A Lady Writing

A Lady Writing is a 1665 painting by Johannes Vermeer.  He is particularly renowned for making masterful use of light in his work. Almost all his paintings are apparently set in two smallish rooms in his house in Delft; they show the same furniture and decorations in various arrangements and they often portray the same people, mostly women.  He died poor and not very well known, and only 35 known works are attributed to him.

Arts in the Olympics

At the 1912 Stockholm Olympics, poetry was an official event.  Modern history's first written work to win an Olympic gold medal was "Ode to Sport," a prose poem by Georges Hohrod and M. Eschbach.  There were also medals in sculpture, painting, and music.  Hilariously, Hohrod and Eschbach did not exist; they were pseudonyms for Pierre de Coubertin, the man who founded the modern Olympics.  The 1948 London Olympics were the final artistic competitions at the games.

Henri Cartier-Bresson

Henri Cartier-Bresson was a French photographer best known for his work Images à la sauvette ("The Decisive Moment"), and his philosophy that there is an elusive instant when, with brilliant clarity, the appearance of the subject reveals in its essence the significance of the event of which it is a part

Henry Moore

Henry Moore was one of the most important sculptors of the 20th century.  He is best known for his reclining figures and his monumental works inspired by ancient Mexican carvings and African tribal masks.  His reclining figures, mother and child tableaux, and helmet head pieces remain his most recognizable works.

The Gross Clinic

The Gross Clinic is one of the best known works by Thomas Eakins (1844-1916).  He was an American painter who was a standard bearer for the Realism movement.  In the painting is depicted Dr. Samuel D. Gross, a teacher and surgeon at the Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia, engaged in a teaching demonstration of a surgical procedure for the medical students seated behind him.  Five other doctors operate on a patient's infected thigh.  The 1875 painting was considered extreme and controversial.

Picasso's 90th birthday

In October 1971, on the occasion of Picasso's 90th birthday, a selection of works from the French public collections was presented in the Grande Galerie du Louvre.  This may mark the first time a living artist's work was displayed in the Grand Gallery, but sources are not entirely reputable.

The musical 'Fiddler on the Roof' takes its title from the painting 'The Fiddler' by Marc Chagall, which shows a fiddler looming over a town, his right foot apparently on a small house's roof. The musical is about Tevye and his five daughters, who move away from their father's traditions.

The Helga pictures are a series of nearly 250 studies by Andrew Wyeth of his neighbor Helga Testorf, mainly painted between 1971-85 (though the final Helga picture was made in 2002).

Fauvism

Fauvism was an early 20th-century art movement that emphasized strong color and brush strokes. The leaders of the movement were Henri Matisse and Andre Derain.

Hilma af Klint

Hilma af Klint was a Swedish artist and mystic whose paintings are considered among the first abstract works known in Western art history.  A considerable body of her work predates the first purely abstract compositions by Kandinsky, Malevich and Mondrian.  She belonged to a group called "The Five," comprising a circle of women inspired by Theosophy, who shared a belief in the importance of trying to contact the so-called "High Masters"—often by way of séances.

'La Maja desnuda' ("The Nude Maja") is a painting by Francisco de Goya. It depicts an unclothed woman reclining on a bed, and is considered the first non-religious, full-size female nude in Western art. It was confiscated by the Inquisition, and Goya painted a 'Clothed Maja' in 1803.

Rembrandt van Rijn

Rembrandt van Rijn was thought to have produced over ninety self-portraits, but more modern estimates put the figure at closer to forty paintings, plus thirty etchings. Modern scholarship puts his total painting output at around 300 pieces, with an equal number of etchings.

Pierrot

Pierrot is a stock character of French and Italian mime and Commedia dell'Arte. His character is that of the sad clown pining with unrequited love for Columbine, who leaves him for Harlequin. He is also in the song 'Au Clair de la lune."

Vanitas painting

Vanitas is a style of painting popular in the Netherlands and Flanders in the 16th and 17th centuries. It was marked by heavy symbolism of death, such as skulls, rotten fruit, watches, and so on.

Count Paris, a kinsman of Prince Escalus in 'Romeo & Juliet,' is the suitor who pursues Juliet before Romeo. He is killed by Romeo in Act V.

The Wyeths are a family of famous American painters, including N.C. Wyeth, best known as an illustrator; his son Andrew Wyeth, a realist painter of landscapes and nature; and Andrew's son Jamie Wyeth, illustrator of animals in the Brandywine tradition. Henriette and Carolyn, N.C.'s daughters, are less-known.

The Barbizon school was a movement of realist landscape painters in France in the 19th century, inspired by the work of John Constable. The most prominent of the Barbizon painters was Jean-Francois Millet.

Walter Gropius was a German architect and the father of Bauhaus. He helped design the Pan Am Building. His family residence, Gropius House, is in Lincoln, Massachusetts.

Group f/64 was a group (named after the smallest aperture setting on a camera) of photographers in the '30s who espoused objective, "straight" photography, especially of the American West. Ansel Adams was a prominent member and a Sierra Club adherent as well.

Emil Nolde

Emil Nolde was a German Expressionist painter, who used bold colors and strokes in his work.  Nolde was an early advocate of Germany’s National Socialist Party, but, when the Nazis came to power, they declared his work "decadent" and forbade him to paint.  He is known for The Matterhorn Smiles and Dance Around the Golden Calf.