Stephen West writes about arts and culture in California. Previously he was media business editor at the Los Angeles Times, executive editor of Daily Variety and, until he retired in 2017, an editor and arts writer for Bloomberg News in San Francisco.
Photographers created a visual revolution in the 19th century by describing the world accurately, almost scientifically. They forced other artists... Read more →
It's summer in San Francisco, time to head to the park, demonstrate your hipness, and show off your tattoos. The de Young Museum's big new exhibition... Read more →
What is there left to say about Andy Warhol? He was one of a handful of 20th-century artists who truly became household names, like Picasso. He was a... Read more →
Becky Sharp, the anti-heroine of William Makepeace Thackeray's sprawling 19th-century novel Vanity Fair, is a handful. Ambitious but poor, charming... Read more →
In Peter Paul Rubens's spectacular Daniel in the Lions' Den, a buff Daniel, with long brown hair flowing over the shoulders and dressed only in a... Read more →
In 1914, Claude Monet could have put away his paint brushes for good. He was financially secure, and his reputation as a star of French Impressionism... Read more →
Before the Brothers Grimm, before Hans Christian Andersen, there was the Roman poet Ovid, who wrote a 15-book epic of mythological tales called... Read more →
The American art scene in the '60s and '70s was almost totally a boys club, and one of the few women who broke through to full membership was Vija... Read more →
Brassai was more than a talented documentary photographer. He was a visual poet of the streets of Paris in the 1930s, focusing on the ordinary... Read more →
Paul Gauguin is probably best known for his tempestuous friendship with Vincent Van Gogh in the south of France and his late work in Tahiti. Yet an... Read more →
Follow Us