In private, the Pre-Raphaelite painter had a silly side

When it was released in 1991, Nirvana’s Nevermind sent shockwaves through the music world. It brought alternative rock to the mainstream and almost overnight made Nirvana the biggest band in the world. The record went on to sell over 30 million copies and is widely considered to be one of the greatest albums of all time. Part of Nevermind’s success was almost certainly due to its incredible cover, created by Robert Fisher. The cover now features in the Museum of Modern Art’s collection and is regarded as a design classic. But before Nevermind’s release...

The earliest known painting of an animal has been identified in a cave on the island of Borneo.

How a staple of luxury décor has gone from work of art to designer must-have – with some ups and downs along the way.

Learn a new creative skill or delve into art history and graphic design through online courses offered by Harvard, Yale, CalArts, and more.

Men using the public toilets in Antiochia ad Cragum would have gotten the dirty jokes in the floor mosaics.

Rich visual parallels between [Australian] Indigenous artworks and microscopic natural structures hidden in the world around us reveal unexpected and intriguing similarities that can deepen our respect for our country and its stories. By Roger Wepf.

A selection of entries from this year’s competition, which is open for submissions until November 15

Christie’s has sold its first piece of AI art, a canvas named the Portrait of Edmond Belamy, for $432,500. The sale is unusual not only as a first for the 252-year-old auction house, but because the expected price for the print was between $7,000 and $10,000.

Well blow me down! These fantastical, bizarre, hilarious scrolls date from the Edo period in Japan, which spanned the years 1603–1868 for those too lazy to Wikipedia it (I know because I Wikipedia’d it). Authorship for them is unknown, which leads me to believe that they were a very refined form of bathroom graffiti, like those beautiful Japanese ceramic figurines that used to appear in Playboy under the heading “Ribald Art” or something that would reveal the figure’s naughty lady parts if you turned it upside down.

Compared with the sophisticated technology Russia employed to meddle in the 2016 U.S. election, the Soviet propaganda in Brutal Bloc Postcards, published by FUEL Design and Publishing, seems downright quaint. Many of these postcards, published by governments of the U.S.S.R. between the 1960s and 1980s, depict the bland, 1960s five-story concrete-paneled apartments known as “khrushchyovka” as if to say, “Look at the modern wonder of collective worker housing!”

Canvas of Girl With Balloon passes through shredder in frame shortly after £1m sale

The woman who bid $1.4 million for a print by renowned artist Banksy will go ahead with the purchase even though it was shredded just after it was auctioned. Strips were left hanging off the famous work from 2006, titled Girl With a Balloon, after the gavel went down at Sotheby’s last week. A video on social media later revealed that a shredding device was built into the painting to be activated if it were ever auctioned.

A catchy tune and one of Stephen Gammell’s illustrations from Alvin Schwartz’s trilogy, ‘Scary Stories To Tell in the Dark.’   If you look at the unassuming photo used by publisher Simon and Schuster of illustrator Stephen Gammell, you will, in no way, perceive the smiling, white-bearded and spectacled man was responsible for creating images which have terrorized the minds of children since 1981. But he is, and I hope this helps reinforce the golden rule one should never judge a book (or a person) by their cover.

The Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in London recently published scans of two of the Leonardo da Vinci notebooks so website visitors can digitally zoom and flip through the drawings and musings of the Italian Renaissance painter, architect, inventor, and sculptor. Jumbled together in the delicate journals are thoughts on both science and art—detailed charts and speculations contained on the same pages as observational sketches of hats or horse hooves.

Australia's last remaining piano-maker has just created an instrument the likes of which the world has never seen. Most grand pianos have 88 keys but Wayne Stuart's family-run business in Tumut, southern New South Wales, has built the first known piano with an impressive 108 keys. This means it boasts a nine octave range, unheard of on the piano until now.

For those who believe in the distinction between high art and low, video games have long been near the bottom of the pile. Fortunately, that has not stopped some of the world’s great art museums from putting on exhibitions. The Museum of Modern Art, in New York, began acquiring games in 2012 and a year later invited visitors to play some of them in a show called “Applied Design”. The most recent video-games exhibition, “Videogames Design/Play/Disrupt”, takes place at an even grander instituion – the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

There are many studies about how we process tonal music and figurative painting, but philosophers are just beginning to understand how our brains react to more abstract work.

The Bard gave Queen Margaret more lines than any other female character, and more than King Lear.

Before established a certain cause of death for the Baroque painter, scientists first had to find his body.

For an artist that's known for his stunts, this could be Banksy's most perfect art world prank. After the gavel fell Friday at Sotheby's auction house in London, Banksy's Girl with Balloon was reduced to shreds -- another apparent act in the disruptive career of the anonymous British graffiti artist.

Art

Before New York City became the shining metropolis that we know today, with its glass and concrete skyscrapers and wide, shop-filled avenues, much of it was quiet farmland. In fact, prior to the mid-1800s, most of the area that would become New York City was all but undeveloped. Before European colonization, the area we now know as New York was inhabited by a number of Algonquian tribes living in small communities.

In this febrile cultural moment filled with fear of the Other, horror has achieved the status of true art. By M M Owen.

Nowadays Weegee is regarded by most art critics as an artist of permanent significance, one whose work is thought all the more valuable precisely because, like the gangster movies of the ’30s that are mirrored in his crime-scene photos, it was created for commercial purposes. By Terry Teachout.

Christie’s has sold its first piece of AI art, a canvas named the Portrait of Edmond Belamy, for $432,500. The sale is unusual not only as a first for the 252-year-old auction house, but because the expected price for the print was between $7,000 and $10,000.

Fluffy felines may have ruled the internet for years, but they have influenced the art world for centuries. Amsterdam’s KattenKabinet exclusively showcases the art inspired by cats.

In the 1610s, a powerful Catholic cardinal with an insatiable taste for art discovered a sculptor named Gian Lorenzo Bernini. At the time, Bernini was a teenager, and still restoring ancient sculptures alongside his artist-father, Pietro. It wasn’t long after Cardinal Scipione Borghese laid eyes on Bernini’s own early work, however, that the young artist’s prospects began to change. Cardinal Borghese commissioned some of Bernini’s greatest works, amassing sculptures in his villa and helping to launch the career of the Renaissance icon.

Truly vibrant red was elusive for many years: until a mysterious dye was discovered in Mexico. Devon Van Houten Maldonado reveals how a crushed bug became a sign of wealth and status.

Originally published in 1491, Fasciculus medicinae quickly proved popular, and dozens of editions followed until 1522.

Non-invasive imaging reveals landscape painting beneath Pablo Picasso’s The Crouching Beggar but who created it remains a mystery

Squonks, Lindworms, Dijiangs, and more.