Whenever French 18th-century artist Adélaïde Labille-Guiard is mentioned, it’s almost always as a counterpoint to her better-known “rival,” Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun.
Bridget Quinn
Bridget Quinn is a writer, art historian, and critic living in the Bay Area. Her most recent book is Portrait of a Woman: Art, Rivalry & Revolution in the Life of Adèlaïde Labille-Guiard. You can find her on her website.
Three Modernist Women Who Reclaimed the Nude
Painting Her Pleasure delves into the work of three women artists whose own engagement with the nude was prescient and groundbreaking
Tracing the Hand of Botticelli
Botticelli’s drawings bring us tantalizingly close to the artist, a man as clouded by intimations of darkness, and seeking some salve of beauty, as we are today.
Beauty and Danger in the Art of Ambreen Butt
The Pakistan-born, Texas-based artist creates energetic works underpinned by a pervasive sense of threat.
Rupy C. Tut’s Landscapes of Belonging
Her paintings, springing from traditional Indian miniature painting made large, radiate both rootedness and displacement.
The Dreamlike Paths of Dialogue with a Somnambulist
The texts in Chloe Aridjis’s new collection of stories and essays unspool not via chronological order, but through the strange rationality of dreams.
A Museum Guard’s Ode to the Healing Power of Art
In All the Beauty in the World, Patrick Bringley revisits the many ways that art meets life, and life art, and how death is often the bridge between them.
The Art World “Darling” Who Went Rogue
Joan Brown resented the easy commodification of her work, and the incessant demand for her to create something just so others could own it.
Rosa Bonheur’s Animal Instinct
Her art demonstrates a grasp of animal nature beyond picturesque figures in a landscape or sentimental stand-ins for human emotion.
Pastels Are Damned Beautiful
An exhibition spanning the 16th century to the present displays pastels in all their lush, radiating color.
Joan Mitchell, a Brilliant Painter and Contrarian at Heart
If painting was Mitchell’s sickness, it was also her salvation.
The Many Feminisms of Contemporary Art
After years in the making, New Time opens at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive.