Portal:Visual arts

The Cloisters, also known as the Met Cloisters, is a museum in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Upper Manhattan, New York City. The museum, situated in Fort Tryon Park, specializes in European medieval art and architecture, with a focus on the Romanesque and Gothic periods. Governed by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, it contains a large collection of medieval artworks shown in the architectural settings of French monasteries and abbeys. Its buildings are centered around four cloisters—the Cuxa, Saint-Guilhem, Bonnefont and Trie—that were acquired by American sculptor and art dealer George Grey Barnard in France before 1913, and moved to New York. Barnard's collection was bought for the museum by financier and philanthropist John D. Rockefeller Jr. Other major sources of objects were the collections of J. P. Morgan and Joseph Brummer.

The museum's building was designed by the architect Charles Collens, on a site on a steep hill, with upper and lower levels. It contains medieval gardens and a series of chapels and themed galleries, including the Romanesque, Fuentidueña, Unicorn, Spanish, and Gothic rooms. The design, layout, and ambiance of the building are intended to evoke a sense of medieval European monastic life. It holds about 5,000 works of art and architecture, all European and mostly dating from the Byzantine to the early Renaissance periods, mainly during the 12th through 15th centuries. The objects include stone and wood sculptures, tapestries, illuminated manuscripts and panel paintings, of which the best known include the c. 1422 Early Netherlandish Mérode Altarpiece and the c. 1495–1505 Flemish Hunt of the Unicorn tapestries. (Full article...)

“	When I've painted a woman's behind so that I want to touch it, then it's finished!	”
	— Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Vollard, Ambroise (1925). Renoir: an initimate record. Translated by Van Dooren, Harold L.; Weaver, Randolph T. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. p. 57. OCLC 631984646.

Jean Bellette (occasionally Jean Haefliger; 25 March 1908 – 16 March 1991) was an Australian artist. Born in Tasmania, she was educated in Hobart and at Julian Ashton's art school in Sydney, where one of her teachers was Thea Proctor. In London she studied under painters Bernard Meninsky and Mark Gertler.

A modernist painter, Bellette was influential in mid-twentieth century Sydney art circles. She frequently painted scenes influenced by the Greek tragedies of Euripides and Sophocles and the epics of Homer. The only woman to have won the Sulman Prize more than once, Bellette claimed the accolade in 1942 with For Whom the Bell Tolls, and in 1944 with Iphigenia in Tauris. She helped found the Blake Prize for Religious Art, and was its inaugural judge. Bellette married artist and critic Paul Haefliger in 1935. The couple moved to Majorca in 1957; although she visited and exhibited in Australia thereafter, she did not return there to live, and became peripheral to the Australian art scene. (Full article...)

• ... that art historian Zehava Jacoby was able to suggest a reconstruction of the lost tomb of Baldwin V of Jerusalem, destroyed in an 1808 fire, using an 18th-century drawing by Elzear Horn?
• ... that Mexican filmmaker David Zonana wrote his first feature film after producing for two other directors?
• ... that the British rap song "Jiggle Jiggle" by filmmaker Louis Theroux has been used in more than two million TikTok videos?
• ... that to encourage the development of Bissau-Guinean cinema, one foreign filmmaker provided the country's film institute with cameras, lights, and a Steinbeck guitar?
• ... that the documentary Railway with a Heart of Gold has actual footage of a derailment captured whilst the filmmaker was attached to the side of the train?
• ... that Bernie Wrightson spent seven years drawing an illustrated edition of Mary Shelley's 1818 novel Frankenstein?
• ... that The Wiccan Web recommends drawing pentagrams on your computer screen with tinctures?
• ... that the art of Irma Blank, of "drawing languages without words" and including sounds, was recognised in the 1970s but fell into obscurity until a rediscovery in the 2010s?