Chauvet Cave Paintings These delicately drawn horses are among the oldest works of human expression - in other words, art. They have stood in their orderly row nodding and whinnying, for 17,000 years, while life marched above and around them through wars, peacetimes, famines and times of plenty, building of towns, cities, railroads, roads, bridges, energy plants, cell phone towers, etc. Only discovered in 1991, these drawings are the companions to the more famous bulls and animal images from the Lascaux caves of the same area in Southwestern France. Though not created to be art in the modern sense, the sheer beauty is breathtaking - when Picasso first saw the Lascaux caves he commented that the artists who had made them had beaten him to everything. These images are a significant link to a time when humans faced a brutal world of cold and hunger armed with little more than their imaginations - it is believed that they used these images for a ritual hunt - throwing spears at them, evoking a 'magic' to give them more power - before venturing out for the real thing. To modern eyes these horses are too delicate and gentle to be prey, but those must have been desperate times, and the horse was far from its status as a domestic animal.

Dali - Weird Mastery Salvador Dali's life was, in many ways, as much a creation of his weird imagination as his art. Spanish, born in 1904, incompletely schooled due to his prickly relationship with authority, he moved through various phases before his celebrity was established with his strange, complex Surrealist compositions, the best known of which is "The Persistence of Memory" (at NY MOMA), with the famous dripping watch. His late life and art became more about show than the quality of the art - stunts such as hanging from a plane by his mustache and knocking out quick commercial drawings - but his earlier work (through the 1930's) is breathtaking in the mastery of technique and narrative composition. This example, titled "The Temptations of Saint Anthony" is, like all the works from the period, full of personal and universal symbolism, and rewards intimate inspection. He was also involved in films, including the Surrealist masterpiece by Luis Bunuel, Un Chien Andalou.

Bronzino's Little Princess Children never really had a childhood until the idea was invented in the 19th century. For centuries before that they were simply smaller; they wore the clothes and acted the roles assigned to them by birth and fate like any adult. This beautiful little girl, who is probably no older than six, wears the restrictive formal dress of a highborn Renaissance adult, including tight bodice, puffed sleeves, and low square neckline. Her name is Bira, and despite the fact that she is illegitimate, she is still a Medici (daughter of Duke Cosimo) and must dress the part of a princess. She features in 20th century art as well as in this 1512 portrait by Agnolo Bronzino - Joseph Cornell encased her image at least two of his magical box collages, seeming to emphasize her fate as a trapped creature of great beauty.

Hockney - Portrait of Celia David Hockney, one of our best living artists, is at once contemporary and old-school, combining as he does an old master's hand and eye with a sense of color and composition that is always new and fresh. This portrait (from the 1970's)is of Celia, a friend who appears in several works. It's done with colored pencils, tools that have been available to artists for a while, but never for 'fine' art until Hockney began to put them to use in his portraits. One of the joys of his portraits on paper is his skillful use of the white paper, the 'negative space' that frames, holds, defines, and embraces the 'positive'image.

Self-image, Albrecht Durer Judging by this self-portrait, done when Albrecht Durer was in his early twenties, self-esteem was not a problem for him. Isn't he beautiful, with his long curls and carefully chosen clothing? Durer lived and worked in Germany in the early 16th century (at the heart of the tumultuous Protestant Reformation) where artists had not yet gained the respect that had been won by their Italian Renaissance colleagues. Northern patrons were slower to allow the dignity of an artist's signature, let alone the credit for the intellect driving a good craftsman's hand. There are three (known) important Durer self-portraits from different times in his life, all of which look us squarely in the eye, demanding that we recognize and respect his presence along with the skill with which he painted them.

Strawberries - Chardin Jean-Baptiste Chardin painted this perfect mountain of strawberries in 1761. Pairing it with two cherries, a stalk with two white carnations, a peach, and a glass of what appears to be water, he offers us a meal that's as luscious as it is healthy. It's a scene of a season, and the colors, shapes, textures, and implied tastes show a logic stipulated by nature, rather than by long distance trade and refrigeration. Chardin was born, lived, and worked in Paris and, though in his art he references 17th century Dutch painters, he himself never ventured much beyond the city limits. He is one of the great masters of the still life; his simple, beautifully composed paintings go beyond realism to reach something grave and profound in the human psyche. In his treatment of the delicious but vulnerable subject matter he tells a tale of the sweetness of life and the inevitability of death.

Rain Dance - Hiroshige With the string of dry years we've had in California we could use a few days like this. Hiroshige, one of the last great Ukiyo-e great of 19th century Tokyo, gives us a good drenching even from a distance. Like the best of Ukiyo-e compositions he puts us high and slightly off-center, catching us off guard visually and putting us directly in the path of the downpour. The word Ukiyo-e, usually translated as 'Floating World,'refers to the art associated with the easily available sensual pleasures that defined the period; typical subjects include actors and beautiful women, and often scenes of local interest. The best known works of Ukiyo-e are, like this, intricately crafted colored woodblock prints.

Visual Music - Paul Klee This rich quilt of pattern and color is a 1922 painting by the German-Swiss artist Paul Klee, a master of the playful and inventive, an artist who sometimes used materials in unconventional ways. He is best known for compositions that appeal to the eye with a light-hearted use of color and line - one of his most delightful is 'The Twittering Machine' at the NY Museum of Modern Art where a line of birds seem to 'twitter' as the handle of a humorously drawn machine is turned. Klee was a talented violinist, married to a pianist, and like his contemporary Kandinsky, created work that evokes the harmonies of music through color, line, and form. It is a sad comment on the times he lived through that even his work, innocent as it appears, was given the label of 'degenerate' by the Nazis. He taught at the celebrated Bauhaus school in Germany until he was forced into exile. As you would expect, his late work is darker and can contain a deeper sense of the malevolent.

SunWorship - Edward Hopper In the middle of winter, sun is a precious commodity. The woman in this 1952 painting by Edward Hopper, titled appropriately "Morning Sun," sunbathes in her city apartment above the shadowy, perhaps chilly and windblown, New York streets. As with all Hopper paintings there's an implicit story - with a first glance come questions about the girl and her life beyond the walls of her sparsely furnished bedroom. Hopper, who painted during some of the hardest years of the 20th century, often slips a poignant sense of loneliness and loss into his scenes of ordinary people going about their business. Quite a few of his paintings have a bright slanting sun coming into a room (almost always from the right side!) - light is an ancient symbol in Art History, often used to convey the idea of hope or relief - whether he consciously meant it that way or not, it gets the idea across!

Holiday Singers In a nod to the holiday season, here is a musical scene from a Nativity by Piero della Francesco, one of the masters of the early Italian Renaissance. It is a Christian image, of course, but the music and spirited singing represent the tendency on the part of most Northern peoples to celebrate the darkest point of the year in some way, no matter their faith. Piero's version of the Nativity is unusual in the specifics of the instruments and the mouths open in song; most depictions of the Nativity include angels but few show them actively making music. Piero was a very precise guy, a mathematician as well as a painter; it's likely that he had a specific song in mind when he painted this. Although Piero's importance was disregarded for quite some time following the Renaissance, he was rediscovered early in the 20th century. The stoic geometry of his figures and compositions appealed to the artists, including Picasso, who developed Cubism.

Open Studio, Picasso style In this season of Open Studios, here is a look at a famous one, that of Picasso in his house at La Californie, on the French Riviera. Lee Miller was an extraordinary woman gifted with abundant personal and professional talents. Ethereally beautiful, she worked as a model before becoming a photographer, who came to be known best, perhaps, for the jarring photos she took in Hitler's bunker after the Allied victory. She was the lover of Man Ray, the Surrealist photographer, and moved in avant-garde artistic circles in Europe. Miller's 1957 picture and her description say a great deal about Picasso, the man and artist, as any studio does about the artist who inhabits it. “Wherever he is, he lives an unbelievably simple life in the midst of an unbelievable chaos of possessions. They are all treasures, motley, matched, chic, shabby, beloved or forgotten. Masterpieces lie next to junk which in his hands will become other masterpieces. Old iron, shards and bones await their moment of glory.”

Shopping, Edo Style This busy scene of people engaged in shopping on a market street by the great Japanese master, Ando Hiroshige, who was born in Edo (Tokyo) in 1797. The title of this work is Station of Otsu, and it is from Hiroshige's series "Reisho Tokaido", or The Fifty-three Stations of the Tokaido. It depicts a scene typical of the Edo period of 1615–1868 and was made in about 1848. Hiroshige created several series on different themes using the complex technique of woodblock printing, a process requires a separate inked block for each color. Colors may also be altered by attention to the way the color is put on - note the graded red at the lower left. Once the blocks were cut and aligned, however, many prints could be made, and thus this way of making art was cheap and popular, and thus available to ordinary people instead of only the wealthy. We're looking at one stop along the highway called the Tokaido, which stretched from Edo to Kyoto, a journey of ten days or two weeks. Some of Hiroshige's scenes from the series show beautiful landscape views, perhaps with a hint of human activity, but here shoppers are buying goods that they need for the journey, or perhaps to give as gifts when they arrive. Note the unusual handling of artistic space, with a 'hole' in the center of the composition and figures pushed out to the sides. When Japanese prints like Hiroshige's hit Europe in the mid to late 19th century, they astonished artists like Degas and Van Gogh and helped alter accepted methods and standards for art.

A Harmonious World This painting, View of Delft by Jan Vermeer, is from one of those rare periods in history when a culture is prosperous, at peace, and feeling very happy with itself. The Dutch Republic had gained its independence from Church and Empire after nearly a century of long bloody battles and was riding high in its role as master of the seas in a newly discovered world of trade. This is one of two landscapes by Vermeer, who left only about 32 known paintings. He is celebrated for his glimmering touch with light - most of us know him for his intimate paintings of women such as Girl with a Pearl Earring - but here is the same soft glowing sense of surface and reflection. The composition, like most Dutch landscapes of the 17th century, has a low horizon with emphasis on sky and water. The city of Delft sits between the two, orderly and calm, and very beautiful in its straightforward presence.

This Land is Their Land In the late 18th century, when Jane Austen was writing delicious pictures of upper-crust English life, Thomas Gainsborough was making his living painting the same people. Can't you see this young couple, Mr. and Mrs. Andrews, sipping punch at a country ball with Mr. Darcy? There wasn't much other choice for a painter at the time; if you wanted to be an artist you obeyed the hierarchy of subject matter set by the Royal Academy. Portraits weren't at the top of the list - that distinction belonged to history painting - but they were respectable and paid well if you developed a reputation among the 'right' people. I love this painting - the soft blue silk of her gown, the cocky comfort of the man's pose, the velvety feel of the greens and the greys. This is at least as much as landscape as a portrait, apparent evidence for the idea that, had there been a way to do it at the time, Gainsborough would have thrown over commissioned portraits for pure landscape. Gainsborough holds a place as an excellent landscape painter in a time when there was no place for pure landscape: landscape as a subject was at the very bottom of that Academic list - no status, no money, no way to make a living at it. He left a legacy, however, that enriched many painters who had the luck to live in a later, less restrictive time.