Bonnard was intimate with all the women he painted: he knew them, as it were, by hand. In his soft, blurred splotches of bright color lies the closeness of the caress, the insights the fingers have divined. Indeed, Bonnard did not ask his models to sit for long, if at all; from a brief sketch he fill
If American drama was to recognize one fictional clan as first family, the Tyrones would win the title. (Granted, it would be a neck-and-neck race with the Lomans of "Death of a Salesman.") Eugene O'Neill's 1956 masterpiece, "Long Day's Journey into Night," established them as the dark alter ego of t
French Impressionism was not just a style, an approach to brushwork, or a sensitivity to light. It was a new kind of content: a focus on the middle-class life of afternoons at the park, outings to the seashore, and a domestic world of well-appointed interiors. This turn toward familial and private sc
In 1921 a French critic posed a priceless question:
"By what witchcraft did [Vermeer], representing the most
daily and commonplace sights, manage to give the
viewer so mysterious, so grand, so exceptional an
emotion?" Vermeer produced only 36 paintings before he died at 43. Yet each piece blissfully