By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout It was a strange time to be visiting Rome for an exhibition, Caravaggio 2025 at the Palazzo Barberini. The city was thronged with people lining up to view the casket of Pope Francis, who had just passed away. The cardinals had gathered for a conclave. Life and death,…
By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout In the United States, but not so much in Europe, you can sometimes walk into a beautiful house decorated with paintings and knickknacks but with no books anywhere to be found. The advent of digital media in the form of audiobooks and Kindle readers has accelerated the disappearance…
By Nina Heyn Spring weather can still be depressing, with rains and winds reminding us that we are not entirely finished with winter. As an antidote, here are few TV shows set in picturesque parts of the world, providing us with a virtual trip to warmer and more exotic places than home. THE WHITE LOTUS…
By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout Personally, I love themed art exhibitions because I always learn from them. I learn about pictures that I have never before seen or sometimes gain an understanding of an artist’s evolution of style. Many painters have favorite motifs (Cezanne’s apples, van Gogh’s olive trees) or subjects (Renoir’s nudes,…
By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout My cultural calendar revolves around art exhibitions, and I have scouted out some highlights of this year’s interesting art shows in Europe and the U.S. I have also included a longer list of upcoming art exhibitions below. In Los Angeles, the J. Paul Getty Museum will start the…
By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout On March 2, the film industry will be celebrating new movies by bestowing Best Picture, Director, and Actor awards, along with a dozen other accolades to movies screened in 2024. This year’s crop of movies seems to be particularly unimpressive. Apart from a few outstanding contenders like Conclave…
By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout “Windows have always interested me because they are a passageway between the exterior and the interior.”~ Henri Matisse January 1, 2025 marked the day when images of Henri Matisse’s paintings moved into the public domain. This means that some of his most iconic images will end up on…
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…