The war between democracy and aristocracy in Janet Malcolm’s Forty-One False Starts.

The Whitney’s adventurous, awkward attempt to explore abstract art through the blues.

Even when painting is abstract, it never ceases to be concerned with decoration.

Robert Burley’s The Disappearance of Darkness, Harvey Wang’s From Darkroom to Daylight.

The Smithsonian’s show on the Civil War and American Art expresses a deep unease about the relationship between between art and history.

MoMA’s monumental exhibition recalls the time when abstraction affected people like love or revolution.

A Russian novelist’s fight, in life and art, to see the world afresh in all its cruelty and splendor.

How working in hotels led Henri Matisse and Ian Wallace to rediscover the intoxicating purity of light.

The Canadian artist who transformed the Vancouver art scene.