What would the Baroque have been without Rubens? This dynamo of artistic energy infiltrated all the great courts of Europe, spreading the lush, riotous, regal style that had formed in the wake of the Renaissance. His sprawling canvases depict life on an epic scale, as if he needed extra room to inclu
At age 48, Julia Margaret Cameron received an unusual gift from her daughter: a camera. It came with the following note: "This may amuse you, mother, in your solitude." Cameron soon transformed her coal house into a darkroom and her chicken shed into a studio. She solicited the assistance of two good
"I really cannot carry on living with all that stuff stuck inside me," Emin once said, and proceeded to dredge up her tainted, passionate past and dish it out raw. The public at large has seen Emin grow up, in a fashion. She's been publicly processing her life since at least 1993, the time of her fir
When Vladek Spiegelman took his son Arthur aside one day to teach him about the Holocaust, it was more than a history lesson; it was a survival lesson. He drew diagrams of the shelter in which he had hidden his family -- not pictures, but simple, urgent drawings that mapped out, in the father's mind,