Art Study

The one real difference between the American press and the Soviet state newspaper Pravda was that the Russian people knew they were being lied to. To expose the lies our media tell us today, controversial journalist James O'Keefe created Project Veritas, an independent news organization whose reporters go where traditional journalists dare not. Their investigative work - equal parts James Bond, Mike Wallace, and Saul Alinsky - has had a consistent and powerful impact on its targets.

Price of Fame, the concluding volume of the life of an exceptionally brilliant polymath, chronicles Luce's progress from her arrival on Capitol Hill through her career as a diplomat, prolific journalist, and magnetic public speaker, as well as a playwright, screenwriter, pioneer scuba diver, early experimenter in psychedelic drugs, and grande dame of the GOP in the Reagan era.

In Keeping Christmas, novelist and Dickens enthusiast Allison Pittman offers 25 readings for advent, seamlessly bringing together the word of God and the words of A Christmas Carol. This contemplative, entertaining book is the perfect companion for those dark winter nights as we eagerly anticipate the coming celebration of Christmas when, like Scrooge, we are given the gift of reflection, repentance, and life anew.

In Finding God in the Land of Narnia, best-selling authors Kurt Bruner and Jim Ware explore the deep spiritual themes of redemption and grace found in the popular Chronicles of Narnia series by C.S. Lewis. With amazing clarity that captures the tone and style of C.S. Lewis himself, the authors offer a depth of insight that will surprise even the most ardent Lewis fan. Each chapter will help readers gain not only a deeper understanding of the popular Lewis series, but of God himself.

All of the greatest creators, from Beethoven to Edison, had something in common. They didn't just create stuff. They created a ton of stuff. That's why I'm a big believer that producers should produce more, directors should direct more, and, of course, writers should write more. The funny thing is, too many writers I know just can't finish a script. Maybe they have ideas, and maybe they write a few scenes, but they don't get to the end. Or maybe they've never written anything and are too afraid to start! That's why I wrote this book.

To many who have discovered his books, C. S. Lewis is more than simply a writer; he has been a spiritual mentor. Here, over 50 Christians share how meeting the mind and imagination of Lewis in his books sparked the beginning or changed the course of their spiritual journey. These inspiring reflections have been shared by ordinary laypeople as well as many well-known leaders and writers.

Honor Yourself: The Inner Art of Giving and Receiving is a must-listen guide for everyone who wants to achieve internal harmony! Life is rarely an either/or equation. In principle and practice, life is full of contradiction - paradox. This inspirational audiobook explores one of the many paradoxes of life - the paradox of giving and receiving. Combining wisdom from the world's great spiritual traditions with real-life stories and practical tools, it exposes the myths that keep people from living a full and purposeful life.

An essay by Edward Lucie-Smith on David Hockney's portraits exhibited at the Royal Academy's "82 Portraits and One Still-Life", and also "David Hockney and the Yorkshire Landscape" at RA in 2012.

Forgotten Empire, the new exhibition in London devoted to the great realm that Alexander the Great destroyed, is an openly political occasion, designed to stress links in the present as well as to revive interest in a part of the past that has more or less sunk into oblivion. It stresses the fact that, despite the tensions that now exist between the Islamic Republic of Iran and Western Europe, a degree of cultural cooperation is still possible.

Lucio Fontana is rightly regarded as one of the most important Italian artists active in the 20 years after World War II, important not only in Italy, but in a pan-European sense. It is, however, also important to remember additionally that he was born in Argentina and spent quite important parts of his early career there, working first as an assistant to his father, Luigi, a sculptor, and then independently.

The tendency for art to detach itself from any duty to reflect observed reality manifested itself in avant-garde art production almost from the beginnings of the Modern Movement in art. It is already present in pure form in Malevich’s drastically reductive Black Square, which consists of exactly that, a black square on a white ground. It is interesting to note the way in which this work was exhibited when it was first put before the public.

The story of David Burliuk, now generally regarded as the father of Russian Futurism, is in some ways one of the strangest in the history of the Modern Movement in art. He was immensely influential in the years immediately before the Russian Revolution, at a time when the whole of the Russian cultural world was in ferment. And fairly soon after that, he was almost forgotten in his own country. This exhibition is, among other things, an attempt to correct an injustice.

Art in Puerto Rico occupies a kind of bridge position, between the North American art world one the one hand and the various Latin American and Caribbean art worlds on the other. Puerto Rican artists have easy physical aspects to the United States, and large Puerto Rican colonies in major American cities, notably New York and Chicago, have led to the birth of mixed vernacular cultures. The one in New York is sometimes referred to as Nuyorican, and has a populist downtown vibe that swings the spotlight toward it every time graffiti art returns to fashion.

Wifredo Lam is by far the most celebrated, and most people would say the greatest, artist produced by the Caribbean region in modern times. His relationship with where he came from is, however, extraordinarily complex - much more complex than most of his admirers suppose, largely because they usually have no direct experience of the region and little knowledge of its social history.

John Millais is the most paradoxical of Britain’s major Victorian artists. Already recognized in his teens as prodigiously gifted, he chose to risk everything by becoming a founder-member of the Pre-Raphaelites, a revolutionary group of neo-primitive painters who, despite the support offered to them by John Ruskin, the most influential critic of the day, risked being treated as outcasts by the ruling artistic establishment.

The creation of a masterpiece needs more than simply determination on the part of a single individual - though this, of course, is a myth that has continuously gained in strength since the time of Michelangelo. As Michelangelo himself well knew, masterpieces grow from a will to see them made on the part of patrons, who often play nearly as important a part in the process as the man who holds the brush or wields the chisel. The Sistine ceiling would never have come into existence had it not been for Pope Julius II.

The current agitation about the restitution of artistic treasures of all kinds to their original locations is usually presented as overdue justice for faults committed by European colonialism. In fact, this is a serious oversimplification. Conquering armies have always regarded works of art as legitimate spoil. Modern attitudes to the legitimate or illegitimate possession of famous artworks can be traced to the European Enlightenment that blossomed in the late 18th century.

The new exhibition at the National Gallery in London ought to be yet another triumph for an institution that is now running a very ambitious exhibition program. Yet this event makes a curiously uneasy effect. There are several, not just one, reasons for this. The first is that Rubens, of all great artists the one who enjoyed the greatest degree of worldly success, had distinctly uneasy beginnings. Of sound Flemish bourgeois stock, he was born in 1577 at Siegen in Westphalia.

Many people - among them, most art-world insiders - think that Joseph Beuys was the most important artist of the second half of the 20th century. Beuys was many things - a shaman, a trickster, a charismatic social and political activist. He spearheaded the return to prominence of the German avant-garde post-World War II, and his impact on both the European and American art worlds continues to be felt today, nearly 20 years after his death in January 1986.

Have you ever wondered if your current season has a purpose? Do you ever feel like your present moment is so far from where you really long to be, but the answer to all your prayers is "not yet"? Join bestselling author and artist Ruth Chou Simons for this six-session audio Bible study as she...