The docent told me that the Museum of Fine Arts Houston (MFAH) has recently become the 16th largest museum in the country. I assume the rankings are for art museums and are based on size of collection, but she wasn’t sure. MFAH’s literature speaks of 60,000 objects, whereas its catalogue from 2000 mentions 40,000. Size […]
Our eight-day visit to Malta and Sicily was co-sponsored by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, so it stands to reason that art would be a major focus of our trip, at least when we weren’t on board the magnificent schooner Sea Cloud. These are among the memories: 1. Valley of Temples, Agrigento. We […]
How instructive, and what a pleasure, to view back-to-back, at the Whitney and the Guggenheim, respectively, shows of abstract art by Georgia O’Keeffe and Vasily Kandinsky! Kandinsky was arguably the first abstract painter, and O’Keeffe, over in backward America, was not far behind. Most interestingly, both came to abstract art through music. It sounds obvious […]
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. […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
You are all here for a lecture on James James Audubon, the great American bird artist. He is the first great bird art in America, but artists have been portraying birds long before his time and all over the world. What I propose is that we all go on safari together, to discover how birds […]
There are literally hundreds and hundreds of sculptures on display at the MIA, and it would take us days to explore them all. So, since we have just under an hour together, I thought I would concentrate on one particular sculptural subject, one that will nevertheless take us all over the museum, and even then […]
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