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Bob Duggan
Contributing Writer
Bob Duggan has Master’s Degrees in English Literature and Education and is not afraid to use them. Born and raised in Philadelphia, PA, he has always been fascinated by art and brings an informed amateur’s eye to the conversation.
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Baggy pants. A cane. A bowler hat. A mustache. These are the unlikely visual ingredients of one of the most important fictional characters of the last century around the world. […]
When William Shakespeare’s friends and fellow actors and authors published his collected plays in 1623, 7 years after the Bard shuffled off this mortal coil, that book, now known as […]
Let others debate whether Santa Claus is white or not. There’s no debate that the definitive American Santa is political cartoonist Thomas Nast’s Merry Old Santa Claus (detail shown above) […]
Vivian Maier took about 150,000 pictures during her lifetime, but never showed a single one to another living soul. When she died in April 2009, Vivian was remembered as a […]
Fewer than 14% of American silent films still exist today in complete form according to “The Survival of American Silent Feature Films: 1912-1929,” a recent Library of Congress report by […]
On October 15, 2013, the City Council of Cupertino, California, debated for 6 hours before finally approvingApple’s plans for a new $5 billion USD office headquarters to be built in […]
The last foreign military invasion of the United States (which included the burning of the White House) took place two centuries ago. Half a century ago, a different kind of […]
Any biographer writing about a familiar subject faces the same towering problem—how do I make this person seem new and modern? When writing about an artist such as Norman Rockwell, […]
Sometimes the toughest shadow to escape is one you cast over yourself. When artist Art Spiegelman began publishing Maus in 1980 in chapter form in the indie comics magazine Raw, […]
We all know Rockwell’s Freedom from Want by heart, even if we don’t know its title.
When we look at the sculpture of Auguste Rodin, we can’t help but feel what his figures feel. Every inch of those sculpted bodies “speaks” the language of passion, whether […]
This week we mark the loss half a century ago of President John F. Kennedy. For that generation, Kennedy’s death was the “where were you” moment. For our generation, the […]
“I could erase an entire life,” thinks a pensive Adolf Hitler as he stares into his mirror in one of the many striking images from the career of artist Raymond […]
Movie ratings in the United States today boil down to a few simple elements—sex bombs, f-bombs, and real (fake) bombs. Too much sex or nudity, too much profanity, or too […]
If you know only one work of modern art, it’s probably The Scream. More people know that “Mona Lisa” of modern angst than know the name of the artist that […]
In addition to its humor, quality drawing, and thoughtfulness, the thing that separated the strip and its maker was the refusal to license and merchandize the work.
Gardiner’s life-long immersion in Bach’s music—as performer and conductor, rather than as academic analyst—qualifies him perhaps better than anyone else alive today to recreate what it was to be the living, breathing, human Bach.
“Unimaginable!” roared Parisian newspaper headlines on August 23, 1911, the day after the Louvre discovered that someone had stolen Leonardo da Vinci‘s Mona Lisa. Who, everyone asked, took La Joconde, […]
Have you ever noticed how long people look at a painting in a museum or gallery? Surveys have clocked view times anywhere between 10 and 17 seconds. The Louvre estimated […]
“How I’ll gobble Paris up, if I’m lucky enough to go back there!” painter Fernand Léger wrote in a 1915 letter home from the front lines of World War I. […]