Cleveland Museum of Art

The Cleveland Museum of Art isn’t imposing from the outside–arriving by taxi it was hardly apparent where the entrance was, the opposite of the grand entries of America’s other great museums: the Met, the National Gallery, the BMFA, Mia, etc. Instead, the statement comes inside, where Rafael Vinoly has created a vast glass-covered plaza that […]

D.C. Notes

Random thoughts from a brief visit to the National Gallery of Art last Saturday (3/23/24): The addition and integration of works from the Corcoran Gallery give the National Gallery one of the strongest, if not the strongest, collections of American art in the country. Despite the softening of the auction market for works in this […]

Frieze LA ’24

Four hours on VIP Thursday at the 2024 iteration of Frieze LA left me unqualified to make informed judgments but still with reactions, however superficial. The initial reaction, as often at such a fair, was being overwhelmed. The crowd was huge, the booths were packed atop each other and there was no easy way to […]

SBMA Paintings

In December when I brought a curator from Minneapolis to see the paintings galleries at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art I realized, to my surprise, that there was little I was proud to show him. And yet, I’ve always been impressed with SBMA’s collection. What happened? First, the Preston Morton Gallery was filled with […]

NY Art Scene ’23

In addition to Manet/Degas at the Met and Ruscha at MoMA, I had a number of other art encounters during our October ’23 in Manhattan. Summary comments follow: Ruth Asawa at the Whitney was the surprise star of the season. Much as Hilda am Klimt was raised to the modern art canon by her show […]