Gardeners (Les Jardiniers). Gustave Caillebotte. 1875-1877. Private collection. Photo: Wikimedia Commons Public Domain. By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout Until about the end of WWII, if you lived in a house or at least in a ground-floor apartment, chances were that you had some sort of kitchen garden space. If you were lucky enough…
Christ Driving Moneylenders from the Temple. Church of St. Aignan (1899). Chartres, France. Photo: Reinhardhauke Wikimedia Commons By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout If you need to impart important messages to people who cannot read, then your choices include talking to them directly or showing them pictures—preferably images rendered in long-lasting materials such as…
Florence cathedral. Photo: Nina Heyn By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout In 1504, when Leonardo da Vinci was mostly done with living in Florence, he accepted an important commission to decorate Palazzo Vecchio (which served as the meeting hall for the Florentine Grand Council) with a fresco depicting the historic Battle of Anghiari fought…
Magdalena Abakanowicz. Abakan Orange, 1971. Sisal. Jankilevitsch Collection. Photo: Marcin Koniak/Desa Unicum, Courtesy of National Museum Poznań By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout “Art does not solve problems but makes us aware of their existence. It opens our eyes to see and our brain to imagine.” ~ Magdalena Abakanowicz In 1962, a young woman…
Rembrandt. Landscape with the Good Samaritan (1638). The Princes Czartoryski Collection, National Museum, Kraków. Photo: Wikimedia Commons By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout Europe has many places that are a perfect combination of art and history. One city that possesses this ideal combination in spades, but is less visited than it deserves, is Kraków…
Edouard Louis Dubufe. Portrait of Rosa Bonheur (the bull was painted by Bonheur), 1857. Oil on canvas. Versailles Palace. Photo: Wikimedia Commons By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout There is a reason why the traditionally dressed Victorian lady in the portrait above is resting her hand on a bull instead of a chair or…
Marc Chagall. I and the Village (1911). MoMA. Photo: Wikimedia Commons By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, the world’s largest contemporary and modern art assemblage, has been in the avant-garde of modern art collecting for almost a century. Founded in 1929 by three enterprising society…
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres – Portrait de Comtesse D’Haussonville (1845). The Frick Collection, New York. Photo: ©The Frick Collection, Wikimedia Commons By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout So many people love the experience of visiting New York. I don’t. I’m overwhelmed by the stone jungle of office towers and the incessant noise of construction, police sirens,…
Barbara Hepworth. Sphere with Inner Form, 1963. Bronze. Barbara Hepworth Museum, St. Ives, UK. Photo: image (c)2003 Graham Rogers at Wikipedia Commons By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout Imagine that you are a mother of a four-year-old boy as well as newborn, underweight triplets. You are living in a damp, badly heated basement in…
Julie Mehretu. Stadia II (2004). Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburg; gift of Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn and Nicolas Rohatyn and A.W. Mellon Acquisition Endowment Fund 2004.50. Photo: Courtesy the Carnegie Museum via the Whitney. © Julie Mehretu By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout The joint exhibition of the Whitney Museum of American Art and Los…