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 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 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 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 When we think of German Expressionism, the images that most readily come to mind are often the black and white lithographs of Berlin artists like Käthe Kollwitz or Erich Heckel, but in fact this art movement also encompassed paintings brimming with color brighter than anything that German art…