Arcadia Public Library

Renoir became hugely popular despite great obstacles: thirty years of poverty followed by thirty years of progressive paralysis of his fingers. Despite these hardships, much of his work is optimistic, even joyful. Close friends who contributed money, contacts, and companionship enabled him to overcome these challenges to create more than 4,000 paintings. Renoir had intimate relationships with fellow artists (Caillebotte, Cezanne, Monet, and Morisot),...

From 1501—1505, Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo Buonarroti both lived and worked in Florence. Leonardo was a charming, handsome fifty year-old at the peak of his career. Michelangelo was a temperamental sculptor in his mid-twenties, desperate to make a name for himself. Michelangelo is a virtual unknown when he returns to Florence and wins the commission to carve what will become one of the most famous sculptures of all time: David. Even though...

Discusses the childhood of Frida Kahlo and how it influenced her art.

I never painted dreams. I painted my reality. When Frida Kahlo was eighteen years old, her body was crushed in a horrific bus accident. But her fiery spirit could never be broken. During her excruciatingly painful recovery, Kahlo taught herself to paint. Kahlo s injuries left her in chronic pain, and her marriage to the world-famous muralist Diego Rivera brought her as much agony as it did happiness. Many of Kahlo s paintings are self-portraits. Her...

"Introduces Mary Cassatt as one of the important American Impressionist painters by exploring the techniques she used to show expression and feelings in her subjects--

In 1973 Michael Craig-Martin exhibited a glass of water on a shelf, together with a printed text, and called the work An Oak Tree. As the text explained, the artist had changed the glass of water into an oak tree. More than thirty years later, Craig-Martin creates – along with screen-savers, works on LCD monitors and conventional paintings - gloriously colourful environments with blown-up outline images of domestic objects. The conceptual and the...

A picture book biography of the life of American painter Georgia O'Keeffe. Includes a time line of her works as well as related art appreciation activities.