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 […]