Mildred Thompson: A visionary abstract painter who used String Theory to illuminate the human condition By William Corwin Mildred Thompson’s paintings “were the children of her age,” to paraphrase the famous opening line of Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1910): the nuclear age, the space age, as well as the civil rights era.  Born in 1936, Thompson grew up at a time when mechanization and scientific innovation achieved a level seemingly capable of anything.  Thompson’s mature paintings are large-scale fantastical diagrams of creative and destructive forces, seducti ..read more

  Nine weeks that upended French Art By Lilly Wei It was July 1905 in Collioure, a quaint French fishing village sandwiched between the sparkling waters of the Mediterranean and the slopes of the Pyrenees located about half a marathon’s run from Catalonia and the Spanish border. Henri Matisse invited André Derain to meet him (and his family) there. The attraction? An azure sky and a dazzling light that gilded all that it touched: medieval buildings, lush foliage, red rock coves, all. As Derain vividly put it, in a letter to a friend: “The nights are radiant, the days are potent, ferocious ..read more

Dutch Art Helps Shape the Western World’s View of Itself By James D. Balestrieri The six themes that comprise Dutch Art in a Global Age: Masterpieces from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, an exhibition on view April 19th through July 14th at Atlanta’s High Museum of Art, convey a complex story of a very small nation-state that grew rapidly into an empire whose reach circumnavigated the globe. Willem Kalf, Still Life with Fruit in a Wanli Bowl, 1664, oil on canvas. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, promised gift of Rose-Marie and Eijk van Otterloo, in support of the Center for Netherlandish Art. Ph ..read more

Into the Spotlight: Contemporary Japanese Women Ceramists By Lilly Wei Clay, like many materials formerly relegated to the less acclaimed echelons of craft, at least in the United States, has risen in esteem of late, as have other so-called minor arts. There are more exhibitions dedicated to it, and clay appears more often as part of the repertoire of multidisciplinary artists in the wake of increasing aesthetic diversification and hybridization. Clay has its own storied history and other cultures have long prized it, particularly in Asia where rare porcelains can command upwards of eight figu ..read more

A new exhibition explores Mark Rothko’s works on paper, revaluing an unappreciated medium By Ashley Busby Too often an artist becomes synonymous with that thing that cements their status, leaving a one-sided glimpse into an evolving career.  For Mark Rothko (1903–1970), his expressive color field paintings, towering in presence and moodily centered in pure washes of color, have come to define him. Untitled, 1969, acrylic and ink on wove paper; sheet: 50 x 42 1⁄8 in. National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of The Mark Rothko Foundation, Inc. Copyright © 2023 Kate Rothko Prizel and Chris ..read more

Yoo Youngkuk, celebrated at home as a groundbreaking modernist painter, is having his first solo exhibition outside South Korea By Lilly Wei Yoo Youngkuk once said that he used the mountain as his principal motif because it contained everything that was needed in painting: color, straight and curved lines, and light. Like Cézanne, he treated nature as geometric forms, substituting rectangles, circles, and triangles for the French master’s cylinder, sphere, and cone. For Yoo, the triangle represented the mountain; the circle referred to the sun or the moon–the source of light; and the lines wer ..read more

“The Hub of the World,” a New Exhibition at New York’s Nicholas Hall, Explores 18th-Century Rome’s Rich Cultural Ferment By James D. Balestrieri It’s hard to imagine a time when the Settecento, as the 18th century in Rome is often termed, wasn’t at least an occasional subject of interest to museums and art historians. In the not too distant past, however, the Settecento was viewed with disdain or ignored altogether as a kind of decadent shadow of the Baroque and High Renaissance. “The Hub of the World: Art in Eighteenth-Century Rome,” on view at Nicholas Hall in New York through November 30th ..read more

Pierre Bonnard produced compositions rooted in the places and spaces of his life that exist as a shimmering resonance of memory By Ashley Busby In an over five-decade career, artist Pierre Bonnard (1867–1947) reveled in the ordinary, painting the environs of his everyday life.  Never without a sketchbook, the artist was known for his daily walks, often spent hastily scribbling in small pocket agendas.  Life itself became the stuff of his paintings, opportunities to riff, to play, to compose.  Interspersed among his sketches we also get a glimpse into his dedication to formal con ..read more

Fantasy Enriches Reality in Magical Paintings by Inka Essenhigh ByLilly Wei Inka Essenhigh has always been a wizard with line. The whiplash fluidity and finesse of her draftsmanship made her an artist to be reckoned with ever since the 1990s, when she was starting out. And what she achieved with it was unique, her own take on the (then pervasive) manga-inspired fantasies that were part technological, part sci-fi, part decorative: pop with symbolist, surrealist, art nouveau, ukiyo-e intimations—and much more. Those strange—and strangely beguiling—early works dazzled, depending as they did upon ..read more

Gabriele Münter was a spirited champion of the avant-garde in Germany, a brilliant draftswoman, and a daring colorist ByAshley Busby In a diary entry from 1926, Expressionist painter and artist Gabriele Münter (1877–1962) ruminated on her continued position on the periphery of the art world, noting: “In the eyes of many, I was nothing but an unnecessary addition to Kandinsky. That a woman can have an original, real talent, that she can be a creative person, is easily forgotten. A woman standing alone—even one of my kind—can never assert herself without help. Other ‘authorities’ have to advocat ..read more