HUMOR HAS LONG had a role in art, though it seems to have emerged with abandon with the age of modern, contemporary art, and postmodern art. Two of the most influential modern artists, Pablo Picasso and Marcel Duchamp, though contemporaries, illustrate two different uses of humor. . . .

FEW ARTISTS HAVE been the subject of so much research as Vincent Van Gogh, the Dutch painter who died in 1890 from a gunshot wound. While his nearly 900 paintings, completed over nine years (beginning in 1881), have provided the lion’s share of research on the great artist, his personal life has drawn equal attention. . . .

THE AMERICAN POLITICAL news of the 1970s was two-fold: the resignation of President Richard Nixon in 1974 and, in 1976, the election to the presidency of Jimmy Carter, a Southern Democrat and evangelical Christian. It was the “Year of the Evangelical,” reported Time magazine, and indeed, it was the conservative Protestant edge that won Carter the election. You had to know something was up when even Bob Dylan, the singer, and Eldridge Cleaver, the former Black Panther, both converted (for a time) to the evangelical faith. Less noticed in this ferment was a turn in conservative Protestant thought about fine art, to include visual art, movies, and literature. . . .

WE ALL HAVE IT: intuition, or that immediate "intuitive" sense of the state of a situation. Webster's Dictionary gives one popular example by way of the common statement, "software with an intuitive interface." In other words, such computer functions "readily learned or understood." Naturally, the term intuition has spilled into nearly all areas of life, including the art of painting. . . .

IN FRENCH PAINTER Edouard Manet’s portrait of the novelist Emile Zola (1868), we see a Japanese block print pinned on a back wall. At that time, Japanese print art was arriving in Paris, and more than a few Impressionists were taken by its novel “flat color” aesthetic. Later, in 1875, to great controversy, the American painter in England, James McNeill Whistler, unveiled his “Nocturne in Black and Gold” painting, which traditionalists criticized for its dark, ambiguous tones and arrangements. Arguably, both Manet and Whistler had been influenced, to some degree, by the new arrival, and collection, of Japanese art in France from the 1860s onward. . . .

ONE ART STUDENT, as an art college senior, had already landed a job based on his excellent portfolio, which included both illustration and digital work. He also had adopted a motto: Carpe Diem—the Roman poet Horace’s Latin phrase for “seize the day.” In general terms, this is modern-day existentialism, a generic attitude based on a highly complex series of developments in Western philosophy. . . .

A DECADE AGO, you still could travel to the Philadelphia suburb of Merion, Pennsylvania, buy your ticket, and enter a rambling mansion filled with 900 paintings or artworks, mostly Impressionist. It was the famed Barnes art collection. Now, you can see that very same collection of the late Dr. Albert Barnes in a modern building, which inside has replicated all the nooks and crannies of the old Barnes mansion, where he had hung his work just so, in nine rooms on two floors, if in very eccentric ways. . . .

PERFORMANCE ART, an identified trend in Contemporary Art, is not what it used to be. Theater has always been with us. So what is different in this new species of visual art? The typical definition is that, now, the artist is a participant in the artwork. The focus is on the actor, not on the end product. Having been re-born in the 1960s, performance art has a close parallel to the "happening," those spontaneous group events with either Dionysian or political overtones. However, performance art is said to be much more programmatic: planned and executed, a contained message of sorts. . . .

WHO IS THAT PAINTER, “Red-something,” I asked myself one day. In the scheme of twentieth-century American painters who specialized in landscape, I knew that Mr. Red-something was at the top of the class. Upon investigation, I realized the error of my ways. There are actually two great landscape painters named Red-something. The first was Granville Redmond (1871-1935), whose career marked California—from San Francisco to Los Angeles—and the second was Edward Willis Redfield (1886-1965) of Pennsylvania. . . .

THE IDEA OF UTOPIA, which in Latin means “nowhere,” was dabbled with in painting, but only took on serious pursuits in modernist architecture. The result are mixed, depending on your tastes. That is because, while a painting of Utopia is to be looked at, a utopian urban plan must be lived within. . . .

IN ART CIRCLES, there's a lot of talk about emotion. The painter is driven to a final result by emotions. Fellow painters tell each other they sensed the "deep emotion" of one another’s artworks. In the advice department, a painter will occasionally instruct others how to capture emotion in a work. Clearly, human nature has some kind of aesthetic emotion, a response to imagery. From there, it becomes a labyrinth of complexity. . . .

THE RECENT AUTOBIOGRAPHY of the famed modern-day art seller, Simon de Pury (The Auctioneer, 2016), is filled with many entertaining episodes. But perhaps his recounting of the "art auction wars" of the 1950s and 1960s is the most fascinating. Here, we can find the mix of aristocracy, American emergence, the Beatles, anti-Semitism, spying for the Soviet Union, and closet homosexuality—not to mention oodles of wealth and getting your name in the New York Times for buying an expensive painting. . . .

ON THE EVE OF 2000, legions of computer coders were employed to reprogram systems to avoid a giant worldwide Internet crash, the dreaded Y2K (which didn't happen). One of the emergency coders was a young painter. "I was a darn good coder," he later said at his painting workshop. Today, he’s a darn good realist oil painter, top-tier nationally. Coding takes concentration, endurance, motor skill, and attention to detail. Could that be part of this painter’s success with the brush? It goes to the question of how much physical temperament, that is genetics and biology, and cultural influence, make the painter.

BEFORE DRAWING BECAME mere "mark making," the skill of hand-done illustration had a tremendous impact on modern painting. The painters that fueled modernist art in France in the early 1900s often had illustration backgrounds—Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Pablo Picasso come to mind. Then, as now, artists often made their living with "commercial art," that is, drawing illustrations for magazines and newspapers. That put the Parisian artists, and others in America, within the “Golden Age of Illustration,” which ended by 1940. . . .

THE RISE OF IMPRESSIONISM, an artistic whirlwind between traditional and modernist painting, seemed to have come out of nowhere. In fact, it was a carefully cultivated art movement that set the pattern for today's art market. The scene was set by a few precursors, such as the loose brushwork and color of Eugene Delacroix and political turmoil in both France and the United States. The Franco Prussian War of 1870 stirred a spirt of revolt and innovation in Paris. And the end of the Civil War in the United States led to an industrial boom, and new wealth. . . .

TEACHING THE HISTORY of America’s founding to schoolchildren has become the new culture war, but perhaps some old artwork can provide a temporary truce. I speak of two historic paintings about “Washington Crossing the Delaware.” The event, which took place in December 1776, was the turning point in the colonial army expelling the British from American shores. Such paintings, and two history books as well, can create a puzzle for young students, and puzzles are a great way to learn. . . .

THE PLEIN AIR PAINTING won first prize. Its beauty and skill were apparent, but the title was also a winner: "Golden Moment." The nighttime scene showed a Texas train yard at the desert's edge under a full moon. A streetlight illumined the tracks, a shed, and a crossing signal. The painter had indeed captured a "moment," and for several reasons. . . .

THE OVERCAST DAY, A TIME of cloudiness and no great sunshine, has taken on a negative connotation in human affairs. Yet it may be one of the best times to paint out of doors, which seems contrary to everything artists learn. Many painters and photographers go for the sunrise or sunset period. . . .

AS MUCH AS WE LIKE the idea of a "brother-and-sisterhood of art," it has essentially been about competition. That is for the good, for competition can evoke excellence. It can also reveal the calculation, even the underbelly, of the art world and some of its most famous practitioners. This darker side of competition has been especially so in modern painting and photography, . . .

WE’VE ALL SEEN THE CARTOON of the artist in beret holding out his thumb with one eye closed. He is using his thumb as a measuring stick. If a house in the landscape is the height of the thumb, and another house is half a thumb tall, then it easier to paint them accurately: two to one in height. Down to the present, painters still rely on such techniques. . . .