Art & Architecture

Writing and recording with scrapbooks

By Ellen Gruber Garvey
May 5 is National Scrapbooking Day. Like National Fig Newton Day or National Golf Month, its purpose is mainly commercial. It was unsurprisingly started by an album company. Scrapbook making is hugely popular and profitable. Stores that sell scrapbooking supplies use the day to sponsor scrapping gatherings or crops where scrapbookers — nearly all women — get together to spread their projects out at tables with equipment for diecutting, embossing, distressing paper to make it look old, and sharing tips about layout and technique as they paste family pictures and memorabilia into their scrapbooks.

Goya’s Third of May, 1808

By Kandice Rawlings
For anyone who’s taken (and remembers) a survey course in Western art, today’s date surely brings to mind a canonical work — Spanish painter Francisco de Goya’s Third of May, 1808. The picture’s fame can be traced both to Goya’s masterful portrayal of drama and political martyrdom, and to its position as one of the first modern depictions of war. Painted some six years after the events it commemorates, this picture, and the circumstances under which Goya painted it, speak to the political instabilities of 19th-century Europe and the resulting tensions these raised for many of its artists.

Game of Kings, Game of Thrones

By Sean O’Hanlan
The Lewis Chessmen, arguably the most famous chess pieces in the world, are currently wrapping up a transatlantic tour. A group of 30 charming walrus ivory miniatures have spent the winter on view at New York’s Cloisters museum; on April 22, they will make their way back home to London’s British Museum.

Leonardo da Vinci is born

This Day in World History
Painter, sketch artist, sculptor, architect, civil and military engineer, cartographer, anatomist, physical scientist, botanist, geologist, mathematician, and more — Leonardo da Vinci defined the phrase “Renaissance man.” Born on April 15, 1452, and dying at 67, he produced a body of work that remains unrivaled. Giorgio Vasari, biographer of the great Italian artists of the Renaissance, aptly called Leonardo “truly marvelous and celestial.”

Charles Cushman and the discovery of Old World color

By Eric Sandweiss
Charles Cushman has gotten me into some pretty tight spots. He’s dragged me through green pastures and led me beside still alleys. He’s drawn me closer than I cared to come to the shadow of death, as I weaved my car through freeway traffic with one eye on the road and the other on my map, one hand balancing a camera and the other tending to the steering wheel.

Memo From Manhattan: Town vs. Gown in Gotham

By Sharon Zukin
On a recent Saturday afternoon, along with 200 other two-legged residents of Greenwich Village and an equal number of their four-legged friends, I attended a protest meeting against New York University’s Plan 2031, a 20-year strategy to increase the size of NYU’s physical presence in New York City by 6 million square feet, 2 million of those to be newly built in the heart of our neighborhood.

David Gascoyne and the missing portrait

By Robert Fraser
I am often asked to name my favourite poem by the British writer David Gascoyne (1916-2001), my biography of whom appears with OUP this month. Bearing in mind Gascoyne was in his time an interpreter of Surrealism, an existentialist of a religious variety and a proponent of ecology, you might expect me to go for a poem along these lines. Instead, I usually choose a poem of the early 1940s entitled “Odeur de Pensée.”

Robert Moses and the Second Avenue Subway

By Joan Marans Dim
The world was allegedly created in seven days, so why is it taking New York City so long — some 90 years, or possibly longer — to create the Second Avenue Subway? According to the MTA, proposals to build a north-south subway line along Second Avenue date back to 1929. But it wasn’t until March 2007 — 78 years later — that the first construction contract for Phase One of the Second Avenue Subway was awarded.

London Fashion Week is fast approaching

By Emily Ardizzone and Anna Wright
2012 will be a momentous year for the UK capital, and the new collections presented in London in this week will no doubt add to the growing feeling of excitement in the run up to the Olympic Games. London’s Fashion Royalty will all be present, from established design houses such as Aquascutum and Paul Smith, to new and emerging talent in the form of the Central St Martins’ Graduate show.

Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling first opens to public

This Day in World History – On November 1, All Saint’s Day, Pope Julius II celebrated a mass in the Sistine Chapel in Vatican City for the first time in at least four years. Those who attended were the first people to see one of the most celebrated works of Western art—the magnificent frescoes painted by Michelangelo Buonarroti on the chapel’s ceiling.

Sydney Opera House opens

This Day in World History – One of the twentieth century’s most recognizable buildings, the Sydney Opera House, officially opened on October 20, 1973. The Opera House, situated on the shores of Sydney Harbor and with a striking roof line, has been designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site, with the comment that the building “brings together multiple strands of creativity and innovation in both architectural form and structural design.”

‘The seed of a story’: The Hidden Kingdom

By Ian Beck

By Ian Beck
It is often difficult to remember exactly the initial seed, the faint stirrings of an idea that sets off the beginning of writing a long story. The root of the idea for The Hidden Kingdom is certainly muddled but it must surely begin with my long interest in Oriental art; in particular, Japanese woodblock prints and the anime films of Hiyao Miyazaki’s Studio Ghibli.

What makes an image an icon?

Image, branding, and logos are obsessions of our age. Iconic images dominate the media. In his new book, Christ to Coke, art historian Professor Martin Kemp examines eleven mega-famous examples of icons, including the American flag, the image of Christ’s face, the double helix of DNA, and the heart.

Defining art and sexuality

As LGBT Pride Month draws to a close, there’s a lot left to think about. Just last Friday, New York became the 6th (and largest) state to legalize same-sex marriage. It was not a Pride Month many New Yorkers will forget.

Forbidden images

By Justyna Zajac and Michelle Rafferty

The world recoiled when the gay community started receiving credit for its influence in fashion and culture, but at least, according to Christopher Reed, they were being acknowledged. In his new book Art and Homosexuality: A History of Ideas, Reed argues that for some time, the professional art world plain ignored the gay presence.

We had the chance to speak with Reed a few weeks back at his Williams Club talk, where he laid out the tumultuous relationship between art and activism. Below we present a few of the controversial things we learned.

Washington City: paradise of paradoxes

By Charles Lockwood and John Lockwood

By John Lockwood and Charles Lockwood

The Washington of April 1861—also commonly known as “Washington City”—was a compact town. Due to the cost of draining marshy land and the lack of reliable omnibus service, development was focused around Pennsylvania Avenue between the Capitol and White House. When the equestrian statue of George Washington was dedicated at