#western-modernism

#western-modernism

A vision lay before him: Fleet Street blanketed with snow, silent, empty, pure white, and, at the end of it, the huge and majestic form of Saint Paul's Cathedral. It was a spellbinding moment: the great thoroughfare temporarily devoid of carts and carriages, the cathedral looming blurrily out of the still-falling snowflakes a real-life snow globe.

The creative output of that tribe was so immense, and their bohemian adventures so inspiring, that I wrote and published a historical novel, The Ashtrays Are Full and the Glasses Are Empty featuring many figures from the Lost Generation.

When I started, there was no art coverage in the news magazines and there was no regular coverage, even in Time ... Contemporary art, particularly, was considered a ridiculous and foolish aberration. It didn't have anything to do with art, according to a lot of people.

The style is characterized by raw, exposed concrete and bold geometric forms. You've certainly seen it before in many cultural and civic buildings built between the 1950s and '70s. With countless examples spanning countries and continents, the look has both historical significance and remains popular-particularly in residential design-today.

At the official launch last November, the current culture minister Rachida Dati described the imperative behind the programme as not just celebrating an uncommon visionary but the "burning relevance" of his legacy: "a commitment to continuing to nurture this demanding idea of what culture is".

I belong to a current of poetry that is meant to be read in public. Houellebecq's statement reflects his philosophy on artistic expression, emphasizing the performative nature of his work across multiple mediums. His musical recordings and public performances demonstrate this commitment to bringing poetry and artistic vision directly to audiences through various channels beyond traditional literary publication.

All of us live in an age where we're bombarded by social media and artificial intelligence - when striving to be your authentic self becomes an increasingly difficult task. Yet, even if it has somehow become a common goal, it is unclear how many of us can truly define the "authenticity" that we say we are pursuing.

In antiquity, many opined about "the elements" in combination. Around 2500 years ago, Leucippus and Democritus founded the idea of atoms. Perhaps everything, they opined, was composed of indivisible building blocks. In the late 1700s, hydrogen and oxygen were discovered. Circa 1804, John Dalton revived atomism to explain chemical behavior. Then in 1869, Mendeleev developed the periodic table: organizing the atoms.

On Franklin Street in Brooklyn's Greenpoint neighborhood, one non-commercial gallery fosters 'a small, stubbornly human space for friction.' Friction—the ubiquitous buzzword that captures the simultaneous delight and discomfort of doing things the slow way—is at the heart of artists Pap Souleye Fall and Char Jeré's current show at Subtitled NYC. It also reflects the overall spirit of this little exhibition space and of a burgeoning movement to reject our culture of optimization in favor of a bumpier, more intimate, less alienating experience.

So long as I manage to avoid lightbulbs or stay out of wine glasses, the buzzing will inevitably give way to silence. My wings will abruptly stop flapping and I'll careen towards the ground like an asteroid. I'll become a speck on a rug, a bit of debris absent-mindedly vacuumed up by someone who has no idea what adventures I've been on in the past minute.

Peter Drucker saw this symbiosis first. He realized that the new industrial order would depend on a worker who produced ideas instead of widgets. The knowledge worker became the engine of prosperity, and management became the social technology that synchronized millions of minds. The modern firm was as much an invention as the transistor it depended on. Three decades later, Tom Peters caught the next wave.

Originally from Dallas and now based in New York City, I approach photography as an exercise in atmosphere, trust, and control. Trained in the discipline of film and later in fashion photography, I work with both natural and artificial light to construct images that feel cinematic and psychologically charged. Moving fluidly between studio and location, I transform spaces into environments that heighten mood and presence.

Postmodernism began as a critique of modernism's exhausted promises. By the late 1960s and early 1970s, many designers no longer treated modernism as radical or socially redemptive. Urban renewal projects accelerated the demolition of historic neighborhoods, and landmark preservation battles raised urgent questions about what the United States valued and, ultimately, protected. The loss of major civic icons, including New York's Penn Station, sharpened public awareness that progress often arrives through erasure.

In 2024, art collector Christian Levett opened Europe's first museum dedicated to women artists in a little town in the south of France. But for those of us who can't make the trip to the Femmes Artistes du Musée de Mougins (Female Artists of the Mougins Museum, or FAMM), the American Federation of the Arts (AFA) has arranged the next best thing: a blockbuster touring exhibition about women artists of the Abstract Expressionist movement, featuring some of the highlights of the FAMM collection.

An exhibition of Wifredo Lam is about as safe a bet as the Museum of Modern Art can place and still plausibly say that it's a bet on expanding the canon. The Cuban artist is one of the most famous painters of the 20th century, featured in almost every single key show about Surrealism. MoMA acquired his famous painting The Jungle in 1946, a few years after he made it.

MADRID - The most famous portrait of Maruja Mallo depicts the artist covered from head to toe in seaweed. She is crowned and draped with long, rope-like strands of kelp, her arms raised triumphantly like an all-powerful marine goddess. This unconventional photograph, snapped in 1945 by the poet Pablo Neruda on a Chilean beach, was no doubt carefully orchestrated by the Spanish artist, who viewed herself as an extension of her unique work, where female energy is a conduit for natural and even cosmic forces.

As 2026 marks the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States, the auction house Christie's is hosting multiple auctions later this month as part of "Americana Week." Was I the only one who didn't know that Jimmy Carter was also a painter? The lots include a painting by that president, Gilbert Stuart's portrait of George Washington for James Madison, and Grant Wood's original study for "American Gothic" (1930).