The Bath is a print, or a series of prints, made by Mary Cassatt in 1891 – at the height of her powers and at a moment when her interest in Japanese prints opened a wonderful set of visual ideas in her mind. Her powers were considerable.  When Pissarro visited her studio in April of that year he wrote of her work to his son Lucien (the two Pissarros had been experimenting with prints themselves. ) You remember the effects you strove for at Eragny?  Well, Miss Cassatt has realized just such [...] more

Giacometti made this portrait of the British art critic David Sylvester in 1960: I think a restful thing about Giacometti is the way different permutations of the same lines and shadings -- the same darkly scratched lines and the same shadings of gray, white, and black -- constitute both the figure and the ground.     A person is a coalescence.   And derives substantiality from the abstract.   The longer you look, the more humane this seems.   [...] more