"Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see."
Surely the most celebrated Belgian artist of the twentieth century, Rene Magritte has achieved great popular acclaim for his idiosyncratic approach to Surrealism. To support himself he spent many years working as a commercial artist, producing advertising and book designs, and this most likely shaped his fine art, which often has the abbreviated impact of an advertisemen
The Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan was sued on Friday for the return of a Pablo Picasso masterpiece allegedly sold under duress in 1938 because of Nazi and Fascist persecution in Europe. A complaint was filed in Manhattan federal court by the great-grandniece of Paul Leffmann, a Jewish industrialist from Germany who once owned “The Actor,” a rare work from Picasso’s Rose Period in 1904 and 1905.
Anti-mafia police in Naples, Italy, have recovered two paintings by Vincent van Gogh that were stolen from a museum in Amsterdam more than a decade ago. The Van Gogh Museum announced Friday that a curator inspected the two works, at the request of Italian authorities, and "drew a firm conclusion: 'They are the real paintings!' " The two canvases, a seascape and a painting of a church, were stolen from the museum in 2002 in a widely publicized heist. They've been missing ever since.
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Born in 1941 in Tacoma, Washington, Dale Chihuly was introduced to glass while studying interior design at the University of Washington. After graduating in 1965, Chihuly enrolled in the first glass program in the country, at the University of Wisconsin. He continued his studies at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), where he later established the glass program and taught for more than a decade. In 1968, after receiving a Fulbright Fellowship, he went to work at the Venini glass factory in Venice. There he observed the team approach to blowing glass, which is critical to the way he works today.
It took Michelangelo four years to create his masterpiece murals that cover the ceiling of the Vatican's Sistine Chapel. A Manhattan artist believes he can recreate the soaring images in just two months on the ceiling of his cramped studio apartment. Alex Gardega is a NYC based artist with an international following. His media of choice: oil painting, watercolors and glass.