Category: Art
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Cool Britannia: Art, Attitude, and the London of the 1990s
It was the summer of 1997 and Downing Street had turned into a nightclub. Tony Blair, barely weeks into his premiership, was playing host not to diplomats but to designers, artists, models, and rock stars. In the garden, Kate Moss smoked cigarettes with Noel Gallagher of Oasis. Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst, the enfant terribles…
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Living in Silence
Makers & Rooms Ivan Van Mossevelde built a house of raw concrete in the Flemish countryside in 1972 for an art collector who filled it with Judd and Sol LeWitt. Decades later, a young architect spotted it through the trees during a walk, was refused entry, and spent years waiting for it to come to…
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Les Lalanne: Where Surrealism Meets Design
In the half-century arc of 20th-century design, few names shimmer with such eccentric magnetism as Les Lalanne. François-Xavier (1927–2008) and Claude (1924–2019) Lalanne were not just artists, not just designers—they were dreamers who translated the surreal into functional form. Their creations—sheep that double as stools, a cabbage sprouting chicken legs, gilded apples, and fantastical brass…
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Giotto: The Painter Who Opened the Window of the Renaissance
When Giorgio Vasari published his Lives of the Artists in 1550, he began the history of Renaissance painting not with Leonardo or Michelangelo, but with Giotto di Bondone. For Vasari, Giotto was the one who “translated painting from Greek to Latin” — that is, who moved art from the flat hieratic conventions of medieval iconography…
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Brutalism: The Concrete Truth
Born in the mid-twentieth century, Brutalism’s structures rose in raw concrete, monumental and uncompromising, shaped by ideals as much as by materials. To its defenders, Brutalism represented honesty — a moral and aesthetic rejection of ornament in favor of truth-to-material. To its critics, it was a dystopian imposition of weight and severity. Few architectural styles…
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The Voice That Didn’t Live to Hear the Echo
Venice · Art · 2026 The 61st Venice Art Biennale opens on May 9th under the title In Minor Keys. Its curator, Koyo Kouoh, died a year ago. The show goes forward entirely as she conceived it — and it may be the most important Biennale in a generation. By Bergotte · Preview, May 2026…
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Henri Matisse: Color, Form, and the Invention of Joy
In the long arc of modern art, Henri Matisse (1869–1954) stands as the painter of joy. Where Picasso dramatized conflict and Cézanne wrestled with structure, Matisse dedicated himself to the pursuit of lightness, radiance, and serenity. His career spans from the dawn of Fauvism at the turn of the twentieth century to the radiant cut-outs…
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In Minor Keys
The Venice Biennale opens on the 9th of May. How to go, how long to stay, and why the city is as much the point as the art The Venice Biennale is the largest and oldest contemporary art exhibition in the world — 131 years old, held every two years in the city least suited…
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Happy 80th Birthday To This Legend
John Waters at 80: The Last Great American Trash Intellectual By Bergotte For more than half a century, John Waters has made an art of what polite culture tries to throw away: vulgarity, deviance, low glamour, bad taste, and the people condemned for possessing any of them. At 80, he looks less like a relic…
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David Lynch: Dreams, Nightmares, and the Surreal Heart of America
David Lynch has always resisted categorization. Filmmaker, painter, musician, and occasional actor, he has built a career on unsettling images and dreamlike narratives that hover between the familiar and the uncanny. To encounter a Lynch film is to enter a world where diners glow with menace, suburban lawns conceal darkness, and reality frays into dream.…
