William Holman Hunt at the MIA
We will undertake a bit of time travel as we enter Sin and Salvation, to the Victorian Age in England. What do we think of when we hear the word “Victorian” today? […] One dictionary definition I came across is, “A stifling and prudish moral earnestness.” In design we think of excessive ornamentation, even fussy clutter. […]
On visiting Broad Contemporary Art Museum
Made my first visit to the Broad Contemporary Art Museum at Los Angeles County Museum of Art this week and walked away with two questions. The first is the usual: what makes this stuff “art”? This was prompted first by seeing galleries devoted to Ellsworth Kelly and Cy Twombly back-to-back. I like Twombly’s work, but […]
Top Ten Artists (Painting Division)
Van Gogh Vermeer Cezanne Rembrandt Hiroshige Piero della Francesca Caravaggio Eakins Monet Diebenkorn de La Tour Durer van der Weyden Chardin Manet Constable Ni Tsan Velazquez Kensett Homer Turner Hokusai Prendergast Gainsborough Veronese Caillebotte Filippino Lippi Wyeth van Eyck Church Pollock Giotto The first question is, How do you rank painters from different eras, different […]
Manet/Velazquez at the Met (2003)
This was an extraordinary exhibition – in fact, three exhibitions in one. First, Velazquez and the Spanish Old Masters; second, Manet and his contemporaries; third, the Great American Portraitists. Like all major Metropolitan exhibitions these days, it was too big, and the “story” it told could have been better presented in half the space. But […]
These Are A Few of My Favorite Frames
Next to the paintings, what I like best are frames, and the MIA collection has some great ones. In case you’ve never picked out your own favorites, here are mine. First, you will note that my list ends around 1900, because that seems to be when framing, as a decorative art, started its decline to […]