Francis Picabia: Our Heads Are Round so Our Thoughts Can Change Direction

Francis Picabia’s Chameleonic Style

The Francis Picabia retrospective at MoMA is wowing museumgoers again with his ever-shifting, always challenging art.
Dresden Germany after firebombing

How Slaughterhouse-Five Made Us See the Dresden Bombing Differently

The bombing of Dresden, Germany, which began February 13, 1945, was once viewed as a historical footnote. Until Slaughterhouse-Five was published.
Edgar Allen Poe

Edgar Allan Poe and the Power of a Portrait

Edgar Allan Poe knew that readers would add their visual image of the author to his work to create a personality that informed their reading.
Mona Lisa at the Louvre

The Mystery of the Mona Lisa

The mystery surrounding the 1911 theft and subsequent conspiracy theory catapulted the Mona Lisa into the popular imagination.
JSTOR Daily Friday Reads

Zadie Smith

Ever since the publication of White Teeth, Zadie Smith has made a career of writing about the actual experiences behind topics like race and immigration.
Gwyneth Paltrow at Toronto International Film Festival, 2012

The Glamorous Tradition of Hollywood Lifestyle Advice

For more than a century, Hollywood has been offering Americans lifestyle advice on how to live better, and the public has been gobbling it up.
Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison, the first African American writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, was born to working-class ...
Photograph: President Barack Obama, Ruby Bridges,  and representatives of the Norman Rockwell Museum view Rockwell’s  "The Problem We All Live With,"  hanging in a West Wing hallway near the Oval Office, July 15, 2011.  Ruby Bridges is the girl in the painting. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)
This official White House photograph is being made available only for publication by news organizations and/or for personal use printing by the subject(s) of the photograph. The photograph may not be manipulated in any way and may not be used in commercial or political materials, advertisements, emails, products, promotions that in any way suggests approval or endorsement of the President, the First Family, or the White House. 

Source: https://flic.kr/p/a41wAb

Norman Rockwell: Provocative Artist or Predictable Hack?

While Norman Rockwell's paintings struck a chord with the mass American public, that was not always not the case with art critics.
James Joyce

James Joyce, Catholic Writer?

James Joyce remains a novelist whose characters are imbued with a Catholic world view, despite declaring himself to be a freethinking heretic.
Jimmie Durham

Jimmie Durham and the Art of Interruption

Jimmie Durham’s first North American retrospective opens at The Hammer Museum this month. Learn about his art, performance, and undying need to interrupt.