New York Art Notes

I was lured to MoMA by the opening of “Vital Signs,” subtitled “Artists and the Body,” although it could more descriptively be called “Women Artists in our Collection and What they Thought of Themselves.” For most pieces, it seemed clear, the artist was more concerned with expressing something they felt than in communicating anything to […]

Siena at the Met

“Siena: The Rise of Painting, 1300-1350” confirmed the view arrived at on our recent trip to Italy, including Siena, that Sienese painting is a cul de sac in the history of art. The exhibition’s first gallery is centered on the Met’s prize Duccio and I cynically wonder if the show was not conceived as a […]

Paris 1874

My big rakeaway from the National Gallery/Musee d’Orsay’s “Paris 1874” exhibition is that Paris 1874 wasn’t such a big deal after all. The show’s premise trades on the popular conception that the first Impressionist show in 1874 marked an almost cataclysmic moment when the Impressionists broke from the official Salon and charted the new course […]

Italy ’24

Italian art, 1300-1500, was the unstated focus of our trip with the Santa Barbara Museum of Art to Hill Towns of Umbria and Tuscany from September 26 to October 9. Without notes, the stops blend together, but for the record we visited Montefalco, Todi, Spello, Spoleto, Bevagna, Clitunno, Orvieto, Assisi, Perugia, Sansepulcro, Monterchi, Siena, Pienza […]

New York Spring

Just as Broadway had, for us at least, an unexceptional spring, the art I saw in New York on this visit left few lasting impressions, which I will briefly highlight. Before we left for Africa we went to the Neue Galerie for the final days of its Klimt Landscapes show. There were a handful of […]

Black Art

We had a fortuitous 30-hour immersion in Black culture: the Brooklyn Museum’s exhibition of art from the collection of Alicia Keys and Swizz B; Hell’s Kitchen, the Alicia Keys musical on Broadway; and Harlem Renaissance at the Met. I reviewed the play elsewhere, but the two art shows were an interesting complement to each other. […]

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 […]