Art Stories

In July someone paid $30 for a small panel of nine shells at a Michigan estate sale; on October 1 it sold at auction in New York for $1.35 million. Its maker, Gertrude Abercrombie, thought herself ugly, called herself a “good witch,” opened her Chicago home to Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker, and paid her doctor with this very painting.

The theft and recovery of two Renoir paintings in Cagnes-sur-Mer reopen the story of the house where the painter spent his last twelve years. Arthritis, war, mourning, sculptures made with another artist's hands and a model who would end up in the movies: this was the last Renoir.

The Whitney in New York opens Roy Lichtenstein’s first major New York retrospective since 1993: the perfect moment to look behind his famous dots. A soldier too shy to knock on Picasso’s door, a broken marriage, the controversy with comic book artists and the secret discipline of the painter who turned comic panels into masterpieces: all of it hides behind the dots.

Seventy years after Pollock’s death, New York’s Metropolitan Museum finally brings Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock together as equals. Paintings signed with initials, destroyed canvases, collages made from fragments of Pollock’s paintings and sleepless nights turned into masterpieces: the secret story of the couple who reinvented abstract painting.

From Klimt’s record-shattering $236 million portrait to a Sorolla seascape and a near-forgotten Danish painter who beat his estimate twenty-five times over: 26 paintings sold between 2024 and 2026 that reveal what people are really buying – and why.

A tour of the 50 most important painters in art history, from Basquiat to Giotto. Discover each master's contribution, key works and how they transformed painting forever.

A hand-painted oil painting that preserves a memory, a watch to mark a new chapter, and eight other gifts to enjoy long after Christmas. This 2026 selection brings together useful, personal, and lasting ideas, with reference prices or suggested budgets under $1,000.

From Judith Beheading Holofernes to her extraordinary self-portraits, we explore ten essential paintings that reveal Artemisia Gentileschi's talent, audacity, and legacy, marking her as one of the great figures of the European Baroque.

This selection gathers 50 of Salvador Dalí's most famous and important paintings. It isn't a strict ranking but an approximately chronological tour of his evolution: the young painter with extraordinary technique in the 1920s, the surrealist of melting clocks, the creator of the paranoid-critical method and, finally, the artist who tried to reconcile Freud with Velázquez, nuclear physics with Catholicism and Renaissance tradition with mass culture.