A three-day art excursion took us to Cleveland and Youngstown, Ohio; Greensburg and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The impetus was the “Manet/Morisot” show at CMA that had been so well received in San Francisco earlier this year. It was exceptional, although too small-scaled to have merited the trip by itself. Fortunately, in the next gallery was a […]
We spent a week in London, reminding ourselves of the masterpieces in the public collections. Monday we strolled along Oxford Street, to and from the Wallace Collection. The furniture with gold marquetry by A.C. Boulle was our discovery. On the lookout for Gainsboroughs as we prepared for our Frick exhibition, I was delighted to not […]
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 […]
A quick shout-out to LACMA for putting on at least four very interesting temporary exhibitions while the main campus is closed for construction (2024 seems an optimistic completion date). The main attraction for me was the show of the Transcendental Painting Group (TPG) that came from the Crocker in Sacramento and is, apparently, the first […]
The opening galleries at both the Whitney and Philadelphia were full of people and Jasper Johns’s greatest hits from the late ’50s: targets, flags, numbers and maps. By the end, the crowds had dissipated and one wondered if the same could be said for Johns’s art. I admit that I had struggled, during the latter […]
I spent a week in London looking at art, revisiting old friends and discovering some new. The Felix Vallotton show at the Royal Academy – coming to the Met later this fall – was a revelation. With only 50 paintings and an approximately equal number of prints, it covered the Swiss artist’s career coherently and completely. […]
Over May and June of this year I’ve had occasion to visit a half-dozen special exhibitions, from the spectacular to the routine to the overstuffed. Far and away the best, and perhaps the best I’ve ever seen, was “Power and Beauty in China’s Last Dynasty,” designed by Robert Wilson. Each gallery was theatrically lit, with […]
Ten Highlights of Our Trip to Arabia. 1. Museum of Islamic Art (Qatar). Everything I hoped it would be: the ‘essence’ of Islamic architecture filtered through the geometric modernism of I.M. Pei. Wonderfully sited with a breathtaking interior: minimal yet full. Each object was given its own space and spotlight; everything seemed important, except maybe […]
Reflections on visiting the Prado and more: Merely by painting The Spinners, Vulcan’s Forge and Las Meninas, Velazquez earned his place at or near the top of Western Europe’s great artists. His royal portraits are honored next, but it’s hard to say how they would have made his reputation today – especially given the unattractive […]
We saw two new modern-art museums this summer: the Broad in Los Angeles and SFMOMA in San Francisco. Both feature spectacular buildings and predictable art; both are worth the trip. The Broad, for obvious reasons, is much the smaller: it houses one couple’s collection; whereas SFMOMA has history and a whole, very rich, city supporting […]
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