Islamic Art at the Met

Based on a quick (two-hour) first visit to the new Met galleries devoted to the broadly-defined lands of the Middle East, my favorite object isn’t even in those eleven rooms: it is the painting of a Cairo mosque by Jean-Leon Gerome that is cleverly placed in the adjoining Paintings gallery featuring the Met’s Orientalist collection. […]

A Day at the Getty(s)

A group from the Santa Barbara Museum Airbused down to LA to visit the Getty Center and the Getty Villa, with an emphasis on Asia and photography, as those were the two curators joining us. In all, there were three independent, but somewhat similar, exhibitions: “Early Photography in China,” “Felice Beato: A Photographer on the […]

New York Notes

Three days in Manhattan in early June gave me a chance to randomly check out galleries and museums – never time enough for all I wanted to see, but enough to provide some insight and inspiration. Far and away the highlight was the Otto Dix retrospective at the Neue Gallerie, both for the power of […]

On Visiting Houston

The docent told me that the Museum of Fine Arts Houston (MFAH) has recently become the 16th largest museum in the country. I assume the rankings are for art museums and are based on size of collection, but she wasn’t sure. MFAH’s literature speaks of 60,000 objects, whereas its catalogue from 2000 mentions 40,000. Size […]

Art Sights of Sicily

            Our eight-day visit to Malta and Sicily was co-sponsored by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, so it stands to reason that art would be a major focus of our trip, at least when we weren’t on board the magnificent schooner Sea Cloud. These are among the memories:             1. Valley of Temples, Agrigento. We […]