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M.C. Escher spent a lifetime turning flat sheets of paper into puzzles of birds becoming fish, angels becoming devils, and one shape sliding seamlessly into the next. It's easy to forget that his art was made for the page — because so much of it seems built to wrap around something. That instinct is exactly what a small run of porcelain vases capitalized on roughly 35 years ago. Produced under license from Cordon Art — the Baarn, Netherlands company that has held the rights to Escher's estate since the 1960s — these vases took some of his most famous tessellations...

Bram Bogart (born Abraham van den Boogaart) was a painter born on July 12, 1921, in Delft, the Netherlands, who later became a Belgian citizen and left a lasting mark on postwar abstract art. The son of a blacksmith, he trained as a decorator at a technical school and took a correspondence course in drawing on the side. After the war, the twenty-five-year-old painter settled in Paris, where he became one of the founders of Art Informel, initially experimenting with cubism and figurative subjects like flowers, still lifes, and self-portraits. It was during the 1950s that he shifted toward impasto,...

If you want to understand how painting survived — and mattered — through the AIDS crisis, the culture wars of the 1980s, and the long shadow of Conceptualism, you have to look at Ross Bleckner. By the late 1970s, plenty of critics had declared painting dead, eclipsed by Minimalism and Conceptual art. Bleckner, trained at NYU alongside Sol LeWitt and Chuck Close and later at CalArts, didn't just keep painting — he made a case for why it still needed to exist. His early striped and geometric works absorbed the vocabulary of Op Art and hard-edge abstraction, but he pushed...

a blog on Lucio Fontana

Hans Waanders worth collecting