Ever since its triumph at the Paris Universal Exposition, Art Nouveau has continued to inspire artists. The movement offered an artistic response to the industrial revolution and the creative vacuum...
Audubon’s ambitious project to paint all the birds of North America resulted in a work that represents one of the greatest advances in ornithology. Not only did he identify new species, he also...
Throughout time, artists have maintained a close relationship with the animal world, which has proved to be an inexhaustible source of inspiration. First, they received inspiration directly from their...
Hieronymus Bosch was painting frightening, yet vaguely likable monsters long before computer games were ever invented, often including a touch of humour. His works are assertive statements about the...
Pieter Brueghel was the first important member of a family of artists who were active for four generations. Firstly a drawer before becoming a painter later, he painted religious themes, such as...
Mary was born in Pittsburgh. Her father was a banker of liberal educational ideas and the entire family appears to have been sympathetic to French culture. Mary was no more than five or six years old...
Flowers are the centerpiece in the majority of pictorial still-lifes. By painting their colours and forms, artists from Brueghel to O’Keeffe have created symbols for both life and mortality. Van...
Since The Turkish Baths (1863) by the French painter Ingres, the Far Eastern woman has, to many, been a symbol of out of reach or forbidden pleasures. Seafaring explorers, military adventurers and...
Goya is perhaps the most approachable of painters. His art, like his life, is an open book. He concealed nothing from his contemporaries, and offered his art to them with the same frankness. The...
Mega Square Herbarium is based on the work of Basilius Besler, the famous plant expert who, for the first time in history, described, painted and engraved over a thousand species of plants. His...
Those who have had the chance to hold a medieval manuscript in their hands cannot fail to have been impressed by the feeling of being in touch with a long-passed epoch. Back when a book was a true...
Mega Square In Praise of the Backside celebrates the most sensual part of the female body. The insightful text by Hans-Jürgen Döpp discusses the backside as a feature that stands for both powerful...
Behind Frida Kahlo’s portraits, lies the story of both her life and work. It is precisely this combination that draws the reader in. Frida’s work is a record of her life, and rarely can we learn so...
The self-appointed “leader” of the artists’ group Die Brücke (Bridge), founded in Dresden in 1905, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner was a key figure in the early development of German Expressionism. His first...
“I am not interested in myself as a subject for painting, but in others, particularly women…”Beautiful, sensuous and above all erotic, Gustav Klimt’s paintings speak of a world of opulence and...
What do the thousands of images of bras and panties on perfectly sculpted bodies that we see spread across billboards and magazines say about our society?
Manet is one of the most famous artists from the second half of the nineteenth century linked to the impressionists, although he was not really one of them. He had great influence on French painting...
Michelangelo, like Leonardo, was a man of many talents; sculptor, architect, painter and poet, he made the apotheosis of muscular movement, which to him was the physical manifestation of passion. He...
