The French painter Jacques Louis David (1748-1825) was the leader of the neoclassic movement. His style set the artistic standards for many of his contemporaries and determined the direction of numerous 19th-century painters. Jacques Louis David early...

MORE than a century and a half after his death, the greatest French painter of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic period, jacques-Louis David, still puzzles and provokes. He was a bundle of contradictions then. Modern critics and scholars have trouble agreeing about him now....

Bordes, Philippe. Jacques-Louis David. Empire to Exile. New Haven and London: Yale UP, 2005. Pp. 279. ISBN 0-300-10447-2. Revolutions severely challenge visual artists, for when well-established lifestyles are suddenly abolished, only the supplest personalities remain productive. When pre-revolutionary institutions are restored, then...

The best thing about Tales and Travels: Drawings Recently Acquired on the Sunny Crawford von Bülow Fund, now on view at the Morgan Library & Museum, is that it’s filled with nobodies: artists whose achievement has become the purview of specialists. There are a few...

You’ve got to hand it to an artist who could even conceive of an erotic burrito, and then muster up the talent to create a sculpture fulfilling the idea’s absurdist promise. There it is, at the beginning of The Art of Betty Woodman, a retrospective...