Food for the Soul: The Art of Gold and the Gold in Art
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Food for the Soul: The Art of Gold and the Gold in Art

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By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout Unique, beautifully designed and crafted, and visually arresting, gold objects are always stars of any museum display, regardless of the symbolism or cultural context that may have been lost over time. From the earliest civilizations of the Fertile Crescent, through ancient Egypt, and in all African and South…

Food for the Soul: “Expressionists: Kandinsky, Münter and the Blue Rider” Exhibition
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Food for the Soul: “Expressionists: Kandinsky, Münter and the Blue Rider” Exhibition

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By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout When we think of German Expressionism, the images that most readily come to mind are often the black and white lithographs of Berlin artists like Käthe Kollwitz or Erich Heckel, but in fact this art movement also encompassed paintings brimming with color brighter than anything that German art…

Food for the Soul: “Sargent and Fashion” Exhibition
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Food for the Soul: “Sargent and Fashion” Exhibition

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By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout After John Singer Sargent died in 1925, his formal paintings of English and American socialites went out of fashion. Throughout the 20th century, the art world was giddy about other things—abstracts, installation art, pop—visual ideas very much removed from the realistic portraiture that was Sargent’s specialty. In that…

Food for the Soul: London Exhibition “Now You See Us: Women Artists in Britain 1520-1920”
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Food for the Soul: London Exhibition “Now You See Us: Women Artists in Britain 1520-1920”

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By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout This summer, the Tate Gallery in London is presenting an exhibition entitled “Now You See Us: Women Artists in Britain 1520-1920,” showcasing 400 years of women creating art in Great Britain. Some of them, like Artemisia Gentileschi and Angelika Kauffmann, came from other countries in search of clients…

Looking at Rivers
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Looking at Rivers

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“Sometimes, if you stand on the bottom rail of a bridge and lean over to watch the river slipping slowly away beneath you, you will suddenly know everything there is to be known.”~ A.A. Milne, Winnie The Pooh By Nina Heyn — Your Culture Scout A.A. Milne was talking about an experience most of us…

Food for the Soul: “Impressionists 1874” – How It All Began
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Food for the Soul: “Impressionists 1874” – How It All Began

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By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout No matter how much or how little we know about fine art, we can all spot the difference between paintings by old masters and the art that was launched by post-Classical artists—Impressionists, Modernists, and representatives of all subsequent movements, from Surrealism to Abstractionism. There are various reasons for…

Nina’s Blog: Italian Spring with Art – Part 2
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Nina’s Blog: Italian Spring with Art – Part 2

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By Nina Heyn- Your Culture Scout The Venice Biennale is an international art show that alternates between architecture and fine art every other year. 2024 is the year for artworks, and Venice, the city already crowded with thousands of tourists, is now also home to artists, critics, and viewers who have been flocking to the…

Nina’s Blog: Italian Spring with Art-Part 1
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Nina’s Blog: Italian Spring with Art-Part 1

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Florence’s Uffizi Galleries—which contain the most famous Renaissance art on the planet—are, unfortunately, best avoided this spring. The size of the crowds is staggering, including huge field-trip groups of high-schoolers and tour groups with guides who block the view of every painting in sight. Right now, those elegant Uffizi halls could be the set for…

Food for the Soul: The Barnes Foundation – Transitions
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Food for the Soul: The Barnes Foundation – Transitions

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By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout “Appreciation of works of art requires organized effort and systematic study. Art appreciation can no more be absorbed by aimless wandering in galleries than can surgery be learned by casual visits to a hospital.”   ~ Albert C. Barnes When Dr. Albert C. Barnes—physician, inventor, chemist, entrepreneur, and one…

Food for the Soul: Stories of Women at the Philadelphia Museum of Art
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Food for the Soul: Stories of Women at the Philadelphia Museum of Art

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By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout Philadelphia’s main art museum was established in 1876 as part of the centennial celebration of the Declaration of Independence. Since then, the Philadelphia Museum of Art (we’ll call it PMA for short) has been expanding its catalog to its current grand total of almost a quarter of a…

Food for the Soul: A Year of the Dragon
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Food for the Soul: A Year of the Dragon

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By Nina Heyn- Your Culture Scout In Asia, being born in a Year of the Dragon means to arrive in an auspicious year; dragons, in Chinese astrology, are symbols of power, good luck, and success. Western culture—the modern take from Game of Thrones notwithstanding—treats dragons as monsters to be vanquished. These two radically different views…

Food for the Soul: Fashioning San Francisco
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Food for the Soul: Fashioning San Francisco

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The theme of the rarefied world of New York socialites in the 1970s is being explored in the second season of the ongoing TV series Feud. This season’s story, Capote vs. The Swans, portrays the rise and fall of a gossipy relationship between Truman Capote and some of Manhattan’s most prominent rich and famous, who…

Food for the Soul: Pink
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Food for the Soul: Pink

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For its Color of the Year 2024, Pantone elected the color named “peach fuzz”—a pink color moderated by some orange or yellow to achieve a shade that in clothing can indeed be called “peach,” while in art it is often used to render skin tones, the light at dusk, or morning clouds in southern latitudes….

Food for the Soul: A Taste of Klimt in Vienna
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Food for the Soul: A Taste of Klimt in Vienna

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Artworks by Gustav Klimt (1862-1918), the most popular representative of Viennese Art Nouveau, grace collections all over the world. After a protracted restitution battle, one of the most famous of his gold paintings, the Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, is now in New York; galleries in cities like Tokyo, London, Tel Aviv, Venice, and many others…

Food for the Soul: The Rossettis – an Exhibition at Tate Britain
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Food for the Soul: The Rossettis – an Exhibition at Tate Britain

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There are so many artworks in London museums that you can always find a substantial exhibition taking place, no matter when you visit. Such is the case now at Tate Britain—part of the national galleries of British art. The Rossettis is a show devoted principally to Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882) and his family, fellow artists, and…

Food for the Soul: From Barbie to Oppenheimer and Back Again
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Food for the Soul: From Barbie to Oppenheimer and Back Again

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It used to be called counter-programming. Studios would, for example, plan to release a comedy skewed to female audiences on a Super Bowl weekend, reasoning that women who would not want to watch football games all day might want to go with their girlfriends to the movies. No longer. Oppenheimer and Barbie were scheduled to…

Food for the Soul: Hollywood’s Impossible Mission and Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One
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Food for the Soul: Hollywood’s Impossible Mission and Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One

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By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout If you, like me, are heading to movie theaters to cool off and to check out the latest blockbusters, you may want to keep in mind that next summer, big-budget movies might be hard to find. On July 13, SAG-AFTRA, the guild of Hollywood actors, announced a strike….

Food for the Soul: Animal Hunt at Art Institute of Chicago
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Food for the Soul: Animal Hunt at Art Institute of Chicago

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By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout Comprehensive and large-scope art museums tend to be those created in centuries past, such as the Louvre in the 18th century and the Metropolitan Museum of Art (the “Met”) in the 19th century. Their function was to provide the inhabitants of big cities with collections that were educational,…

Nina’s Euro Blog 2023: Chasing Art in Paris
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Nina’s Euro Blog 2023: Chasing Art in Paris

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Paris is not very user-friendly this spring because ongoing strikes are affecting daily life to a great degree. I was planning to see Vermeer’s The Astronomer—a painting that was not included in the loan exhibition at the Rijksmuseum—which is often described as a “companion” to The Geographer, featuring the same model and a similar scientific…

Food for the Soul: “Rembrandt & His Contemporaries” Exhibition in Amsterdam
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Food for the Soul: “Rembrandt & His Contemporaries” Exhibition in Amsterdam

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By Nina Heyn — Your Culture Scout While many art fans might not be able to get tickets to the sold-out Vermeer show at the Rijksmuseum, there is another exhibition of exquisite Dutch Baroque art in Amsterdam that is ongoing at the same time at the nearby museum called Hermitage Amsterdam. The star of this…

Food for the Soul: Women Alone – Vermeer at the Rijksmuseum
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Food for the Soul: Women Alone – Vermeer at the Rijksmuseum

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By Nina Heyn — Your Culture Scout The sold-out, long-touted, once-in-a-lifetime Vermeer exhibition at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam is in full swing—crowds of lucky ticket-holders are thronging through a few small rooms. But perhaps this is the right space to exhibit these intimate, delicate pictures that hung forgotten for 200 years until they became the…

Food for the Soul: Pearls
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Food for the Soul: Pearls

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By Nina Heyn — Your Culture Scout Probably one of the most celebrated paintings that features pearls is one where these jewels are the least visible. It is the painting called Woman with a Pearl Necklace, and it was painted around 1663 by Johannes Vermeer (1632-1675). Over two years, he painted five pictures that featured…

Food for the Soul: Peeking into the Artist’s Mind — An Interview with Henryk Waniek
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Food for the Soul: Peeking into the Artist’s Mind — An Interview with Henryk Waniek

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By Nina Heyn — Your Culture Scout Even though most of the artists I admire are from the 20th century—from David Hockney to Leonora Carrington, and from Gerhard Richter to Francis Bacon—I’m usually not able to post about them here because images of their art are still under copyright. It is, therefore, a rare treat…

Painting Together
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Painting Together

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By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout Unless you are writing a script for a TV show, writing is a decidedly solitary occupation (you can hardly write a novel “together”). Painting is a bit more conducive to communal activity and many artist communities sprung up throughout the 19th century. Once some artists discovered a particularly…

Food for the Soul: Global Trade Part V – Europe
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Food for the Soul: Global Trade Part V – Europe

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By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout Even before Roman soldiers started building and then marching on the roads of the empire, expanding the imperial trade across all the outposts, there were well-worn trading paths that led to Rome. Etruscans, who preceded the Romans on the Italian peninsula, had been trading extensively with northern lands….

Food for the Soul: Oscar Contenders 2023 — Part 2
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Food for the Soul: Oscar Contenders 2023 — Part 2

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By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout A few weeks ago, we highlighted a few early and interesting contenders for the Best Picture crown at the upcoming Academy Awards. Here we present the remaining candidates following the announcement of the nominations on Jan. 24. EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE This movie is an outlier in…

Food for the Soul: Beautiful Banknotes
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Food for the Soul: Beautiful Banknotes

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Józef Mehoffer. Allegory of Saving (1933). Stained glass window, KOMK Bank, Kraków. Photo: Zygmunt Put/Wikimedia Commons By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout “All these pieces of paper are issued with as much solemnity and authority as if they were of pure gold or silver…and indeed everybody takes them readily, for wheresoever a person may…

Food for the Soul: Law, Justice, and Art
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Food for the Soul: Law, Justice, and Art

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Wu Youru. Regaining the Provincial Capital of Ruizhou (1886). Private collection. Photo: Wikimedia Commons By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout The conventional wisdom that “law” and “justice” are not the same thing can be illustrated by works of art from any historical period. The painting above represents a battle between the Chinese Imperial army…

Feast for the Eyes
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Feast for the Eyes

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By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout No one has ever rendered fruits more juicy or seafood more fresh than 17th-century painters in the Low Countries. Starting with late-Renaissance artists such as Pieter Aertsen and continuing for a century and half afterwards in the works of Dutch painters from Frans Snyders to Vermeer,  this decorative tradition…