Visual Moment | Photographer Richard Avedon’s New Take on the Group Portrait
Sometime in the late 1970s, my father-in-law, who owned a bookstore in Chicago, arranged a book-signing party for the photographer Richard Avedon.
Visual Moment | Judy Chicago’s Revolutionary Art
Judy Chicago always wanted to be an artist. “From the time I was a child,” she writes in her 2021 autobiography, The Flowering, “I had a burning desire to make art.”
The First Blockbuster Art Exhibition of Our Time
A new exhibition highlights the story of how some of the world’s most iconic European paintings left Germany immediately after World War II and ended up touring the United States in what became the first blockbuster art exhibition of our time.
Visual Moment | The Compelling Odysseys of Looted Art
In the sumptuous catalogue for the New York Jewish Museum’s late summer exhibition, Afterlives: Recovering the Lost Stories of Looted Art, on view through January 9, 2022, a cropped image of French artist Pierre Bonnard’s color-diffused painting Still Life with Guelder Roses appears alongside an army photograph of the salt mine in Altaussee, Austria, where the Nazis secreted looted art and other treasures.
Visual Moment | Sacred Art from an Italian Ghetto
In the middle of the 18th century in the city of Ancona on the Adriatic coast of central Italy, a young Jewish girl, about age 15, produced a stunning work of embroidery.
Visual Moment | A Biblical Family Torn Asunder
Some works of art are perfect receptacles for the stresses and troubles of their times while they are graced with a wisdom that is fundamental and ongoing, making them perpetually relevant.
Art Moments
With so many museums and galleries closed or open only for reduced hours this winter, here are a few opportunities to experience art.
Jewish Museums Leap Into the Covid Void
If there’s one thing museums have learned from the pandemic that forced them into cyberspace, it’s that the audience that is hungry for what they have to offer—whether lectures, courses or archival treasures—is much larger than they knew.
Visual Moment | Milton Glaser: Master of Design
The world lost a towering figure in the field of design this year. Graphic artist, illustrator, teacher, icon maker, art director and creative thinker Milton Glaser passed away after a long illness on June 26, his 91st birthday.
Lost Time: Painting through a Pandemic
Confined to her home studio outside Tel Aviv during the COVID-19 lockdown, artist Zoya Cherkassky started producing a painting a day.
Visual Moment | The Daring Madame D’Ora
Recalling a past that was so different from wartime and its terrors, she wrote: “I was only familiar with one of them, the one perfumed with luxury and flowered with orchids.”
Talking With God at Auschwitz
A new exhibition marking the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the former death camp examines how faith helped sustain people during the Holocaust.