Can Art Cure Alzheimer’s Disease?

If art can help us hold onto memories, can it help us when we lose them to aging or disease? In Creative Aging, which runs through November 30, 2012 at The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC, health experts and museum experts join forces to help those suffering from memory impairment, especially that related to Alzheimer’s Disease, and other physical challenges. Part of November’s National Arts and Health Month, Creative Aging uses the Phillips’ amazing art collection to stimulate the subjects’ minds and engage them in a dialogue with the art and each other. The thoughts, feelings, and memories stirred up, as well as the art they create, are unforgettable. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "CanArt Cure Alzheimer’s Disease?"

[Image: Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890). The Road Menders, 1889. Oil on canvas; 29 x 361/2 in. The Phillips Collection, Washington D.C. Acquired 1949.]

[Many thanks to The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC, for providing me with the image above and other press materials related to the exhibition Creative Aging, which runs through November 30, 2012.]

How Helen Frankenthaler Blossomed Into a Great Artist

News that Helen Frankenthaler died yesterday at the age of 83 after a long illness is making a lot of people recall just how important a figure the self-described “saddle-shoed girl a year out of Bennington” was in the history of 20^th century American art. Schooled in Cezanne and Cubism during her college days, Frankenthaler found her way in the rough and tumble art world of Abstract Expressionism with a combination of personal beauty and brains that boys club couldn’t ignore. Often ignored for being too soft, too feminine in her art, Helen Frankenthaler’s death’s reminding us that a lady can be a painter, too, and a great one. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "How Helen Frankenthaler Blossomed Into a Great Artist."

Target Practice

The American art scene lost one of the great, yet forgotten artists of the twentieth century last Tuesday with the passing of Kenneth Noland at 85 years of age. One of the Color Field painters, the abstract art movement christened by influential critic Clement Greenberg as the true successor to the Abstract Expressionism of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, Noland enjoyed his greatest success in the late 1950s and early 1960s, only to become collateral damage when Greenberg tumbled from the apex of the critical world and he and the rest of the Color Field painters became targets, too. (Noland's ") Please venture over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Target Practice."