By the 1540s the theme of Apollo and the Muses, established during the sixteenth-century Italian Renaissance, had made its way to northern Europe where Maerten van Heemskerck seems to have been one of its champions. Heemskerck was one of the first Dutch painters to travel to Italy for art studies after which he devoted his… Read More

When artist and activist Elizabeth Catlett lived in New Orleans in the early 1940s, much of the city was racially segregated, including City Park—and, by extension, the New Orleans Museum of Art. As the chair of the art department at Dillard University from 1940 to 1942, Catlett was determined that her students should have the… Read More

An unadorned glass bowl displayed in NOMA’s decorative arts galleries was made in 1932 directly from the factory mold of a Corning Glass Company locomotive-headlight lens. The “Lens” Bowl is part of the important Modern design movement that openly paid tribute to new materials and thoughtful industrial production. Read More

From 1923 through 1929 the circle was the single motif which Wassily Kandinsky explored exhaustively in ten major paintings. Sketch for Several Circles is a study for Kandinsky’s large painting Several Circles, now in the collection of the Guggenheim Museum, New York. Read More