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 […]