From 1900 to 1907, Antoine Bourdelle worked on the model for Hercules the Archer, which is considered his most famous work. In Roman mythology, Hercules is known for his strength and numerous far-ranging adventures, including a cycle known as the “Twelve Labors,” one of which is depicted in this sculpture. Read More
In 1933, as the company approached its 100-year anniversary, Pommery Champagne hired Ilse Bing to produce a series of photos documenting its production facilities in Reims, France. Even though she was ostensibly hired to sell more champagne Bing approached the job with the same creativity and avant-garde approach found in her personal work. Read More
Bernardino Luini’s artistic style appears to have developed under various influences during the High Renaissance, but his greatest artistic debt is owed to Leonardo da Vinci. Read More
In the summer of 1936, Walker Evans and James Agee, on assignment from Fortune magazine, set out to chronicle the daily lives of typical sharecropper families in the American South. In Hale County, Alabama, they found three families—including the Fields—with whom they lived for a month, with Evans photographing and Agee writing about their lives and environments, including this photograph from the family’s kitchen. Read More
Smiling children with subtly rounded bodies are among the best-known types of clay figurines from the Veracruz area of Mexico. Skillfully made of thin-walled clay, the movable limbs are attached to the body by strings, a device which permits the arms and legs to move to different positions. Read More
The title of Tony Smith’s sculpture Lipizzaner is a reference to the white stallions of the Spanish Riding School in Vienna, Austria, because the complex surface of the modular forms in the work suggests a prancing horse. Read More
Pablo Casals’s Obelisk, a towering accumulation of welded bronze cellos, dominates the waters of a lagoon in the Sydney and Walda Besthoff Sculpture Garden. Standing over twenty feet tall, the Obelisk is an imposing example of monumental sculpture by Arman. Read More
In Leonard Baskin’s bronze sculpture Ruth and Naomi, the biblical women are bound together by shared sadness and mutual support. The work is sited in the Sydney and Walda Besthoff Sculpture Garden. Read More
The hallmark characteristic of seventeenth-century Dutch still lifes is a closely observed illusionism wedded to moralistic content. An excellent example is provided by Cornelis de Heem’s Still Life with Fruit on a Ledge. Read More
More than 500 years ago, Japanese artists developed a technique that celebrates breakage as a part of life’s journey. This ceramic-repair methodology, known as kintsugi, highlights cracks as part of the beauty and the history of an object, rather than something to disguise. Read More
Lotte Stam-Beese’s portrait of fellow Bauhaus student Albert Braun reflects the innovative creative process nurtured by the Bauhaus School of Design in Weimar-era Germany. Read More
In a new body of large-scale sculptures, painting, installations, and performances, which includes The Mete of the Muse, Fred Wilson focuses on histories of the African diaspora, and the lingering legacy of colonialism and slavery in the United States and around the world. Read More
Commissioned in honor of NOMA’s centennial, Forever is a large-scale wall painting by the Philadelphia-based, Nigerian-born artist Odili Donald Odita. Extending 150 feet, the mural contains 87 colors, calibrated to respond to the physical space and changing light of the McDermott Lobby. The title conveys the impressions of dynamism, musicality, and continuity Odita gathered from… Read More
Taken on its own as a visual object, this punch service in NOMA’s decorative arts collection is striking. A large aluminum sphere punch bowl centers a galaxy of spherical cups riding on a ring like Saturn’s, the repeated shapes emphasized and softened by spherical birchwood handles. Read More
Will Ryman’s large-scale sculpture America is a reflection on the industries and economies that built the United States over the past few centuries. America is made of many materials, each of which have been carefully selected and arranged by Ryman to reflect the legacy of capitalism in this nation. Read More
In 1940, Josef Sudek began his best-known series of photographs, a body of images of or through his studio window in Prague, Czechoslovakia. Read More
Photographs of and through windows have remained popular throughout the history of photography. In the early years, the presence of windows was driven by necessity: photography in its infancy required great amounts of light, and windows obliged. Read More
Photography has often been employed in the service of recording exceptional spaces, but a photograph always more or less distorts the space it is supposed to record. The distortion may enhance the true nature of the interior or it may severely misrepresent it. Read More