Although she is one of the twentieth-century artists who made Modernism unmistakably American, Georgia O'Keeffe channeled the European influences of Rodin, Matisse, and Picasso into an extremely personal vision of landscape. Encouraged by Arthur Wesley Dow's fusion of Japanese art, Art Nouveau's app
Jane Austen has been reincarnated in the personage of Kazuo Ishiguro. The great novelist of early-nineteenth-century English manners, who observed the moral inconsistencies of the nobility and argued for a form of social meritocracy, could not have hoped for a more loyal and perfect heir to her legac
After his fiftieth birthday Eugene Atget limited his diet to milk, bread, and bits of sugar; he honed in on his hygiene and lived to perfect his art. Peculiar in his habits and devoted to the development of photography, Atget struggled unnoticed for most of his life. It wasn't until his death that hi
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