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Video:  How This Photographer Used Selfies To Explore Layers Of Identity

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A photograph of a woman in front of Peter Paul Rubens' Daniel in the Den of Lions

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Elizabeth Catlett in her studio, 1942

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Six women, eight men, two satyrs, and one child gather in pairs and trios in a loose row that spans the width of this nearly square painting. They are set within a landscape with craggy rocks, cliffs, and trees. Most of the people face us, and the men, women, and child have pale skin. The two satyrs have men’s torsos and furry goat’s legs, and they have darker, olive complexions. Most of the men wear voluminous, knee-length togas wrapped in short robes in shades of white, topaz blue, grass green, coral orange, or rose pink. Most of the women wear long, dress-like garments in tones of shell pink, apricot orange, or lapis blue over white sleeves. For all but one woman, their garments have fallen off one shoulder to reveal a round, firm breast. Several objects are strewn on the rocky, dirt ground in front of the group, including a wide, wooden bucket with a piece of paper affixed to its front to our right, a glass goblet, a pitchfork, a large blue and white ceramic dish filled with grapes and small yellow fruits, and an overturned cup near the center. Cliff-like, craggy rocks rise steeply behind the group to our left, filling much of the sky opposite a tall grove of leafy, dark green trees to our right. A few puffy white clouds float across the vivid blue sky. The slip of paper on the barrel has been inscribed, “joannes bellinus venetus p MDXIIII.”

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A photograph of a woman in front of Peter Paul Rubens' Daniel in the Den of Lions

Video:  Look Closer: The Art of Devotion

Explore powerful stories of devotion, love, and artistic passion through iconic works of art—from religious masterpieces to revolutionary portraits. 

Video:  Print Like a Great: Elizabeth Catlett

What happens when legacy, artistry, and womanhood collide? LaToya Hobbs creates a stunning woodcut portrait of Naima Mora, inspired by the life and work of legendary printmaker Elizabeth Catlett—Naima’s own grandmother.

Video:  How This Photographer Used Selfies To Explore Layers Of Identity

Video essayist Nerdwriter helps us explore the extraordinary work of photographer Tseng Kwong Chi, whose iconic East Meets West series blends self-portraiture, performance, and satire.

Video:  End as Beginning: Chinese Art and Dynastic Time

The A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts presented by Wu Hung (2019)

Video:  Master Printmaker LaToya Hobbs Creates a Woodblock Print Inspired by Elizabeth Catlett

Master printmaker LaToya Hobbs creates a woodblock print portrait of Naima Mora, referencing the sculpture Naima created by Elizabeth Catlett.

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Sydney J. Freedberg Lecture on Italian Art presented by Keith Sciberras (2024)

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A young woman with pale, peachy skin and flushed cheeks sits facing our right in profile as she plays a guitar in this horizontal painting. The scene is painted with blended strokes, giving it a soft look and making some of the details indistinct. At the center of the composition, the guitar rests against the woman’s shoulder so it almost spans the width of the painting. The instrument has a caramel-brown body, and the dark brown neck lightens to slate gray by the sound hole. The woman’s eyes are lowered as she looks toward her left hand, her long fingers pinning the strings along the fretboard. She plucks the strings with her other hand. Her hair is covered in a red headscarf tied at the nape of her neck. One end rests on her left shoulder, farther from us, and the other hangs down her back. A low, flat-topped, black, brimmed hat sits atop the scarf. The woman’s features are delicate, and her pink lips are parted. She wears a gold chain with an oval pendant around her neck. Her jacket is gold with a pattern loosely painted with dabs of lapis blue, butter yellow, and rose pink. A yellow ribbon or band is tied to the neck of the guitar and slung over her shoulder. The indistinct space behind her is painted with strokes of moss green, goldenrod yellow, and a few swipes of marigold orange near her face. The artist signed and dated the painting in brown in the lower right corner: “Renoir.98.”

Sonia De Los Santos and Auguste Renoir’s “Young Spanish Woman with a Guitar”

A six-story, narrow building stands alone in an otherwise unoccupied lot under the deck of a high bridge, with a river and cityscape in the background in this horizontal painting. Dozens of people, small in scale, are each painted with a few swipes of black and some with peach-colored faces. They gather at the foot of the building and around a fire to our left, near the lower left corner of the composition. The fire is painted with a dash of orange, a few touches of canary yellow, and a smudge of gray smoke. Several more people stand and sit against the building, which has a streetlamp near its entrance. The back end of the building angles away from us to our right, so we see the narrow, front entrance side to our left. Each of the six floors of the building has two windows with fire escape ladders on the narrow side we can see. Some strokes in red and white on the lower levels of the long, flat side of the building suggest signs or posters. The top story glows a warm sienna brown in sunlight, while the rest of the building and the scene below are in shadow. More people walk along a grayish-violet fence that encloses the lot beyond the building. The ground is painted thickly with slate gray, pale, sage green, and one smear of white to suggest snow. To our right and a short distance from us, a white horse pulls a carriage near the foot of the bridge. The ivory-white, concrete piling rises up and off the right edge of the canvas and supports the deck of the bridge above. Only a sliver of the brick-red underside of the bridge is visible, skimming the top edge of the painting in the upper right corner. Two twiggy, barren trees grow up beyond the muted purple fence, and the landscape beyond is bright in the sunlight. A terracotta-orange building rises along the left edge of the painting, with the area between it and the lot under the bridge filled with thickly painted patches of butter yellow, amethyst purple, and sage green. Beyond that, an ice-blue river flows across the composition. The shore beyond is lined with patches of beige and tan paint that could be buildings. A black tugboat puffs bright white smoke in the river. The sky above is frosty white. The artist signed the work with dark blue in the lower left corner of the painting, “Geo Bellows.”

Maria Schneider and George Bellows’s “The Lone Tenement”

Delfeayo Marsalis and Hawkins Bolden’s “Untitled”

A naked man with ghostly white skin sits upright in a canopied bed set in a narrow room in this tall, vertical painting. Wearing a black cap, he looks to our left in profile toward a skeleton who comes through a door along the left edge of the composition. The man gestures at the skeleton with one hand and, with the other, toward a bag of money held up by a small demon next to the bed to our left. The skeleton wears a white shroud and holds an arrow. A winged angel kneels next to the man in the bed, one hand on the man’s shoulder and the other lifted to gesture at a crucifix hanging in the window over the door. A small devil on the canopy above looks down onto the bed. At the foot of the bed, a man wearing a green robe and headdress drops coins into a sack held by another demon. Three more demons crawl about and hide under the chest. Pieces of armor and weapons lie on the ground to the right in front of a stone ledge in the foreground. Two pieces of clothing drape over the ledge to our left.

Peter Sheppard Skærved and Hieronymus Bosch’s “Death and the Miser”

A young man sets out in a golden boat on a river that winds from the bottom right corner of this horizontal painting across a lush landscape and into the distance before disappearing beyond two rocky outcroppings far off to our right. Hazy in the distance, the jagged peaks of a barren red mountain rise into an almost cloudless blue sky. To our left, a semi-transparent, white palace looms above and beyond the mountain, filling most of the upper left quadrant of the composition. Hills and valleys leading from the mountain and palace are dotted with trees and carpeted with grass. A winged and haloed angel wearing a white robe stands on the bank of the river under a towering palm tree in the foreground, in the bottom right corner of the canvas. The angel has pale skin and long golden hair. One hand is lifted toward the palace or a young man in a boat in the river nearby. The small boat is angled away from the riverbank to our left and toward the palace. The boat is ornately decorated and at its bow, a winged, golden figure holds an hourglass aloft above her head. The young man has pale skin, shoulder-length brown hair, and he wears a red and gold tunic. A profusion of flowers and trees line the riverbank.

Daniel Ho and Thomas Cole’s “Voyage of Life” Series

Sa-Roc and Margaret Burroughs’s “Sleeping Boy”

Close to us, six people, all nude with light skin, stand or lie intertwined with snakes on a bank of rocks in this horizonal painting. Beyond them, the deep, distant landscape has a brown horse, tiny in scale, headed for a city of stone buildings beneath a vivid blue sky filled with twisting white clouds. The people’s bodies are sinewy and elongated, and their skin is painted in tones of ivory white, warmed with peach highlights and streaked with deep gray shadows. At the center, a man with a white beard and white, curly hair lies back on the charcoal-gray rock with his knees bent and his shins splayed out. With his body angled away from us to our right, he holds the body of a long, silvery-gray snake in his left fist, on our right, down by his hip. The snake curves behind the man’s body and he grips the snake behind its head. The man has high cheekbones and sunken cheeks, and rolls his eyes up and back to look at the snake, whose wide-open mouth nearly touches his hair. To our left, a cleanshaven young man stands with his body facing us but he arches back, holding an arcing snake in his hands. The young man’s right hand, on our left, bends at the elbow so he can grasp the snake’s tail and his other arm stretches straight back, holding the snake’s body as it curls around so its fangs nearly reach the young man’s side. To our right, next to the older man, a second, dark-haired young man lies on the rocks with his head toward us. His feet are on the ground, so we look onto the tops of his thighs. He lies with one hand resting on the ground, overhead. Three people seem to float, feet dangling, alongside the right edge of the painting. The person closest to us looks onto the writhing people in profile, back to us. A second person just beyond also looks to our left. A third head turns the opposite direction and looks off to our right. In the distance, the golden-brown horse is angled away from us, one front leg raised, on a path that moves from behind the rocky outcropping to the far-off town. Nestled in a shallow valley, buildings in the town are mostly painted with rose pink and red walls and smoke-gray roofs. The land dips to a deeper, green valley to our right, lining the horizon that comes two-thirds of the way up the composition. The standing people are outlined against the sapphire-blue sky and knotted, gray and white clouds.

Jenny Scheinman and El Greco’s “Laocoön”

Created with tiny, colored stones and glass, this mosaic shows groups of people along and near the edge of a brilliant, topaz-blue body of water with a large, lemon-yellow, stylized sun in the sky in this horizontal composition. The aquamarine blue and vibrant yellow along with lime green, lilac purple, oyster white, and teal used in the people and landscape give this work a shimmering look. A pair of people recline together under a tree in the lower right corner. A sheep stands nearby, and a bird perches in the tree above. Beyond the tree and to our left, a cluster of box-like forms suggests a city in the distance. Larger in scale, so seeming closer to us, a man wearing a lapis-blue toga and a yellow cap holds a stringed instrument, a lyre, in front of his body. To the left, at the center of the composition, a trio of women each wearing amethyst-purple, magenta-pink, or lapis-blue dresses stand close to each other. They have long, dark hair and their bodies and garments are outlined in black. Between them and the large sun to our left, a winged horse with a buttercup-yellow body and turquoise-blue wings rears up. Near the upper left corner, the stylized sun is represented by a disk surrounded by pointed peaks, surrounded by a larger disk outlined with another ring of triangular points. A winged person holding a set of pan pipes flies above the sun to our left, over a small crescent moon below. Near the lower left corner, two groups of people gather around a body of bright blue water occupied by two fish. The artist signed and dated the work in the lower right corner: “MArC ChAgAll 69.” The mosaic is displayed outside in front of a screen of trees, with a band of bushes with green and orange leaves below.

Dom Flemons and Marc Chagall’s “Orphée”

Series

West to East

Travel across America with us in this special series of articles and videos to learn how artists are inspired by the places they call home.

All of the series

Marie Watt Explores the Story of Turtle Island

Rick Lowe's art blends canvas and community in the Third Ward

Called Back: On George Morrison, Land Acknowledgement, and Returning Home

Iowa Artists Craft Complex Visions of the Rural

Modernist Barns and Modern Farmers

Potter Richard Bresnahan Navigates an “Eco-mutual” Future

Art that Represents, and Misrepresents, the US-Mexico Border

Emmi Whitehorse Paints the Harmonies of Her Homelands

Sentinels and Sprawl: Photographs of the Saguaro Cactus

Create Like a Great

Our ongoing video series highlights contemporary artists modeling the techniques of their creative heroes.

Paint Like a Great: John Singer Sargent

Sculpt Like a Great: Antonio Canova

Photograph Like a Great: Dorothea Lange

Print Like a Great: Elizabeth Catlett

Artists 101

Brush up on key and unexpected facts about artists with our series of quick reads.

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Elizabeth Catlett in her studio, 1942

Charles White, Elizabeth Catlett in Her Studio, 1942, Courtesy of The Charles White Archives.

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Sir Edwin Landseer, The Connoisseurs: Portrait of the Artist with two Dogs, before Jun 1865, oil on canvas, Royal Collection Trust/© His Majesty King Charles III 2022

Who Is Sir Edwin Landseer? 10 Things to Know

Who Is Vermeer?

The Art of Time Lapse

Our most popular video series reveals the magic of the creative process from start to finish.

Master Printmaker LaToya Hobbs Creates a Woodblock Print Inspired by Elizabeth Catlett

John Hitchcock’s Mesmerizing Art Installation From Start to Finish

A Sculptor Recreates Antonio Canova’s “Venus," From Clay to Marble

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