Clyfford Still sold approximately 81 works during his lifetime. He had only 15 exhibitions. But neither statistic is due to a lack of demand for the pioneering Abstract Expressionist painter’s bold and uncompromising work, nor to a dearth of output.

ALEXANDER CALDER and Pablo Picasso barely knew each other, and only met four times in their lives. Their works are, at least superficially, very different. Nonetheless, an exhibition now at the de Young Museum in San Francisco makes the case for comm

WHEN WE speak of “realist” art, we had better be sure we know which reality we have in mind. The term is often applied to 19thcentury works that strove to depict nature and the human world in a way that would be most recognizable to those who viewed

IN 2017, WHEN he turned 80, David Hockney decided to move to rural France. The artist, who had long split his time between his native England and Los Angeles, had been traveling in Normandy and felt the impulse to move there for a while. He was cravi

TOWER OF THE Koutoubia Mosque, which is considered Winston Churchill’s most important painting, set a world auction record for the artist and former British Prime Minister at Christie’s Modern British Art Evening Sale in March. The painting came on t

IN 1969, “OBJECTS: USA,” a survey dedicated to American craft designers, opened at the National Collection of Fine Art at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C. The show was the brainchild of visionary gallerist Lee Nordness and featured works

ONE OF THE most iconic bodies of work depicting the American West was made by a European artist who spent less than two years in America and then never returned. In 1833–34, the Swiss painter Karl Bodmer acted as official artist of an expedition up t

JAMES CALK and his wife, Betsy Havens, are both painters, though in different styles. Calk’s work is gestural abstraction with a suggestion of landscape, executed with a bright palette and thick impasto. Havens, a figurative artist is as inspired by

When the Japanese designer Katsu Hamanaka arrived in Paris in 1924, he opened a workshop dedicated to objets d’art of shagreen, ivory, and precious woods. In Tokyo, he had studied with the celebrated lacquer artist Katsutaro Yamazaki, and in France,

“THE POND,” A solo exhibition of Thomas McNickle’s work, is on view at Jerald Melberg Gallery through April 24. Followers of the Charlotte, N.C.- based gallery’s programming will likely be familiar with McNickle’s sumptuous paintings—the artist has b

“For Modernism, we may take it that abstraction is the law and that realism is the criminal,” wrote the art historian Linda Nochlin in the early 1970s. At that time, abstraction had already lost some of its dominance, but the point was and still is s

ALICE NEEL PAINTED some of the 20th century’s most evocative portraits. Over the course of her seven-decade-long career, she rendered stirring representations of friends, lovers, colleagues, and the diverse groups of people who populated her longtime

THE CELEBRATED landscape painter Gregory Kondos turns 98 on April 3. In celebration, Caldwell Snyder Gallery is presenting an exhibition of rare artworks by Kondos this month at its San Francisco gallery location. The show includes a selection of oil

WHILE PERSIAN (or Farsi) is the national language of Iran and originated there, it is also an international language. Today, its reach extends into Azerbaijan, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan, and in previous eras it had an even bigger footpr

SCOTTSDALE ART Auction, one of the largest Western, wildlife, and sporting art auctions in the Southwest, will have more than 400 works of art for sale this month, split between two afternoon sessions, one on April 9 and the other on April 10. On off

MAKING UP the bedrock of Zaplin Lampert Gallery, a mainstay of Santa Fe’s art scene for nearly 35 years, are “explorer artists,” the stalwart painters and photographers who ventured into the American West during the 19th century. In fact, the gallery

Spain once exerted a magnetic force on the American imagination. After losing most of its New World colonies in the 1820s, Spain entered a long period of political and economic decline during which it came to seem like a backwater of Europe, a land t

Francesco Marmitta was born in Parma in the 1460s. He was the son of a wool and wax merchant and became an acclaimed painter, goldsmith, engraver of gems, and illuminator. Today, his work is in several high-profile collections. Virgin and Child Flank

“POSSIBILITIES,” a new conceptual exhibition that opens at Denver’s K Contemporary on December 19, will be mounted with blank, white canvases. Rather than show completed works, the exhibition is designed to encourage collectors to commission original

MCCLAIN GALLERY of Houston, Texas, is currently mounting its first solo exhibition of work by the Vermont-born, Brooklyn-based artist Julia Kunin. “Rainbow Dream Machine,” which is on view through January 30, presents ceramic pieces from Kunin’s Cary

THE 2021 Scottsdale Art Auction, the largest sale of important Western, Wildlife, and Sporting art in the Southwest, is scheduled for April 10. The sale will be held at the auction house’s facility in Old Town Scottsdale, Ariz., and is slated to feat