As we approach three full decades of a world without the Soviet Union, certain details about life in the societies that constituted it inevitably begin to fa...

Gustav Mahler (1860-1911). While decorative funeral masks have been used to adorn the dead since ancient times, from those gracing Tutankhamen to Agamemnon, ...

One of the finest achievements of European furniture making, this cabinet is the most important product from Abraham (1711--1793) and David Roentgen's (1743-...

History remembers Pablo Picasso first as an innovative painter, and second as an uninhibited personality. The latter especially generated many an anecdote ...

In the spring of 1980, Debbie Harry and Chris Stein of Blondie met H.R. Giger at a party at the Hansen Gallery in New York City, which was showing an exhibit...

Washington-based painter Tyree Callahan modified a 1937 Underwood Standard typewriter, replacing the letters and keys with colour pads and hued labels to cre...

If you've worked in retail you'll know how boredom can often kick in. These industrious bookshop employees have found a novel way to combat this boredom.

SOMEWHERE OFF ROUTE 50 IN Herndon, Virginia, next to a LabCorp and across the street from a dentist’s office, there is a warehouse that houses almost every p...

The daguerreotype was the first commercially successful photographic process (1839-1860) in the history of photography. Named after the inventor, Louis Jac...

On 7 May 1964, a gaggle of excited passengers alighted on to a rainy disused railway station platform in south Manchester and took their seats for what one o...

“At first I went with a Youth Board worker to take pictures of their wounds from a gang war in front of their candy store hang-out,” recalls Bruce Davidson o...

Moments after Valerie Solanas entered Andy Warhol’s sixth-floor office at 33 Union Square West on June 3, 1968, carrying two guns and a massive, paranoid gru...

Spartacus not only led a slave revolt with tens of thousands of soldiers in the first century B.C., but repeatedly defeated Rome in battle. Still, his moti...

On the evening of July 27, 1890, Vincent van Gogh stumbled back to his tiny room at the Auberge Ravoux in Auvers-sur-Oise, just north of Paris. When the in...

Diane Arbus was born on March 14, 1923, in New York City. An artistic youth, she learned photography from her husband, actor Allan Arbus. Together, they fo...

Before Stanley Kubrick directed arguably some of the best movies ever made like "2001: Space Odyssey" or "The Shining," he was a simple teenager in New Yor...

The Republic of Congo and its neighbor the Democratic Republic of Congo are not often associated with the latest international fashion trends. In recent ye...

Uğur Gallen was born and lives in Turkey, and for years has seen neighbouring Syria plunged into a civil war that has affected the lives of millions of peopl...

Ogawa Kazumasa lived from the 1860s to almost the 1930s, surely one of the most fascinating 70-year stretches in Japanese history. Ogawa's homeland "opened" ...

The Bauhaus, Barry Bergdoll writes in the New York Times of the German design school founded a century ago last month, "lasted just 14 years before the Nazis...

In 1851, three years after war with Mexico had halved that country and expanded U.S. territory into what would become several new states, Emma Willard, the n...

Russian marine biologist and underwater photographer Alexander Semenov creates extraordinary photographs of the deep sea aliens. Alexander is currently leadi...

Catherine II was Empress of Russia for more than 30 years. Born Sophie Friederike Auguste von Anhalt-Zerbst on May 1729 in Stettin (now Szczecin in Poland), ...

Reducing an artist’s work to their biography produces crude understanding. But in very many cases, life and work cannot be teased apart. This applies not onl...