Vanished Smile (R A Scotti)

Imagine walking up to the Mona Lisa, removing it from the wall, and carrying it down the corridor for a private viewing. Keep it as long as you like! It seems absurd, doesn’t it? And yet that was possible a century ago. Museum policy permitted photographers to remove art from the Louvre’s galleries with no [...]

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Charles Harper’s Birds & Words (Charley Harper)

Charles Harper’s Birds & Words [LibraryThing / WorldCat] is a collection of about five dozen bird prints originally published by the Ford Motor Company in the 1950s and reprinted in a very limited edition twenty years later. Now, a year after Harper’s death, his paintings are gathered together again. Working in a self-described “minimal realism” [...]

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The Art of the Snowflake (Kenneth Libbrecht)

As kids we were all told snowflakes were six-sided crystals and no two were alike. Most of us even made paper cutouts or drew snowflakes for winter school projects. But how often have we had the chance to actually see six points on a real snowflake? I lucked out just last month as they fell [...]

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The Irish Game (Matthew Hart)

There’s nothing like a good art heist movie. A shady collector bankrolls a technically sophisticated theft but eventually gets caught when an even more impressive armada of security forces snare him in a net. Real art heists don’t always involve collectors. Increasingly, art is a commodity for drug traffickers. The works aren’t appreciated as art [...]

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