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 […]
Spring 2025 The Met’s big show this season was Sargent & Paris, basically a retrospective of his works from the decade beginning with his 1874 arrival in Paris. The 1874 date was serendipitous, as it matched the “Paris 1874” exhibition last year at the National Gallery, commemorating the first Impressionist exhibition. We could see Sargent’s […]
“Siena: The Rise of Painting, 1300-1350” confirmed the view arrived at on our recent trip to Italy, including Siena, that Sienese painting is a cul de sac in the history of art. The exhibition’s first gallery is centered on the Met’s prize Duccio and I cynically wonder if the show was not conceived as a […]
Just as Broadway had, for us at least, an unexceptional spring, the art I saw in New York on this visit left few lasting impressions, which I will briefly highlight. Before we left for Africa we went to the Neue Galerie for the final days of its Klimt Landscapes show. There were a handful of […]
We had a fortuitous 30-hour immersion in Black culture: the Brooklyn Museum’s exhibition of art from the collection of Alicia Keys and Swizz B; Hell’s Kitchen, the Alicia Keys musical on Broadway; and Harlem Renaissance at the Met. I reviewed the play elsewhere, but the two art shows were an interesting complement to each other. […]
In addition to Manet/Degas at the Met and Ruscha at MoMA, I had a number of other art encounters during our October ’23 in Manhattan. Summary comments follow: Ruth Asawa at the Whitney was the surprise star of the season. Much as Hilda am Klimt was raised to the modern art canon by her show […]
I approached the Ed Ruscha retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art with low expectations. From numerous auction, museum and art gallery shows I was very familiar with Ruscha’s playful use of a single word in fanciful type on a plain background, made of gunpowder or other unusual medium. Clever and attractive, but how many […]
New York: Hot on the heels of its blockbuster Van Gogh (Cypresses) exhibition, the Met has trotted out two of the big four “Impressionists” to draw more crowds and open their wallets. (I put “Impressionists” in quotes because neither Manet nor Degas would have accepted the classification, and their styles differ significantly from the light-infused, […]
I approach a themed show at the Met with some skepticism: are the curators making, let alone creating, a point in order to justify amassing loans for a blockbuster show? From a museological viewpoint, it is no longer enough, or professionally justifiable, to say, “Here are a lot of van Goghs for your viewing pleasure” […]
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