Feted as the “Queen of the Bohemians,” Abercrombie saw herself as a kind of jazz witch forging dream visions into a strange, eerie, and occult body of work.

The president’s obsession with cultural control is evidence of a continued fascist creep, and not just another joke exercise in narcissism.

The calligrapher, illustrator, and mother to Andy Warhol lived with her son in New York City for decades, supporting and even collaborating with him on artistic projects.

The burning of large areas in the city suggests the dusk of America as a dream manufacturer, and the beginnings of a darker story.

Jacopo Ligozzi gave visual expression to the developing myth of empirical objectivity, of being able to successfully collect, measure, analyze, and categorize.

The authorities inadvertently transformed a perp walk photo of the accused killer of a healthcare CEO into a Renaissance painting of the arrest of Christ.

Memento moris remind us that death is inevitable, nothing afterward is assured, and what we do in that crack of light between oblivions is our responsibility.

Launched on October 31, 1517, the Protestant Reformation broke not just with the Catholic Church but with all that’s dark and demonic, wanton and witchy.

A new book provides an ideal introduction to a Renaissance painter largely known only to specialists, but who was counted among the most important of his generation.

Death, in the artist’s imagination, is the oblivion that spares no one, regardless of what you have or haven’t done, regardless of who you are. 

The artist would develop a distinctly Protestant imagery that replaced sacredness with utility, functioning essentially as propaganda minister for Martin Luther.

The first woman to make her living from painting captured herself and other women in the ways they wished to be perceived.

The vandal who beheaded Esther Strauss’s sculpture of the Virgin Mary in labor disregarded centuries-old depictions of the mother of God as just a mother.

The 12th-century mystic continues to attract devotees among both Catholic clergy and New Age gurus, Christian traditionalists and radical feminists.

In his violent, carnal visions, sparks of divinity may glow even from within the blackest confines of our fallen reality.

The 16th-century “Isenheim Altarpiece” confronts us with the reality of suffering, violence, and death in a century where violence is both omnipresent and obscured.

The artist’s perplexing paintings should be viewed not as mere visual puzzles, but instantiations of an occult philosophy.

He believed, and demonstrated, that individuals could ascend to divine realms of knowledge.

His 1559 masterpiece “The Fight Between Carnival and Lent” is an argument in paint for moral and spiritual ambivalence. 

Bosch was the inventor of the modern Western imagining of the demonic while transcending that tradition — all because of bad weather and moldy bread.