Priyanshu Shrivastava asked:


Immaculate Marble Sculptures with polished looks have intrigued generations of people with their refined beauty, sophistry and elegance. Timeless masterpieces of art the sculptures in marble stones radiate an air of aristocracy and luxury. Wonderful statues, idols, decorative pieces are sculpted from metamorphosed limestones that are popularly known as marbles.

The sculptures celebrate the greatness of mortal souls into tactile forms. Invaluable legacies of art the sculptures have great cultural and historical significance. They speak about the art, culture and heritage of the bygone era. These immortal artworks can inspire the young artists and connoisseurs of arts.

The sculptors engraved impressive structures from blocks of marble. Tools like chisels, hammers and hand drills helped them to sculpt their creations. Rubbing stones and sandpapers were used to smoothen the outer surface.

Coats of shiny polishes like tin oxides were applied to add luster and glow to the sculptures. Marbles were used extensively for figurative works for the ease of use, remarkable quarrying capacities and durability that increased with ages. The translucent surfaces enabled a uniform and in-dept realistic touch to the structures.

The practice of sculpting marble into exotic pieces of art came to India from the European countries. Marble sculpting was practiced in vogue in Italy, Rome, Paris, England from the late eighteenth century. Soudbinine, Bourdelle, Leon Fourquet, Rodin, Victor Peter and Jean Escoula are some world famous sculptors who had left some indelible pieces of marble arts that inspire awe and reverence.

The tradition of Marble sculptures in India began with the carvings of religious deities. Idols of Buddha, Lord Shiva, Lord Ganesha, Lakshmi Devi and Goddess Durga spellbind with their intricate engravings, meticulousness, clarity and precision.

Spectacular architectures and royal buildings were established from fine marbles. The Taj Mahal of Agra is a living example of marble architecture built during the Mughal era. Inspired by traditional as well as contemporary arts, the sculptures in marble are visual embodiments of aesthetic creativity and excellent craftsmanship of the regional artists. Other popular themes captured in the sculptures were female figurines with all their feminine charms and graces.

Figures of birds, animals and tribal people were also modeled from the marbles. Colored marbles in shades of pink, green, red, gray and white were used along with the pure white marbles. Today the marble sculptures have made entry into the domestic arena as decorative art pieces in the form of figurines, furniture, fireplaces, photo frames, vases, medallions, show pieces, tiles and garden sculptures. The breathtaking creations of marble make for elegant and stylish indoor and outdoor decorations and cherished gifts to the loved ones.

Visit www.india-crafts.com For further information on Marble Sculptures

Saatchi Gallery asked:


Art museum is the collections of much variety of exhibitions and paintings. There are old art, new art, pretty art, art that makes us think or is even shocking. Anything that people experience turns up in art: love, war, eating, sports, nature, and faith, anything at all. Most museums are either free or have free days when you can go and enjoy the art. Commercial galleries are also free. Many places offer free lectures, either by an artist whose work is on display, or by individuals who are very knowledgeable in a particular collection on display.

At Saatchi Gallery you can see the List of Main Art Museums around the World as follows.

Whitney Museum of American Art

The Whitney Museum of American Art is the leading advocate of 20th- and 21st-century American art. Founded in 1930, the Museum is regarded as the preeminent collection of American art and includes major works and materials from the estate of Edward Hopper, the largest public collection of works by Alexander Calder, Louise Nevelson, and Lucas Samaras, as well as significant works by Jasper Johns, Donald Judd, Agnes Martin, Bruce Nauman, Georgia O’Keeffe, Claes Oldenburg, Kiki Smith, and Andy Warhol, among other artists.

The State Hermitage Museum

The State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg is Russia’s premier art museum. It began life as the private art collection of the imperial family and was nationalised and greatly expanded after the Revolution. The Museum is housed in the buildings of the former imperial palace in the centre of St Petersburg.

Art Institute of Chicago

A world of art is on display––European and American paintings, sculpture, prints and drawings, photographs, textiles, decorative arts, and architectural fragments and drawings, plus the arts of Asia, Africa and the ancient Americas.

British Museum

The British Museum holds in trust for the nation and the world a collection of art and antiquities from ancient and living cultures. Housed in one of Britain’s architectural landmarks, the collection is one of the finest in existence, spanning two million years of human history. Access to the collections is free.

Boston Museum of Fine Arts

The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston was founded in February 4, 1870 and on July 3, 1876 opened its doors of its building in Copley Square, a John H. Sturgis and Charles Brigham-designed gothic structure of red brick and terra-cotta.

John Ugoshowa asked:


Folk art auctions feature a wide range of objects that reflect the artist’s craft traditions, and traditional social values. Folk art is generally produced by people who have little or no academic artistic training. Folk artists usually use established techniques and styles of a particular region or culture.

Folk art auctions include paintings, sculptures and other decorative art forms. Some artists also consider utilitarian objects such as tools and costumes as folk art. For the most part, the category of folk art auctions exclude works by professional artists.

It has been my experience that folk art auctions have something for just about anyone. I found a folk art painting of a cat in a peach tree that was done by the artist Tascha. The artist also noted on the folk art auction that they create unique ceramic tile art.

My mother purchased a blanket chest for me years ago that I listed recently in a folk art auction. The chest was made about two hundred hears ago and is very beautiful. The original painted decorations are still intact.

I found an interesting folk art auction for a carnival knock-down dummy in the shape of a large cat. It was made around 1930 and is twice the size of similar items. I researched the item on a non-auction site and found that it is worth a lot of money.

My heart is still swayed by Americana folk art auctions. I recently fell in love with a painting I found up for auction of Elvis on a Harley in front of a large American flag. It was spectacular! The stretched canvas was painted with acrylics.

I especially like the Halloween themed folk art auction I found that was offered by Sister Raya New Orleans Folk Art. The title of the painting was Little Spooky the Cat – Awaiting the Great Pumpkin. The painting was painted in classic vintage style and used gold maple, red sapphire, blue pearl, white, pumpkin orange, sable brown, amber rust and jet black. I would love to have this hanging on my wall all through the autumn months.

Another folk art auction that I found and was sad to bid up past my budget was a handmade set of miniature dominos. The set was in a folk art decorated maple case. The set dates from the mid to late 1800’s. It was really exquisite and I’m sorry that I missed out on it.

I really liked another folk art auction that I found for a modern fraktur. A fraktur is a specific kind of Pennsylvania German folk art. The fraktur I found was a watercolor of a marriage record. It was very colorful and looked like it held very special significance to its original owners.

I found a wood box from Maine in a folk art auction that really appealed to me. It was rather small, but was painted chrome yellow and was trimmed in forest green. The paint was crazed and worn and it was made in the late nineteenth century. There were no visible nails and the hardware was reported as looking original.

The folk art auction that I missed out on that was way out of my price range was for an Andrew Clemens sand bottle. The sand bottle was date 1887 and was covered in patriotic decorations. It was an apothecary style bottle with a stopper and it contained at least ten different colors of sand. The bottle ended up selling for eighty five hundred dollars. I’m sure that it has ended up in an excellent collection of folk art.

I found an amusing folk art auction for three wooden carvings. The name of the piece was Three Articulating Folk Art Whimseys and were all made by the same artist. The carvings were accented with sheet metal neckties. The first carving in the folk art auction was of a cobbler, a blacksmith and a gentleman with a donkey. The second carving was a diminutive soldier and the third was a cobbler smoking a pipe. I think that this piece of Americana was purchased at a low price of three thousand dollars and was worth much more.onto a black light stand that has been built especially for them.

John Burton asked:


Renaissance

The Renaissance (meaning rebirth) was a cultural movement that started in Italy in the fourteenth century, and spread throughout Europe. In art, the style of painting became highly realistic, and attempted to mimic nature as closely as possible.

What to look for: a rich three-dimensional perspective, human subjects in proportion (usually wearing robes and making grand gestures), and convincing representation of spaces.



Baroque

The term Baroque is often applied to art of the whole of the seventeenth century, and first half of the eighteenth century. Painters expanded on the naturalistic tradition established during the Renaissance, and extended their subjects to include landscapes, and still life. Baroque painters often set their subjects in vast landscapes, or interiors with extended views through doors, windows, or mirrors.

What to look for: melodramatic spaces, fat cherubs, light rays and fruit bowls.





Rococo

Rococo was a decorative art that originated in France in the early eighteenth century and is marked by elaborate ornamentation, with a profusion of scrolls, foliage, and shell-like forms.

What to look for: paintings of the aristocracy at play, asymmetry to composition, many small-scale ornamental details, and pastel colours.



Neo-Classicism

During the Neoclassical period (mid eighteenth century), the work of the Greeks and Romans (pre- Renaissance) became popular again, and paintings depicted historical subjects.

What to look for: paintings with sharp outlines, cool colours, armour, spears and sandals.



Romanticism

Romanticism is assumed to be in opposition to Neoclassicism, and the term used to refer loosely to a trend in art of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It was characterized by the avoidance of classical forms and rules, emphasis on the emotional and spiritual, nostalgia for the grace of past ages, and a fondness for exotic themes.

What to look for: complex compositions, intense colour, soft outlines and heroic or scantly clad subjects.



Realism (1850 – 1880)

Realism came about in France during the Industrial Revolution. Realist Artists attempted to create objective, accurate, detailed, and unembellished representations of the external world based on the impartial observation of contemporary life. The name Realist refers to their subject matter; humble citizens doing everyday work and previously considered unworthy of representation in high art, rather than mythical heroes, Biblical or classical subjects, and portraits of the rich.

What to look for: paintings of poor people working.



Pre-Raphaelites (1848)

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood were a group of young English artists who rebelled against the style of the day that was being taught at the Royal Academy and other art schools. They felt the art was dark and muddy in colour, and the subject matter artificial. They admired the work of the artists of the fifteenth century, and their name, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, honoured the depiction of nature in Italian art before “Raphael”. Pre-Raphaelite artists believed art should have a serious, moral purpose and often filled their work with symbols suggesting deeper meaning. Most of all, they believed in artistic excellence. To give their paintings a lighter, fresher look, they used bright colours and painted on a white canvas, rather than a brown one. While the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood lasted less than ten years as a group, other artists carried on with the style, which became broader and more muted in colour.

What to look for: subjects taken from the Bible, Shakespeare and the legend of King Arthur. Paintings exhibit meticulous detail, intense colours, tight handling of paint and complex compositions. Many works are highly realistic.



Impressionism (1860 – 1900)

The Impressionists were a group of French artists discontent with academic teaching, and who shared approaches, and techniques. They abandoned traditional formal compositions in favour of a more casual and less contrived arrangement of objects within a picture. The identifying feature of their work was an attempt to record a scene accurately, but without the use of traditional muted browns, greys, and greens in favour of a lighter, more brilliant palette. They stopped using greys and blacks for shadows, and used short (visible) brush strokes to produce flecks of unblended pure colours. They cast off literary and anecdotal subjects in favour of candid portrayals of ordinary people (doing regular things in everyday locations), landscapes, and architecture. Indeed, they rejected the role of imagination in the creation of works of art. Their name derives from a criticism of the first “impressionistic” work publicly displayed.

What to look for: paintings look normal from far away, but close up they are a bit of a mess. Also look for the same the same image painted two or more times under different lighting conditions.



Post-Impressionism (1860 – 1905)

Post-Impressionist were not a cohesive movement, and the style of individual artists vary. Post-Impressionism was simultaneously an extension of Impressionism, and a rejection of its concern for the naturalistic depiction of light and colour in favour of an emphasis on abstract qualities or symbolic content. Post-Impressionists continued using vivid colours (e.g. Cézanne painted red grass), thick application of paint, and distinctive and visible brushstrokes.

What to look for: You see paint first, and the image second.





Abstraction

Abstraction is a generic term for art that does not represent recognizable objects. Abstractionist abandoned art as the imitation of nature in favour of imagery from the imagination and the unconscious. Abstraction comprised a number of different movements, such as Fauvism, Cubism, Futurism, Dada, Surrealism, and Expressionism.

Fauvism (1905 to 1907), as a movement, had no concrete theories. The name derives from the judgment of a critic who referred to the artists disparagingly as “les fauves” (wild beasts). Fauvist artwork is characterized by distorted forms, bold and vivid colours, often applied unmixed, and a spontaneity and roughness of execution. Fauvism was short lived, and most practitioners became Cubists.



What to look for: You may say to yourself, “I could do that.”

Cubism (1907 to 1914) retreated from traditional perspective in favour of geometric forms. It attempted to achieve the illusion of three-dimensional forms in a different way by showing many aspects of familiar objects all at once from many vantage points to create new combinations.

What to look for: You may ask yourself, “What is it?”

Futurism(1909) was an Italian movement with the intention to reject tradition ideals, and celebrate the aesthetic generated by the speed and power of the machine, and the energy and restlessness of modern life. Futurists adopted the Cubist technique of depicting several views of an object simultaneously with fragmented planes, and used rhythmic spatial repetitions of the object’s outlines in transit to render movement. Their preferred subjects were machines, and urban crowds. Their palette was more vibrant than the Cubists’.

What to look for: You may ask yourself, “What is it?”

Dada (1916–1923) was initially a Swiss movement who channelled their revulsion at World War I into an indictment of the values that had brought it about. They were united not by a common style, but a rejection of conventions in art. Through unorthodox techniques, they sought to shock society into self-awareness. The name Dada itself was typical of the movement’s anti-rationalism. Various members of the group are credited with selecting the name for its childish and nonsensical connotations.

What to look for: You could be forgiven for not recognising a Dada exhibit as art (e.g. Duchamp “improved” the Mona Lisa by drawing a moustache on her).

Surrealism (1924) flourished in Europe between World Wars I and II, and grew principally out of the earlier Dada movement, and was similarly a reaction against the “rationalism”. It attempted to join fantasy and everyday reality to form a new reality, and drew on the theories of Sigmund Freud, that the unconscious was the source of the imagination. Many different forms of Surrealism developed, including the realistically painted images of Salvador Dalí.

What to look for: something that simultaneously looks real, and unreal.

Expressionism: was an art movement of the early twentieth century in which traditional adherence to realism and proportion was replaced completely by distorted colour and form to emphasize and express the intense emotion of the artist.

What to look for: dribbling, drippy paint splattered on the canvas.

 

Portraits by John Burton

John Ugoshowa asked:


In the field of modern art, art deco plays a large and impressively lavish role. The strong colors and sweeping curves lend art deco the trademark boldness that expressed much of the progress and modern advances of the twentieth century. Art auctions around the world still move many art deco pieces of various kinds. If you’re interested in collecting art deco, there are many art auctions both online and off that deal primarily in art deco.

In the twentieth century the decorative arts converged in what is known as the art deco movement, which grew to influence architecture, fashion, the visual arts as well as design. The term ‘art deco’ was derived from a World’s Fair held in Paris, France, called the Exposition Internationale des Arts Decoratifs et Industriels Modernes in the year 1925.

Though the movement and term comes from the Exposition Internationale des Arts Decoratifs et Industriels Modernes, the term was not widely used until the late 1960s. Especially pre- World War I Europe influenced the art deco movement, though many cultures influenced and were influenced by this art movement. Much of the world was experiencing similar shifts in modern technological advances.

For the most part, the art deco movement was brought about and inspired by the rapid advances of technological and social facets of the early twentieth century. As culture responded to these increasingly changing times, the art deco movement was an outgrowth of these modern phenomena.

Art deco is considered generally to be an eclectic type of decorative modernism that was influenced by a variety of artists and particular art forms. Art deco includes furniture, metalwork, clocks, glasswork and screens as well as paintings and other fine art types of pieces.

The art deco style is known for its lavishness and epicurean flairs that are attributed to the austerity of culture brought about by World War I. Strong patterns and bold colors and shapes were used, as were many particular motifs used universally.

For example, the sunburst motif was used in everything from the Radio City Music Hall auditorium, images of ladies’ shoes, the spire of the Chrysler Building and several other pieces of art, architecture and design. Other ubiquitous motifs found in art deco were stepped forms, the zigzag, chevron patterns and sweeping curves.

In the West, art deco lost its steam around the Second World War, but continued to be used all the way into the 1960s in colonial countries such as India, where it served as a gateway to Modernism. Then in the 1980s art deco made a comeback in graphic design. Art deco’s association with 1930s film noir led to its use in both fashion and jewelry ads.

Today art deco is revered by many and dismissed as old news and overly gaudy by others. Though it undoubtedly played a major role in art history, as with most art, individual taste frames the individual’s interpretation and like or dislike of art deco styles.

Art deco is one of the most well known art movements. This is mostly due to its wide base of influences and influenced art forms and cultures. Since much of the world was experiencing many of the same advances in technology and mass production, many of the same ideas and symbols were relevant in various parts of the world.

Sean Donahoe asked:


Choosing the best frame for your art is one of the most important parts of buying art for your home or office. What may have looked great when purchasing may look terrible by the time you have it on your wall and leave you dissatisfied, or worse, wanting to return your art to the supplier.

How can you avoid this situation? Well, it’s all about balance…

Whether you are purchasing your art online or from a brick and mortar art store you have to consider not only which wall the art may be going on but also the surrounding objects that add elements of color to the wall itself.

Let me give you an example by picturing the following. We have a white wall, with some dark vertical shelves, a small potted plant in a tan vase and a soft light. Next, we are online ordering our art and find a wonderful piece that is a beautiful rolling landscape that we must have. Now let’s choose the frame. First, let’s consider the wall. It is very light (white) and has accents in tan (the vase), green (the potted plant) and black (the shelves). The ideal frame in this situation is something that stands out from the largest block of color in this area, the wall. We should consider a dark frame rather than a light frame. Next, we need to complement these element colors – the vase and the shelves – so that our framed art does not look out of place when mounted on the wall. We complement these colors by choosing a nice dark tan, brown or black color for our frame to really offset these accent items.

You can fine tune the style by choosing extra trim options. Look at the smaller elements in the room. What colors are you dealing with? Do you have red or gold books on those shelves? Maybe a small statue or ornament lives on top of the shelves. What kinds of shapes are used in the furniture in the room? Are you seeing a lot of curves or straight edges? Ideally, you want the shape and trim of the frame to complement these subtle sub-elements in your room.

Next it is time to choose the mats. Mats are heavy paper inserts that create a more polished look or even a embossed effect to make your art really stand out. In many cases this comes down to personal preference. However, as a general rule of thumb, to create the decorative illusion that the art was designed to be part of the room, you should choose matting that complements the color of the wall but also contrasts with the primary colors in the art itself. You can often use double matting to soften transitions of color or create virtual blend to soften any harsh colors in the art itself. Ideally, have the two mats should compliment each other.

With a little care and consideration about the area you want to place your framed your art within, you can make any art blend into your home with good framing and matting choices. One final tip – if you are purchasing art online or at a brick and mortar retailer, take a picture of the wall to compare with your framing options and matting. That way you have an accurate representation of the colors and it will help you remember the exact shades you may be dealing with.

Art Exchange asked:


The World’s Best Art Consultancy

art-exchange.com unveils Release III of its art tool for designers

The Future Art Consultancy

Locating and placing artwork in a design project is arguably the most difficult part of the project. While some designers take on this task themselves, many enlist the assistance of an art consultant. One limitation of this approach is the consultant’s limited universe of artists. Most art consultants end up with a few “go-to” favorites.

Imagine an art consultancy able to directly access 10,000 artists, with technology capabilities aggregating art choices in a portfolio for emailing or high-resolution printing for presentations. Add the ability to correspond with clients via e-postcard including selected images. And finish with the ability to access framing options online thus enabling the designer to actually show the customer how the pieces will look framed.

Does It Work?

Can a website help you find art? Art-Exchange (www.art-exchange.com) is not a new website, not a new service, not a new company. It does, however, take a new approach to providing art to designers. And it has a new site design that Art-Exchange claims will make the service even more powerful and easier to use.

I spoke with Richard Gipe, President and CEO of Art-Exchange, to find out why he thinks his company’s service is so special. I asked him, “If you had to communicate Art-Exchange’s value to designers in a single sentence, what would you say?”

Here’s what he said: “If you want to access as much art as we have on Art-Exchange, you would have to go to 20,000 galleries, and you would have to deal with so many different sellers that the logistics would be overwhelming.” That sounds pretty good. But does the site work?

About Art-Exchange

Art-Exchange is a business service provider that specializes in solutions for the design trade. They can offer solutions to designers as an art consultancy, or they can provide solutions to art consultants to help them be more effective and efficient.

For the past five years Art-Exchange has been actively contacting artists to list their works on the exchange. Today there are approximately 100,000 different works of art created by over 10,000 different artists. Imagine searching 100,000 records to locate the perfect art solution. Nearly 60% of all the works are originals, and the remaining 40% is a variety of editions. All of these works are organized in a database, and a search engine locates works using any or all of the following criteria:

• Artist’s name

• Title

• Subject matter

• Style

• Medium

• Size

• Colors

• Price

• Orientation

Suppose you need oversized original works and price is an issue. Maybe you want only works with lighthouses. Or perhaps you need large public works. That’s how specific the search engine can be. And with the new design, if you enter several criteria and the search engine can’t find a work that matches all your criteria exactly, it will refer you to the works that match your criteria most closely, so that you don’t have to start over. As one of the new site’s designers said, “We don’t ever want to show nobody anything.”

Normally, designers hire an art consultant or visit multiple galleries or view print books to find the perfect art solution. That’s the old way of finding art. Now designers can look in one place and view tens of thousands of originals alone. This is the new way of finding art. Art-Exchange let’s designers search for all the art they need in one place. That alone has the potential to save time, but the website has some other very powerful features that give designers even more flexibility and power.

Powerful Features

One very important new feature is the Designer Portal. Art-Exchange has four different portals that members can use to enter the site. There’s one for retail clients, one for community partners, and another for artists and other sellers. But the Designer Portal is available only to designers. Once you enter the portal, you can search for the art you want, view images of the art, and immediately see designers’ wholesale pricing.

Here’s another great new feature: Portfolios. How do you keep track of the works that fit your client’s needs? You keep a portfolio. Designers can set up portfolios for individual clients, different locations, or just for future reference. It’s easy to save works to custom-made portfolios. And it’s easy to show the portfolio to clients—from anywhere in the world.

Another terrific feature is the Exhibitions section. Exhibitions include the works of around 200 artists and are compiled topically. Prior exhibitions, which are still accessible, include Realism, Landscape, Watercolor, and Impressionism. In order to have fresh ideas readily available for clients, designers need to be reviewing art all the time, and these exhibitions can help. It takes only fifteen minutes to view an entire exhibition.

Another feature that can help designers and clients work together—especially when clients have trouble describing their interests—is the Postcard feature. Clients can go to the website to browse for themselves. They can view an exhibition, browse by artist, or do a search. When they find something they like, they can send images to their designer using electronic postcards.

Soon, Art-Exchange will even offer the ability to create Custom Frames online so that clients can view the artwork in different frames and choose the one they like best.

Full-Service Art Consultancy

Art-Exchange goes far beyond just the website, however. They also provide full-service art consultancy. They have a full staff of qualified art consultants who can do as much or as little as a designer wants them to. Anything a typical art consultancy does, Art-Exchange will do. If a designer works with an art consultant already and wants to maintain that relationship, Art-Exchange will even work with his or her current art consultant.

How to Access the Features and Benefits of Art-Exchange

Go to www.art-exchange.com and visit the Designer Portal. Log in as a designer and learn about how the service works. You can easily search for art, access their full-service art consultancy, or guide your favorite art consultant to Art-Exchange. A subscription is free. Art-Exchange is paid by the sellers on completed transactions; so they only get paid if they’re helping designers find the right art, for the right job, at the right price.

When asked what he would most want to communicate to designers about the company and the service it provides, Gipe said, “I want the members of ASID who place art to try the art consultancy service at Art-Exchange, and if they’ll give us 10% of their trust, we’ll earn the other 90%.” If you’re a designer or an art consultant, it’s worth trying. Does it work? Is it really whole new way of finding art? Yeah, that’s what it is. And for designers, the world of art will never be the same.

Saatchi Gallery asked:


Art museum is the collections of much variety of exhibitions and paintings. There are old art, new art, pretty art, art that makes us think or is even shocking. Anything that people experience turns up in art: love, war, eating, sports, nature, and faith, anything at all. Most museums are either free or have free days when you can go and enjoy the art. Commercial galleries are also free. Many places offer free lectures, either by an artist whose work is on display, or by individuals who are very knowledgeable in a particular collection on display.

At Saatchi Gallery you can see the List of Main Art Museums around the World as follows.

Whitney Museum of American Art

The Whitney Museum of American Art is the leading advocate of 20th- and 21st-century American art. Founded in 1930, the Museum is regarded as the preeminent collection of American art and includes major works and materials from the estate of Edward Hopper, the largest public collection of works by Alexander Calder, Louise Nevelson, and Lucas Samaras, as well as significant works by Jasper Johns, Donald Judd, Agnes Martin, Bruce Nauman, Georgia O’Keeffe, Claes Oldenburg, Kiki Smith, and Andy Warhol, among other artists.

The State Hermitage Museum

The State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg is Russia’s premier art museum. It began life as the private art collection of the imperial family and was nationalised and greatly expanded after the Revolution. The Museum is housed in the buildings of the former imperial palace in the centre of St Petersburg.

Art Institute of Chicago

A world of art is on display––European and American paintings, sculpture, prints and drawings, photographs, textiles, decorative arts, and architectural fragments and drawings, plus the arts of Asia, Africa and the ancient Americas.

British Museum

The British Museum holds in trust for the nation and the world a collection of art and antiquities from ancient and living cultures. Housed in one of Britain’s architectural landmarks, the collection is one of the finest in existence, spanning two million years of human history. Access to the collections is free.

Boston Museum of Fine Arts

The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston was founded in February 4, 1870 and on July 3, 1876 opened its doors of its building in Copley Square, a John H. Sturgis and Charles Brigham-designed gothic structure of red brick and terra-cotta.

Priyanshu Shrivastava asked:


Arts and Crafts together create a potential force that enables artists to give material form to their innate refined qualities. It signifies the aesthetic sense, creative power and artistic quality of an artist is manifested. Arts and Crafts also have a great cultural and historical significance. Under the veneer of colors and craftsmanship can be found the rich history, culture, lifestyle and tradition of the bygone eras.

Both words have great value when they get implemented in practical manner. The young artists and craftsmen of today can learn a lot and innovate new ideas from the arts and crafts of the early days.

The Arts and Crafts Movement that created furor in the later half of the nineteenth century in Europe. It was a kind of social movement that emerged to point out the impact of industrialization on the society. The romanticism and the creative aspects of human beings were in decline and there was a clear shift from handmade crafts to the machine made ones.

It is difficult to classify the various streams and forms of Arts & Crafts . The variations of arts may include Decorative Arts, Drawings, Paintings, Sculpture, Photography and Videography, Dance , Singing etc. Ethnic as well as modern paintings and sculptures of brass, bronze and wood serve as great marvels for interior decorations. Crafts made from several resources like glass, wood, paper, plant products, metal, ceramics, porcelain, leather, fabrics and plastics can be used as indoor and outdoor decors or as gifts to the loved ones.

The practice of Arts and Crafts in India began from the Indus Valley Civilization and continues in the modern times. Fascinating Terracotta Crafts, Potteries, Textile Crafts and Metal Wares were the hallmarks of arts and crafts of the Indus era. The Mauryan era is famous for its Stone Sculptures and Jewelry .The handcrafted cave engravings of the Ajanta and Ellora capture Gupta arts in its finest form. Textile Crafts, Ornate Jewelries, Miniature Paintings and Sculptures characterize the Mughal era.

Our site Indian Arts & Handicrafts has come up with panoply of Arts and Crafts collected from the various regions of India. Come tread in this virtual world of arts and crafts and enrich yourself with interesting information on the same.