The Stonebreakers. Gustave Courbet (1849). Dresden Gemäldegallerie. Destroyed in 1945 during an air raid. Photo: Public Domain Wikimedia Commons By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout Art gets lost, stolen, or destroyed all the time. Thousands of works have been destroyed by fires and wars or simply by someone changing their mind, like Rockefeller being…
Gustav Klimt. Beethoven Frieze (detail). Vienna. Photo: Public Domain Wikimedia Commons By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout Ludwig van Beethoven’s birth date is unknown but his baptism, that most likely took place no later than a day later, has been recorded as December 17, 1770. This year, therefore, it is a round 250 year…
Martiros Saryan. By the Well. Hot day, 1909. Martiros Saryan Museum, Yerevan, Armenia. Photo: Wikimedia Commons Public Domain “Man’s best friend” has been a friend of artists throughout centuries and esthetic styles. By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout As soon as I wrote a story about cats in fine art, dog aficionados felt a…
Couturier Cat. Tsuguharu Foujita. 1927. Photo: Public Domain Wikiart.org Before there were videos of funny cats on the Internet, for about 4000 years there were simply fun cat paintings. By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout Long before the entire world got stuck in front of flickering screens all day long, cat videos were the…
Food for the Soul will now be adding a dedicated mini-site to bring you all the culture stories in one place By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout The world has just hunkered down to wait out the virus. Everything has ground to a sudden halt: going to work or school, dining out or seeing…
The Ghent Altar or An Adoration of the Mystic Lamb. Inside panels. Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons, Public domain. The most stolen artwork ever has been restored to its original glory By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout When brothers Hubert and Jan van Eyck started painting panels of a commissioned altar some time in 1420’s…
Leonardo da Vinci. Ca.1491. Study for the Sforza monument. Image source: Wikimedia Commons, public domain By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout It was a classic moment of serendipity. Catherine, Robert and I have been filming stories about da Vinci in Milan when we met at a book fair an Italian author, Marco Malvaldi, who…
“If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need”. Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 BC) By Nina Heyn, Your Culture Scout A typical museum of fine art is a depository of paintings, drawings and sculptures, sometimes objects of historical value, writings or artifacts (think the MET or the Tate). They fulfill the…
“Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. The sitter is merely the accident, the occasion. It is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on the coloured canvas, reveals himself.” Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray By…
“I believe that art can create the power and energy of happiness,” artist Hung Yi. By Nina Heyn, Your Culture Scout As you probably know, apart from gorgeous views, overpriced real estate and great restaurants, San Francisco is famous for its outstanding museums that rival the New York ones. Here are three of them to…