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…
“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…
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…
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…
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…
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….
Ridley Scott, the man who over half a century has given us Gladiator, Alien, Blade Runner, and The Martian, has not stopped making big movies. His latest is Napoleon—you do not get any grander than that in terms of subject matter. It is an ambitious biography of the emperor’s rise to power, his many battles,…
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…
We conclude “The Year of Vermeer” at Food for the Soul with a visit to The Art of Painting , which can be found at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. Vermeer painted it around 1666, at the height of his artistic power, and the title assigned to this canvas by historians seems to reflect the…
It so happens that all four Vermeers that can be found in collections in London are about making music. The most elaborate of them is actually called The Music Lesson, acquired by King George III in 1762. This canvas spent about a hundred years misattributed to other Flemish artists (either Frans or Willem van Mieris),…
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,…
By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout The new and wonderful loan exhibition of Vermeer at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam is an occasion to reflect on how the life and works of this 17th-century artist can be relevant to us today. Here are half a dozen “lessons” that I draw from the story of his…
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…
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…
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….
By Nina Heyn — Your Culture Scout We celebrated the year 2019 as “The Year of da Vinci,” reporting all year long from the groundbreaking exhibition at the Louvre as well as anniversary exhibitions in Italy, Poland, and the Netherlands. We would like to celebrate 2023 as “The Year of Vermeer,” inspired by the upcoming,…
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…
James Tissot. Ball on Shipboard (1874). Tate Britain. Photo: Wikimedia Commons “The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page.” ~ St. Augustine By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout While we may be upset by the various pandemic travel restrictions the world is now experiencing, it is worth…
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…
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…
By Nina Heyn — Your Culture Scout HILMA (2022; dir. Lasse Hallström) Hilma af Klint (1862–1944) was a Swedish abstractionist painter who was largely ignored and certainly misunderstood by her contemporaries—family, art critics, friends, the public. It took decades after her death in 1944 for her paintings to be rediscovered in an attic by her…
“Ars longa, vita brevis.” ~ Hippocrates, Aphorismi By Nina Heyn — Your Culture Scout As the world witnesses a historic change in Great Britain, which welcomes Charles III as the new king (the coronation ceremony has been scheduled for May 6, 2023), it is perhaps worth remembering the first English monarch of this name—Charles I…
“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.“~ Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, 1898 By Nina Heyn — Your Culture Scout Most really good artists would not paint a family—theirs or somebody else’s—just as a record of people’s faces. They would use the theme to say something important about their…
By Nina Heyn — Your Culture Scout “The discovery of America, and that of a passage to the East Indies by the Cape of Good Hope, are the two greatest and most important events recorded in the history of mankind.” ~ Adam Smith in An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of…
By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout Even if Venice itself is not in the Middle East, until the early 1500s the Venetian empire, built on trade with Asia and the Levant, extended far beyond the city walls, incorporating such lands as Dalmatia and Istria, and reaching practically up to Constantinople. Venice was the gateway…
By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout In Florentine museums and churches, there is an endless parade of Madonnas and altar compositions of the Holy Family, which have somewhat lost their religious impact after so many centuries of changing spiritual views. When they are displayed en masse in art galleries, what makes the most immediate…
By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout The world is watching bad—and then worse—news coming out of Ukraine every day. Millions of people, even those who last month were not sure where Ukraine actually is, now follow the tragedy of people losing their lives, homes, livelihoods, and a homeland. There is one more thing that…
The Comet of 1680 over Rotterdam. Lieve Verschuier (1680). Rotterdam Historic Museum. Photo: Wikimedia Commons Public Domain “As above, so below.” ~ Hermes Trismegistus (6th century AD) By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout A sudden appearance in the night sky of an exotic shape of a ball and a shiny tail would be hard…
Gideon. Sketch for a fresco. Franz Anton Maulbertsch (1796). Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest. Photo: Wikimediart.org By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout There is a longstanding intellectual debate about whether an individual can change history. Attila the Hun, Alexander the Great, and Adolf Hitler come to mind in support of this argument, with countless…
By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout “For we fight not for glory, nor riches, nor honors, but for freedom alone, which no good man gives up except with his life.” ~ Declaration of Arbroath, 1320. National Museum of Scotland. We are used to seeing ideologically engaged works in modern art museums. Twenty-first-century artists often…
By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout For 15th-century Europeans, sub-Saharan Africa was to a great extent terra incognita until Portuguese explorers started venturing further and further south along the continent’s western coast. These expeditions culminated in 1497 with Vasco da Gama’s voyage all the way down to the Cape of Good Hope and on…
By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout There are bigger world problems than this, but you may have noticed that your favorite sheets are not in stock at Ikea—it is the global trade disruption, compliments of the pandemic. As “out of stock” notices affect our ability to obtain our favorite snacks, shoes, a sofa or…
By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout Art serves many social purposes, such as creating a magic ritual, preserving memories, announcing praise or condemnation, revising history, and (obviously) providing esthetic enjoyment. It’s no wonder, then, that art has also been used to warn people of the potential consequences of their actions. The British Museum houses…
The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness.” ~ Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes (1911) By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout The struggle between the forces of good and evil lies at the root of all religions. In India, one of the most…
By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout There are some languages, like German, Polish, and Latin, that have many grammatical cases (so-called declensions) and three genders. You must know exactly what you are going to say before you say your sentence, or it will never come out right. You cannot change your mind halfway. Painting…
Poster for the Suffragette movement. Mary Lowndes (1909). Published by Brighton and Hove Women’s Franchise. Artists’ Suffrage League. Photo: Public Domain Wikimedia Commons By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout If an individual stands up to bullies or resists violence, it is called personal courage. When a group does it, it is often called a…
By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout March 18, 1990 was the St. Patrick’s Day holiday in Boston. The streets were full of revelers, and the police had their hands full with traffic control. Two mustachioed policemen who knocked on the doors of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum on Fenway Street were readily admitted by…
Robert Henri. Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, 1916. Oil on canvas. Whitney Museum of American Art. Photo: Wikimedia Commons By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout In a press release issued in 1930, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney announced that she was launching a museum of American art because “…not only can the visiting foreigner find no adequate presentation…
Gardeners (Les Jardiniers). Gustave Caillebotte. 1875-1877. Private collection. Photo: Wikimedia Commons Public Domain. By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout Until about the end of WWII, if you lived in a house or at least in a ground-floor apartment, chances were that you had some sort of kitchen garden space. If you were lucky enough…
Christ Driving Moneylenders from the Temple. Church of St. Aignan (1899). Chartres, France. Photo: Reinhardhauke Wikimedia Commons By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout If you need to impart important messages to people who cannot read, then your choices include talking to them directly or showing them pictures—preferably images rendered in long-lasting materials such as…
Florence cathedral. Photo: Nina Heyn By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout In 1504, when Leonardo da Vinci was mostly done with living in Florence, he accepted an important commission to decorate Palazzo Vecchio (which served as the meeting hall for the Florentine Grand Council) with a fresco depicting the historic Battle of Anghiari fought…
Rembrandt. Landscape with the Good Samaritan (1638). The Princes Czartoryski Collection, National Museum, Kraków. Photo: Wikimedia Commons By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout Europe has many places that are a perfect combination of art and history. One city that possesses this ideal combination in spades, but is less visited than it deserves, is Kraków…
Marc Chagall. I and the Village (1911). MoMA. Photo: Wikimedia Commons By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, the world’s largest contemporary and modern art assemblage, has been in the avant-garde of modern art collecting for almost a century. Founded in 1929 by three enterprising society…
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres – Portrait de Comtesse D’Haussonville (1845). The Frick Collection, New York. Photo: ©The Frick Collection, Wikimedia Commons By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout So many people love the experience of visiting New York. I don’t. I’m overwhelmed by the stone jungle of office towers and the incessant noise of construction, police sirens,…
Barbara Hepworth. Sphere with Inner Form, 1963. Bronze. Barbara Hepworth Museum, St. Ives, UK. Photo: image (c)2003 Graham Rogers at Wikipedia Commons By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout Imagine that you are a mother of a four-year-old boy as well as newborn, underweight triplets. You are living in a damp, badly heated basement in…
Gustave Caillebotte. Paris Street, the Rainy Day (Rue de Paris, Temps du Pluie ), 1877. Oil on canvas. Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL. Photo: Wikimedia Commons. Impressionism owes a huge debt to Gustave Caillebotte but hardly anyone today knows his name. By Nina Heyn- Your Culture Scout Musée D’Orsay is one of the most…
Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun. Self-Portrait, 1791. Oil on canvas. National Trust, Ickworth House, UK. Photo: Wikimedia Commons By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout When we think of the French upper classes just before the French Revolution, what comes to mind are those impossible panniered gowns, powdered wigs, rouged cheeks, and ostrich feathers. Which is…
Olga Boznańska. Self-Portrait, 1908. Pastel, gouache on cardboard. National Museum, Warsaw. Photo: Wikimedia Commons By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout Even casual museumgoers are familiar with such female artists as Georgia O’Keeffe or Mary Cassatt—celebrated painters whose art is prominently displayed in major Western galleries. Fewer art lovers are familiar with someone like Olga…
By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout Even though practically every major ruler in world history has issued some coinage, just a handful of currencies have gone on to become international standards—used for a long time and widely traded. These include the drachmas of ancient Greece, the Roman Empire’s denari, and a coin called the…
Hilma af Klint. Self-Portrait, date of painting unknown. Oil on canvas. Hilma af Klint Foundation. Photo: Wikimedia Commons By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout The fact that painter Hilma af Klint has been unknown in the history of modern art is not that surprising. That even now she remains unknown is a bit more…
The Adoration of the Kings. Jan Gossaert (1510-15). Photo © The National Gallery, London. By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout One of the most artistically alluring Christmas themes is the one known as the Adoration of the Kings. The exotic story of the three rulers of faraway kingdoms, led by a star to Bethlehem…
Book of the City of Ladies. Christine de Pizan (c. 1405). Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris. Photo: Wikimedia Commons By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout We do not know who illustrated the Book of the City of Ladies, but we know the author: Christine de Pizan (or de Pisan). This miniature portrays her as…
Land Girls Hoeing. Manly Edward MacDonald (1918-19). Canada War Museum. Photo: Wikimedia Commons By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout Women have not always been stuck at home just sewing and running households. They have also been out in the fields as farmers or trading in the markets as merchants. Industrialization brought women into cities,…
Part A Young Woman Sewing. Nicolaes Maes (1655). Harold Samuel Collection, © City of London Corporation, London. Photo: Wikimedia Commons By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout This is the second part in our series on women at work—this time captured in their most accessible milieu—working at home. The tasks depicted may be some of…
Birth of the Virgin. Domenico Ghirlandaio (1479-85). Santa Maria Novella, Florence. Photo: Wikimedia Commons Public Domain By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout The majority of figures in paintings, especially those created before the 20th century, are male. The paintings show men heroically fighting or representing religious or mythological figures, men hunting, or men suffering…
“Beyond a critical point within a finite space, freedom diminishes as numbers increase. This is as true of humans in the finite space of a planetary ecosystem as it is of gas molecules in a sealed flask. The human question is not how many can possibly survive within the system, but what kind of existence…
Effects of Good Government in the City. Ambrogio Lorenzetti (1339). Palazzo Pubblico, Siena, Italy. Photo: Wikimedia Commons Public Domain By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout The United States is preparing for the November 3rd presidential election amid the most polarized debate in living memory about what is right and wrong and what kind of…
Strange Garden (Dziwny Ogród). Józef Mehoffer (1903). National Museum, Warsaw. Photo: Public Domain Wikimedia Commons. By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout There are very few advantages of a global lockdown other than decreased pollution, but perhaps one of them is our renewed appreciation of gardens. A lot of us have favorite gardens. It might…
Boxer of the Quirinale. C. 330-50 BC. Palazzo Massimo alla Terme. Rome. Photo credit: Nina Heyn. In the history of art, any recovery of a lost masterpiece is a happy event, but such events are more rare than an art loss. By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout Sometimes, there is hope for a lost…
The Storm on the Sea of Galilee. Rembrandt van Rijn (1633). Stolen in 1990 from Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Boston. Photo: Public Domain Wikimedia Commons. By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout Since antiquity, artworks have been the first thing to be looted. By the turn of the 19th century, the collection of war trophies…
The Stonebreakers. Gustave Courbet (1849). Dresden Gemäldegallerie. Destroyed in 1945 during an air raid. Photo: Public Domain Wikimedia Commons By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout Art gets lost, stolen, or destroyed all the time. Thousands of works have been destroyed by fires and wars or simply by someone changing their mind, like Rockefeller being…
Gustav Klimt. Beethoven Frieze (detail). Vienna. Photo: Public Domain Wikimedia Commons By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout Ludwig van Beethoven’s birth date is unknown but his baptism, that most likely took place no later than a day later, has been recorded as December 17, 1770. This year, therefore, it is a round 250 year…
Martiros Saryan. By the Well. Hot day, 1909. Martiros Saryan Museum, Yerevan, Armenia. Photo: Wikimedia Commons Public Domain “Man’s best friend” has been a friend of artists throughout centuries and esthetic styles. By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout As soon as I wrote a story about cats in fine art, dog aficionados felt a…
Couturier Cat. Tsuguharu Foujita. 1927. Photo: Public Domain Wikiart.org Before there were videos of funny cats on the Internet, for about 4000 years there were simply fun cat paintings. By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout Long before the entire world got stuck in front of flickering screens all day long, cat videos were the…
Food for the Soul will now be adding a dedicated mini-site to bring you all the culture stories in one place By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout The world has just hunkered down to wait out the virus. Everything has ground to a sudden halt: going to work or school, dining out or seeing…
The Ghent Altar or An Adoration of the Mystic Lamb. Inside panels. Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons, Public domain. The most stolen artwork ever has been restored to its original glory By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout When brothers Hubert and Jan van Eyck started painting panels of a commissioned altar some time in 1420’s…
Leonardo da Vinci. Ca.1491. Study for the Sforza monument. Image source: Wikimedia Commons, public domain By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout It was a classic moment of serendipity. Catherine, Robert and I have been filming stories about da Vinci in Milan when we met at a book fair an Italian author, Marco Malvaldi, who…
“If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need”. Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 BC) By Nina Heyn, Your Culture Scout A typical museum of fine art is a depository of paintings, drawings and sculptures, sometimes objects of historical value, writings or artifacts (think the MET or the Tate). They fulfill the…
“Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. The sitter is merely the accident, the occasion. It is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on the coloured canvas, reveals himself.” Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray By…
“I believe that art can create the power and energy of happiness,” artist Hung Yi. By Nina Heyn, Your Culture Scout As you probably know, apart from gorgeous views, overpriced real estate and great restaurants, San Francisco is famous for its outstanding museums that rival the New York ones. Here are three of them to…
“Even the most art-averse cynic will recognize the blood, sweat and tears that went in to creating this strange and beautiful experience.” ~ Jordan Hoffman, reviewing Sky Ladder in The Guardian By Nina Heyn, Your Culture Scout In the 21st century, serious collectors have significantly turned away from old masters and impressionism towards modern art….
“A beautiful body perishes, but a work of art dies not.” Leonardo Da Vinci By Nina Heyn, Your Culture Scout What does Leonardo da Vinci have to do with salt? Quite a lot if you are in the city of Cracow. If you have already crossed Paris and Venice off your travel list and you…
Food for the Soul Series Check it out: The Luncheon of the Boating Party by Pierre-Auguste Renoir By Nina Heyn – Your Culture Scout “To my mind, a picture should be something pleasant, cheerful, and pretty, yes, pretty! There are too many unpleasant things in life as it is without creating still more of them.”…