When American audiences first went to the movies in 1896, they saw monumental subjects such as Niagara Falls projected onto canvas screens framed with huge gold frames. Within months of the debut of films by the Edison and Lumi?re companies in New York, the whole country could see the new "moving pictures" not only in […]

Now in its tenth year, the works on display at Glasgow?s Art Fair?05 confirmed the current trend in favor of painting over conceptual or installation work. But it remains an eclectic, heterodox affair?exhibitors range from small, committed community arts groups such as Impact Arts, working with homeless kids in the city?s east end, to the […]

Among the great painters of leisure, Jean Baptiste-Camille Corot stands out as one of the finest. Bathers enjoying the dying light of a late August swim, or figures crouched in a moment of intimate contemplation, distracted by their reveries from the day?s chores?in the languorous pastors of Corot, even the peasants have time to daydream. […]

Basel for dummies Basel, Switzerland, a small town bisected by the Rhine and tucked in along the border of Germany and France, is an unlikely home for the biggest art fair in the world. Aside from Pope Felix V?s Council of Basel, from 1431-49, a brief rebellion in 1831 and Dr. Albert Hoffmann?s accidental discovery […]

A large survey of Egon Schiele?s drawings and paintings closed this weekend at the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam. It was the first ever exhibition in Holland devoted to Scheile, the Austrian expressionist who died of Spanish flu in 1918, but the event was most notable for a bold, and apparently unprecedented interdisciplinarity: live performance […]

While traveling in Iran, the American painter Laurie Blum set out to create her own unique Persian paintings drawing inspiration from the natural landscape. Hafez, which literally translates to "one who memorizes the Koran," was the pen name for Iran’s 14th century poet, Mohammad Shirazi. His mystical verses were loved as much for their unfailing […]

With a mixture of denial and acceptance, discomfort and support, Chinese society is recognizing that homosexuality exists. A notable change occurred during the late 1990s and early 2000s, when sodomy was decriminalized in 1997 and the new Chinese Classification and Diagnostic Criteria of Mental Disorders removed homosexuality from its list of mental illnesses on April […]

Painter and printmaker Gary Stephan and the filmmaker and painter Cheryl Donegan have known each other for over 20 years, since she was a student at RISD and he was showing at Mary Boone Gallery. They met at Stephan’s studio recently to discuss his new sculptures, the reasonable limits of interpretation, and his continued attempts […]

Currently showing at Galeria Janet Kurnatowski, a new-ish space in Greenpoint, is a modest but extremely compelling show curated by Scott Malbaurn. Art on the Line features five artists each working with aspects of a pedigreed artistic element that, despite its illustrious past, came to last century’s finish line hobbling. Art on the Line Shane […]

There’s only a very short curatorial introduction to the exhibition at the Arsenale in Venice for the 51st edition of the Biennale. Rosa Martinez quotes Beckett only to defy him: while he spoke of an art that was "weary of puny exploits, weary of pretending to be able, of being able, of doing a little […]