Two quick reactions from a quick first visit to the Met’s blockbuster fall show, “Divine Egypt.” First is the extraordinary amount of Egyptian material in the Met’s collection. One almost feels that an impetus for the show was the Met’s desire to bring out of storage scores of objects that probably haven’t been displayed for […]
The big excitement at the Met this spring has been the long-awaited opening of the Rockefeller Wing, housing the collections of African, Oceanic and Pre-Columbian art, designed by Kulapat Yantrasast of WHY Architecture. It has received glowing reviews. I don’t like it, and, as I’m trying to do with my negative reaction to the Sargent […]
The Cleveland Museum of Art isn’t imposing from the outside–arriving by taxi it was hardly apparent where the entrance was, the opposite of the grand entries of America’s other great museums: the Met, the National Gallery, the BMFA, Mia, etc. Instead, the statement comes inside, where Rafael Vinoly has created a vast glass-covered plaza that […]
Random thoughts from a brief visit to the National Gallery of Art last Saturday (3/23/24): The addition and integration of works from the Corcoran Gallery give the National Gallery one of the strongest, if not the strongest, collections of American art in the country. Despite the softening of the auction market for works in this […]
I’ve always found the MFA to be just about the hardest art museum to navigate. It also used to be the fustiest. On a day visit last week I found numerous design improvements, in line with user-friendly trends; but with many galleries closed for reinstallation or upgrading I was just as confused going from one […]
Ever since the George Floyd tragedy, cultural and media institutions have been making up for a century of neglect by spotlighting Black-related art and artists. The relatively staid Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has ridden the wave, first with a new “Afrofuturist” period room, then a dossier exhibition around Why Born Enslaved!, a […]
Museum- and gallery-going were necessarily down in 2021, thanks to Covid, but we were fortunate to have our base in New York and family in San Francisco, giving us a chance to catch some of the season’s big shows and rub shoulders with smaller venues along the way. In retrospect, the year doesn’t look so […]
I wondered, as I wandered through the many galleries of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, how long will we have this kind of encyclopedic, time-specific museum? Or more to the point, how long will we have them outside New York and a few other world capitals? You have to remember that the encyclopedic museum (EM) […]
A major museum exhibition can have two justifications: it can make a novel or interesting point, or argument; or it can present great, or at least interesting, objects. By those measures, The Renaissance Nude at the Getty Center was a disappointment. If there was a point, it was hardly novel or coherent. Despite social inhibitions, […]
For more than 50 years Claude Monet has been one of my favorite artists, but while there are works I like more than others, I had never systematically analyzed his different periods vis-à-vis my taste. Three recent experiences, however, have shown me that I don’t like all Monets and led me to rate the “good” […]
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