In 1840, to witness the full force of nature’s tumult and beauty, the 65-year-old British painter Joseph Mallord William Turner had sailors lash him to a boat’s mast for four hours during a tempest. “I did not expect to escape,” Turner said, “but I felt bound to record it if I did.” Turner’s record is the momentous Snow Storm: Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth (1842)—a vertiginous whirlwind of streaking blacks, burnished ochers, glinting silvers, and pewter grays, with sensuous layers of opacity and translucence engulfing the boat, its bright white sail clawed nearly to oblivion. READ ON

Artists can find inspiration everywhere, even in thin air. For shoe designer Christian Louboutin, who grew up in Paris’s far-flung 12th Arrondissement, it was reliably found somewhere more concrete—at the Palais de la Porte Dorée, an extravaganza of an exposition hall built to house the Colonial Exhibition of 1931. READ ON