The works of Gauguin and the Russian avant-garde of the early 20th Century have a great deal in common, but until a recent exhibit, few people had paid attention to the myriad links between the two.  In this article, we sum up some of those connections, and provide links...

The Renaissance was a period of scientific, technological, and artistic innovation that affected nearly all of Europe by the 16th century.  Italy was the center of this roughly 200-year period of rapid advancement (where it had started as early as the 1300s), as names of the great Renaissance artists...

To an outsider, the idea of “reading” a painting might seem preposterous. After all, you read words, not pictures. How can a painting, then, be “read”? But in the field of art appreciation, “reading” a painting is an everyday activity, and it comes as naturally as reading a book...

What do you do after you have taken care of all of life’s necessities? Sometimes the urge to create something just for the sake of its aesthetic value arises, either to capture what the creator of the artist sees or project subjective qualities onto the work. As art has...

In 1800s France, art was a purely academic past time. There were rules about everything, from use of light and color to subject matter to composition. Critics dominated the art scene, particularly those belonging to the Salon, which was an organization of elected critics who determined the great contemporary...