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 […]

Manet/Velazquez at the Met (2003)

This was an extraordinary exhibition – in fact, three exhibitions in one. First, Velazquez and the Spanish Old Masters; second, Manet and his contemporaries; third, the Great American Portraitists. Like all major Metropolitan exhibitions these days, it was too big, and the “story” it told could have been better presented in half the space. But […]

A Meditation on Beauty

      We ran across a fascinating exhibition in Berlin last year called “Beauty” (more exactly, “Schonheit”), in which an Italian diplomat selected 100 objects from the various German national collections. My favorite display lined up three female busts: the famous one of Queen Nefertiti, a Florentine Renaissance marble, and a 13th-century terra cotta from […]