By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout “I am not one of those talking painters of whom there are so many now, who can tell you twenty-four times in one breath what art is but who have never once in twenty-four years of painting managed to show you what art is.”~ Caspar David Friedrich A…
“My world is one of crime. I steal from every artist around the world.”~ Wayne Thiebaud By Nina Heyn There are curiously few cityscapes in 20th- and 21st-century art. Impressionists documented the Paris of the last decade of the 19th century, but from about the 1900s until today, artists have been more interested in painting…
By Nina Heyn If it is spring in Paris, fashion is an obvious theme, but in the world of art, this means something more sophisticated than a runway at a designer house. Three major Paris museums have riffed on the theme of fashion in a manner reflecting these museums’ style and collections. House of Worth…
By Nina Heyn When I wrote a chapter about Baroque painter Artemisia Gentileschi (1593 – c. 1656) in my book, Women in Art: Artists, Models and Those Who Made It Happen, I wanted to separate the sensationalism of her biography from her art, which was original and high-quality, regardless of the unusual circumstances of her…
By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout Sometimes, with artists who died young, we can only wonder what greatness they would have achieved had they lived long enough. Such a list could include Raphael—the wunderkind of the mid-Renaissance—the talented Impressionists Frédéric Bazille and Gustave Caillebotte, who could have created masterpieces had they lived as long…
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 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 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 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…