Detail from Las Meninas by Diego Velázquez

Who Was the Little Girl in Las Meninas?

A Spanish princess who became a German queen, Margarita Teresa lived a life structured by Catholicism and cut short by consanguinity.

Our Obsession with Art Heists

A deeply ingrained interest in stolen objects and their recovery reflects our collective uncertainty over how we value art.
Portrait of Beatrice Hastings before a door by Amedeo Modigliani

Beatrice Hastings: The Forgotten Modernist

Marginalized in early histories of Modernist literature, Hastings left a mark on one of the most influential literary magazines of the early twentieth century.
Have One Brand

Orange Crate Art

California citrus growers drew on mass-printing techniques and advances in color lithography to create distinctive brands for their boxes.
Rosa Bonheur in her atelier (1893) by Georges Achille-Fould

Rosa Bonheur’s Permission to Wear Pants

One of the few women permitted to wear trousers during the Third Republic, the French artist developed a sense of self through her clothing choices.
Jackie Ormes

The Groundbreaking Work of Jackie Ormes

The first Black woman to have a regularly published comic strip, Ormes gave form to the political and social concerns of Black Americans.
The cover of Ebony and Topaz: A Collectanea

The Short but Influential Run of Ebony and Topaz

The 1927 art and literature magazine only ran for a single issue, but “proved an integral component of Harlem Renaissance cultural production."
A Happy Christmastide

Share These Victorian Holiday Cards

It's all birds and flowers and kittens in these greeting cards. May they, as one of the cards says, keep winter from your heart.
Mario Montez

How Latin Camp Rocked the New York Underground

Puerto Rican queers produced theater and film that made them mainstays of the New York underground arts movement of the 1950s and ’60s.
A reliquary shrine attributed to Jean de Touyl, ca. 1325-50

What’s in the Box? The Art of Reliquaries

The cult of relics dates back to the second and third centuries, when Christian martyrs were often killed in ways that fragmented the body.