History, Natural History & the Arts
In April 2009, the heirs of Berlin-born George Grosz filed a restitution lawsuit against New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) claiming that three paintings by the artist held in the museum’s collection rightfully belong to the family.
The trustees resisted the call. [Read more…] about Painters, Poets, A Manhattan Museum, and the Nazis
Hidden Histories of Jazz Age New York: From the Suppressed to the Strange (SUNY Press Excelsior Editions, 2026) by Jonathan Ezra Goldman offers a fresh look at 1920s New York City, unearthing stories of everyday life and marginalized communities.
In sections that intertwine entertainment, politics, art, technology, crime, shopping, eating, and recreation, the book portrays sweeping events such as the Harlem Renaissance, Prohibition, and immigration through anecdotes of individual experiences that counter the era’s popular conceptions of ballooning wealth and uproarious celebration. [Read more…] about Hidden Histories of Jazz Age New York
An outspoken critic of the National Socialist (Nazi) Party, Jewish photojournalist Gisèle [Gisela] Freund fled her native Germany in 1933 with Adolf Hitler’s rise to power. Having settled in Paris, she obtained her PhD at the Sorbonne in 1936 and would become the most talented chronicler of the vibrant and multi-national bohemian community of artists and writers that made its home in Paris during the 1930s.
By 1939, Freund had photographed many of the greatest writers and artists of the twentieth century, amongst them Henri Matisse, Samuel Beckett, T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Jean Cocteau, André Breton, Colette, André Malraux, Paul Valéry, Tennessee Williams, Peggy Guggenheim, Simone de Beauvoir, and Jean-Paul Sartre. [Read more…] about The Battle for Ulysses in Paris & New York
Despite actively participating in art history, female artists tended to act in the shadow of their male contemporaries.
For well into the twentieth century, they were excluded from art schools, galleries and museums. Therefore, few platforms for the exhibition of their work were available. [Read more…] about An Experimental Museum: Dreier & Duchamp in Manhattan
One of the notable things about the history Victory Mills factory building destroyed by fire on Saturday was it’s early use of reinforced concrete construction.
Although the precedents for concrete construction go back to the Roman era, it did not find true favor as a building material until the nineteenth century. Experimentation in both America and Europe allowed builders to acquire sufficient practical experience with concrete to assure its general acceptance. [Read more…] about Victory Mills: Destroyed Factory Building Noted For Early Concrete Construction
At the start of the 1880s, Barcelona was an expanding city of about 350,000 people. Its medieval walls had been knocked down only twenty-five years earlier. Capital of the autonomous community of Catalonia, city and region developed into Spain’s economic dynamo. Prosperity mushroomed. A self-confident territory strove to re-establish its identity by invigorating local traditions, culture and language. Barcelona became an engine of change and modernity. [Read more…] about Catalonia in Manhattan: The Architectural Legacy of Rafael Guastavino
In 1933, Marion Greenwood (1909-1970) catapulted to international fame as one of the first women to paint a public mural in Mexico. Diego Rivera celebrated the then 24-year-old artist as one of “the world’s greatest living women mural painters.”
She traveled the globe to create award-winning portraits of people from diverse backgrounds, crossing racial, cultural, and class lines. [Read more…] about The Life and Art of Marion Greenwood
Rochester, NY was home to approximately 14 mid-century modern round banks built between 1968 and 1974. Characterized by traditional mid-century modern features, including large windows, flat roofs, and clean lines, the banks are credited to architecture firm Pioch & Mellen and were originally built for Columbia Bank.
Approximately half of these buildings have been demolished, with one location in Brockport currently set to be torn down to make way for a Chick-Fil-A. [Read more…] about Western NY’s Mid-Century Modern Round Banks
Composer Hanns (Johannes) Eisler was born in July 1898 in Leipzig, Saxony, where his Austrian father Rudolf worked as an academic. The family moved to Vienna in 1901 and settled in Leopoldstadt, a district known for its large Jewish population. Being an outspoken atheist (although of Jewish descent), Rudolf was denied a post at Vienna University and worked for the publisher Werner Klinkhardt as editor for a series of books on philosophy and sociology. [Read more…] about Red Scare Mania: The Karl Marx of Music
Foremost among new state park developments in the 1950s was the 1959 completion of a new state park on Barnhart Island on the St. Lawrence River, in present-day Robert Moses State Park (formerly St. Lawrence State Park) in the Thousand Islands region. [Read more…] about Robert Moses State Park’s Midcentury Modern Designs
As New York’s state park system continued to develop in the post-war era, buildings and features accommodating an expanding range of functions were needed to meet the surge of visitation that followed the end of the war.
Among these were pool complexes, such as at James Baird State Park in the Taconic region in Dutchess County, NY. While the swimming pool no longer exists, the complex’s keynote feature — the bathhouse (1950) — remains. [Read more…] about State Parks’ Post-War Pools and Bathhouses
After World War II, the taste for rustic architecture that defined the interwar period of New York’s state park design began to wane. This also happened across the National Park Service system, which fully embraced modern architecture in the mid-1950s. [Read more…] about New York’s Postwar State Park Architecture
Margery Ryerson was born in 1886, graduated from Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York in 1909, and moved to New York City in 1911, where she lived until her death in 1989 at the age of 102. Ryerson studied under famed art instructors, Robert Henri and Charles W. Hawthorne, and worked with each to compile their classroom lessons into published instructional guides. [Read more…] about Margery Ryerson: The Art Spirit Contagious
The Brooklyn Museum will present “Consuelo Kanaga: Catch the Spirit,” a new exhibit opening March 14, 2025. The canon-expanding exhibition charts the major yet overlooked artist’s radical photographic vision across six decades.
The retrospective exhibition presents the work of Consuelo Kanaga (1894–1976), a critical yet overlooked figure in the history of modern photography. Co-organized with and first exhibited at the Fundación MAPFRE in Barcelona and Madrid, Spain, followed by a presentation at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the survey will return to the Brooklyn Museum, which houses the world’s most extensive Kanaga collection. [Read more…] about Exhibit Highlights Photographer Consuelo Kanaga (1894-1978)
For decades, UFOs have been spotted in the skies around the world, mercurial celestial phenomena, here and then gone. Few places, however, have had a flying saucer that rested on the ground puzzling curious visitors.
Lake George Village is one of but a few spots on Planet Earth that can boast it was home to an alien-looking structure, called Futuro or Futuro House. [Read more…] about Futuro: Lake George’s Flying Saucer Home
The term “New World” originated from the late fifteenth century and referred to the recently discovered Americas which astonished Europeans who had previously thought of the world as consisting of Europe, Asia and Africa (the “Old World”).
The earliest accounts of Spanish explorations in Central and South America were written in a series of letters and reports by Peter Martyr d’Anghiera (1457 – 1526), an Italian-born historian and chaplain to the Court of Ferdinand II, King of Aragon, during the Age of Exploration. [Read more…] about Transit & Transfer: The Avant-Garde in Montmartre & Manhattan
Charles Annibale is well-known throughout the Southern Adirondacks and Saratoga region as the friendly, hardworking owner/operator of Clean and Clear Windows.
But there’s another whole side to this industrious dynamo — and it, too, involves glass! Over the past seven years, Annibale has earned a thriving reputation as a mosaic artist whose abstract masterpieces are made exclusively from fragments of glass rather than traditional mosaic tiles. [Read more…] about Artist Charles Annibale Creates Stunning Abstract Glass Mosaics
Painter George Benjamin Luks was born in August 1867 in Williamsport, Pennsylvania. According to the 1880 census, his father was Polish and his mother born in Bavaria. The family then moved to the coal mining borough of Pottstown, Montgomery County, PA, where his father worked as a physician.
Living in the midst of a community of struggling Eastern European families, Luks was directly confronted with the toughness of the immigrant experience. It would determine his career as an artist.
In the Steerage
Luks began his studies at Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. Dissatisfied with the conservative standard of teaching, he left for Europe and spent time in Düsseldorf (a number of American painters had received their training at the city’s Art Academy). He visited London and Paris. [Read more…] about In the Steerage of the Great Atlantic Migration
An automaton is a machine designed to operate on its own by responding to predetermined instructions. By the mid-eighteenth century, a number of talented craftsmen operated in Paris from
where they exported clockwork automata and mechanical singing birds around Europe and beyond.
The undisputed master in this domain was Jacques de Vaucanson. In 1735, he constructed a life-sized flautist that produced twelve melodies. His masterpiece was unveiled in May 1764 when he presented a “Canard Digérateur” (Digesting Duck) to the public. [Read more…] about Waiters, Restaurers, Automats & Depression Cocktails
Founded by Morris, Gustavus and Gotthelf Pach, the photographic studio of Pach Brothers emerged in the wake of the Civil War. The family had moved from Berlin to the City of New York when the boys were young.
Sharing an interest in the emerging process of photography, they roamed the streets of their local neighborhood taking pictures of scenes and residents. The New York directory of 1866/7 lists the Pach Brothers working at 260 Bowery. A decade later they were operating from a studio on Broadway. [Read more…] about The Urinal Controversy: Walter Pach & Marcel Duchamp’s ‘Fountain’
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