During each of the holiday seasons, the author tries to come up with a lesson that will incorporate art history and have a holiday theme. One recent winter-holiday season, the author was thumbing through a catalog and saw a picture of note cards that had famous artists' stockings hanging on a mantel. This triggered an idea for the author's…

This article describes a project with a transformative approach to color theory and still life. Students' use of an arbitrary color scheme can open their eyes, push their creativity and produce exciting paintings. Ordinary still-life objects will be transformed into dramatic, vibrant visuals. The Fauve style of painting is a great art history…

Although there is a surplus of literature dealing with U.S.-Mexico border identities and cultures, this article begins to problematize and reposition Chicana/o art historical discourse by engaging with the U.S.-Canada border. By investigating the relationship between working-class histories and Chicana/o visual culture in Michigan, the article…

In his book "A Whole New Mind," Daniel Pink describes the aptitude of Symphony as the ability to synthesize, or to put pieces together. Symphony is the capacity to see relationships, detect broad patterns, and to create by combining diverse elements together. The artist Wassily Kandinsky exemplifies Symphonic thinking. A pioneer in nonobjective…

Imaging of artwork is an important aspect of art conservation, technical art history, and art authentication. Many forms of near-infrared (NIR) imaging are used by conservators, archaeologists, forensic scientists, and technical art historians to examine the underdrawings of paintings, to detect damages and restorations, to enhance faded or…

However innovative Cezanne's pictorial structure may appear to those with a preconceived notion of what a representation of reality ought to be, his art is not a simple continuation of previous movements, nor is it a revolutionary reversal that leads directly to cubism and abstract art. (Author/SJL)

Defines the scope of research concerning "inscriptions in painting" from a semiotic point of view. Shows that in cases from medieval pictograms to modern new concreteness inscriptions are used to subvert the pictorial content of art works. (RS)

Argues that Fernand Leger avoids the mimetic use of literary elements in order to subvert the conventions of the illustrated book and subordinates meaning to a graphic interplay where word and image can, on occasion, become interchangeable. States that Leger subverts the borderline between readable and nonreadable, lyric and painterly. (RS)

Notes that Jules Kirschenbaum, a modern American artist whose work integrates inscriptions and figurative painting, studied under the masters of abstract expressionism yet exhibited with protagonists of "magic realism." States that his later work took a wholly different turn--it became art about meaning and the "meaning of…

In 1939, Texas artist Alexandre Hogue completed "The Crucified Land," a striking comparison of water erosion on a Denton, Texas, wheat farm to the martyrdom of Jesus of Nazareth. "The Crucified Land" was originally intended as the final canvas of Hogue's "Erosion" series, which the artist began in 1932 as a…

For more than two thousand years, the painted image has been critical to the culture of the West. At the beginning of the 21st century, however, painting sits quietly in a small corner and is, for the most part, ignored. Museums increasingly devote their contemporary exhibition space to "installation art," as opposed to discrete objects…

Argues that Rene Magritte's experiments with words and images are preceded by other experiments with his surrealist friends in Brussels. States that the surrealists' failure to adequately represent women causes Magritte to treat both images and words as mere representations, subject to an equally radical splitting from the "real" thing…

States that the painted words in Jasper Johns' art act in two different capacities: concealed words partake in the artist's interrogation of visual perception; and visible painted words question classical representation. Argues that words are Johns' means of critiquing modernism. (RS)

Almazan, a pioneering painter and graphic artist, played a major role in the development of Chicano art in San Antonio. He was admitted into the Men of Art Guild, the preeminent Texas art group, when he was nineteen years old.

Notes that educators often view art as an intellectually shallow, mechanical process. Describes Sir Joshua Reynolds's concept of invention as the intellectual combination of placing the painter's mental picture of actions, expressions, and characters on canvas. Calls for educators to stress intellectual qualities of art in order to develop…