In Focus

George Grosz arrived in Berlin in 1912, after attending art school in Dresden, and the city he discovered would provide both the raucous subject matter and the acerbic tone for his work over the next two decades.

On May 13, 1952, the celebrated artist George Grosz arrived in Dallas, Texas, finally reaching the landscape of his childhood dreams. Grosz's invitation to Dallas originated from Leon Harris, Jr., the young vice president of a Dallas department store, A. Harris & Company, who conceived the rather improbable idea of offering Grosz a major commission as a component of the store's 65th anniversary celebrations.

Chinese export porcelain was a particular interest of Wendy Reves. While Emery Reves was supportive of his wife's efforts, it was she who built this part of their collection. The inspiration to collect porcelain came from the New York philanthropist Mary Lasker. Emery Reves knew her husband, Albert Lasker, through their mutual involvement in postwar humanitarian projects on behalf of displaced Jewish refugees, and the couples often saw each other in New York and Europe.

Concentrations 17: Vernon Fisher, Lost for Words was a special exhibition at the Dallas Museum of Art from January 23 - April 17, 1988. The following is an essay from the brochure accompanying the exhibition, written by Sue Graze, then-Curator of Contemporary Art.

In the 13th century, Marco Polo wrote of the great Seljuk Turkish carpets of Anatolia. This weaving tradition continued even after the decline of the Seljuks and the rise of the Ottomans in the 14th-16th centuries. European scholars, uncertain of the names of the sites of Near and Middle-Eastern carpet manufacture, called them by the names of the artists in whose paintings they appear.

A 1747 description of the art of fan painting in The London Tradesman dismissed it as "an ingenious trifling Branch of the Painting Business.

The article "Luxe," or Luxury, in Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d'Alembert's Encyclopédie asserts that "[w]ithout an abundance of luxuries, men of all ranks believe themselves to be poor." If this appears a mere truism to us today, it was to 18th -century observers a sign of radical change overtaking their society. Luxury itself was nothing new, of course. It had long been a crucial mode of social differentiation, enforced by sumptuary laws and the marketplace.

Alexandre Hogue deliberately intensified the conditions in his depictions of the Southwestern United States in order to generate empathy within his viewers for the desert-like conditions. He called this approach psychoreality.

In contrast to Etruscan gold jewelry of the early Orientalizing stage, that of the Classical period is comparatively rare. Although the forms became less elaborate, the artistic talent of the Etruscan goldsmith was still strong enough to create novel shapes and develop new stylistic tendencies.