Bob Duggan
Contributing Writer
Bob Duggan has Master’s Degrees in English Literature and Education and is not afraid to use them. Born and raised in Philadelphia, PA, he has always been fascinated by art and brings an informed amateur’s eye to the conversation.
“Workers of the world, unite!”Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels bellowed in The Communist Manifesto in 1848, largely in response to the Industrial Revolution (and Second Industrial Revolution) threatening not just […]
Among the many things about America that the American Civil War changed was its art. Painting and sculpture simply couldn’t be the same. In these sesquicentennial years, every aspect of […]
Because two thirds of all countries in the world have abolished the death penalty, the majority of executions happen in just five countries—China, Iran, North Korea, Yemen, and the United […]
Despite knowing the full-colored truth, I’ve always pictured the 1930s and 1940s in black and white. Laura,The Big Sleep, The Killers, Shadow of a Doubt, and countless other examples of […]
On May 24, 1813, just months after publishing Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen went to a show in search of her female hero. ”I dare say Mrs. D[arcy] will be […]
How desperate can a city facing financial armageddon get? What’s the last resort for cities such as Detroit, wounded first by the failing American auto industry and then set bleeding […]
What really matters in an art education? Do we teach every child to paint or sculpt? Do we school them in names and dates and places? Or do we somehow […]
Modernism first moved on May 29, 1913. That’s century-old hyperbole, of course, but if any date achieves day of infamy status for modern art in the 20th century, it’s the […]
When the Tate Britain recently revealed the latest rehanging of their astounding collection of British art, many long unseen works found a new place in the galleries, but one long-standing […]
The gun debate in America may have “jumped the shark” with yesterday’s Mother’s Day Parade shooting in New Orleans that left 19 wounded, including two children. When something as universally […]
With all apologies to Neil Young, this is the story of Johnny Rotten, or at least the story of his clothes. PUNK: Chaos to Couture, which opens today at the […]
By some accounts, last year’s move of the Barnes Foundation from its original home to the new location on Philadelphia’s Benjamin Franklin Parkway marked the last stroke in the fall […]
Women have come a long way in the arts, but there’s still a long way to go. It’s not so unusual to find the work of contemporary women artists in […]
No myth about art and artists abides as pervasively as that of Vincent Van Gogh, the mad genius. To mark the grand reopening of the renovated Van Gogh Museum in […]
Few things are as painful to watch in movies as an activity you know and love being portrayed poorly. From the awkward baseball swings of athletically challenged actors to the […]
To paraphrase Tennyson, in the spring, a young (or old) man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of baseball. It’s “love” in the original, or course. When I saw a notice […]
Can the study of art history stop looking like ancient history itself? Can it transcend the old approaches and embrace the digital world? As digitized as art history has become […]
“[T]he Gothic era,” Bruno Klein writes in the introduction to Gothic: Visual Art of the Middle Ages, 1140-1500, “was a time of seeing, in which much was discussed in words, […]
Since the Victorian invention of the modern, romantic concept of childhood, images of the innocent child have dominated Anglo-American culture and its art. Even nude images of young children that […]
It is believed that the first war-related photographs were taken in 1847 by an anonymous photographer during the Mexican–American War, of which we “Remember the Alamo” and little else. But […]
The Holocaust is a touchy subject anywhere on earth, but touchiest at the capitol of the country where “The Final Solution” began. Germany and its capitol, Berlin, still struggle with […]
With Easter coming this Sunday and the minting of a new pope still fresh in people’s minds, considerations and reconsiderations of Christianity seem natural and unavoidable. The Renaissance art of […]
Prison does things to a man, even if he gets to go home at the end of a long day of guarding the inmates. Scotland’s HM Prison Barlinnie features the […]
One of the must-see destinations for any traveler to New York City is The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Skirting the eastern edge of Central Park, the Met epitomizes the encyclopedic […]
The appeal of the British drama/high-class soap opera Downton Abbey for American audiences has long been a subject of great speculation. Simon Schama called the show “cultural necrophilia” for bringing […]
On the morning of March 18, 1990, two thieves dressed as Boston police walked into the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and 81 minutes later walked out with an estimated $500 […]
Artist Charles Krafft’s enjoyed a dark, edgy, “don’t you see the irony” reputation for more than 20 years now. Krafft’s Nazi-inspired ceramics (such as his portrait bust of Adolf Hitler’s […]
As the eyes of the Catholic world (and beyond) remain glued to the chimney of the Sistine Chapel (shown above) for the white smoke indicating the election of a new […]
“I’m a storyteller at heart,” Star Wars mastermind George Lucas says at the beginning of his proposal for a new museum to be built on the grounds of San Francisco’s […]
This week’s unveiling of Leo Villareal’s The Bay Lights (shown above), the world’s largest LED sculpture running along 1.8 miles of San Francisco’s Bay Bridge, shone a light on more […]