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…
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…