By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout Throughout the year we celebrate various holidays—some religious, others cultural or connected to historical events. I thought it might be fun to find art that would illustrate those calendar milestones. In some cases, I have researched artworks that are not well known because they are not on display,…
By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout In Christian iconography, the joy of the birth of Jesus is often celebrated in a theme of “Journey of the Magi” but also as “Adoration of the Shepherds.” While the “Magi” images allowed artists and their affluent patrons to show off the splendor of decoration, using gold-ground or…
By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout When in 1916 Tamara married Tadeusz Lempicki (pronounced “Wem-pitski”), a Polish nobleman and a lawyer appointed at the Russian Imperial Court in St. Petersburg, it seemed that her future was on a settled course. She would be the beautiful wife of a handsome lawyer and raise her newborn…
By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout And they’re off…. Hundreds of movies are now in competition for numerous awards from critics associations, film industry guilds, academies, industry organizations, and, of course, the most important one: the Motion Picture Association of America that votes for the Academy Awards, popularly called Oscars. Here are some interesting…
By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout A couple of weeks ago, the city of Warsaw launched a new art museum. A sleek, white-walled Museum of Modern Art, designed by the American architect Thomas Phifer, has been built in the very center of the city, facing the wedding-cake-shaped, socialist-era Palace of Culture and Science. Conceptually,…
By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout At the origin of the Dulwich Picture Gallery’s collection lies a story of a king who first lost his crown, then his country, and then his freedom. The king in question was Stanisław August Poniatowski, the last king of Poland who, like England’s King Charles I, was better…
By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout Jozef Chełmoński (1874-1914; his last name is pronounced Hew-mon-ski) is a painter whose position in Polish art history is the equivalent of Monet’s fame in France, that is, an artist whose works can be found on everything from merchandise to school textbooks and whose iconic canvases are likely…
“The starry sky at last, actually painted at night, under a gas-lamp.”~ Vincent van Gogh in 1888 By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout As part of the celebration of its 200th anniversary, the National Gallery in London has just opened an exhibition titled Vincent van Gogh: Poets and Lovers. Despite the short span of…
By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout Unique, beautifully designed and crafted, and visually arresting, gold objects are always stars of any museum display, regardless of the symbolism or cultural context that may have been lost over time. From the earliest civilizations of the Fertile Crescent, through ancient Egypt, and in all African and South…
By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout As the end of hot summer days approaches, it is the perfect time to binge a little on some shows, perhaps during a lazy weekend by the water. Lolling about on a hot afternoon does not mean we have to give up on intellectual prowess, however, so I…