At the turn of the twentieth century, the United States was becoming an unmistakably modern nation. Cities were expanding, factories were multiplying, railroads and electric…
View More The American Arts and Crafts Movement: Mission Style and the Search for an Honest American Design
There is a peculiar kind of insecurity that sometimes follows us into art museums. We may enter a gallery perfectly confident in what we find…
View More The Art You Love Needs No Apology
There is a persistent myth about collecting art that has probably kept more people from owning original artwork than almost anything else: the idea that…
View More How to Buy Art When You’re Not Wealthy
For much of history, Jewish civilization has been described primarily as a civilization of words. Torah, commentary, prayer, poetry, philosophy, law, and storytelling occupy such…
View More The Jewish Eye: A Very Brief History of Jewish Art from Antiquity to the Present
The first time I had the privilege of standing before an original Johannes Vermeer was at the Timken Museum of Art in San Diego, where…
View More Johannes Vermeer: Light, Silence, and the Art of the Dutch Golden Age
One of the great mysteries of Peanuts is that its most imaginative character is not one of the children, but the dog. Charlie Brown worries.…
View More The Imagination of Snoopy
Introduction: The Problem of Popularity Few charges are more damaging in elite art discourse than the accusation that an artist is “popular.” The word should…
View More Against Contempt: Why Popular Artists Deserve Serious Art-Historical Attention
In the spring of 1968, the United States was grieving, burning, arguing, and changing. Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated on April 4. Cities…
View More Harriet Glickman, Charles Schulz, and the Quiet Revolution of Franklin in Peanuts
Fantasy art is often treated as a lesser branch of visual culture, as though dragons, warriors, sorceresses, strange worlds, heroic bodies, enchanted forests, alien landscapes,…
View More The Greatness of Fantasy Art: Frazetta, Vallejo, the Hildebrandts, and the Visual Imagination of the Modern Mythic Age
Few animals have moved as easily between the sacred, the comic, the erotic, and the domestic as the rabbit and the hare. Across world art,…
View More The Rabbit and the Hare in World Art History: Fertility, Moonlight, Marginality, and the Sacred Ordinary