<p><span class="deck">He said that his critics didn’t like his work because it was “too noisy,” but he didn’t care what any of them said. George Luks’ determination to paint only what interested him was his greatest strength and his greatest weakness.</span></p>
<p><span class="deck">American art was hardly more than a cultural curiosity in the early years of this century. Now, it is among the world’s most influential, and much of the credit belongs to a self-made woman named Juliana Force.</span></p>
<p><span class="deck">When Pierre S. du Pont bought the deteriorated Longwood Gardens in 1906, he thought that owning property was a sign of mental derangement. Still, he worked hard to create a stupendous fantasy garden, a place, he said, “where I can entertain my friends.”</span></p>
<p><span class="deck">In an age when the best black artists were lucky to exhibit their work at state fairs, Henry Ossawa Tanner was accepted by the most selective jury in France.</span></p>
<p><span class="deck">At the dawn of this century, a new form of residential architecture rose from the American heartland, ruled by the total integration of space, site, and structure.</span></p>
<p><span class="deck"><span class="typestyle">The man who may be America’s greatest artist liked to fend off the curious with the statement “My life is all in my works. ” He was right, but the works and the life take on new poignance with the release and exhibition of a once-private collection of his letters, photographs, and sketchbooks.</span> </span></p>
<p><span class="deck">For 150 years, a crenelated Gothic Revival castle in Connecticut has housed an art collection that was astonishing for its time, and remains so.</span></p>
<p><span class="deck">A PAIR OF GERMAN-BORN CRAFTSMEN BEGAN BY MAKING EXUBERANT FURNITURE AND WENT ON TO SHOW A NEWLY RICH GENERATION HOW TO LIVE.</span></p>
<p><span class="deck">A historian of American portraits tells how he determines whether a picture is authentic and why that authenticity matters.</span></p>
<p><span class="deck">World War I made the city the financial capital of the world. Then, after World War II, a very few audacious painters and passionate critics made it the cultural capital, as well. Here is how they seized the torch from Europe.</span></p>
<p><span class="deck">He may have been the greatest caricaturist of all time; he has imitators to this day. But his true passion was for a very different discipline.</span></p>
<p><span class="deck"><lead_in> AN OHIO UNDERTAKER’S LIFELONG</lead_in> obsession has left a mysterious outdoor gallery of American folk art.</span></p>
<p><span class="deck">His contemporaries saw the painter Charles Burchfield as another regionalist. Today, it seems clear that the region was the human spirit.</span></p>
<p><span class="deck">At the height of the American avant-garde movement, Fairfield Porter’s realistic paintings defied the orthodoxy of Abstract Expressionism and risked rejection by the art world. But today, his true stature is becoming apparent: He may just be the best we have.</span></p>
