New York, May ’14

On successive days I saw similarly provocative shows, at the Guggenheim and the Museum of the City of New York. Neither contained great art; both raised questions about the role of art in society. Futurism was the kind of exhaustive, indeed definitive, survey in which the Guggenheim excels. Full of loans from Italy, it showed […]

The Gloomy Gardner

The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston has a lot in common with the Barnes, now in Philadelphia. Both are private, idiosyncratic collections amassed early in the 20th century by a single individual, and both are, or have been, severely constricted by the founder’s deed of gift. The collections, of course, differ: Barnes was into […]

Balthus at the Met

Once again I was so annoyed by the wall labels of a Met show that I had trouble appreciating the art. This time the show, apparently conceived and titled for marketing purposes, was called “Balthus Cats and Girls” – thus, appealing to the Met’s two main audiences: men and women. The first shortcoming of the […]

Philadelphia!

Thirty years after our last visit to the City of Brotherly Love, we returned for an art visit to the new Barnes Foundation building and the much older Philadelphia Museum of Art and Pennsvylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA). As much as we enjoyed those jewels, we also loved the setting: Philadelphia seemed clean, […]

The Louvre

The Louvre A more-or-less forced march of four hours let me survey most, but not all, of the Louvre’s paintings on display and made me wonder how I had seen so much more on previous visits. I don’t know a better strategy, but there must be one. I started with the Flemish and Dutch schools […]

Paris Museums

The Musee du Quai Branly – what a hodgepodge! In a stab at the ‘new museum,’ galleries have been eliminated, and the visitor is expected to flow through continents, like some Nile-Amazon combination. Then, what impresses is not quality, but quantity. Instead of one great Kota reliquary figure, we find eleven lined up in a […]

Musee d’Orsay

We saw the light and dark of European 19th century art at the Musee d’Orsay: the world’s leading collection of Impressionism in the 5th floor permanent galleries and a special exhibition on the ground floor of “Dark Romanticism,” called, infelicitously from Poe, “The Angel of the Odd.” The latter featured art “that used terrifying and […]

American Art in Winona

Winona collectors Mary Burrichter and Bob Kierlin have done in Winona exactly what I’ve been trying to get the MIA to do in Minneapolis for 15 years: build a representative collection of 19th-century American landscape painting. Moreover, they’ve done it in less than 10 years and built a beautifully sited museum on the Mississippi River […]

Up-to-Date in KC

Whenever I go to a comparably sized city, I inevitably end up comparing their art collection to the MIA’s, and this thought was never far from my mind as I toured Kansas City’s Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art last Wednesday (10/10/12). My investigation was neither deep nor complete, as there were whole parts of the collection […]

Oh, Canada & Globalization

MassMOCA is featuring an exhibition of new Canadian artists which, while not purporting to define an entire country, does give an idea of current artistic sensibility north of the border. I had a marvelous time and, looking back, was struck by the fact that six of my favorite seven pieces had moving parts. (I didn’t […]