuisine has its foundations in this time and place. So...
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Opening this week at the Getty Center is Paris: Life & Luxury, which traces the refined activities that took place inside a luxurious Parisian town house of the mid-1700s. On the streets outside such a house, however, occurred one...
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