A newly finished restoration of the Empire State Building gives us the chance to again appreciate the structure’s glittering brilliance.
Masterpiece
The 28 reliefs in Andrea Pisano’s doors for the Florence Baptistery depict the Virtues and scenes from the life of John the Baptist.
White’s ‘Stuart Little’ was unique in its departure from the predictable moralism of earlier children’s stories.
Jackson Pollock’s ‘Mural’ is a bridge from his representational to his radical work.
With his portrait of Félix Fénéon, painter Paul Signac conferred the mantle of genius on a sympathetic critic.
Three separate works combine to create the dazzling Lindau Gospels.
Henry Fuseli’s ‘The Nightmare’ bewitches the observer with its unnerving ambiguity.
Robert Penn Warren’s ‘All the King’s Men’ remains just as insightful about ambition, electioneering and governing as when first published in 1946.
A departure from his swinging dance music, Duke Ellington’s ‘Mood Indigo’ softly conveys an intimate, ruminative and melancholy mood.
Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis get dolled up to avoid the mob in Billy Wilder’s ‘Some Like It Hot,’ an idiosyncratic comedy that blended slapstick and screwball.
William Carlos Williams’s ‘The Red Wheelbarrow’ offers an intimately human experience in its consideration of a quotidian scene.
In Wong Kar Wai’s ‘In the Mood for Love,’ when neighbors find out their spouses are having an affair, they strike up a quiet liaison of their own.
Eva Hesse’s sculpture ‘Repetition Nineteen III’ celebrates humor, eroticism and discovery.
Jack Nicholson stars in Bob Rafelson’s ‘Five Easy Pieces,’ which captures the mood of a nation caught between two pivotal periods.
Edward Elgar’s ‘Land of Hope and Glory,’ recently nearly banished by the BBC from the annual Proms Concerts, is proof of the emotional power of a great melody.
In William Hogarth’s engraving of the South Sea Bubble, chaos reigns in the wake of widespread financial ruin.
Paul Manship’s sculpture of Prometheus at Rockefeller Center is a golden encapsulation of the myth of noble sacrifice in service of human advancement.
Thomas Jefferson’s Poplar Forest retreat is smaller and less famous than Monticello, but in its modest size it represents a distilled expression of the Founding Father’s intellect.
Degas’s ‘The Bellelli Family’ is an unusually candid depiction of tensions, emotions and alienation.
Knut Hamsun’s ‘Hunger’ contends that growth without hardship is an illusion and that art without confrontation is mere entertainment.
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