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Matthew Gurewitsch

Weegee danced and screamed to get the beach crowd's attention. The masked man called himself the Spider.

Weegee’s Day at the Beach

For the noir photographer Weegee, bathers at Coney Island had another kind of gritty reality

In the Spoken Word recording, John Steinbeck recounts how he came up with the idea for The Grapes of Wrath.

Voices from Literature’s Past

The British Library’s Spoken Word albums of recordings by British and American writers shed new light on the authors’ work

The Feast of Esther, painted by Lievens c. 1625, was identified for years in 20th-century art texts as an early Rembrandt. Like Rembrandt, Lievens used contrasts of light and shadow to add drama.

Jan Lievens: Out of Rembrandt’s Shadow

A new exhibition re-establishes Lievens’ reputation as an old master, after centuries of being eclipsed by his friend and rival

The Battle of Actium, c. 1680.

The Divine Art of Tapestries

The long-forgotten art form receives a long overdue renaissance in an exhibit featuring centuries-old woven tapestries

"Years later, in the Kremlin," Karsh would recall, "[Leonid] Brezhnev agreed to sit for me only if I made him as beautiful as Audrey Hepburn."

From Castro to Warhol to Mother Teresa, He Photographed Them All

Yousuf Karsh took a singular approach to fame and the famous

The painted replica of a c. 490 B.C. archer (at the Parthenon in Athens) testifies to German archaeologist Vinzenz Brinkmann’s painstaking research into the ancient sculpture’s colors. The original statue came from the Temple of Aphaia on the Greek island of Aegina.

True Colors

Archaeologist Vinzenz Brinkmann insists his eye-popping reproductions of ancient Greek sculptures are right on target

“I do think there’s a lot of good writing now on TV,” says Ruhl. “I loved ‘Six Feet Under,’ for example. But writing plays is my first passion. So far, I’m very happy in the theater.”

Wild Woman

Playwright Sarah Ruhl speaks softly and carries a big kick

David Hockney exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts in London

David Hockney and Friends

Though the artist doesn’t think of himself as a painter of portraits, a new exhibition makes the case that they are key to his work

Beowulf face to face with fire-breathing dragon

Evildoer

The Beowolf monster is a thousand years old, but his bad old tricks continue to resonate in the modern world

A Night at the Opera

Weegee’s wartime snapshot was widely seen as social criticism, but it was, in fact, a farce