The exhibition “Through Vincent’s Eyes” at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art disabused me of two long-held ideas about Van Gogh’s art: 1. That his style was a reaction to Impressionism, and 2. That he never painted a bad picture. Before I get into my critique, however, I should commend curator Eik Kahng and the […]
Museum- and gallery-going were necessarily down in 2021, thanks to Covid, but we were fortunate to have our base in New York and family in San Francisco, giving us a chance to catch some of the season’s big shows and rub shoulders with smaller venues along the way. In retrospect, the year doesn’t look so […]
I wondered, as I wandered through the many galleries of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, how long will we have this kind of encyclopedic, time-specific museum? Or more to the point, how long will we have them outside New York and a few other world capitals? You have to remember that the encyclopedic museum (EM) […]
The opening galleries at both the Whitney and Philadelphia were full of people and Jasper Johns’s greatest hits from the late ’50s: targets, flags, numbers and maps. By the end, the crowds had dissipated and one wondered if the same could be said for Johns’s art. I admit that I had struggled, during the latter […]
The Met’s “Surrealism Beyond Borders” is more a show of social and political history than art. Surrealism was an expression of nonconformity, even to the point of rebellion, that artists around the world (defined here as Japan, Mexico, South America and Europe) latched onto, often but not always cognizant of the dicta laid down in […]
Aside from the well-known and iconic Bronzino young men from the Frick and the Met and Eleonora and son from the Uffizi, the exhibition of Medici portraits at the Met featured a lot of pedestrian, undistinguished family portraits from a distinctly unfavored era of Art History: Mannerism. Collecting them together brought out what a severe […]
Just a note of horror that my favorite painting by Vermeer – and thus, one of my favorite paintings of all time – seems to have been, if not ruined, significantly diminished by an act of “restoration.” According to a report in the 9/14/21 New York Times, “After nearly three centuries behind a layer of […]
Our first two weeks in Manhattan post-pandemic put me back in touch with great art. I had no computer and I failed to take notes, so the impressions that follow will be imprecise and subject to correction and emendation when we spend more time in New York in the fall. The Frick Madison. The big news […]
The fun of Frieze LA is seeing and be seen, feeling part of the “arts community,” especially if you have a VIP pass, which we’ve had the last two years, thanks to a friend at the Addison Gallery in Andover. The fair is much smaller than Frieze NY, which is in some ways a good […]
Single-artist exhibitions and displays can enhance your appreciation of the artist – or not. The Felix Vallotton show in London (and subsequently at the Met) was a prime example of the former: his work was unfamiliar beforehand; his style developed in interesting ways over his career; and the paintings selected were almost all top-notch and […]
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