Fine Art

Adolf Wölfli

Adolf Wölfli was a Swiss outsider artist. He was abused both physically and sexually as a child, and was orphaned at the age of 10. He thereafter grew up in a series of state-run foster homes. He was later convicted of attempted child molestation, for which he served prison time. After being freed, he was re-arrested for a similar offense and in 1895 was admitted to the Waldau Clinic, a psychiatric hospital in Bern where he spent the rest of his adult life. He was very disturbed and sometimes violent on admission, leading to him being kept in isolation for his early time at hospital. He suffered from psychosis, which led to intense hallucinations.

Earl Cunningham

Earl Cunningham American folk artist. Cunnigham was a self-taught artist who painted mostly landscapes. He used vivid colors, flat perspective, and a few recurrent themes. He added incongruous details, such as flamingos in Maine and Viking ships in Florida, to his work.

Erté

Erté was a Russian-born French artist and designer.

Guy Debord’s Kriegspiel

In January 1977, the French Situationist Guy Debord founded the company Strategic and Historical Games. This company had an immediate goal: to produce a game of war that Debord had already designed in his head years before. Inspired by the military theory of Carl von Clausewitz and the European campaigns of Napoleon, Debord's game is a chess-variant played by two opposing players on a game board of 500 squares arranged in rows of 20 by 25 squares.

Gary LeMaster

Gary LeMaster is a sculptor of eggshells.

Walton Ford

Walton Ford is an American painter.

Rineke Dijkstra

Rineke Dijkstra is a photographer who manages to capture frailty like nobody else.

Harold Smith

Harold Smith represented Lloyds of London and many other insurance companies for over 50 years, specializing in fine-art and jewelry theft. He also was a security consultant for leading jewelers, museums and art galleries in the United States and overseas, including Sotheby's, Christie’s, the Smithsonian, and the Getty Museum. Among his cases were the largest gold robbery in the history of the United States and the master theft of 13 paintings from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 1990, which included a remarkable Vermeer, “The Concert.”

Karlheinz Weinberger

For decades the work of Swiss photographer Karlheinz Weinberger was shrouded in obscurity. In the 1950s he published numerous homoerotic photographs under the pseudonym "Jim" in Der Kreis, the legendary international gay magazine that featured highly sophisticated photographs by, among others, George Platt Lynes and Herbert List. Weinberger was one of the first queer photographers to show his often working-class models posing in their everyday surroundings.

Vija Celmins

Vija Celmins is an acclaimed Latvian-American visual artist best known for photo-realistic paintings and drawings of natural environments and phenomena such as the ocean, spider webs, star fields, and rocks.

Opus

Encyclopædia of the sublime