These carved wooden figures have human faces but animal attributes, and reflected the achievements of their owners.
Location City: Philadelphia
The artist imbues the scene of the darkening piazza with a sense of foreboding.
Giorgio de Chirico, The Soothsayer’s Recompense
Exploring how Duchamp's art challenges viewers is essential to understanding his creativity and much of the art of the last century.
Marcel Duchamp and the Viewer
A black painter confronts white supremacy amidst the two world wars.
Horace Pippin, Mr. Prejudice
Which one is “true,” the one that tricks the viewer into thinking it is really there, or the one that announces itself as what it is, lines drawn on paper?
Juan Gris, The Table
A founding myth for Pennsylvania and for the United States
Benjamin West, Penn’s Treaty with the Indians
Fresh water for a young Philadelphia
Thomas Birch, Fairmount Water Works
Picturing Spanish conquest in an era of U.S. expansion
Peter Frederick Rothermel, De Soto Raising the ...
An artist asks: war or healthcare?
Sue Coe, Aids won’t wait, the enemy ...
"We have met the enemy and they are ours." The battle that turned the War of 1812
Thomas Birch, Perry’s Victory on Lake Erie
African Americans' ongoing fight against racism in the U.S. undermined the sense of victory in both world wars.
Horace Pippin, Mr. Prejudice
Living in peace—predator and prey, and Native Americans and settler colonists—but for how long?
Hicks’s The Peaceable Kingdom as Pennsylvania parable
An explosion in a mine kills 111, Shahn captures the devastation of those left behind.
Ben Shahn, Miners’ Wives
On the eve of the American Revolution, a glimpse of politics in portraiture
John Singleton Copley, Portrait of Mr. and ...
A brutal history told for a modern American city, Mexican muralism in New York
Diego Rivera’s Sugar Cane
How a portrait of an African Muslim came to hang side-by-side with the founding fathers in one of America's earliest museums.
An African Muslim among the founding fathers, ...
Perspective is the star of this painting. Saenredam expertly widens the viewpoint to create an interior panorama.
Saenredam, Interior of Saint Bavo, Haarlem
Mary cries and falls into John’s arms. Rogier’s precise observations accentuate the emotional impact of this scene.
Rogier van der Weyden, The Crucifixion, with ...
As the European public grew increasingly hard to scandalize, Duchamp crossed the Atlantic to stir up more trouble.
Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase, No ...
Love, sex, science, broken glass, a coffee grinder, a bride from another dimension—this one really has it all.
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