Renoir Drawings

The new show of Renoir “drawings” (i.e., any work on paper plus a couple of oils) at the Morgan Library and Museum should hammer the final nail in the coffin of Renoir’s reputation as a coequal of Manet, Monet, Degas, Sisley and Pissarro in the pantheon of Impressionism. Moreover, Caillebotte and Morisot have risen lately […]

Divine Egypt

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 […]

Caspar David Friedrich

The Met’s retrospective of Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840) ) did just what a museum retrospective should do: it presented key major works in historical context and gave an overall view of the artist’s development from his early work to his finish. It’s a show unlikely to be replicated, as most works are held by German […]

Gustave Caillebotte

The exhibition opening this week at the Getty (with previous and future stops at the Musee d’Orsay and Art Institute of Chicago) is subtitled “Painting Men” and purports to address for the first time “the central place he accorded [men] in his painting” and “the singular way in which [he] saw his male subjects.” There’s […]

Lumen at the Getty

As the overall sponsors, the Getty undoubtedly had a leg up on creating an exhibition that fit into PST’s “Art & Science Collide” theme, and they took advantage by pulling together “Lumen: The Art and Science of Light.” There was one remarkable object after another, a plurality from England but extraordinary loans also from Italy, […]