The Musee du Quai Branly – what a hodgepodge! In a stab at the ‘new museum,’ galleries have been eliminated, and the visitor is expected to flow through continents, like some Nile-Amazon combination. Then, what impresses is not quality, but quantity. Instead of one great Kota reliquary figure, we find eleven lined up in a […]
We saw the light and dark of European 19th century art at the Musee d’Orsay: the world’s leading collection of Impressionism in the 5th floor permanent galleries and a special exhibition on the ground floor of “Dark Romanticism,” called, infelicitously from Poe, “The Angel of the Odd.” The latter featured art “that used terrifying and […]
Winona collectors Mary Burrichter and Bob Kierlin have done in Winona exactly what I’ve been trying to get the MIA to do in Minneapolis for 15 years: build a representative collection of 19th-century American landscape painting. Moreover, they’ve done it in less than 10 years and built a beautifully sited museum on the Mississippi River […]
Whenever I go to a comparably sized city, I inevitably end up comparing their art collection to the MIA’s, and this thought was never far from my mind as I toured Kansas City’s Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art last Wednesday (10/10/12). My investigation was neither deep nor complete, as there were whole parts of the collection […]
MassMOCA is featuring an exhibition of new Canadian artists which, while not purporting to define an entire country, does give an idea of current artistic sensibility north of the border. I had a marvelous time and, looking back, was struck by the fact that six of my favorite seven pieces had moving parts. (I didn’t […]
The MIA’s “Rembrandt in America” featured, by approximate count, 50 paintings – 25 by Rembrandt, 25 not so much. The spectrum ran from two authentically great works – the MIA’s own Lucretia and the Self-Portrait from Washington – to two sad pastiches – the Young Woman from Allentown and the Ringling’s Lamentation. Everything else fell […]
Rembrandt van Rijn painted great works of art from 1628 to 1669. There wasn’t much art collecting in the United States in those years – of course, there wasn’t even a United States. The first Rembrandt painting came to America probably in 1884, more than 200 years after Rembrandt died. So it is not surprising […]
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 […]
In the last two weeks I’ve had the opportunity to view two new installations of American paintings, 19th century through the Ashcan School, one at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the other at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. Surprisingly, but perhaps because of my different expectations, the former was disappointing while the latter […]
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. […]
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