Picasso: Cubist Bathers. Or: The Bathers. That is the name of the wooden sculpture group that Pablo Picasso (1881 – 1973) made in 1956 from salvaged wood. Picasso once told why he preferred wood to marble: “I find it strange that we ever got the […]

Brancusi: The Endless Column. In Romania stands this recognized ‘world monument’ of iron and bronze, no less than 30 meters high. It seems to almost disappear into the clouds. But the Romanian artist Constantin Brancusi (1876 – 1957) carved the original idea much earlier, in

In a tree trunk, many younger versions of the same tree are hidden. Giuseppe Penone makes these visible again. Wood carving artists take into account the natural shapes in a piece of wood. Knots, they should not be in places where an eye or nose

Jeff Koons had kitsch enlarged and presented it as art in museums. The last major purchase of a large wooden artwork by the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam was already over 30 years ago (1988): ‘Ushering in Banality’ by Jeff Koons (1955). The American artist did

Janson’s art bible fails, even though it is a holy book for the art world. What wood carving art is in it? Or better: what and who are all missing? A lot, unfortunately. In the 1184 pages, only 25 illustrations of wooden art objects can

From the poetess Sappho who lived on Lesbos, one poem has survived. It is about her female beloved who nevertheless chose a man. We are writing 570 years before Christ. The poem inspired the Dutch sculptor Gerhard Lentink (1956) to create a monumental sculpture, in

Was it a child’s toy? Or was it a ritual figurine, used by a shaman to appease the gods? With a handle to better hold this ‘Man of Willemstad’? We will never know for certain. What is certain is that the oak figurine is 7,500