Close-looking has its rewards when it comes to appreciating art from the past, be it a work from 40 years ago or 400.  When that close-looking is paired with diving headlong into academic papers and obscure footnotes, you’ll start to turn up some unique interpretations and backstories that can wholly change how you see—and appreciate—a work of art. Over the course of the year, we’ve done our fair share of digging into art history, be it the little-known histories of the Gardens of Versailles or one of the epic artist-patron feuds (and the artwork that incited it). Read on to discover eight of our favorites.

Frida Kahlo’s Anniversary Painting to Diego Rivera Holds Clues to Their Turbulent Marriage

by Katie White, October 29, 2024

Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo. (Photo by Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images)

The two titans of Mexican Modern art, Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera were a notoriously combative romance. The couple, nicknamed “the elephant and the dove” by Kahlo’s parents, wed in 1929, divorced a decade later in 1939, only to remarry the following year (the couple remained married until her death in 1954). But their relationship extended far beyond husband and wife; the couple were comrades, confidantes, and advocates for each other’s art.  Unsurprisingly, the couple sometimes made appearances in the other’s work. One little-known example is Kahlo’s tender Diego and Frida 1929–1944 (1944), a painting Kahlo made to mark the couple’s 15th anniversary, and which was given as a gift to Rivera. The portrait depicts a split face, half Rivera and half Frida, surrounded by a vine, a conch and scallop shell, and a depiction of the sun and moon. This small painting, with a shell-laden frame likely bought at a tourist market in Veracruz, is rich with significance, which draws from Aztec myths of the sun and moon, Frida’s struggles with fertility and much more.

In 1982, Artist Agnes Denes Planted a Wheatfield in Lower Manhattan. Here’s What You Should Know About the Iconic Work

by Annikka Olsen, June 14, 2024

Agnes Denes, Wheatfield – A Confrontation: Battery Park Landfill, Downtown Manhattan – With the Statue of Liberty Across the Field (1982)
© Agnes Denes, Courtesy Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects.

Hungarian-American artist Agnes Denes has been back in the spotlight this year. An interpretation of the artist’s iconic Wheatfield – A Confrontation, which was originally grown in Lower Manhattan in 1982, was grown in Basel over the summer, and on view during Art Basel.  This year, in Bozeman, Montana, another variation of the work Wheatfield – An Inspiration (2024) was presented by Tinworks. This wheat was ultimately harvested and turned into bread. Artnet writer Annikka Olsen has kept an eye on these installations, and in June, offered a close reading of the original installation. To make the field, Denes sourced 200 truckloads of soil and 285 hand-furrowed rows planted with traditional wheat laid across two acres. The field was anything but set it and forget it, Olsen explains, involving meticulous and continuous care for the field situated on prime New York real estate. And you’ll never guess how much wheat was harvested from the tip of Lower Manhattan.

‘Little Venice’ to the Labyrinth: A Lost History of the Versailles Gardens

by J. Cabelle Ahn, October 5, 2024

France, Ile-de-France, Versailles, Bassin de Latone in Gardens of Versailles. Photo By DEA / C. SAPPA/De Agostini via Getty Images.

The gardens of Versailles were back in the spotlight this year, centuries after the fall of the French monarchy with the Summer Olympic Games hosting equestrian events on the palace’s grounds. This October, as the art world readied to jet to the City of Lights for Art Basel Paris and Paris Photo, we took a deep dive into the lost history of the gardens of Versailles, through fascinating features that no longer exist. Among these was the famed labyrinth of Versailles, with 39 fountains based on Aesop’s fables, as well as, for a time, a canal filled with gondolas sent by the Republic of Venice. These details are as dazzling as they are at times dark.

Was Manet’s Final Masterpiece Meant to Be a Riddle? Here Are 3 Facts About His Iconic Bar Scene
by Katie White,  August 12, 2024

Edouard Manet, A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1882) Photo: Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images.

Edouard Manet’s last masterpiece, The Bar at Folies-Bergère, is also his most enigmatic. Painted in 1882, the year before he died, Manet was already in mounting physical decline and the artist knew his end was near. Which is to say, he painted The Bar with intentionality as a final testament. The painting, which was displayed at the Paris Salon later that year, is ripe with tantalizing details. The painting shows a young barmaid, behind a marble counter filled with drinks and a platter of oranges, working at the bar of the Folies-Bergère, an iconic destination of 19th-century Paris nightlife. But behind that, the painting is a riddle. The reflections in the mirror, infamously, fail to reconcile with the scene we set before us. But that’s just one of a bevy of curious details, including the corsage at her bosom, the liquor labels, and a curious pair of trapeze swinger’s feet at the upper left.

James McNeill Whistler’s ‘The Peacock Room’ Is a Glittering Masterpiece With a Dark History
by Katie White, October 10, 2024

The Peacock Room, 1877, remodeled and painted by James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834-1903), United States of America, 19th century. Washington, Smithsonian Institution, Freer And Sackler Gallery. Photo by DeAgostini/Getty Images.

The Peacock Room, now in the collection of the National Museum of Asian Art, in Washington D.C. has a surprisingly fractious history. The late 19th-century blue-green room is ornately painted with golden adornments and is considered one of the premier extant interiors of the Aesthetic Movement and one of the leading embodiments of the Anglo-Japanese style, which was in vogue in the U.K. during the mid-to-late 1800s. What many people don’t know is that the room, created from 1876 to 1877, led to a legendary feud between artist James Abbott McNeill Whistler and his patron British shipping magnate Frederick Richards Leyland, who had commissioned the room for his Kensington townhouse. What’s more, the Peacock Room’s accompanying architect, Thomas Jeckyll may have suffered a breakdown because of it.

The Secrets of Vermeer’s Iconic ‘Girl With a Pearl Earring’
by Karen Chernick, June 18, 2024

Johannes Vermeer, Girl with a Pearl Earring (c. 1665). Photo: Sepia Times/ Universal Images Group via Getty Images.

Johannes Vermeer’s  Girl with a Pearl Earring is a painting of incredible mystique.  In most of Vermeer’s paintings (of which, only 36 are known), writer Karen Chernik points out, the women are indisposed, going about their everyday tasks. They answer correspondence, play musical instruments, and pour milk. But in Vermeer’s best-known painting, Girl With a Pearl Earring (1665), the woman looks out from the canvas with serene focus. The tilted angle of her face, and her covered hair, make her a bit difficult to discern. This figure was called a tronie, the Dutch term for a ‘type’ that is more about representing a motif or character than an actual person. But the secrets of Girl with a Pearl Earring hypothesizing that the model might be Vermeer’s eldest daughter Maria, and much, much more.

The Surprising Story of the Cat-Obsessed Artist Behind the Famed ‘Le Chat Noir’ Poster

by Annikka Olsen, October 28, 2024

Théophile Steinlen, Tournée du Chat noir (1896). Photo: Buyenlarge/Getty Images.

“Anyone who has ever stepped foot in Paris or even passingly encountered French art has likely seen a version of the 19th-century poster Tournée du Chat Noir de Rodolphe Salis, or ‘Tour of Rodolphe Salis’ Chat Noir.’  Iconic to the point of perhaps cliché, the motif has appeared on everything from totes and postcards to gift shop prints and mugs—frankly, you’d be more hard-pressed to find something it hasn’t appeared on,” writes Annikka Olsen in her introduction to an article about Théophile Steinlen, the artist behind one of the most ubiquitous images of the 20th century. But what Olsen reveals, in her writings, is that Steinlen himself was a staunch character with both an obsession for cats—and worker’s rights. A hero for our times, if I say so myself.

Why Walter De Maria’s ‘The Lightning Field’ Remains a Striking Work of Land Art
by Katie White,  June 4, 2024

Walter De Maria, The Lightning Field, 1977. Long-term installation, Western New Mexico. ©Estate of Walter De Maria. Photo: John Cliett. Courtesy of Dia Art Foundation, New York

Walter De Maria’s iconic land artwork from 1977—The Lightning Field—is regarded as one of the masterworks of Minimalist art. Located on a remote high desert plain in New Mexico, the work, the work consists of 400 stainless steel poles, measuring two inches in diameter, evenly spaced, at intervals of 220 feet. The work is mythic in its allure, an American temple on a hill set amid the natural world. Commissioned by the Dia Art Foundation, the installation is an art world pilgrimage site, of sorts, and that’s intentional. The Lightning Field draws both from the traditions of Christian pilgrimage sites as well as the temples of the Greco-Roman world. And while the likelihood of lightning at the The Lightning Field remains relatively low, the possibility of it is even more important.