Sometimes what is initially thought to be awkward will eventually be visually pleasing.
—Sol LeWitt, “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,” 1967
Bars of Color within Squares, a permanent installation in MIT’s Green Center, Cambridge, MA.
Finding Bars of Color within Squares. Photo: George Bouret
Reviewed by Yumi Araki
Hidden between three buildings surrounding Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT’s) Green Center, Sol [...]

By Peter Walsh
Luis Meléndez: Master of the Spanish Still Life, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA through May 9.
Locked into a low-status, unprofitable niche, talented Spanish still-life painter Luis Meléndez (1716–1780) made little money and achieved even less fame during his lifetime. He is said to have complained to the king, who never honored him [...]

I envision Rembrandt with chalk or pen always at hand, sketching from life and imagination constantly. This is also how he taught his pupils, who like him also produced numerous drawings related and unrelated to paintings or prints. Why do so many experts disagree?

By Gary Schwartz

In an earlier column I illustrated a large number of [...]

How many drawings by Rembrandt are around? More than many experts admit. The issue is not just a quibble over numbers. It has far-reaching consequences for our reconstruction of Rembrandt’s working method and our understanding of his art. The showdown is coming at a conference on the artist at the J. Paul Getty Museum in [...]

Food was front and center in the here and hereafter. A sumptuous feast was in the offing. But what was for dinner in the afterlife? Chasing the whim of what food went with funerary art, after several blind alleys I landed at Oleana, the Inman Square restaurant invented by Ana Sortun, a Norwegian Seattle native.
by [...]

Visual artist Carmen Sasso’s stimulating interpretation of life’s colorful evolutionary ebb and flow exudes plenty of color, detail and movement.

Carmen Sasso’s “You’re Welcome,” at the Atlantic Works Gallery until December 28
By Yumi Araki
The Atlantic Works Gallery, located in East Boston, MA, offers a magnificent view of Boston harbor. Yet even in competition with this impressive [...]

By Gary Schwartz
To the memory of Dan Tsalka.

Among the acts of art vandalism blamed on the nineteenth century, one of the minor ones was actually undone fifteen years ago. It had to do with the dismemberment of a painting by Jan Steen of the wedding night of Sarah and Tobias, a story from the apocryphal [...]

The Posthuman Dada Guide: Tzara and Lenin Play Chess by Andrei Codrescu, Princeton University Press, 248 pages, $16.95.
Reviewed by Harvey Blume
In 1916, as Europe waged an horrific war that, nearly a century later, makes even less sense, if possible, than it did at the time, refugees, renegades, draft dodgers, opportunists, revolutionaries and artists massed in [...]

Whether you’re a Jungian or a Freudian, think Jung was a genius or charlatan, or even if you’re someone who’s never given much thought to psychotherapy, the exhibition on the “The Red Book” at New York City’s Rubin Museum of Art (which runs through February 15) is worth a visit.
THE RED BOOK by C.G. [...]

The “Red Book” was Jung’s attempt to understand himself as well as the structure of the human personality in general and the relation of the individual to society and the community of the dead.

THE RED BOOK by C.G. Jung. Edited by Sonu Shamdasani. English translation by Shamdasani, Mark Kyburz, and John Peck. W.W. Norton & [...]