George Caleb Bingham

Looking ahead to the exhibition that will visit the Met this summer, I have just read the catalogue, “Navigating the West: George Caleb Bingham & the River” and found it illuminating and crystallizing why I so like Bingham’s work. First, it put his oeuvre in context: one never knows how unique an artist’s vision is, […]

Museum-Goer’s Wish List

A Museum-Goer’s Wish List (in no particular order) [work in process] Nearly every sizeable museum now has a Collections Handbook, a softcover, 2/3-size for $20-something book that illustrates and explicates a selection of highlights, usually one to a page. My wish is that this handbook feature primarily, if not exclusively, works on permanent display. What […]

Rembrandt’s Hands

In honor of the visit by Rembrandt’s Self-Portrait from Kenwood House in London, the Metropolitan Museum in New York has hung a large gallery (614) almost entirely with large portraits by Rembrandt and his followers or workshop (the latter all indubitably purchased by American collectors and donated to the Met as actual “Rembrandts,” only to […]

Islamic Art at the Met

Based on a quick (two-hour) first visit to the new Met galleries devoted to the broadly-defined lands of the Middle East, my favorite object isn’t even in those eleven rooms: it is the painting of a Cairo mosque by Jean-Leon Gerome that is cleverly placed in the adjoining Paintings gallery featuring the Met’s Orientalist collection. […]

The Clock, redux

I caught up with Christian Marclay’s The Clock again this weekend, this time at one of its new permanent homes, Boston’s MFA. The couches were comfy and the exhibition space was off the beaten track; the audience was small but committed and the viewing experience a good one. The second time around, the novelty of […]

The Clock

When I went to see The Clock at the Paula Cooper Gallery in Chelsea I had no idea what to expect, thanks to curator David Little’s warning not to read about it beforehand. Based on the work’s title, I was not surprised when each movie clip that appeared on the big screen had a timepiece […]

Glazing at the MIA

Oftimes when touring a special exhibition I will be asked by a visitor, “Why does this painting have glass over it?” and my answer is always, as we were taught, “Good question.” In so many ways, glass on a painting distracts and detracts from the museum visitor’s experience of the artwork. First, depending on the […]

Kandinsky & O’Keeffe

How instructive, and what a pleasure, to view back-to-back, at the Whitney and the Guggenheim, respectively, shows of abstract art by Georgia O’Keeffe and Vasily Kandinsky! Kandinsky was arguably the first abstract painter, and O’Keeffe, over in backward America, was not far behind. Most interestingly, both came to abstract art through music. It sounds obvious […]

On visiting Broad Contemporary Art Museum

Made my first visit to the Broad Contemporary Art Museum at Los Angeles County Museum of Art this week and walked away with two questions. The first is the usual: what makes this stuff “art”? This was prompted first by seeing galleries devoted to Ellsworth Kelly and Cy Twombly back-to-back. I like Twombly’s work, but […]

Top Ten Artists (Painting Division)

Van Gogh Vermeer Cezanne Rembrandt Hiroshige Piero della Francesca Caravaggio Eakins Monet Diebenkorn de La Tour Durer van der Weyden Chardin Manet Constable Ni Tsan Velazquez Kensett Homer Turner Hokusai Prendergast Gainsborough Veronese Caillebotte Filippino Lippi Wyeth van Eyck Church Pollock Giotto The first question is, How do you rank painters from different eras, different […]