Pierre-August Renoir (1841-1919) led the Impressionist style but also was a singer, a student of Charles Gounod. Family circumstances, however, led him away from Gounod’s church choir and into a porcelain factory apprenticeship at age 13. Mechanization of his work

“Work like a slave; command like a king; create like a god” The majority of photographs taken of French-Romanian sculptor Constantin Brâncuși (1876-1957) show a kind of Grizzly Adams, a man with unkempt hair, long beard, a deeply lined face

Picasso’s 1937 oil painting Guernica is considered one of the ‘most moving and powerful anti-war painting in history.’ The work is enormous, standing 3.49 meters (11 ft 5 in) tall and 7.76 meters (25 ft 6 in) across. The picture

American sculptor Alexander Calder (1898-1976) was known not only for his distinctive mobiles but also his ‘stabiles,’ non-moving sculptures. One of his best-known ‘stabiles’ is Cirque Calder (Calder’s Circus), a collection of over 70 miniature figures and animals with over

Born Andrew Warhola on 6 August 1928 in Pittsburgh, Andy Warhol (1928-1987) was a leading figure in the visual art movement known as pop art. This exciting artistic movement challenged the traditions of fine art by including imagery from popular

The art of the Norwegian painter Edvard Munch (1863-1944) was always conducted in the shadow of illness – both his own and hereditary mental illnesses that ran in his family. In his art, we find out hidden fears, the shadow

We think of Debussy as the composer of the dreamworld sound of impressionism. He was an active follower of the symbolist movement, which rejected naturalism, realism, and clear-cut forms in favour of the indefinite and the mysterious. The symbolist poets

An exhibition just opened in Muscat, Sultanate of Oman, on the artistic legacy of Franco Zeffirelli (1923-2019). In talking to people at the opening, so many remember so many different aspects of his art: one remembers his film of Romeo