BTW Berkshires 
Rosa Bonheur had won international fame for her scenes of horse fairs and ploughing oxen. She went to abattoirs and open markets to study animals, and she dissected them to learn their anatomy, like Leonardo Da Vinci learning the chambers of the human heart. But she had to get a letter of permission from the…
The cloth of her shirt ripples like light on water, and above her three circles of light shine like bubbles or sun on a lens. This is a self-portrait. Dora Maar was about 28 when she made it. I can imagine her in her darkroom, shaping light and shade on a silver gelatin print. Sounds…
In 1999, the summer Mass MoCA opened, Robert Rauschenberg came several times to see his work installed in the football-field-sized gallery in building 5. The 1/4 Mile or 2 Furlong Piece gathered images from athletes and animals to umbrellas and planets. In collage or silkscreened onto fabrics, aluminum and copper, they formed a massive record…
I spent a sleeting winter afternoon walking through Japanese Impressions at the Clark Art Institute. Here’s a glimpse of colors, subjects and styles in these woodblock prints as they change over time. You can find the full feature story here, and my thoughts here, on these artists across a century and a half.
The shop or restaurant catches my eye across the way. It’s raining on a quiet street in Kyoto at night. The lights glow behind the windows and in the red globe under the eaves. On the wet pavement, two women are looking through the door, as hard to see in their red and yellow coats…
On a cold, clear morning in a studio in Edo, a man picks up a paintbrush. He remembers a day on the coast at sunrise when the maple leaves were turning crimson. He is in his 30s, and he is beginning to be known as one of a group of artists who travel in the…
She stands in profile with one arm lifted, pointing toward his forehead, and he closes his eyes against the light. These are not the well-known poker faces of daguerrotypes. Their expressions are fluent, feeling, and the light touches their skin like the glow in a pre-Raphaelite painting. They look alive. Julia Margaret Cameron’s portraits surprised her…
He lives at the southern end of Stone Hill. On a late summer afternoon he walked around his garden. On the slope above him, the meadow grew hip-high and protected the wetland that sent a stream across his lawn. Here he channels the water into ponds and keeps the grass cut around natural marble intrusions…
A courtesan without a name looks levelly along her shoulder. Saint Sebastian leans against a tree trunk and gazes at the sky. Hercules shoulders his club, and Susannah cups up water from a pool. And they are almost as bare as the day they were born. These paintings once hung in the palaces of the…
Daphnis and Chloe lean casually together as he speaks into her ear. Around the corner a bat-winged Spaniard rides a wildcat in the night, and beyond a traveler in Egypt stands like a fragment of shadow outside the step pyramid at Sakkarah. Six degrees from the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown can reach around the…