THE MAGAZINE
No Halos at the Dinner Table: The Human Side of Leonardo’s “The Last Supper”
What happens when holiness gives way to humanity? In this reflective art-historical essay, TWoA revisits Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper at Santa Maria delle Grazie, reading the fractured gestures, shadowed faces, and absent halos as a radical insistence on the apostles’ human vulnerability. Moving from Renaissance Milan to modern reimaginings by Domenico Ghirlandaio, Mary Beth Edelson, and Salvador Dalí, the piece traces how this table—sacred yet ordinary—continues to frame faith, doubt, betrayal, and belief as profoundly human experiences.
Spring Vibes!
Sometimes, an image says more than words. Spring is in the air! Celebrate it with TWoA and the best spring artworks.
Lights of Spiritual Growth: Ramadan Lanterns
As Ramadan unfolds, its most luminous symbol comes into focus: the fanous. These traditional lanterns, glowing in homes and streets across the Muslim world, embody far more than decoration. Rooted in faith, charity, and spiritual discipline, they reflect Ramadan’s deeper call toward enlightenment, resilience, and communal care. To understand Ramadan, one must follow the light.
Pablo Picasso in Music: “Formes en l’air” by Artur Lourié
What happens when Cubism leaves the canvas and enters the concert hall? In Formes en l’air (1915), Russian composer Artur Lourié transforms Pablo Picasso’s fractured visual language into an experimental piano score that reimagines how music can be seen, read, and heard.
Let’s Get Corny: Grant Wood’s Portrait of Rural America
Few American paintings have been interpreted — or misinterpreted — as often as Grant Wood’s American Gothic. Long reduced to parody or polemic, the work resists easy meaning. This essay revisits Wood’s intentions, his Midwestern roots, and how a single image came to reflect America’s shifting ideas about home, dignity, and belonging.
A Kiss for Valentine’s Day
Few images of love are as instantly recognisable as Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss. Often reduced to a decorative symbol of romance, the painting rewards closer attention. This essay revisits Klimt’s gilded masterpiece, exploring how ornament, symbolism, and subtle gesture turn a fleeting embrace into something enduring — intimate, enigmatic, and profoundly human.
From the Eyes of a Young Photographer: Berk Kır, “Extimacy,” Merdiven Art Space, Istanbul, 5-31 January 2024
In Extimacy, on view at Merdiven Art Space, the young photographer Berk Kır pushes photography beyond the visual. Incorporating sound, found materials, and the urban environment itself, the exhibition invites viewers to encounter images as physical objects — shaped by touch, space, and the quiet thresholds between what is seen, heard, and felt.
Guest Artist: Ginevra Mastrocola, 19, Brera Academy of Fine Arts, Milan
For Ginevra Mastrocola, art is both refuge and reckoning. In Monomania, created while still a student at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts, she stages a sparse, meditative installation that asks viewers to sit with silence, uncertainty, and the fear of creative inadequacy — revealing how vulnerability itself can become a material for making.
Monet in Winter
Winter was never bleak in the hands of Claude Monet. In snow-covered views of Argenteuil, Lavacourt, and the wheat fields beyond Paris, Monet found not desolation but light — soft skies, muted colour, and the quiet poetry of everyday life slowed by winter. This selection revisits how the Impressionist painter transformed cold, fleeting moments into scenes of calm and warmth.
The Most Perfect Holiday Painting: Antoine Vollon’s “Mound of Butter”
At first glance, Antoine Vollon’s Mound of Butter seems almost absurd: an enormous, glistening heap of dairy, painted with reverence and weight. But look longer, and the still life reveals itself as something more enduring — a meditation on abundance, material pleasure, and the rituals that anchor us to season and memory. Few paintings capture the spirit of holiday indulgence with such unsentimental grace.
Street Artist JR at the Paris Opera: Back to the Cave
While the Paris Opera undergoes restoration, JR has turned its scaffolding into something more than a temporary skin. Retour à la caverne imagines the opera house as a return to humanity’s first artistic impulse — the cave — culminating in a nocturnal performance choreographed by Damien Jalet to music by Thomas Bangalter. With dancers moving like bats beneath embroidered handprints, the project collapses distinctions between street art, ballet, ritual, and monument.
AI as an Artifical Brush: Refik Anadol
In AI as an Artificial Brush, Turkish-American artist Refik Anadol reimagines painting for the algorithmic age. Drawing on machine learning, memory, and data, his hypnotic works—seen at institutions like Museum of Modern Art—blur the line between human imagination and artificial “dreaming,” asking whether creativity can exist without the human hand.
In Defense of Dogs Playing Poker
Long dismissed as kitsch, Dogs Playing Poker has become one of the most recognisable images in American visual culture. In this sharp, good-humoured essay, Tamar Avishai revisits Cassius Marcellus Coolidge’s iconic painting A Friend in Need (1903), arguing that pleasure, accessibility, and humour have always had a place in art. Moving between connoisseurship and popular taste, the piece asks a simple question: why shouldn’t art also be allowed to amuse?
Guest Artist: Sara Cancelliere, Accademia di Brera, Milan, Italy
For 18-year-old artist Sara Cancelliere, art is both a universal language and an intimate act of self-discovery. In this TWoA guest feature, Cancelliere discusses Sogni di un viaggio (2022), a mixed-media self-portrait exploring the idea of the journey—at once physical, emotional, and unconscious. Created while studying at the Accademia di Brera in Milan, the work reflects a young artist’s search for identity through memory, material, and imagination.
Happy Birthday, Pablo Picasso!
Few artists have shaped modern art as profoundly as Pablo Picasso. In this TWoA birthday feature, Melis Seven looks beyond the familiar masterpieces to uncover five lesser-known facts—from Picasso’s precocious childhood to his role in reinventing painting, sculpture, and modern visual language. A concise celebration of an artist whose influence remains impossible to escape.
A Glimpse of Autumn
As the seasons shift, landscape painting offers a quiet way to mark the passage of time. In this TWoA reflection, Melis Seven turns to autumnal scenes by Gustave Courbet and Thomas Cole, whose glowing forests and distant horizons capture the warmth, melancholy, and stillness of fall. A meditation on colour, atmosphere, and the subtle poetry of seasonal change.
Discovering the Soul of West Asia: The Collection of the Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah
Sultan Sooud Al Qassemi has built one of the most diverse and gender-balanced collections of modern and contemporary Arab art. Through the Barjeel Art Foundation, this expansive collection is made widely accessible—much of it available to view online. Not sure where to begin? In this TWoA feature, Lina and Christina Ezrahi trace the stories behind a selection of extraordinary works, offering an entry point into the rich artistic histories of West Asia.
Ai Weiwei: “Know Thyself” and the Power of Lego, neugerriemschneider, Berlin, 14 September 2023 – 30 March 2024
Familiar masterpieces reappear—this time built from Lego bricks. In this TWoA exhibition review, Christina Ezrahi explores Know Thyself, Ai Weiwei’s solo show at neugerriemschneider, where iconic images by Monet and Leonardo are reimagined through memory, politics, and personal history. Playful in material yet grave in meaning, the works reveal how childhood objects can carry the weight of exile, protest, and self-reflection.
The Real Story Behind John Singer Sargent’s “The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit”
Some paintings ask to be revisited, changing as we change. In this TWoA essay, Tamar Avishai explores John Singer Sargent’s The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit (1882), a portrait that quietly breaks the rules of representation. Drawing on modern realism and echoes of Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas, the painting captures childhood not as display, but as lived experience—intimate, elusive, and hauntingly familiar.
How to Enjoy Art History by the Pool (or From Your Sofa)
Art history doesn’t have to be confined to lecture halls and libraries. In this TWoA lifestyle piece, Tamar Avishai offers easy, pleasurable ways to weave art into your summer—whether you’re poolside, travelling, or stretched out on the sofa. From novels and films to podcasts, museums, and even colouring books, this is art history at its most relaxed and inviting.