Art in the News

KodakIt was a slow start to the year, but things have picked up in the last week or so. Let’s start with the big news from January:

  • The bankruptcy of Eastman Kodak should come as no great surprise to anyone in this digital world, but it’s a sad loss nonetheless. Long before JPEGs there were Kodachrome slides, and long before Powerpoint there was the Kodak Carousel slide projector. Generations of art history students grew up on Kodak products.
  • Two deaths and a birthday (sort of): American Surrealist painter Dorothea Tanning (1910-2012) and artist Mike Kelley (1954-2012) both died last week. And January 28 would have been the 100th birthday of Abstract Expressionist painter Jackson Pollock (1912-1956).
  • And just when we thought the Dan Brown effect was finally on the wane, there’s a new revelation about Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa.

2011 Artists’ Obituaries

Last summer I posted links to obituaries for Cy Twombly and Lucian Freud. Let me add the names of a few more noteworthy figures in 20th-century art who have passed away since then:

Art in the News

A few more art-related items in the recent headlines:

  • An obituary for Cy Twombly, 1928-2011. The American artist, best known for making paintings that look like blackboard scribbles, died on July 5th at age 83.
  • An architectural review of Zaha Hadid’s Guangzhou Opera House in China.
  • An article on Samuel F. B. Morse’s Gallery of the Louvre. The painting, currently on view at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, is one subject in David McCullough’s new book, The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris.