artporn

“I went out one morning to look at the Shelton Hotel and there was the optical illusion of a bite out of one side of the tower made by the sun, with sunspots against the building and against the sky,” said Georgia O’Keeffe, recalling the precise moment that inspired her to paint The Shelton with Sunspots. Although her...

One of the most exciting modern artists I have stumbled across since starting these essays. Obi is a Nigerian artist with impressionist and expressionist tendencies with beautiful execution and style. Here we see she also plays with framing and separation, the photographer’s left hand on a camera is separate from the main...

In the evolution of Mondrian’s art, this small work, painted on cardboard in a loose pointillist technique, clearly belongs with the preceding works of 1908, such as Windmill in Sunlight....

Artist Hans Reudi Giger, was a Swiss-born proponent of “biomechanical art” blending human and machine. His work in the 60s and 70’s went on the influence monster and set design for the Alien film series. He often collaborated with his muse and sometimes lover Li Tobler until her death at age 27. Her face is visible in some...

Here we can see van Gogh’s style point at something to come later - cubism. Typically his style is longer strokes, ie Starry Night, to convey motion or movement of light. Here however his strokes are short - almost to pointillism, but this predates cubism by nearly 20 years.

Robert Delaunay chose the view into the ambulatory of the Parisian Gothic church Saint-Séverin as the subject of his first series of paintings, in which he charted the modulations of light streaming through the stained-glass windows and the resulting perceptual distortion of the architecture. The subdued palette and the patches...

Henri Matisse often painted the same subject in versions that range from relatively realistic to more abstract or schematic. At times the transition from realism to abstraction could be enacted in a single canvas, as is the case with The Italian Woman, the first of many portraits Matisse painted of a professional Italian model...

Pinchon executed this work in a Post-Impressionist style with a subdued Fauve or Neo-Impressionist palette of golden yellows and incandescent blues. The dynamic image of the train in Pinchon’s painting is an homage to the emerging industrialized world....

In the 1940s Rothko, together with his friend Adolph Gottlieb, believed that the painting of myth, with allusions to tragedy, was the proper response to the horrors of war, the Holocaust and the atom bomb. He once wrote, with Friedrich Nietzsche in mind, that ‘only that subject matter is valid which is timeless and tragic’....

Mark Tobey’s animated matrices of brushed line, like the mature works of Jackson Pollock, are allover compositions. That is, unlike conventional representational paintings, they have no discernable center of focus, no single emphasized portion. Even Cubist works maintain vestiges of pictorial illusionism through an increased...

Schooled as an architect in his native Santiago, Chile, Matta went to Paris in 1933 to work for the famed modernist architect Le Corbusier. By the mid-1930s, Matta had become friendly with members of the Surrealist circle, and in 1937, influenced by both Surrealist techniques, including automatism, and his architectural...

Finnur Jonsson was one of the pioneers of abstract art in Iceland and was the first to show such works there. He also made portraits of people and nature and traveled. He worked a lot on the social issues of visual artists, wrote in newspapers and got into debates about visual art, he also worked extensively in goldsmithing and...

Though a leading voice in the Abstract Expressionist movement and one of their rare women artists to achieve critical and financial success in her lifetime, Joan Mitchell painted in a manner subtly distinct from her Abstract Expressionist peers. Hers was an idiosyncratic style defined by a varied use of color and with a...

This brilliant and free evocation of an unknown young woman in evening dress is at the antipodes of the worldly or official portrait practiced by the painters accustomed to the Salon....

Marilyn Minter’s sumptuous depictions of designer-shod feet—which stalked across billboards in New York’s Chelsea gallery district as part of a public art project in 2006—have become signature images in the artist’s oeuvre. Drawing on the potent erotic charge of the high heel, Minter amplifies its currency as a...

This painting is one of the first representations of urban proletariat. Whereas peasants (Gleaners by Millet) or country workers (Stone Breakers by Courbet) had often been shown, city workers had seldom been painted. Unlike Courbet or Millet, Caillebotte does not incorporate any social, moralising or political message in his...

From the moment of his arrival in Arles, on 8 February 1888, Van Gogh was constantly preoccupied with the representation of “night effects”. In April 1888, he wrote to his brother Theo: “I need a starry night with cypresses or maybe above a field of ripe wheat.” In June, he confided to the painter Emile Bernard: “But...

When he painted The Saint-Lazare Station, Monet had just left Argenteuil to settle in Paris. After several years of painting in the countryside, he turned to urban landscapes. At a time when the critics Duranty and Zola exhorted artists to paint their own times, Monet tried to diversify his sources of inspiration and longed to...

The French painter Corot displayed a great originality in lyrical landscape painting. He traveled to Italy three times during his life, but he only visited the subject of this work, Naples, on his first trip. From his several small sketches of Naples Castle, Mt. Vesuvius, Ischia and Amalfi, however, it would seem that this trip...

In contrast to the cluttered assemblage of juxtaposed objects of varying scales in other boxes, Joseph Cornell here creates a coherent miniaturized world. A black painted border on the surface of the glass frames a white palace and serves as a proscenium that invokes the world of theater and spectacle. The title Setting for a...

Lida Abdul is a performance and video artist. She and her family fled Afghanistan following the Soviet invasion of 1979, and lived as refugees in India and Germany before immigrating to the United States. Based on this experience, Abdul considers herself a nomadic artist, and her films, videos, and installations focus on themes...

In a group of works made between 1930 and 1933, Alberto Giacometti used the Surrealist techniques of shocking juxtaposition and the distortion and displacement of anatomical parts to express the fears and urges of the subconscious. The aggressiveness with which the human figure is treated in these fantasies of brutal erotic...