Flourishing between 1890 and 1910, Art Nouveau was a short-lived but highly influential movement that spanned Europe from Glasgow to Vienna, creating an artistic style that had a huge impact on the applied arts and encompassed a wide range of figures, including Antoni Gaudí, Alphonse Mucha, Gustav Klimt, Aubrey Beardsley, René Lalique, Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Louis Comfort Tiffany. Art Nouveau artists sought to abolish hierarchies between different forms of art, placing fine arts such...
Four exquisite works of art, made especially for private devotional purposes, together with an outstanding new study by Professor James R. Banker, underline the importance of Piero della Francesca as one of the pre-eminent artists of Renaissance Italy. Neglected for four centuries, the surviving paintings of Piero della Francesca are today regarded as sublime masterpieces, with the artist himself seen as central to the flowering of Renaissance art, and equal in importance to Leonardo da...
Painting had rarely come easily to Henri Matisse, the Fauve. Throughout his career, he questioned, repainted, and re-evaluated his work. In 1905, Henri Matisse left the dusty heat of Paris to spend the summer at Coullioure; a small fishing village on the southern coast of France. For some time he had felt disillusioned with his painting. Up until then, Matisse had been influenced by the Impressionists, but he began to find their art “a completely objective...
Pop Art Artwork: Lichtenstein Sleeping Girl. Charles Ford talks to Sotheby’s Worldwide Head of Contemporary Art, Tobias Meyer about twentieth century masterpiece, Roy Lichtenstein’s Sleeping Girl. 1962 was a landmark year for the art world. Pop Art arrived in New York City with a one-man show by Roy Lichtenstein (1923-97). The exhibition caused a sensation, with the shock-of-the-new grabbing media attention and taking the Pop Art movement forward on a wave that lasted for more than 20...
The early twentieth century saw one of the most influential artists of the time, painter, designer and architect, Theo van Doesburg, leading the charge for what the avant-garde has always represented: the dangerously new. One of the most influential art movements of the twentieth century, regarding abstract art and design, was De Stijl or ‘The Style’ formed in the Netherlands by the Dutch artist Theo van Doesburg. Through his enthusiasm for the arts—he was also...
