Art News

The course of this global pandemic has left many feeling shattered and searching for distraction. Derived from two small Japanese words meaning golden and joining, kintsugi is fundamentally about ‘beautifully mending a broken thing.’

Summertime’s gardens have long inspired artists and botanists. Botanical illustration emerged around the time of Plato, more than 2,000 years ago. The medium launched not as a fine art, but as a record-keeping device and a teaching tool. At the time, botany and medicine essentially were one and the same. 

Since its 1996 debut, Pokémon has grown into a worldwide, pop-cultural phenomenon. For Japanese fans, however, Pokémon carries far more cultural significance due to its strong connection to the still widely practiced Shinto faith.

Can the visual arts capture movement in stillness? This slideshow traces the representation of dance, particularly of dancing groups, through western art history with special attention paid to the trope’s Grecian origins. Maenads, the female followers of Dionysus, and Nymphs, usually following Hermes or Pan, are among the most popular dancing Greek figures.

After having the highest value-added tax (VAT) rate for art in the European Union, Italy has just reduced it to 5%, the new European low. 

Beneath the shade of pine and myrtle, researchers from the Casa della Regina Carolina Excavation (Cornell University; Bologna University; Harvard University) in Pompeii, Italy were hard at work again this summer. One of the project’s main goals this year was to further uncover the ancient garden that was once planted and maintained by the Roman inhabitants. 

Sun, sand, sky, water, and women predominate as subject matter when artists throughout history turned their attention to communicating the light, languid heat, and soft sensuality of long summer days.

Serving as an arguable transition from the mysticism of religion-based scientific belief into modern science, alchemy bridges the gap between the spiritual and the physical. Although most alchemists sought to combine precious metals into gold to form the philosopher’s stone, an object that is shrouded in mysticism and supposed to grant one eternal youth.

Located in Vallauris, France, the Madoura Studio was founded as a pottery workshop in 1938 by French ceramicist Suzanne Ramié along with her husband, George.

From the extreme flooding in Asheville to the catastrophic fires in Los Angeles, and every melted glacier gap in between, the globe is reeling from recent climate threats, and it doesn’t look like we’ll be able to catch a break anytime soon.