“Bell may, indeed, be the least liked member of Bloomsbury. Bell has been found wanting by biographers and critics of the Group – as a husband, a father, and especially a brother-in-law. It is undeniable that he was a wealthy snob, hedonist, and womaniser, a racist and an anti-Semite (but not a homophobe), who changed from a liberal socialist and pacifist into a reactionary appeaser. Bell’s reputation has led to his being underestimated in the history of Bloomsbury.”

A collection of posters from various expositions held in Japan in the 1920s to 1940s.

With photographs by Man Ray, Brassaï, and Ilse Bing, a new exhibition of Surrealist images from the 1920s and ’30s captures the magic and majesty of the City of Light.

Frequently, too, did modernist architecture cause precisely the social ills it sought to alleviate. The most obvious example is the public housing projects, ostensibly designed as cool, futuristic, noble spaces — majestic towers, intersticed with sloping, green lawns — that were supposed to confer upon their proletariat inhabitants a certain nobility but which did precisely the opposite. Disconnected from a vibrant urban street life, constructed in their monolithic, drab way, rejected by workers and populated by the unemployed, the projects bred isolation and antisocial activity: The only people who made use of their sloping, green lawns were the drug dealers. Wolfe recounts the story of the Pruitt-Igoe housing project in St. Louis, into which millions of curative dollars were poured but which nonetheless proved hardily resistant to habitability. At a commission meeting in 1971, a task force asked residents for their suggestions for improving the place. A chant arose: “Blow it … up! Blow it … up!”

In the future, cities will have no single location. Mounted on huge vehicles, skyscrapers will roam the steppes of Russia, forming temporary citiscapes then wandering on. This gallery of fantastical cities includes atmospheric purifiers beyond Earth and a waterfall metropolis.

Arnold Bocklin was a 19th century symbolist painter whose work influenced and inspired Salvador Dali, Sergi Rachmaninoff, Marcel Duchamp and H. R. Giger. Adolph Hitler owned eleven of his paintings and cited Bocklin as his favorite painter.

Degas’ attitude toward French Jewry reached its artistic climax in his 1879 painting of Jewish banker Ernest May, “At the Stock Exchange.” Degas shows May as a hook-nosed Jew with bulging eyes and lips - an artistic ‘mark’ of the Jew’s alien status. The scene incorporates the reality of Jewish financial hegemony, well known to Degas with the emergence of the Rothschilds as an economic force in France and throughout Europe.

Craftsmanship defined… pre-CGI. They don’t make them like they used to.

Our high traditions of sacred and imaginative Art have nearly died with the decline of religion and the spiritual uplift it brings to the artistic imagination and our higher natures.