One this day, June 17, 1775, American patriots fought the Battle of Bunker Hill in Massachusetts against the Red Coat troops of the British Empire. The battle took place during the Siege of Boston. To mark that occasion, allow me to direct you to the website of the Museum of the American Revolution, located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Its special exhibition,…
New York’s Democrat Mayor de Blasio and his allies finally succeeded in removing the bronze statue of Thomas Jefferson that stood in the legislative chamber of the New York City Council for more than 100 years. On October 18, 2021, the mayor’s Public Design Commission voted unanimously to take down the statue. I view the censorious act as an open…
“You keep all your smart modern painters I’ll take Rembrandt, Titian, Da Vinci and Gainsborough.” 20th Century Man – The Kinks TRAC 2014 offered a dizzying array of panels, presentations, and demonstrations, some of which I found to be much more agreeable than the keynote address of Roger Scruton, which I wrote of in Part I of my observations on…
When hundreds of arts professionals from all over the country, indeed from all across the globe, come together at a four day symposium to enthusiastically discuss the future of realism in painting… it could be said that something might be afoot in the art world. TRAC 2014, or The Representational Art Conference, took place from March 2 through March 5,…
Celebrated American paintings were presented at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in an exhibition titled American Stories: Paintings of Everyday Life, 1765-1915. The exhibit was comprised of 103 paintings that depicted the American experience from the colonial period to the Gilded Age of the late 19th century. On display were iconic canvases by the likes of John Singleton Copley,…
The Lure of the East: British Orientalist Painting, is an important exhibition running in London at the Tate Britain from June 4th, 2008 through August 31st, 2008. The exhibit provides a somewhat critical look at Orientalism, the genre commonly associated with nineteenth-century Western artists who depicted the peoples and cultures of an imagined Near and Middle East. The Tate is…
What possible relevance could Adolphe-William Bouguereau, a French academic painter from the Victorian age, have in today’s world? That in essence is what the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette asked when it interviewed me regarding a display of the painter’s works at the Frick Art & Historical Center of Pennsylvania. The Frick exhibit, In the Studios of Paris: William Bouguereau & His American…
The article When Art Becomes Inhuman was written by conservative Karl Zinsmeister for a 2002 edition of The American Enterprise magazine. Zinsmeister’s commentary was a general condemnation of modern art, with a sharp focus upon the extremes of postmodernism – which he described as a “left-wing cause.” Zinsmeister sarcastically declared, “Surely you’ve noticed that the art smarties never lay out…
