"Islamic art" can be a challenging term in an ever-changing art world. Through the exploration of a wide array of media – from painting, sculpture, and photography to video and multimedia – an internationally renowned group of scholars, collectors, a...

"I am convinced that the true collector does not acquire objects of art for himself alone. His is no selfish drive or desire to have and hold a painting, a sculpture, or a fine example of antique furniture so that only he may see and enjoy it. Apprec...

Who was the man behind "The Scream", the iconic painting that so acutely expresses the anguish of the twentieth century? Edvard Munch (1863-1944) was twenty-eight when he embarked on a lifelong effort to paint his 'soul's diary' – and began a perver...

The Bowdoin College Museum of Art features nearly 24,000 works spanning antiquity to today, housed on Bowdoin's campus in coastal Maine. Since it began collecting in 1811, the museum has served as a unique resource for students, scholars, and visitor...

In the 1880s, James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903) reinvented himself through the medium of watercolor. At the time, excellence in watercolor was most often associated with British artists, and most notably with the work of J. M. W. Turner (1775-1851)....

In this important book Christina Weyl takes us into the experimental New York print studio Atelier 17 and highlights the women whose work there advanced both modernism and feminism in the 1940s and 1950s. Weyl focuses on eight artists – Louise Bourge...

Barbara Furlotti presents a dynamic interpretation of the early modern market for antiquities, relying on the innovative notion of archaeological finds as mobile items. She reconstructs the journey of ancient objects from digging sites to venues wher...

Brimming with lively animals both real and fantastic, the bestiary was one of the great illuminated manuscript traditions of the Middle Ages. Encompassing imaginary creatures, such as the unicorn, siren and griffin; exotic beasts, including the tiger...

The name Manet often evokes the provocative, heroically scaled pictures he painted in the 1860s for the Salon, but in the late 1870s and early 1880s the artist produced quite a different body of work: stylish portraits of actresses and demimondaines,...

As the discipline of art history has moved away from connoisseurship, the notion of beauty has become increasingly problematic. Both culturally and personally subjective, the term is difficult to define and nearly universally avoided. In this insight...