Enigmatic, magnetic, elusive, and mysterious -- these words and others like them have been employed over the decades to describe actor/playwright Sam Shepard's cryptic persona and plays. After leaving a dead-end town in the middle of a California wasteland, a young Shepard moved to America's biggest

Dystopic, Melancholy, Off-broadway, Primal, Tense, Visceral

Vincent Van Gogh's life was one of tragedy, pain, loneliness, and misunderstanding. But it also contained a deep sense of compassion for others, powerful feelings of love, ecstatic reactions to nature, and an abiding passion for beauty. Although he was unacknowledged during his lifetime, very few peo

Anxiety, Figurative painting, Intimate, Polychromatic, Post-impressionism, Self-reflection, Tense

The bleakest, filthiest junkhouse in the mansion of rock 'n' roll serves as a crash pad to the memory of this band, which romanticized every deadly vice and self-destructive habit known to man. Founded in the early 1960s by Lou Reed, an educated Jewish junkie, and the classical violist John Cale, the

Agitated, Anxiety, Distorted, Fuzzy, Minimal, Moody, Noise rock/art rock, Psychedelic, Religious, Spare, Tense

Vienna-born actor, writer, and director Erich Von Stroheim worked mainly in the silent film genre (only one of his films was a "talkie"), but he seemed nevertheless to make a lot of noise. As an actor in Hollywood during World War I, he was often typecast as the leering, be-monocled Prussian villain.

Epic, Germans in hollywood, Perverse, Silent film, Tense