A latchkey kid in rural Japan learned the world through American radio, then painted that solitude into the most recognizable children in contemporary art.
Long before November 11 marked the end of a war, it belonged to a Roman soldier who cut his cloak in half, a gesture painters kept returning to.
Around 1400, painters from Prague to Florence shared one courtly style of gold, lapis, and garden flowers, until the Renaissance quietly absorbed it.
Long before museums claimed them, painters turned their own walls, staircases, and gardens into the most personal artworks they ever made.
Long before online outrage, a single canvas could end a career, summon the Inquisition, or sink a royal marriage, and these paintings did exactly that.
Gertrude Abercrombie painted moonlit rooms and lone sorceresses for the jazz musicians who filled her home, and a $30 estate sale find sold for $1.35 million.
Long before their bright palettes made them famous, and sometimes long after, the great colorists of modern art painted skulls, murders, and war in near-black.
From Mumbai to Madrid, contemporary artists are mining old masters, miniatures, and caricature, and giving those traditions new life for the screen age.
Decades before Impressionism, Dada, and Surrealism took the credit, smaller art movements had already reached the same ideas, then slipped out of the story.
A numerologist's tip and years of looking at Chinese gardens led Brice Marden to a spectrum painting that reached MoMA with its paint still wet.
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