Famous Paintings
Edvard Munch’s Ten Most Famous Paintings
The Scream, Madonna, The Sick Child and more: the ten works that made Munch the painter of modern anxiety and desire.
Latest
Meaning & Story
What Is Happening in Nighthawks?
Four people, one counter, no conversation and no way in. What Hopper actually put in the painting, and what viewers have added since.
Famous Paintings
Paul Cézanne’s Ten Most Famous Paintings
Apples, bathers, and one Provençal mountain painted over and over: the ten works that made Cézanne the father of modern art.
Room & Placement
Hanging Art in Hallways, Stairwells and Entryways
The stairwell rule that keeps a climbing group straight, why hallway art belongs on one wall only, and how to beat the glare that ruins both.
Famous Paintings
Édouard Manet’s Ten Most Famous Paintings
Scandals, barmaids, and picnics that outraged Paris: the ten works that made Manet the reluctant father of modern painting.
Meaning & Story
The Gold in Klimt's The Kiss
Real metal leaf, a gold engraver's son, and a set of Byzantine mosaics in Ravenna — how the most famous gold surface in painting was made.
Famous Paintings
Wassily Kandinsky’s Ten Most Famous Paintings
From fairy-tale riders to floating circles: ten works that trace how Kandinsky talked himself out of painting things and into painting feeling.
Room & Placement
Art for Small Rooms and Awkward Walls
Why one large piece beats three small ones, how to measure a wall that has a door or a thermostat in the way, and what to do with slots, slopes and corners.
Famous Paintings
Paul Klee’s Ten Most Famous Paintings
Angels, fish, floating balloons and grids of color: ten works by the twentieth century’s most inventive and least pompous modernist.
Famous Paintings
J.M.W. Turner’s Ten Most Famous Paintings
Fire, shipwreck, moonlight and Venetian haze: the ten pictures that made Turner the greatest painter of weather in Western art.
Movements
What Is Impressionism?
The movement that made painting a record of light rather than of subject — who started it, when, and the five things to look for.
Formats
Canvas vs Framed Prints: Which Should You Choose?
Canvas suits painterly images and relaxed rooms; a frame suits photography, detail and formal walls. The differences that actually decide it.