“Another slim volume”
A Glen Baxter drawing.
NEA, NEH, CPB funding
A visual representation of the combined budgets of the National Endowment for the Arts, National Endowment for the Humanities and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
Work with Care
A WPA poster.
WPA stamps
Stamps from WPA posters.
Valentine’s Day
A reddened version of an illustration from an 1890s anatomy text.
Dante, Beatrice, and Nancy
Gustave Doré and Ernie Bushmiller, with help from the alpha tool and me.
Two Henrys
The comics character and the sculptor.
Alex Katz meets Lionel Hampton
I said, ‘Mustard?’ and he said, ‘Yes, please,’ and I said, ‘Wow!’
More “some rocks”
From the British Library.
John Ashbery, New Collages
George Herriman meets Giorgione.
Martinis or cheap cigars
Henry Threadgill, on the importance of adjusting to the economic difficulties of life as an artist, filmmaker, musician, writer.
Art of sardines
A cartoon by Mark Stivers.
Heads up
Whoever designed the posters and their sequence must have put much thought into — and taken much pleasure from — the work.
Orange Trek art
Fresca at l’astronave has created two great, witty examples of Star Trek orange crate art.
“Oh yes, of course, art simplifies”
Willa Cather, from a letter to Ida Kleber Todd.
Erasmus ekphrasis
Stefan Zweig describes a painting.
From an old notebook
Alfred Appel Jr.: “The great popularity of this show suggests there is a kind of exit poll being taken at the end of the 20th century, and the vote is in favor of eros over thanatos. Matisse is everyone’s person for celebrating the simple things that all the wars and disasters of the 20th century have not obliterated from the lives of ordinary people.”
The Awkward Party
Art by George Bodmer.
Tony Bennett’s pencil
“David Hockney told me to use these pencils. They’re really like, really like stationery stores for cheap.”
Art criticism
Caroline Pratt: “I sometimes feared that if we discovered a genius, his contemporaries would shame him into becoming an academician, such is the conservatism of children.”
Cartoon ink
Oscar’s Day cartoons.
“Ordinary, thrown-away things”
Joel Meyerowitz on photographing objects in the painter Giorgio Morandi’s studio.
Frank Stella, here and now
“I feel that there’s nothing other than the moment though. So you have to do it now.”
Bill Murray looks at a painting
Asked to talk about a moment when art has mattered to him, Bill Murray describes an encounter with Jules Adolphe Breton’s The Song of the Lark after a disastrous first experience on stage in Chicago.
Orange enamel art
By Juan Esteban Perez.
From a Van Gogh letter
“So you must picture me sitting at my attic window as early as 4 o’clock in the morning ...”
From a Van Gogh letter
He looks at the world and sees paintings.
Van or van
Van Gogh or van Gogh? The Chicago Manual of Style decides for me.
Van Gogh's rec room
A George Bodmer cartoon.
From a van Gogh letter
The religious fervor and sermonizing of van Gogh’s early letters is occasionally interrupted by a passage of perfect description.