Reflections on visiting the Prado and more: Merely by painting The Spinners, Vulcan’s Forge and Las Meninas, Velazquez earned his place at or near the top of Western Europe’s great artists. His royal portraits are honored next, but it’s hard to say how they would have made his reputation today – especially given the unattractive […]
Mnuchin, a local gallery that presents museum-quality shows, rounded up works from the ’80s by Sean Scully, one of my favorites for his rough, building-block construction works. In the ’80s, however, he hadn’t yet found his winning formula. He was advancing toward it, and that in itself was interesting to see; but compared to his […]
The Met’s second big fall show opened last week, and as usual it is big: something like 40 of the 60 known paintings by Valentin de Boulogne – from the Louvre, above all, plus the Vatican, Indianapolis and several venues in Rome and Florence – have been gathered and, unfortunately, hung together. Unfortunate, because so […]
A quick but labored walk through the Met’s newest blockbuster exhibition, Jerusalem (1000-1400), made me wonder if I was ‘arted out,’ if I was going to museums out of habit or sense of duty and no longer able to truly enjoy myself. Yes, there were a few things that caught my eye, but for the […]
The age-old, unanswerable question came to mind as I pondered two equally compelling objects on back-to-back days in San Francisco (8/13-14/16). The first was the “strandbeest” at the Exploratorium in an exhibit titled “The Dream Machines of Theo Jansen.” There were actually several on display, including one that was operational. Contraptions made largely of PVC […]
We saw two new modern-art museums this summer: the Broad in Los Angeles and SFMOMA in San Francisco. Both feature spectacular buildings and predictable art; both are worth the trip. The Broad, for obvious reasons, is much the smaller: it houses one couple’s collection; whereas SFMOMA has history and a whole, very rich, city supporting […]
George Schastey The Met built a small show, Furniture in New York’s Gilded Age, around their “discovery” of furniture designer George Schastey, responsible for the Met’s newest period room, the dressing room from 4 West 54th Street completed in 1890 for Arabella Worsham, mistress and later wife of Colles Huntington. Period photographs allowed the Met […]
Herewith, in chronological order, my ten personal favorite works from the Museum of Capodimonte in Naples: Colantonio del Fiore, St. Jerome in his Study (1446). Best of the Naples artists featured upstairs; fun detail and warm, cuddly lion. Botticelli, Virgin Mary with Child and Angels (1469). I can’t get enough of the early delicious Botticelli, […]
Florence is a veritable Disneyland of Renaissance art, with commensurate gelaterias and boutiques scattered among the rides. As with Disneyland, one doesn’t want to miss an attraction, which inevitably leaves the visitor exhausted by the experience, even if one has five days, as we just did, to see it all. Although this was my third […]
I gave the much-maligned Museum of Modern Art the benefit of my doubt by signing up for a discounted “senior New York in May” membership en route to a quick tour of the current exhibitions. Taking the elevator to the sixth floor I entered the lobby area of temporary shows, where a mass of seated […]
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