The painter Morris Louis was born in Baltimore, where he attended the Maryland Institute of Fine and Applied Arts from 1929 to 1933. After four years living and working in New York, Louis returned to Baltimore to work as a private art instructor before making his final move to Washington, D.C., in 1952. The 1950s were pivotal for Louis’s career; he produced his most mature and celebrated works of art during this decade. While teaching at the Washington Workshop Center of the Arts, Louis met fellow abstract painter Kenneth Noland, with whom he visited the studio of Helen Frankenthaler. Louis was profoundly inspired by Frankenthaler’s work and incorporated her method of staining canvases into his own process, producing the color-field paintings for which he is known today.
These silver Torah finials are from Corfu and were made between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, by an artist whose initials were A.Z. They were used in the Scuola Greca Synagogue, which…
Motherwell’s most famous series of artworks was his Elegies to the Spanish Republic, which he intended as “a funeral song” for the losing side, the Republicans, in the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939)…
This Piedmontese synagogue, built in 1595, is typical of many synagogues constructed in times and places where Jews did not want to call attention to themselves because of fear of persecution. From…