The Art Institute of Chicago is one of the rare art museums that was founded by artists, rather than by collectors. With the Chicago Academy of Design in 1866, a group of 35 artists started a free art school with

Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes hit Europe like a storm: no one had ever seen ballet taken to this level. Founded in 1909 by Diaghilev and lasting 20 years, the Ballet was based in Paris and traveled around Europe and to

The German symbolist artist Max Klinger (1857-1920) took inspiration from Brahms to create his Brahmsphantasie, a book of music and images that took Brahms’ music to a level never before seen. In his Brahmsphantasie, Klinger divided the work into 3

In pre-Christian celebrations of spring, the egg was seen as a symbol of rebirth. Symbolizing the resurrection of Jesus, it was subsequently defined as an Easter egg by early Christians, “likening the egg symbol to the tomb from which Christ

We were visiting the Richmond Museum of Fine Arts the other week and noticed two wonderful pieces of particular musical interest. In the Museum’s extensive holdings of silver items, we found two pieces commemorating operas by Richard Wagner. A sterling

In Haruki Murakami’s many novels, there are always a number of references that will appear: Cats, Ears, Hokkaido, Wells or Deep Holes, Jazz, Classical Music, and so on. In his latest novel, Killing Commendatore, we have music in the very

Steven Malinowski got frustrated at reading a complicated score and decided to animate it, and thus, the Music Animation Machine was born. Its first life was last century – way back in the mid-1970s… a time before personal computers, before

A recent exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, Virginia ‘Jasper Johns and Edvard Munch: Love, Loss, and the Cycle of Life’ brought together works of the two painters, the Abstract Expressionist Jasper Johns (1930-) and the Norwegian