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…
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 Unique, beautifully designed and crafted, and visually arresting, gold objects are always stars of any museum display, regardless of the symbolism or cultural context that may have been lost over time. From the earliest civilizations of the Fertile Crescent, through ancient Egypt, and in all African and South…
By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout As the end of hot summer days approaches, it is the perfect time to binge a little on some shows, perhaps during a lazy weekend by the water. Lolling about on a hot afternoon does not mean we have to give up on intellectual prowess, however, so I…
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…
By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout After John Singer Sargent died in 1925, his formal paintings of English and American socialites went out of fashion. Throughout the 20th century, the art world was giddy about other things—abstracts, installation art, pop—visual ideas very much removed from the realistic portraiture that was Sargent’s specialty. In that…
By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout This summer, the Tate Gallery in London is presenting an exhibition entitled “Now You See Us: Women Artists in Britain 1520-1920,” showcasing 400 years of women creating art in Great Britain. Some of them, like Artemisia Gentileschi and Angelika Kauffmann, came from other countries in search of clients…
By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout No matter how much or how little we know about fine art, we can all spot the difference between paintings by old masters and the art that was launched by post-Classical artists—Impressionists, Modernists, and representatives of all subsequent movements, from Surrealism to Abstractionism. There are various reasons for…