Though it lies just across the Mediterranean from Europe, barely a stone’s throw from Spain’s southernmost tip, Morocco couldn’t possibly be farther away.With its moun...
Hubble’s most magnificent imagesWith investigations into everything from black holes to exoplanets, the Hubble Telescope has changed not only the face of astronomy but also our very sen...
Lucian Freud (1922 2011) was interested in the telling of truth. Always operating outside the main currents of 20th-century art, the esteemed portrait painter observed his subjects with the regimen...
Toward the end of his monumental career as a painter, sculptor, and lithographer, an elderly, sickly Matisse was unable to stand and use a paintbrush for long. In this late phase of his life-he was...
Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn (1606-1669) stands as one of the most important painters in Western art, but nowhere else do we encounter his inimitable talent more so than in his drawings and etching...
The essential ImpressionistNo other artist, apart from J. M. W. Turner, tried as hard as Claude Monet (1840–1926) to capture light itself on canvas. Of all the Impressionists, it was th...
Viva La Sexual Revolution!The 1960s liberate the world’s newsstandsSexual revolution, civil rights, Flower Power, miniskirt, women’s liberation, The Pill, Black Panthe...
Deconstructing perspective with Picasso and peersPioneered by Picasso and Braque, Cubism has been described as the first avant-garde art movement of the 20th century. With inspiration from Af...
Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–1669) never left his homeland of the Netherlands but in his massive body of painting, drawing, and etching, he changed the course of Western art. His prolific oeuvre ...
Paul Gauguin’s Pacific visions radiate with color and sunshinePaul Gauguin (1848–1903) was not cut out for finance. Nor did he last particularly long in the French Navy, or as a t...
Johannes Vermeer, creator of life from oil paintDespite numbering at just 35, his works have prompted a New York Times best seller; a film starring Scarlett Johansson and Colin Firth; record ...
One of the most accomplished human beings who ever lived, Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) remains a quintessential Renaissance genius. The perfect companion to the Leonardo Graphic Work edition, this...
Albertus Seba’s unrivalled catalog of animals, insects and plantsThe Cabinet of Natural Curiosities is one of the 18th century’s greatest natural history achievements and remains ...
Only 20 paintings and eight drawings are confidently assigned to Netherlandish painter Hieronymus Bosch (c. 1450–1516) but in their fantastical visions they have secured his place as one of t...
The textures and tones of dreamy ProvenceNestled in the south of France, bordering the Mediterranean Sea, is a land renowned for its lavender fields, fine cuisine, golden sun, and dreamy land...
The history of the adidas shoe, from its earliest beginnings until today100 years ago the brothers Adolf ("Adi") and Rudolf Dassler made their first pair of sports shoes. Hundreds o...
The years between the First and Second World Wars in Germany are famed for their cultural boom. With Berlin as its epicenter, the Weimar Republic was replete with ground-breaking literature, philos...
On December 15, 1868, Carl Friedrich Philipp von Martius (1794–1868), Professor of Botany at the University of Munich and director of the Royal Botanic Garden, was carried to his grave in a c...
Sex shops offer anything men’s hearts (and other parts) desireIn the late 1960s specialty bookstores selling magazines under the counter were replaced by sex shops, or “adult book...
Volume two of the definitive exploration [br]of the [i]Star Wars[/i] galaxyFrom the moment Star Wars burst onto the screen in 1977, audiences have been in equal parts fascinated and appalled ...