If the function of an art museum is the display of art, the new building for the Studio Museum of Harlem fails spectacularly. My guess is that not more than 25% of the space contains art. Its most notable feature is a massive main staircase, which is all you see when you enter. In keeping […]
We spent a week in London, reminding ourselves of the masterpieces in the public collections. Monday we strolled along Oxford Street, to and from the Wallace Collection. The furniture with gold marquetry by A.C. Boulle was our discovery. On the lookout for Gainsboroughs as we prepared for our Frick exhibition, I was delighted to not […]
It’s not fair to judge the new building and displays at LACMA based on a mere two-hour walkthrough, but that’s what a first impression is all about. So cutting to the chase, as they say, I give the architecture an A, the art a C. From the outside, the building is light, sinuous and strikingly […]
The new show of Renoir “drawings” (i.e., any work on paper plus a couple of oils) at the Morgan Library and Museum should hammer the final nail in the coffin of Renoir’s reputation as a coequal of Manet, Monet, Degas, Sisley and Pissarro in the pantheon of Impressionism. Moreover, Caillebotte and Morisot have risen lately […]
Two quick reactions from a quick first visit to the Met’s blockbuster fall show, “Divine Egypt.” First is the extraordinary amount of Egyptian material in the Met’s collection. One almost feels that an impetus for the show was the Met’s desire to bring out of storage scores of objects that probably haven’t been displayed for […]
The big excitement at the Met this spring has been the long-awaited opening of the Rockefeller Wing, housing the collections of African, Oceanic and Pre-Columbian art, designed by Kulapat Yantrasast of WHY Architecture. It has received glowing reviews. I don’t like it, and, as I’m trying to do with my negative reaction to the Sargent […]
The Met’s retrospective of Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840) ) did just what a museum retrospective should do: it presented key major works in historical context and gave an overall view of the artist’s development from his early work to his finish. It’s a show unlikely to be replicated, as most works are held by German […]
The exhibition opening this week at the Getty (with previous and future stops at the Musee d’Orsay and Art Institute of Chicago) is subtitled “Painting Men” and purports to address for the first time “the central place he accorded [men] in his painting” and “the singular way in which [he] saw his male subjects.” There’s […]
As the overall sponsors, the Getty undoubtedly had a leg up on creating an exhibition that fit into PST’s “Art & Science Collide” theme, and they took advantage by pulling together “Lumen: The Art and Science of Light.” There was one remarkable object after another, a plurality from England but extraordinary loans also from Italy, […]
Fall 2025 I’ve covered the Met’s big show for the fall, Divine Egypt, in a separate post and will briefly run down here the other art highlights of October in New York and Washington–the latter because although the National Gallery was closed by the government shutdown we went ahead with our planned four-day visit. A […]
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