“If Ever I Cease to Love”: The Pageantry of Carnival Costume Designs

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The Magnificent Lunatic: The Life and Work of Sarah Bernhardt

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The Urban Canvas and Its Artists

Graffiti is hardwired into society. People have a natural impulse to leave their mark on public property, to tell the world they were here and, perhaps, what they think about it. Historically, graffiti serves many purposes. Victors of war have used it as territorial markers and gangs to stake out their turf. Politicians use it to spread their ideology while subversives use it to talk back to authorities without fear of reproach. Advertisers promote their products and criminals their unlawful services with graffiti. Lovers immortalize their devotion. The dislocated and alienated claim a sense of place. And artists gain a public audience. At its most basic level, graffiti is an affirmation of our own being; it is an announcement that “I was here.”

Kazimir Malevich: The Evangelist of Abstraction

In order to achieve a higher awareness, Malevich believed that people had to abandon logic and that art was the gateway for doing so. He had felt an urgent need to release art from rationality: “I give warning of danger. Reason has imprisoned art in a box of square dimensions.”

At Home in Storyville: the Brothel Pictures of Ernest Bellocq

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Remembering the Hours: Nancy Cunard’s Expatriate Press

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Clues to a Lost Woman: The Photography of Francesca Woodman

Examination of the art of photographer Francesca Woodman, who committed suicide in 1981.

George Bellows: The Sketch Hunter

Many of Bellows’s friends described him as a man in a hurry. His artistic career bloomed early: at age twenty-six, five years after attending art school under the mentorship of Robert Henri and William Merritt Chase, he was elected a member of the National Academy of Design. At thirty he displayed his paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He was elevated by the Academy to full Academician the next year and was considered the country’s most accomplished lithographer-a meteoric rise by most artistic standards.

Terrible Beauty: The Visual Poems of Clarence John Laughlin

Before falling for photography, Clarence Laughlin had wanted to be a poet. As a young man he immersed himself in the French symbolists, particularly Baudelaire. Unable to sell his prose poems and wanting to quit his job as a bank teller, he bought an inexpensive camera, built a homemade darkroom and taught himself the fundamentals of photography. His goal was to be the Baudelaire of the camera. He called his early results “visual poems” and meant for the images to be explicated like poetry. For Laughlin, objects possessed an intricate web of psychological associations and a multitude of meanings.

Gordon Conway: Poet of Chic

During the height of her career, fashion illustration was dismissed by fine-art elitists as trivial or at best a “Cinderella art.” They claimed that the work did not spring from inspiration but rather from the client’s pocketbook and that it was ephemeral — timely rather than timeless. Yet over the decades the aesthetic beauty of the genre has withstood fine-art scrutiny, and fashion illustration is today recognized for its importance as a historical record of a society and style as well as for its popularity among collectors and connoisseurs.

Norman Bel Geddes: A Modernist da Vinci

In 1929 American theatrical and industrial designer Norman Bel Geddes drafted “Airliner Number 4,” a plan for a nine-deck amphibian airliner with areas for deck games, shops and salons, an orchestra, a gymnasium and a solarium. He calculated that twenty engines would be needed to achieve cruising altitude. In Horizons (1932), a book on American streamlined design and urban planning, he carefully detailed the airliner’s projected fl ying time and fuel usage, along with the cost of building, equipping, furnishing and operating the plane. To fi nancial backers, the design seemed innovative but extravagant, and it was never built. [2008]

The Satirical Art of George Grosz

Berlin artist George Grosz dressed with an air of art-school irony in a variety of costumes — a cowboy hat and spurs, a powdered face, rouged cheeks and lips and a padded, checkered jacket, or a rakish-looking Fedora and an American gangster-styled suit. But the role the young artist played most often was that of the dandified idler, with spats and walking stick, as he joined fellow artists at Café des Westerns to gossip, debate, play chess and drink coffee and spiked lemonade.

Haunted: The Drawings of Romaine Brooks

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In 1930, after Romaine Brooks sprained her leg, her doctor prescribed bed rest. The artist shut herself in her room in her Parisian apartment on rue Raymond and used the seclusion to begin her Memoir, No Pleasant Memories.

George Barbier: The Knight of the Bracelet

With the publication of This Side of Paradise in early 1920, F. Scott Fitzgerald, a Princeton dropout, failed U.S. amy officer and former middling advertising executive, achieved instant celebrity and became a spokesperson for his generation.

Egon Schiele: Portraits of an Artist

In [Schiele's portraits] he rendered tortured emotional states against isolated, blank backgrounds. All of his stylized portraits reflected his own inner world. In fact, Egon Schiele’s art was a means to learn about his life, his loves, his sexuality.

Art Feature: Leon Bakst & Kris Somerville

Impatient with academic formalism, Serge Diaghilev, a charismatic, furiously energetic former law student, founded the World of Art movement in St. Petersburg in October 1898.

The Myth of the Fine Artist

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The Letters of Robert Lowell

The Letter’s give us Lowell’s life as he lived it, inside out. We find him not just in history but in his house, on a particular morning, taking a break from his other work to write for a friend’s ear.

On the Plain of Smokes, Ornamental Horses, etc.

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The Tom McAfee Discovery Feature

Featuring the following poems: For a Friend in the Hospital Arrival at the Cabin Hornet’s Nest Returning to Cuttyhunk Poem Butterflies The Peacock Flounder