His parents were horrible people. He was sickly all his life, dying eventually of an excruciating bladder cancer at only 48. His emotional life was often ungovernable. His at first rapturous marriage to a beautiful young aristocrat far above his station was plagued by suspicion, jealousy and outrigh
The sumptuous colors, dazzling brushwork and sheer drama in the paintings of Anders Zorn (1860-1920) earned the Swedish artist fortune and fame during the Gilded Age. But Zorn’s work and name gradually fell into obscurity outside Sweden. As a result, his brilliant body of work has not been sho
The Jewishness of Jesus has seldom been rendered more clearly in art than in the crucifixion scenes of Marc Chagall. Of the 31 paintings and 22 works on paper in “Chagall: Love, War and Exile” (on view until Feb. 2, 2014, at the Jewish Museum in New York City), the handful of crucifixion
You know how sometimes you find yourself slogging through a literally and figuratively Big Novel thinking “This ‘work’ is long merely for sake of acquiring the Heft of Importance”—and “I’m 400 pages into this thing but still think I’m going to cut bait